A Tale of Two Countries

A tale of tempting fate (or pride comes before a fall)

I’m not a religious person. I’m about as agnostic as a gal could be. Furthermore, I wouldn’t survive a reasoned debate about world religions because the necessary knowledge for such an undertaking falls into my many “ignorant zones”. However, I do believe in fate. And my own personal experience shows that you shouldn’t tempt fate because it will turn round and bite you in the bum, so to speak.

Last week, I visited a lovely lady who runs a chilli farm in Orgiva. She escorted me and the Terrible Toddler Twosome to her rather attractive outdoor swimming pool and emerged with a brand new double airbed, still in its box. Out came the airbed, out came a pump. We oohed and ahhed and coooed over the airbed. All hail the airbed! Isn’t it great! Isn’t it perfect! My companion swung the airbed into the pool so we could give it the much-anticipated ‘inaugural run’. But – lo and behold - it immediately snagged on a metal rod installed in the side of the pool and deflated. We had to admit: we’d been too smug about the airbed so fate taught us a lesson by deflating the darn thing.

The week beforehand, I went for a meal with the friend described in a previous blog entry: the one who accused me of constantly tempting fate on the road by being negative towards Spanish drivers. We ventured into my favourite local pizzeria where I’ve always been satisfied with the food. My friend started complaining: “I don’t like this restaurant – I reckon I’ll get bad food here.” I ordered Argentinean steak and my companion selected tuna steak. Guess what? My steak was delicious – a juicy, flavoursome treat. My companion’s tuna was, in comparison, fishy and raw. He complained to the chef who said “it’s supposed to come like that” and walked away (customer service Spain: another story). My companion was cross and I was smug about him “tempting fate by being negative about the restaurant”. Talk about turning the tables! Hah hah!

I remember, in the past, having two different road traffic accidents (one, a crash involving a vehicle parked on the hard shoulder and two, a rear-end shunt) while thinking exactly the same thought both times: “I’m enjoying this motorway drive and this music CD is really good”. How can that happen? Answer, because I was (a) being thoroughly smug and (b) thinking about how much I was enjoying the experience rather than keeping my eye on the road. Nowadays, I daren’t allow smug motoring thoughts to enter my consciousness: they must be banished immediately lest there be a third nasty RTA. A rear-end shunt may sound slightly comedic (!) but being towed 300 miles with your vehicle all mashed up, aware that you’ve given an elderly man whiplash and fearing points on your license is serious payback for laughing in the face of fate.

Fate can work the other way too. It laughs and plays with us and gives us positive or negative signs. Once, when I’d lost the buyer for my Brighton flat and was feeling despondent because I was about to lose my house purchase too (a collapsed chain), my cat at the time – Bumble – emerged from under my bed carrying a fiver in her mouth. She dropped the glorious and unusual feline find at my feet. “Aha, much better than a dead mouse,” I thought.  A few hours later, my estate agent phoned me. He wanted to bring a prospective new buyer to view my flat, which had not yet been officially relisted as for sale. The buyer immediately offered £5k more than the previous one. I couldn’t help thinking that the cat had brought a sign of divine providence and tempted fate in my favour.

Airy-fairy bollocks? Maybe. But we’ve all had ‘one of those days’ where things go exactly our way and ‘one of those other days’ where everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And, speaking personally, either being too negative about something or daring to be smug - even for a few minutes - almost always causes a disaster in my immediate environment. So, folks, let’s think positively and not blow our own trumpets: it’s not big and it certainly ain’t clever. As the old adage goes, ‘pride goeth before the fall’. It certainly does!

Very bad and a little mad (muy malo y un poco loco)

 

Being a writer of “dry, ironic humour” has its upside (including the chance to snigger childishly at one’s own work) and its downside (other people occasionally thinking it’s not funny). Yours truly is a prime ranter, sniggerer and delver into black humour when the usual dry humour doesn’t suffice, as well as being “self obsessed”, “droning on” and full of “I, I, I” (“way-aye!”) and the cult of “me, me, meeeeeeeeeee”! See, I can take the piss out of myself as well as lambasting assorted other ‘targets’. Well, one has to write about something, I suppose.

But is this sort of material a bit, well, questionable? Should yours truly be more sensible in what is penned? A recent misunderstanding about my ‘Beware the Brits Abroad’ blog entry has led me to contemplate where journalism ends and undue criticism begins. After much hair-pulling about offending a ‘nice lady’ from Torre del Mar with my comments in the aforementioned blog entry, and even showing the offending material to my elderly Mother (more stringent than Mary Whitehouse in her heyday) to see if I had “gone too far this time” (she said not), it transpired that it was a case of mistaken identity. The ‘nice lady’ thought that one of my targets for sarcasm, ‘Hectoring Dad’ – whose son I had named ‘Jack’, just as I might have called him ‘John’ or ‘Jim’ - was based on her close male friend. By unfortunate coincidence, this man’s son of a similar age is called Jack and the family concerned was staying at the Torre del Mar campsite at the same time as Hectoring Dad and me. The ‘nice lady’ eventually asked her friend “did your son enjoy the campsite swimming pool” (the location drawing my sarcastic narrative) and he answered “we never went near it”. I was pleased as punch when this hideous misunderstanding was resolved as, believe it or not, I don’t like to offend people (especially nice ones)... but a slight paranoia about my “dry humour” has lingered onwards.

For example, I love Spain and could never, ever be considered a Spain-hater but I’m continually sarcastic about some of its characteristics, such as naff customer service and manic motorists. I would call it “poking fun” or “being ironic”. However, some people view my observations in a different way. An English hombre of my acquaintance recently insisted “you bring motoring problems upon yourself by being so negative about the other motorists” and added “why is it that you assume some of them are drunk” (this was a bit rich, considering that my critic was tipsy on costa at the time). Hmm! The aforementioned hombre completed the box-set of compliments by suggesting that “...if you want to continue with your pants driving, you should keep up your existing attitude” and topped it off with the old chestnut (wait for it), “my Mother is just the same”. Argh! I pointed out that there’s a difference between being “negative” and adopting “defensive driving” where – for example – one does not venture too close beside the car that’s swaying from lane to lane in front of one’s own vehicle. Ironically, about two minutes after I ejected the hombre out of my van, a Spanish driver shot out of a side street without looking and I had to do an emergency stop. Of course, if he’d crashed into my van, it would have been my fault for being so jolly negative and nothing whatsoever to do with his ‘malo’ driving abilities (more on ‘malo’ soon).

Anyone who has read ‘The Secret’ will know about ‘the power of attraction’, in which a person attracts whatever they’re dwelling upon or requesting from the universe – be it positive or negative. Taking this concept in one possible direction, people tend to sense the black clouds of doom and, hence, avoid us when we’re feeling negative, so why can’t the Spanish motorists sense my feelings and simply steer clear of negative ‘ol me and my van? However, I do hold truck with the idea that if you drive along the motorway thinking constantly about crashes, you’re far more likely to have one than if you’re actually concentrating on the damn road!

Remaining with my demeanour concerning Spain, the Spanish citizens and the native lingo, I’m convinced that my most commonly used expression is “mucho malo” (very bad) – a useful catch-all phrase for anything from “it’s gone a bit cloudy –mucho malo!” to “the cashpoint won’t work – mucho malo!” to “my children are misbehaving – mucho malo!”, and so on. I don’t dare tally the daily incidence of this expression as I know it would be into double figures, at least. [N.B. Yes, I know it should be 'muy malo' now thanks to a helpful user comment. :) ]

I also like the expression “un poco loco” (a bit mad). From discussing “el hombre loco” in the Coviran to “mi ninos estan locos” (my kids are mad), it’s so easily and liberally applied. So, am I drawing all that is “bad” and “mad” towards me? And then commenting that it’s “no normal” (not normal) to boot. Hmm!

Perhaps I ought to change my favourite expressions to “muy bien” (very good), “bonita” (beautiful), “excelente” (excellent) and “soy tranquilo” (I’m calm). Perhaps I’ll try this fresh approach for a week and report back here soon...

 

Driven Round the Bend in Spain?

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a tad out of order for me to moan endlessly about the prospect of returning to Spain just because I find the process a pain. And, yes, I admit to turning into a modern day “Mary Mary Quite Contrary” – how does your garden grow? Uh, I dunno! I understand why the long-suffering lady in the Poohaven Post Office gave me a filthy look when, shortly before swapping countries, I moaned loudly about the Pound/Euro exchange rate and the cost of groceries in Espana. Give or take domestic warfare, kiddie tantrums and Sky box teething problems, at least it is sunny here!

My van, however, clearly isn’t as fond of Espana as the rest of the family. After its bout of entering into “limp mode” on the autovia, it has now sustained a few paint chips on the bonnet (how did that happen?) and it is eating diesel much faster than ever before. Could it be a faulty turbo, the air con consuming fuel like a demon or is ‘mi caminonetta azul’ staging a protest at winding mountain roads and ‘unmade’ tracks (that means “sh*tty, bumpy tracks” to anyone who doesn’t have delicate sensibilities).

A friend of mine who lives in Granada gleefully informed me that her husband - who has recently moved here from Cuba - has passed his Spanish driving test at second attempt. I was bemused to hear about the content of the test, which doesn’t feature a three point turn (this explains why Spanish motorists just can’t do a ‘proper’ turning manoeuvre) but it’s ever so heavy on theory. The candidates must answer stringent questions on all manner of topics such as “what are the effects of heroin and cocaine on the driver” and – my particular favourite – “what are the dimensions of the L plate”, which the driver is expected to display for a year after passing the test. If the candidate doesn’t know the exact dimension of their L plate, they fail the test and must start again. Talk about Spanish bureaucracy. Argh!

To my mind, it seems probable that many Spanish motorists have conducted first-hand research into the effects of cocaine on the driver, and possibly also the effects of Costa (similar to home-brewed sherry) and carajillos (brandy coffee). Judging by the number of bashed-up vehicles in my neighbourhood, the motorists are p*ssed, stoned or haven’t really done a test. Plus they park in particularly selfish places – for example, directly opposite tight bends and bollards – where other vehicles struggle to pass with their wing mirrors and panels intact. Surely these widespread practises are in contravention of the rigorous Spanish driving test. Si?

I once bought a Spanish-plated, second hand Peugeot for 1,500 Euros. This old banger, which was favourable on fuel consumption but spent more time in the garage than on the road, would have cost £200 in England. On the day of purchase, it was parked briefly on the street outside my house, opposite other parked vehicles, for the purpose of unloading. A passing motorist probably assessed that the gap was too narrow to drive through but instead of waiting for us to move the car or sounding his horn, he chanced it anyway and crunched both my passenger side panels, causing two huge dents. Is antisocial motoring behaviour taught in the theory test? I think not! So why is it de rigueur here?

Mi gusta Espana but the driving habits, as well as the sloth-like customer service (we’ll save that for another blog entry – betcha can’t wait!) can drive you round the bend. And my van was certainly happier in England - even if it’s alone in its capacity for preferring the M23 and the A27 to the winding road between Lanjaron and Orgiva.