9. Fond farewells, Feliz Navidad, and f***ing flu

It is time to leave lovely Moncarapacho and the fabulous Intrepids (read about them here), so we decide to throw a little farewell party. To make it cosy, Steve and I try to put up the safari room that fits onto the side of Georgie. We’ve done this once before with the help of Lawrence (Steve’s daughter Rosie’s partner – stay with me here) and it seemed pretty self-explanatory, but this time it appears to have morphed into a puzzle of double-mensa proportions. I ask ‘Mr Jim Broadbent’ to help, and go off to cut up bread and cheese, and fill bowls with Pala-pala (a brand of micro-chipstick that we are all addicted to).

Despite days of running to and from electrical shops we’ve been unable to find the right combination of TV, speaker, connecting cable, and microphone neccessary to get my karaoke working. In the end, Steve signs us up for two days of online karaoke. It has over 20,000 songs. Anything you can think of. No mic, but brilliant all the same.

Kick off is at six, and by six thirty we’ve crammed nineteen people into Georgie, and the party is in full swing. At seven thirty Steve gets the karaoke going. Now it must be said that when I’d mentioned the idea previously, several of the Intrepids had been somewhat lukewarm about the idea. But as the first song up is the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, everyone sings their hearts out.

We do all the usual Christmas songs, with the men trying to outdo each other on the Noddy Holder bit, then we move on to golden oldies and classics.

Steve is wistful about having seen Dusty Springfield in concert when he was young. The warm-up band had been some chaps calling themselves The Beatles.

By about ten, some of the people have wandered home, and we’re left with the party die-hards; Terry and June, John and Brenda, ‘Mr and Mrs Jim Broadbent’, and two couples that we’ve never met before. That’s how parties go though, isn’t it?

Steve has somehow got drunk again, and is starting to be very bossy with the karaoke as it’s playing from his phone. He puts on obscure music that no one but me has ever heard of, but then forgets to sing along. He also’s very excitable as he’s sitting next to ‘Mr Jim Broadbent’, who is always upbeat, and who wants to walk 500 miles and then do the entire Proclaimer’s back catalogue.

At one point Steve tries to get his attention, but due to the effects of alcohol on his not-quite-recovered-from-the-stroke brain he can’t remember either of his names and ends up yelling, ‘Darling! Darling!’ without noticing anything untoward about this. Honestly: piss myself.

For me, this is the signal to wrest the phone from his hands and get the karaoke back under some kind of control. So I put on Let it go from Frozen for him to sing and you never saw a happier man. Apart from ‘Jim’, who also looked a little teary. ‘Great song, this’, they both agree, as they mumble the bit about fractals.

Sadly, the next day Brenda has gone down with some horrible bug, and by the time we leave early the following morning, John, ‘Mr Jim Broadbent’ and Steve are all complaining of feeling shit.

And so to Spain

We’ve been invited to spend Christmas with Elena’s parents (Julio and Emilia) in Don Benito, Spain. Elena is our son Sam’s girlfriend and they are both going to fly over and spend Christmas here as well. We’re all very excited, (Sam especially so, as he’s heard that Don Benito translates as ‘Mr Pretty Man’, which we both think is terribly cool until we find out it doesn’t).

We’ve planned an easy journey so that we won’t be too tired: across to Seville, then up the motorway towards Merida, stopping for the night at a truck stop on the way, and doing the last leg the following day.

Near Monasterio we stop for petrol and find the mother-load of truck stops: Leo’s. It’s a 24-hour service station, complete with mini-mart, gift shop, self-service cafe, restaurant, bar, showers, hotel, squash courts, enough parking for 100 trucks, and – get this – its own butchers and deli.

We actually park near the helipad

It has everything and none of it is the usual down-market tat you get in Britain, though I search and search for something crap to photograph. The best I can find among the beautiful, soft, leather handbags and miles of artisan pickles, cheeses and marmalades, is a shelf of pocket knives. They have artfully carved wooden handles in the shape of slightly flaccid penises.

Now, I am generally a glass half full person and so this causes me to wonder why I judge them to be on the way down, so to speak, rather than on the way up? I once had a friend who was interviewed by a policewoman after seeing a flasher. ‘Was it erect or flaccid’, the PC wanted to know? My mate was twelve and had no idea what she was talking about, so the PC tried again: ‘Well was it dingling or dangling?’ she asked. Not helpful. No. But it came to mind as I looked at those penknives. Did they have a hint of dangle or a sorry attempt at a dingle?

Steve was now feeling terrible from the bug and I was succumbing to it as well. Bugger. Searched out all the drugs we’d bought with us, and cursed myself for not realising that a gallon of Nightnurse and some industrial strength Sudafed were the real essentials. We go into Monasterio and try to persuade two different chemists to sell us as much vitamin C as possible and any other drug we can get. They’ve never heard of time-release vit C, and if they have, they’re not going to sell it to us. So we cope with what they give us and head back to Leo’s, where we can get a three-course meal, with bread, and wine or coffee, for €8.50.

Feliz Navidad (cough, splutter, snivel, achoo)

Emilia and Julio have a town house in Don Benito for the winter, and a country house, just outside, for the summer. It is arranged that Sam and Elena, along with her sister Julia and boyfriend David, will stay with us at the country house. It has a huge driveway that Elena is certain we can get Georgie onto, but if we can’t make it around the tight corner, then we park on the next door’s driveway instead.

Well, we don’t make it around the corner, so onto the neighbour, Manolo’s, driveway we go. We haul everything we think we might need into the house, take more drugs, and follow Julio around as he shows us where everything is. He doesn’t speak English and we are total beginners at Spanish, but it is amazing how much you can figure out by people pointing at things.

He builds up an enormous fire, which has the advantage of being on an inside wall, on the other side of which is our bed-head. We are assured that the heat will transfer well into the room. Great. Because this is the summer house, which means it was designed specifically to stay cold. Great high ceilings, tiled floors, lots of drapes and shutters, no central heating. Dear old Julio comes three or four times a day while we stay there, and builds up that fire every time. Probably used an entire tree. Sorry, environment, but I was cold, and had the flu, so it had to be done.

The family are wonderful, warm, loud, and gushing. We meet the two grandmas, 93 year old Emilia, and 91 year old Visi (pronounced busy). Emilia wants to know why my hair is grey when hers is still dark brown. Honestly, so did I.

There are aunts and cousins and friends and Elena’s elder brother, Juan, with his wife and new baby. I have to tell them all that I have a bug and will only shake their hands, and that I won’t go near the baby. Steve and I are terrified that after our visit we’ll find out we’ve killed off both the grandmas and the baby is in intensive care. So we keep our distance. And then we cry off and head back to the country house, and fall into bed.

The next day is Christmas Eve, and the traditional day for celebrating: the big meal will be in the evening and the gift giving will commence after that. In general, only a small gift is given at this time, the main presents arriving with the advent of The Three Magic Kings at Epiphany. Or the Three Wise Men, as we know them. I ask Elena why they are called ‘magic’ and she pauses for a long while and then says, ‘because they are magicians’. So there you have it.

It makes sense when you consider that Santa Claus grew out of a Scandinavian tradition, and so would be of much less importance here. The Kings bring the gifts to baby Jesus, so that’s when the children get their gifts as well – on the 6th January. But because Elena and other members of her family can only get time off at Christmas, they decide to celebrate a little early.

Tiny grandma Emilia

Thanks to the flu and all the medication, the next few days are a bit of a blur. Steve and I take turns doing the meals while the other one crashes in bed. I eat spider-crab legs, he, a sparrow. Older Emilia becomes my very best friend despite not understanding a word each other says. We use Google Translate A LOT.

Elena’s mum kindly sends us home each night with jars of homemade soup and bags of food, which we are too ill to make use of. The next-door neighbour, Manolo, cuts us veg from his patch – some broccoli, a romanescu, and the biggest cauliflower I have ever seen. I genuinely didn’t know they made them that big. Since Julio nearly severed his foot falling off the patio roof a year ago, he has been unable to grow his own veg. So he keeps chickens in what was his veg patch and Manolo grows the produce. Then they share it.

We drug ourselves up and stagger out to bars to meet all their lovely friends. Julio shows us pictures of his house in Almancil, on the coast, and practically orders us to stay there as long as we want. They shower us with every bit of hospitality it is possible to receive.

But when a plate of angulas are put down in front of me, I admit, I freak out a bit.

Let me explain.

When I was a kid I had a phobia about ‘slimy’ foods: you know – things that have no bite to them, like custard. Couldn’t bear them, they made me gag. Then one day my parents gave me a plate of tinned spaghetti, the mere sight of which was appalling to me. And my helpful elder brother said, ‘that’s worms, that is’. I think I threw up.

By the time I was twenty I was finally able to eat both custard and pasta, but only in small quantities. Now, of course, I am wolfing them down with gusto. Yay, sorted.

But when you’ve got the flu you just want comfort food, and familiar things, and nothing that tastes a bit funny. Don’t you? And angulas, of course, are baby eels. They are small – about the width of a piece of tinned spaghetti – and grey. Yes, grey: with no hint of a tomato sauce to disguise them.

It is all my childhood food nightmares come back to haunt me. In my drugged up and bacteria-logged state I imagine I’ll have to sit there until I eat a whole plateful, just like when I was a kid (mums did that then – thought it was good for you).

So I eat one. And it’s actually nice, and nothing liked it looks. But then my son comments that he thought I was more adventurous than that. And I want to be the mum he thinks I am, and scoff them down with sophisticated assurance, but they are GREY! And then Julia, Elena’s sister, says that she doesn’t like them either, and I think, Oh thank God.

Moving on

On our last day, Manolo and Julio come and cook lunch for us at the country house. Both Emilias come, and the long table is laid for us and all the neighbours. Julio tells us that he and Manolo have been best friends since they met on the first day of school, aged five, over sixty years ago. Sweet.

They’re going to cook a traditional spanish peasant breakfast dish for us, and to do this, they need to utilise the cauldron: the one that Julio has been using to take out the fire ashes all week. I love this.

They work really well together, as you would expect. Using knives that Crocodile Dundee would quail at, they hack up bacon into lardons the size of your average chocolate brownie. They salute them in loads of olive oil, then add three whole heads of garlic, split into cloves.

Then they chuck in a washing-up bowl of red pepper strips, to soften and char. Finally, all these things get scooped out and put aside, and the oil is used to flavour and fry an entire cauldron full of breadcrumbs. This means stirring and stirring, so that each crumb has some oil, and has crisped up a little – about 40 minutes of hard graft, I reckon. This is man food.

They’ve also broken up different types of chorizo meat and mushed them in pans with wine and other flavourings. The peppers, garlic and lardons are stirred back in at the end, and bowlfuls of the mixture are topped with the fried chorizo. It is bloody lovely.

But then we have to leave. And the driveway that has been so easy to pull onto, is suddenly quite difficult to get out of. The gates opens inwards, so we were at an advantage coming in. Trying to navigate our way out of a space that is only just big enough, with the gates catching, and scraping along Georgie’s sides, is brutal. I’d held the right gate on the way in, but Steve’s angle must have been slightly different then, because Manolo is getting crushed as he tries to do it.

But these are the men who carry knives and eat man food out of cauldrons. They ate those bloody eels, for God’s sake – this is not going to beat them. In the end, one of Manolo’s sons climbs onto the hedge, I kid you not, and lassos the gate for Julio and Manolo and Emilia to haul open with a rope.

And then we are away. And where do we go? Back to Leo’s of course.


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