Now you may have noticed the Clubs dotted all over Spain. We passed one near Cabo Roig the other day. It was that which made me think of this post. The clubs tend to be on the outskirts of towns but not all are.
I often think we immigrant Britons are divided into two camps - those who think Spain is brilliant and those who think it's a nightmare full of outdated systems and indolent people. With my rose tinted glasses firmly in place I thought for years that these out of town clubs were the result of careful urban planning. Noisy clubs, I was thinking dance type clubs, well away from people who wanted to get an early night.
In the time before Google maps, before Booking.com when things were still priced in pesetas and you were pleasantly surprised to find that your hostal bedroom had a washbasin, we were wandering around Southern Spain in a hired car. Our holiday plan was pretty simple really. We drove around gawking at stuff and when it began to get to evening we stopped outside a hotel or a hostal, asked if they had a room, asked how much it was and with that sorted we spent the evening eating and drinking. Proper holidays. That night the plan was proving trickier than usual. We'd tried in a couple of decent sized towns and either been turned away from full hotels or run away as we baulked at the prices. Our usual fallback of roadside restaurants with a bloke at the bar in white shirt, yellowed with age and sporting grease stains, and where there were a couple of underused, dusty and sparsely furnished rooms upstairs seemed to be, uncharacteristically, full of builders and travelling salesmen. It was getting dark, we were fed up and my body was crying out for intravenous beer.
Then, Eagles like, a hotel appeared as if from nowhere. It had a huge neon sign - Club, Hotel. When we were hotel hunting we took it in turns to ask for rooms. Our Spanish was so dodgy, so stammering that humiliation was certain. It was my turn. We parked out front of the hotel in the very quiet car park. I opened a couple of double doors that looked entrance like and I was met with a wall of sound. Wrong door. That must be the club. I walked around the corner. In an unreformed 20th Century man sort of way way I was impressed by the shortness of the skirt and the length of the legs. The woman inside the skirt was young, thin and busty. They know how to have fun in Andalucia I thought. It crossed my mind that it was a bit early to be out having fun in Spain, it was around nine in the evening, but, well, rural nowhere. Then I noticed a very red, equally thin, equally busty young woman with a red wig, red lips, red vest and indecently tight red shorts and red shoes. We're quick thinkers we Yorkshiremen. The penny dropped. I decided that this was a time to be as foreign as possible. I put on my broadest of Yorkshire accents. I probably said ay up. "Rooms this way?" I grunted. The short skirt had done her homework though - she was bilingual. "Ghelo, big boy - dew wants fun?" A little further on the other side of this display of femaleness I could see a sign that said reception. Maybe it would be safe there. I pushed on. The man behind the desk had some weightlifting type chums standing behind him to each side. They wore black t-shirts full of pectoral muscles and biceps. "This isn't a hotel for tourists, is it?", I asked. His look was so condescending. He shook his head. He uttered not a word. The short skirt had her hands on my shoulders. I pushed past. I pushed past the red wig. I jumped into the hire car.
"No rooms," I said to Maggie.
