The Home Counties

Maggie has a plan for a bit of a rebuild of our house. Demolition and rebuild apart there is also a long list of ancillary jobs. One of those is putting a sliding door between the kitchen and living room. Maggie has something specific in her mind's eye, something rustic, something wooden, and a visit to the Fundación Casa Pintada in Mula yesterday made her wonder about reclaimed doors.

I remembered that we'd been to a market where they had a supply of antique doors. We misremembered (something that seems to happen more and more frequently) the name of the market and ended up going to a place called el Mercadillo el Zoco in Algorfa rather than the Mercadillo el Moncayo in Guardamar.

I've been here, in Spain, a while. It's not new to me, not novel, but it still takes me by surprise when we go somewhere public and Britons apparently outnumber Spaniards. It can happen in bars, in housing estates, and even in towns. It happened today. Maggie was sure that there were lots of Belgians, Dutch, Germans and French at the market, which is almost certainly true, but there was no doubt that the lingua franca was English, not Spanish. Also, in my opinion, the overriding presence was British.

One for the road?

I know it's perverse but I was pondering on the romanticism of the drunk the other day. Actually it was probably whilst I was in the HiperBer supermarket trying to decide whether to buy whisky or brandy. That pondering led me down Memory Lane - what was the name of that journalist? The one with the byline "so and so is unwell". The phrase appeared when there was no column because the man was too far gone to write. As I vainly struggled, synapses and neurons not doing what they should, that Mike Figgis film, the one with Elisabeth Shue and a Nicolas Cage bent on self destruction, came to mind. I liked the Cage character and I enjoyed the film. I occasionally wonder whether my own days will end in an alcoholic stupor.

That's where this post ground to a halt. I couldn't remember the name and I'd forgotten what the point of the post was going to be so I went to bed. When I awoke in the morning I was thinking Geoffrey. In fact it's Jeffrey, Google remembered, Jeffrey Bernard and it was the Spectator not the Evening Standard.

It's dead easy to drink too much in Spain. It's one of the stereotypes that exists about British  immigrants and Britons in Spain in general. Pint in hand and probably shouting. Not that Spaniards don't drink. Whenever I suggest to Spaniards that other Spaniards are pretty abstemious I often get reminded of botellones - when Spaniards gather together in a public place to socialise and drink alcohol. The participants are typically young people with a carrier bag laden with bottles and cartons full of booze, mixers and snacks. It didn't use to be at all unusual to see workers drinking a brandy or an anis alongside their coffee though, thinking about it, it's a while since I've seen that. What I've never seen is Spaniards drinking as though the stuff is going out of fashion.

The last litre bottle of brandy I bought was Terry, Spanish produced but perfectly palatable. It cost 8.69€ or about £7.70, J&B whisky was 11.65€ or about £10.32 though that was for the smaller 70cl bottle. Have a shot, un chupito, alongside your coffee and it will cost 1€ or about 88p for what would be a traditional double in a UK pub. I forget how much a 5 litre container of perfectly nice wine is from our local bodega but it's under 6€ - so the equivalent of a bit under 7 bottles of wine for not much over five of your British pounds.

Now imagine the situation. You are British. You're retired or you're not working. You are generally reasonably well off, comfortable cash wise. The weather is good, you can sit outside for a lot of the year. You're a little bit bored, not bored bored, but with plenty of time on your hands, you're a bit cut off from the world around you because you haven't quite mastered the local language and so what can you do with your time?