Difficult one, this one.   Where to start, really? 

These past few weeks have not been easy for either of us.  It kind of caps off what has not been a great time for us in Madrid – or rather a boring commuter town north of Madrid.

To sum it all up; I have been made redundant from school but can’t say much about it because our union is taking legal action on my behalf.  The decision to make me redundant is irreversible but more compensation is being sought.  Sonalee has just resigned as well.  We will be going back to the village at the end of April.

After being really angry about it we now have a sense of relief that we will be leaving.  We have never been happy here although we tried.  We tried to find some interesting stuff going on around Colmenar but it just ain’t happening.  And we tried to convince ourselves that we could deal with a toxic work environment.

We couldn’t.

Sonalee first gave me a clue back in September that she was not happy at the school.  Her exact words were, “I fucking hate that place!”.  Which, looking back, was a big clue.  It never really got any better.  The black dog of Depression had begun to stalk the both of us, especially after Christmas.  When, in the early morning,  you find yourself slumped over the steering wheel telling yourself that you just don’t want to go there but knowing that you had to then you know your mental health is not what it should be.  No one should feel unadulterated joy at going to work but equally it shouldn’t be making you despair.

If it were just us who felt like this then we would be taking a long look at ourselves.  But we’re not.  Lots of other staff are leaving after just one year or two years.

What it does do is make me realise how lucky I was in Lisbon to have good management and supportive policies.  And Morocco too.  And how happy I was to work there.    And how social it all was with Friday night drinks and football matches. 

Here we feel very isolated from friends and family.  We have not made any friends apart from Eddie and Kate who also live out in the sierra.   But they’re really young and they do stuff that young people do. In Lisbon I had the time to talk to staff, chat about stuff and arrange social stuff.  Not here.   We have made no friends at work, not like we did in Lisbon and Rabat and in Sri Lanka. 

So it’s kind of just been us.  In a town so boring that Swindon would look exciting and hip beside it.  Madrid is what it is, a capital city full of culture, sport, extreme poverty, an overwhelming smell of stale urine and good times.  We live in the antithesis of that, apart from the smell of wee. One of our abiding memories will be the utterly bland local restaurants.  The Peruvian one is good as is one of the Mexican ones but the rest are just, really really boring.   

Another memory will be the sheer mountains of dog poo.  It’s everywhere.  Lots of people here have dogs and walk them and it’s great to see but we all walk them in the same place near us but, and this is a big but, what is left is a minefield of different coloured and textured poo. 

And it’s not our dogs, before you ask.  I always clear up until we reach the huge abandoned quarry that doubles as the semi-wild place to walk your dog.  Then it’s every dog for themselves. 

So, we’re going ‘back home’.  With all of our stuff.  We have, effectively, two sets of everything for a home and now we have to squeeze it all into the house in the village.  We currently have four couches altogether.  And four kitchen tables.  Two fridges.  Plus a load of other shit that we seem to have collected over the past 18 months.   Is it normal to accumulate so much stuff in such a short space of time?  And what the Hell do you do with two potato mashers?   

Despite all that has happened we have attempted to explore around here and to see a part of Spain that we would otherwise just bypass.  We’ve been to the mountains to see the snow and the huge pine forests that attract so many walkers.  We’ve been to the Prado and I can honestly say it blew me away with its collection.

We have been to Madrid to eat curry a few times, actually quite often.  The place we frequent is, no word of a lie, one of the best – if not the best – curry house I have ever been to.  It is superb.  We will miss it.

We have also visited the Valley of the Fallen, a hugely controversial monument to the dead of the Spanish Civil War.  It has quite the story to tell.  Anyway, it was astonishing it its scale.  Just mind blowing.  This place means different things to different Spaniards and it fascinating to see how it still affects politics here.  I came away with a sense of awe at the structure and of sorrow at its necessity. 

What has cheered us up immensely has been our witnessing of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark doing their stuff last week in central Madrid.  OMD have long been a favourite of mine and I have wanted to see them for so long since they reformed.   They did not disappoint.  It was brilliant and made us realise that it isn’t all shit, far from it. 

One of my jobs this week is to see if I can find more gigs to go to before we leave. 

I don’t think we will leave Colmenar Viejo and Madrid with too many regrets.  We feel duped that promises that were made were never going to be honoured but we weren’t the only ones to fall for it.  We will miss our landlady who is just lovely, as is her family of self-proclaimed communists (who own land).  We had wanted to see our friends who got married recently more regularly but we never got around to getting over our lethargy because we were really not happy.  So glad we did go to the wedding though!  

The rat race of Madrid just isn’t us.  Lisbon didn’t have that vibe as much as it does here.  Neither did Rabat.  We don’t like it at all.  We didn’t get out of the UK to then jump back into its teaching environment in Spain.  Sod that. 

It will be nice to spend time at home.  It is an old house and it needs care and attention that you can’t give during two weeks nor in the height of summer.   We will be less isolated there as well because of our friends.  Honestly, the food won’t be any different apart from the curry.    We have some ideas about what we will end up doing but, at the moment, what is uppermost in our minds is that we are feeling a bit happy again.

It’s nice.   I would recommend it.  

Ayubowan

Hasta Luego, inshallah

Ciao

Paul

PS It has to be these guys.  There were so unbelievably good for people ten years older than us.  We loved it, one of the best gigs we have ever been to.