Autumn

Hm, hm.  It seems a very long time since I wrote anything other than coursework essays and job applications, and a very, very long time since my last contribution to here.  So long that, since Tenerife, I’ve moved house, finished the course, started teaching, and become the oldest resident in this strange muddle of a building which goes by the name of ‘flats’.

The building is late 18th century – high ceilings, oddly shaped rooms, doors like drawbridges. There’s an old brick washhouse in the garden. I assume the original outdoors loos were knocked down – no trace of these anyway.  But you’d know there must have been some at some stage, from the way the ‘mod cons’ are either tacked on the end of each flat, or squirreled away inside, or both, as in my flat.  I have a kitchen in an extension which has the dimensions of a deep press or cupboard; and a bathroom in what was once a cupboard the size of a viable walk-in wardrobe.  I have a minute study, an enormous bedroom and another room which functions as a living room in the sense of housing living-room furniture but which also functions as a large hall, it being impossible to arrange living room furniture in ways which will encourage lounging on account of the door into the hall proper, the door into the kitchen, a large picture window and an enormous, rather ghastly tiled hearth, sans fireplace.  The décor is still that of the precious occupant, despite good intentions to the contrary: peach ceiling and egg yolk walls in the bedroom; turquoise ceiling and sky-blue walls in the study (a room which is tiny, crammed full of bookcases, and very comfortable); and all manner of floral in the bathroom creating an effect which defies description.  I have a small back yard surrounded by a low wooden fence (blue) beyond which lies the communal washing green.

A far, far cry from the cottage.  A welcome far cry too.  Conditions at the cottage had become intolerable by February. It was icily cold; the water supply failed repeatedly; I was perfectly miserable.  

Here, I have pavements, street lights, neighbours, a shop round the corner, a bus stop at the end of the road, and I don’t have to trail my bin half a mile down a track each week to be emptied by the refuse collectors.

Civilisation is plain wonderful!

Home from holiday

Home from holiday - we caught the plane late Friday night and I got home today. It's been minus degrees here all week apparently. The cottage was like an ice box, so I lit a huge fire; collected dogs, bathed walked and fed them; then went back to Himself’s central heating picking up a curry for dinner en route. I've just unpacked my bag - enough sensibility for tonight. Tomorrow I'll deal with laundry and mail and other matters of responsibility.

It's been a strange week. We knew Tenerife would be a little different - pure package holiday - but it wasn't quite as ghastly as anticipated. Not quite relentlessly kiss-me-quick hats and English breakfasts after all, although there was a fair degree of that, lots of tattoos in evidence at the pool, and supertanned bulky women oozing out of spangled tops and plunging 18 in straws through cherries and sparklers and paper umbrellas into vibrantly coloured cocktails in tall flared glasses. But after three days we discovered we weren't where we thought we were, which was a little disorientating.

We walked to Las Americas one evening - along an esplanade. International restaurants gave way to Irish bars, and English bars and casinos and night clubs the deeper into Los Americas we went: all very tawdry and depressing. We turned back, got lost, and found a wonderful little restaurant which served excellent fish, tucked away behind a hospital - so good we went back another night for paella, despite the tuneless crooner who comprised the evening's live entertainment, and the (largely English) clientele waving their hands in the air as they sang along to Tom Jones.

The food was wonderful. One night we found an Italian restaurant, ate pasta, drank wine from enormous balloon glasses, and were treated to pudding on the house. Another night I had swordfish while Himself ate veal. We stumbled across a proper Canarian restaurant in the north, where you chose your own fish from an aquarium. I think I had snapper but since the waiter spoke no English and my Spanish doesn't include enough words for fruit from the sea, it could have been anything except the pike, which I recognised and banned from my plate. Himself had a sea food stew, which included mussels and prawns and squid and octopus as expected, but also limpets or barnacles.

The weather wasn't great - overcast for at least half each day and on a couple of occasions the sun didn't break through at all: warm enough to stroll around in T-shirts and shorts, and to eat outside at night, but not hot enough to encourage reading by the pool and turning brown. We hired a car and drove north, hoping to reach La Laguna, where, unusually, the houses are significantly more than twenty years old and built from stone not concrete. We got very lost and spent almost 2 hours driving through manic traffic in the capital - made all the more hair-raising as I had to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road, didn't understand any of the road markings, kept forgetting the rear-view mirror would be on my right and that I was supposed to drive anti-clockwise round roundabouts. Another day we drove west towards blue sky, stopped where the sun was strong enough to cast sharp shadows, and stripped off to read, eat ice cream and watch dolphins from a bench above a tiny black-sand beach, before travelling further round the coast to Los Gigantos, where we were awed by the second highest sea cliffs in the world, and ignored invitations to enter twee coffee houses for scones, jam and 'real English tea'.

The water is bad; soft drinks are exorbitant; wine is cheap; spirits are very cheap and measured by the glass. We drank rather a lot of alcohol in consequence. We overindulged to such an extent last Sunday that neither of us can remember anything at all about the evening.

Someone stole Himself’s battered but beloved boat shoes.

We found what we thought was a Turkish coffee shop on the sea front: startlingly empty. The coffee was served from a thermos, and cakes appeared to be served with boiled egg. It was a Swedish tourist office and evangelical church, and the cakes weren't cakes but some kind of oval unleavened bread encasing what appeared to be wallpaper paste.

Despite the place being stiff with Brits we were taken for Swedish, French, German and Dutch - and I was taken for someone's mother. We met a Norwegian couple in a bar who asked Himself three times what he did and asked me several times more about our children. We met a Dutch couple at the complex who loved the place so much they'd spent 5 weeks there every year since 1996. We met a couple of young Glaswegian boys when we all waiting in the bar while the flats were readied - their heads were shaven, their tattoos were dark against white skin. We met them again when they leapt over the wall between our patio and the pool, mistaking our flat for theirs; and again on the last morning when we were waiting in the sun for the coach to the airport: Himself and I read, they suffered hangovers. They were as pale as when they arrived, having partied late each night and woken only in time to hit the night scene. We ended up sitting behind them on the coach, so heard their astonishment on seeing the place in daylight for the first time.

We were advised by a local to go down to the sea front to watch the police impound illegally parked cars. So we did just that, and had trouble tearing ourselves away - scores of hired cars were lifted or dragged onto trailers, or towed away, by about a dozen policemen who were utterly oblivious to screaming handbrakes and the smell of burning rubber.

We sat in a restaurant with live music and saw a group of seniors walking tipsily home, who, on hearing the music, took their partners and waltzed beautifully along the pavement, then out into two lanes of traffic, which stopped for them.

I read AS Byatt's A Whistling Woman, which was, I think, a failed attempt to replicate the wonder of Possession; a detective story by James Lee Burke which moved so fast through such a complicated plot that I was left completely unable to tell not only who did it, but what he'd done; and Hosseini's Kite Runner, which I couldn't put down; the end made me cry; and I now want to visit Afghanistan. We both read Stuart McSomeone's excellent detective story Cold Granite, set in Aberdeen - the plot wanders all over the place and it suffers the first-novel disease of dotting all plot I's and crossing all plot T's but the characters are superbly drawn.

It was a full week in an odd way; not busy but peculiarly rich.

Today's rying times

I had a 'course dinner' last night - for those on the course still in here.  Eleven of us in Chinese buffet restaurant: two from Oman, a Pole, a Belgian, two from N. Ireland, a Glaswegian, a Welshman, one from China, one from Hong Kong, me.  Cross-cultural small talk is very strange.  At one stage an Omani sitting on my left, asked the Welshman opposite 'How much do you weigh?' The Welshman replied 'Er, about 12 stone I think', to which the Omani responded 'I meant in grams.'  A little later we seemed to be in some kind of encounter group, after the Glaswegian who'd arrived rather drunk, and who's recently separated from his wife, described in great detail just how sad Christmas had made him feel.  The Glaswegian had been married for about 25 years, and the average age of the group is about 24, and the solutions proffered tended towards the extraordinary - I distinctly heard one girl advising the afflicted gentleman to go ice skating, because it always worked for her.  The entire meal was punctuated by stints of photograph-taking, during which we all had to stop talking/eating/etc. and face either left or right towards the waiter or waitress standing at one or other end of the long table we occupied, who'd been cajoled into the task, and who was trying to work out how to use the camera pressed into his/her hands, while the chap from Hong Kong exhorted us, repeatedly, to 'Look gorgeous!' 
 
The Chinese girl wasn't very impressed with the food, but then she's never impressed by anything British.  Since the place is self-service, I gave her my plate and asked her to choose what she considered the best of the selection for me.  Unasked, she kindly did the same for pudding: I was given a pot of mango milk jelly; a pot of a different milk jelly, which looked slightly blue and tasted vaguely soapy; and a bowl containing both something small and round in batter which looked unnervingly like scampi, but which was, I think, a piece of banana, frittered, and an enormous slice of gateau, thickly coated and filled with ersatz cream and bespeckled with vibrantly coloured hundreds and thousands, both of which soused in a sauce of the same bluish hue as the unidentifiable jelly and bobbing with unidentifiable bits - perhaps fruit.  She'd furnished herself with the same (although she had two pots of each jelly), and cleaned plate (and pots).  I was less successful.  
 
The evening was deemed a huge success, and people have arranged another gathering - to an ice rink.  My fortune cookie's verdict: 'Today's trying times will become tomorrow's good old days.'