‘Tis the Season to drive on some of the most boring roads in Europe for nine hours to come home for a few weeks.  Of course it is. And to re-acquaint yourself with the language that you have not spoken for months on end and have been really bad at practising on Duolingo.  My level of Spanish stays, to my shame, at the level of a 3 year old.  I really have to change that considering I have a Spanish god-daughter. 

The holidays represent a good end to a really shitty year for the both of us, or at least the first ¾ of it.  The last few months have been much better.  This is, of course, thanks to us being in the same country at last but also to a robust and energetic social calendar organised by the senior school English Department at my school.  It is weird.  We are all very very different people yet we all get on really well.  They even respect the fact that I am a miserable bastard all of the time.  I know!   I don’t get it either. 

It would be fair to say that this year has seen its share of changes to rank alongside those of the previous few years.  Six months ago Sonalee and I were on separate continents and now we are sharing our time together between an expensive apartment in a middle class suburb of Lisbon and a slightly tattered house in the middle of Spanish Andalusia.  And I am doing the job that my wife has been doing for over twenty years and doing it so much worse that she would have done!

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Look, I am enjoying the role.  I am enjoying the challenge.  I am enjoying the subject, very much in fact.  I am enjoying working with my ebullient colleagues but there is no way in Hell that I am anywhere near as good as Sonalee at teaching what I teach.  What to do? 

Well, one thing is to embrace living in one of the more interesting European capitals.  I think we do that as best we can with four dogs and one permanently pissed off cat.  We have yet to fully experience all of the culture that is now on our doorstep but we are trying to see more and more of our adopted city for a year.

We see the extreme differences between the haves and the have nots that are so visible in any major conurbation.  These differences are so visible where we live in Lisbon and yet hidden in our small village in Andalusia.  In Lisbon the poor and the desperate are out on the street, seeking help or even just someone to talk to.  Here in deeply rural Spain, they stay behind their front door, are not spoken of but assisted quietly without fuss or ostentatious acts of charity. 

The same with the Crazies, those who have little connection with the working-for-wages majority because of some mis-wiring of their neural pathways or some horrific episode from their upbringing that has scarred them too deeply.  They are there outside the station or the local supermarket scaring ‘ordinary’ folk and begging for help, financial or otherwise.  We see them hanging outside the huge catholic church down the road in our area known as  Paco De Arcos, some with dogs that they love as their only companion in their lives. 

We do not see this in our village; it is hidden away and not discussed in polite circles.  We last saw it in patches in Morocco but we remember it from our time in Sri Lanka – that acute extreme of wealth and poverty.  Speaking of Sri Lanka…

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Short Eats.  A staple of Sri Lankan cuisine.  Fried snacks of fish, meat and vegetables. Very much a Sri Lankan cultural highlight.   All originated in Portugal.  We see them everywhere we go in Lisbon.  Sonalee was aware of the huge influence of Portuguese in the Sinhala language but we didn’t realise just how much of an influence it is.  Similarly with architecture and music.  We knew the laws of Sri Lanka were determined by the British and we all know the massive influence of the British on Sri Lankan life which is there in every cricket match on the island but we were rather ignorant of just how much Portugal left an imprint on Sri Lanka.   

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If there is one thing that has opened our eyes as we live on the Atlantic Coast of the Iberian Peninsula it is that the idea of unique and special Sinhalese nationalism is utter bollocks, just as it is in England or Spain.  If you are reading this in Sri Lanka, ask the next politician banging on about how special the Sinhalese are why his name is Perera or Fernando and where it comes from.

And speaking of Portugal…

I got to meet a cross-section of the wealth and privileged of the city during the various Parents’ Evenings of the last few weeks.  Parents’ Evenings are always an interesting time.  You step out of the bubble of being a professional teacher within a special group of professional teachers within an organisation led by professional teachers to be confronted by a group of adults that do not share your universal ideas of how education works. 

It has ever been thus. 

Parents’ Evenings have always left me feeling exhausted and yet thoughtful.  They are an opportunity to hear about life away from the world that you exist in and how the pedagogical ideals we seek as teachers has to be balanced by so many other factors in a students’ life.  I have to say that most parents were okay with me, which is always gratifying.  

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One thing I have noticed is the same with senior and junior children is the embarrassment factor in having your teacher talk to your parents.  It is astonishing.  15 year olds squirming as much as 9 year olds will always make me smile. 

But it is the holidays and I am not supposed to be thinking about school.  I will, instead think of my mum’s visit this last week.

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My mum is pretty remarkable.  I know many sons say this but I think I am justified in saying it.  She’s 78 and a widow of a quite amazing man, my step-father, who moved house in her 70’s to be nearer her grandchildren and then moved back to our home city once they had grown up and didn’t need their grandma as much as they used to.  She volunteers twice a week at local vaccination centres, helping old people get their vital jabs.  She’s a four-time London Marathon finisher and someone who, at 70, decided she would do two months charity work in a school in Sri Lanka simply because it was the right thing to do and because her son was working in the country at the time. 

Mum is my role model for just getting on and doing something.  She is my role model for age being no barrier.  She is my role model for cooking chips in a frying pan.  These are important things in life and should be celebrated. 

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Anyway, it was fantastic to have her here for a week over Christmas.  It made our Christmas a family one.  She loves the dogs and they love her.  Our friends like her, probably more than they like me (this has been mentioned before) and she likes them.  The house seems a little bit empty without her, which is weird since she was only here for a week. It was our first time together for nearly two years thanks to covid and yet another reminder of what the past few years has taken from us.

We said goodbye at the airport today, two days after getting a covid test in Torremelinos.  We had never been to Torremelinos before.  We will never go to Torremelinos ever again. 

Anyway, we said goodbye at the airport with Dora and Luna accompanying us because they’re cute and stuff.  Dora decided that she absolutely needed to have the shit of her life alongside the huge escalators that allow you to travel from the car park to the terminal. 

It was huge!  Four massive, stinking turds of such prominence that anyone coming within 50 feet would have re considered their holiday arrangements. 

So proud. 

So embarrassed clearing it up.

Luna decided that charm was the key here at this place of busy people doing busy things.  This involves walking up to anyone and giving them the pathetic eyes that says ‘stroke me, love me but above all, feed me’.  It was endless.  Then, after mum had negotiated the trials of travelling during a pandemic and finally gotten through security, Luna decided to take a massive dump outside the terminal where lots of men were smoking.  Her offerings were left in a steaming bag in the giant ashtray that inhabits the outside of the main entrance.  

So proud.

Our return to the village was with a sad tinge.  The dogs had so enjoyed Grandma staying.  This was not, I hasten to add, just because she had brought a bag of treats for them to be emptied each day.  Mum had been here with us for our Christmas dinner and the disappointment of not winning a single bloody thing on the Spanish Xmas lottery, the biggest in the world. 

Mum was also here for our most profoundly shocking moment in our village thus far– the death from a heart attack of a bloke called Antonio on the day before Christmas Eve.  Antonio was a scruffbag of a bloke, a gitano (gypsy) who I feel was never fully accepted by some in the village.  But he and his wife were the ones who accepted us without any thought when we arrived in here.  He loved dogs.  He loved them loads.

Antonio saw us with our dogs as we were walking and was the first in Fuente Tojar to talk to us, simply because he wanted to share videos of his dogs whilst we sat at Bar Chico.  His wife and him were the ones who talked to us during our first Andalusian summer as we exchanged all views regarding dogs and how to deal with naughty children (their daughter is a bit of tearaway).  

Antonio was so busy around here.  He had his gypsy hands in many enterprises, some profitable some not.  He loved his dogs.  He was up and down our road ten times a day.  We always exchanged greetings, if not words.  He always smiled at us and we back. 

We knew him as Farmer Jack.  We’re not sure why but it seemed to be the amalgamation of various clichés from British comedy of many years.  We will always know him as Farmer Jack.  And we miss him.  We miss him a lot.  He was a daily occurrence in our life in our village.  He was an ever-present.

We don’t have many friends in Fuente Tojar.  We have our close ones like Jan and Ken and we have others that we like but have yet to know properly.  These are the foreign ones.  Our local friends are equally as sparse.  We have Marie, of course.  We have our neighbours and some of Jan’s friends.  But Antonio, well, he was somewhat different.  We didn’t know him as Antonio, partly because there are roughly 210 Antonios in the village. 

We learned of his fatal heart attack whilst we were on way home from shopping on Christmas Eve.  His funeral was for five o’clock that evening.  In Spain, there is no hanging around.  You die, the next day you are buried.  Simple. 

Brutal.  And raw.  Sonalee and I attended our first Spanish Catholic funeral with a heavy heart at our local church that rang the funereal bells with a practised art.  We stood, sat and stood again many times as we listened without understanding at the eulogy of a man that we barely knew yet meant something to us.   I got upset.  His wife was, understandably, distraught as were other relatives.  We both felt a little self-conscious but we also both felt that we wanted to say goodbye.

What to do?

It was nice to have mum here to talk to about it, to talk about Antonio and what he meant to us.  Mum has seen it all before so she dispensed the wisdom that was required and led the toast to a man we will miss.

I say seen it all.  That wasn’t quite true.  She had not seen Die Hard, the Xmas movie that needs to be watched on Christmas Eve.  She was impressed.  Who wouldn’t be? 

And so we now look forward to the New Year.  Given the crazy circumstances of the past few years, we have no idea what might happen.  I have a contract until the end of the academic year and that’s as far as we have gotten with regards to making any plans.    I am sure it is the same for many of us. 

Ayubowan

Hasta luego, inshallah

Tchau

Paul

PS:  There is a house in New Orleans…

PPS:  This is pretty good as well.