Warming up

Last night, well this morning I suppose, the windows started to rattle and the wind howled and the thunder thundered and the lightning lit the bedroom from time to time. When I got up a couple of hours later the sun was shining on the puddles on the patio and the cats were tiptoeing from dry spot to dry spot. It's a sign of the time of year. Like my feet hurting. Neither is new. I've complained about this, the feet that is, a lot. It stems from walking miles in flat bottomed sandals at Benicassim pop festival but the foot pain was always bad each summer long before the Benicassim debacle. Really the trouble starts as I move from proper shoes with proper socks to sandals and lighter shoes worn with those funny short socks. In Spanish the socks are called pinkies. Isn't that a great name?

So Summer, early Summer when it's still Spring, is big storms and uncomfortable feet. And flies, hundreds of flies, thousands of flies. No, not just flies really; all sorts of small flying and walking things with myriad legs. Some of them bite, some sting, some amuse the cats or sing long and loud into the night. The cats were keeping their distance from a small but very hissy snake in the living room yesterday morning. I escorted it out into the field opposite wearing big gardening gloves (me not the snake). The toads have stopped though; I haven't seen any toads for a while. Sometime in the winter I kept finding toads all over the place - they seemed to like the shower in the guest room especially but also just the corner under the computer desk. The wasps and bees are back too. The wasps are really attracted to water. If the hose isn't turned off at the tap it drips and forms a shallow puddle on the patio and that water attracts a large but mono-specific cloud of wasps (should that adjective be unispecific, unispecies, monospecies?). I hear that people who have pools find this waspish determination to drink water less than amusing. I don't know why the swallows, which are particularly talkative at this time of year, don't swoop down on these various clouds of fast food. Maybe they do, maybe that's why they fly acrobatically close to my head every now and again. And at dusk the chattering of swallows becomes the clicking whistling of the bats.

But I realised this is because it's now definitely summer. It's easy to tell when it's summer in Spain, in Alicante at least. It becomes warm on a regular basis. There is no doubt about it as there is in the UK. The shower is a good indicator of this. In winter I wait for the water to run warm from the distant gas water heater but, by now, if I'm impatient, even the cold water isn't cold enough to be unusable from the get go. The mirror doesn't mist up either but that might be because the window is open. And doors and windows stay open. I have to remember that we need to be security conscious and lock this and that.

Lots more motor traffic in the lane too. The apricot tractor went back and forth and back and forth with the trailer piled high with blue plastic boxes full of fruit. I suppose that's why people have to buy their shelves from Ikea now because nobody uses those orange boxes that I fastened together as shelves when I was a poor student. But there are lots more traffic movements in general. I suppose there are maintenance tasks even if they are not harvesting. I'm certainly locked in a struggle with the the Culebrón plant life. The weeds can grow faster than I can knock them down - I swear that some can grow 15cms from one day to the next. The mulberries fell onto the drive to be squashed underfoot, under-tyre, and turned into an oozing pulp that had to be swept away, now the nisperos are falling off the trees in significant quantities and just to add to the fun some sort of ball things, seed pods I suppose, are tumbling off the palm tree in dustpan flexing quantities. If my fight with the plants, on a garden scale is grim and unceasing then I suppose the farmers are locked into something even more titanic. Mind you their hoes are bigger than mine.

No doubt about it though. It's warming up and it'll soon be my very favourite time of year here in Spain, when the countryside just heaves and sighs as the sun beats down. And I can crack open the ice cold beer without any feelings of protestant guilt.

Do you think I should take a coat?

It's an old photo. December 2007

I left the bathroom wearing just a t-shirt. Well, jeans and shoes and stuff too. My intention was to put on the hoodie that was hanging on the kitchen door but, as so often nowadays, I was distracted by something else and I forgot. It wasn't till I began to feel chilly that I remembered my original plan. 

My overcoat was also hanging from the same hook as the hoodie. Time for that to go into storage I thought. The overcoat, a long dark overcoat, is probably my favourite coat. It came with me from England. It was two or three years old when we got here so it must be closing in on 20 years old now. The lining's a mess and if you look at it closely it's got that sheen on some of the seams to bear witness to its longevity. March is the month when the weather starts to take a turn for the better here in Alicante. 

The t-shirt incident and the coat reminded me of a story I'd read, as a youth, about a civil servant and an overcoat - Dostoyevsky perhaps, or Kafka? Google says it was Gogol. The story tells of a minor civil servant whose life becomes dominated by saving for a new warm coat. As soon as he has it the coat is stolen from him by a couple of ruffians. The police will do nothing and he dies of a fever brought on by his coatlessness. If Gogol could write a short story about an overcoat I could blog about one!

In the North of Spain people need cold weather clothes just like they need central heating and insulation. Here, in Alicante, when people wear a scarf it's really only because they want to wear a scarf. It's just conceivable that on a couple of days each year a scarf may actually be necessary, gloves even, but, basically, proper cold weather gear isn't really called for in Alicante. It's not that we don't have winter or anything. As I have remarked tens of times it is perishing inside in winter but outside, when it's not nice, the best description, often, would be something like chilly. As we've closed in on Spring my denim jacket has come into its own and, before that, a sort of thick cardigan I have has done sterling work through the traditional winter months. Sports jackets are good too, a bit of a barrier against the cold but without too much weight. With a pullover and sports jacket I'm set up for most Winter Alicante weather except rain. 

This year I may have worn the overcoat ten times. When I wear my overcoat people don't notice the sheen, they don't laugh at it, they notice that it's big and dark and coatlike. When I wear the coat Spanish people often comment to me on the coldness of the weather. The wearing of a long overcoat is certain proof that it's cold. 

If March is when the weather cheers up late October and November is when we notice that things are changing for the worse. Last November I bought a jacket; one to wear outside against the cold and rain and wind. It was a bit of a whim but it was cheap and it was a nice sort of yellow colour. It's made of a vaguely waterproof sort of material so it could be a replacement for the rainy day waterproof jacket I bought in 2009 in Salamanca. The new jacket also has a bit of a lining so it is warm enough to replace the padded jacket I bought in Granada in 2016. I've tried hard to wear it, what with it being new and things, but I reckon it's been out fewer than four or five times in the four months.

The clocks change on Sunday. The sun has shone all today and I was able to cast off my pullover for several hours. Very soon that t-shirt will be fine as long as I remember to add the jeans, sandals etc.