After I’d written my last blog, there was a great outpouring of anguish. Crying, wailing, stamping of feet and just a general malaise that my words of wisdom from our time in Spain were to end. But I just said to José, “come on now, you’re a grown man in your late forties and a teacher at that. Pull yourself together and get on with your lesson” so he dried his eyes and did just that.
It has been an interesting time in the interim, but no-one wants to hear about life in Bexhill. It doesn’t have the same element of je ne sais quoi about it, although in Bexhill where the average age is 92, there is a lot of je-ne-sais-ing going on!
Fast forward to 2023 and here we are again in Spain, looking for a property to buy. I am practising my e-Spinach once more, pronounced as ‘eh?’ not eeeeee like in Yorkshire, where “Eeee spinach” means, ‘what the hell have you served me for me dinner and where’s me chips?’ We’ve only been here a week but the madness has continued like we were never away and so it felt only fair to you, my loyal readers, to offer you a little more insight into the workings of the Spanish way of life.
The customer service remains as wonderful as ever. We are staying with friends but as we were due to arrive into Malaga so late, we arranged to stay overnight at the airport hotel. In actual fact our flight was nearly 3 hours late, maddeningly just under the time limit for when we would have claimed enough compensation to fly BA to New York, First Class. On checking in at the hotel, the son of the family checking in before us asked the tubby, middle-aged man if there was any food available. Without looking up, the guy, who made it obvious he rather have been having a colonoscopy, just said “there’s a vending machine” and gesticulated with his whitlows. I glanced at it. There was a ham and cheese sandwich in there, pleading to be set free, looking for all the world like it had been prepared for Franco when he popped over to Malaga for a paddle to take his mind off the Civil War.
Thankfully we didn’t need food. We had eaten our combined body weight in sandwiches, crisps, mini quiches and bulgur wheat salad in the BA lounge. Where’s a hotpot when you need one? Still, it was free at the point of scoffing, so who cares? We didn’t…..not after the three large G&T’s we poured ourselves, although there was something off with that gin as it made me feel a little wobbly for a while afterwards.
And so onto the house-hunting. We set up a few visits - and when I say ‘we’ I mean José, because if I’d done the talking, we could have ended up inadvertently arranging to go for a cervical smear. The very first visit was set up for just after 10am and we arrived at the inmobiliaria 5 minutes early (yes, your lessons continue - that’s ‘estate agent’ in Spanish). The guy chatted to us, then chatted on the phone, then chatted to us some more and then eventually told us that we were going to view the house with his colleague. Cue said colleague, a young lady who came in late, looking for all the world like she’d been on the sangrias all night and wearing what can only be described as a pelmet on her legs. I am not denigrating this young lady for what she was wearing - people can wear what they like - but this small piece of cloth barely covered her surname. There was one moment when she arrived in the office that was straight out of a ‘Carry On’ film, where she bent over her desk to get the air con remote that had fallen. All it needed was the sound effect of a Swannee Whistle and Sid James leching.
Sexism aside, we set off with this young lady to our first house which was off the beaten track, as so many are. We drove down this tiny, twisty-turny road and found our way blocked by a car. It appeared that the car had stopped working and given the fact that it was on a slight incline, could have had the handbrake taken off and rolled backwards a little so we could pass. But this is Spain. The lady waved and gave that shrug that says ‘I know I’m in your way but I don’t give a toss because a man is fixing this and I am beholden to him’ So much for equality! We sat there for 10 minutes during which time, the said man looked at the engine, scratched his armpit, touched a couple of things under the bonnet (which would be my limit!) then eventually brought his car up and jump started her car.
Not once did he acknowledge we were there and needed to get past. ‘Lady’ then proceeded to reverse her car back onto her drive, whilst ‘man’ stood watching, then slowly….very slowly….carefully folded up the jump leads and put them back into his car before reversing, very dramatically I might add, out of the way.
We went past, only to see that the house we were to view was right behind this one. We could have left our car where it was and walked! The estate agent who was in the car with us never mentioned this, but was probably still sleeping off the sangria and wondering why she hadn’t put a maxi skirt. When we got out, we were greeted by a red faced little Englishman who was virtually jumping up and down like a demented hobbit and demanded to know where we’d been. He told us he’d been waiting for ages for us and had another visit at 11am, so we couldn’t look at the house. In the time he was ranting at pelmet skirt, we could have been round the house twice. José took charge and firmly told this man that we were there now and we would take 5 minutes to look round the house so could he start showing us. I don’t know who was more shocked, me or the little man but he showed us round, too scared to deny my hubby the viewing.
We could see from the outset that the house was not for us. It was far too small and the view from one window was of the whitewashed walls of the neighbour. That was infinitely better than the view from another window, which was a massive pile of rubbish the neighbour had dumped on their (the neighbour’s) land, but which our potential new house looked directly onto. And then we went to the upstairs patio, where this little wrinkly old man told us with an exaggerated Peter Butterworth ‘Carry On’ style wink that it was “very private and good for an all over tan…if you know what I mean?” I knew what he meant and I didn’t want to think of said little old man out there in the buff, more so when I saw his sallow, diddly little wife sitting downstairs flicking through a Margaret Drabble. Never was there more need for mental floss than at that moment!!
We made our excuses and left him to rush off to his 11am appointment, whilst we went to the car park of a local bar where we met the other estate agent. We transferred to his clapped out old ‘wanker’ and drove out to the next property.
For those of you not in the know, you will need to read an earlier blog, however the word Pajero in Spanish literally translates as ‘wanker’. Nissan chose to ignore this and named the car thus.
Once at the next property, it was beautiful. An old cortijo (Country House) with loads of rooms, loads of potential and at a very good price. There was a reason for that. It adjoined an olive mill. Noisy, smelly and not conducive to a life in the country, we left and moved onto the third place.
When we arrived there, the estate agent had no idea if he was in the right place, but we sat outside the gate and waited for someone to come. Thankfully we were in the right place or we could have still been sitting there. The place was ma-hoo-sive but was currently being used as a country retreat for recovering drug addicts. There were two guys sitting watching TV looking for all the world like they wanted to know if we had any smack on us; that sad look of desperation and resigned determination etched in their faces. That was irrelevant to the woman whose house it was, who gleefully told us that these people would be chucked out if the place was sold and so not to worry about that. It was a nice place, but was not quite what we were looking for.
We went back to Iznajar in the wanker, said our goodbyes and went for breakfast. We had imagined that the two houses we had booked to see would be completed in an hour. Three hours later, we were beginning to flag from lack of nutrition so headed for some much needed provender before doing the same again the next day………(to be continued)
