The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society

by Chris Stewart

Translation’s a funny thing, though. I was interviewed by two young Taiwanese journalists, who explained to me what a humorous book the Chinese had found Driving Over Lemons. Out of curiosity I asked them if they could translate the title. I know a bit of Chinese and it struck me as peculiarly long. They scratched their heads, then said Sheep’s Cheese and Guitar Heaven: a Ridiculous Drama of Andalucia.

  What did Chloë think about the books?

  * * *

  Well, she was mystified by the English title! I have a vivid memory of her worried face when she first heard us discussing it. ‘Driving Over Lemons – an Octopus in Andalucía… what on earth does that mean?’ I think she was about seven at the time. So ever since then I have been the ‘Octopus in Andalucía’.

  She once said she would much rather I wrote novels: to her, my books are really just diary pieces and too familiar to be interesting. But secretly I think she gets quite a kick out of my success. A few months ago, she went to open a bank account in Granada, and as she handed across her ID card, the woman behind the counter exclaimed, ‘Ay, Chloë Stewart… you must be the girl in the book! Ay, how I loved the book.’ It’s no bad thing to be known at the bank.

  Do you think Chlöe – or Ana – might write her own version of life at El Valero one day?

  * * *

  No. Ana has not the remotest desire to write, although she types with style and wit. (And has just reminded me that she might still go into competition with a plot for a ‘body-stripper book’). It’s hard to say with Chloë; I hope that we’ve given her a childhood that could give her something to write about. But right now she’s a university student – and has flown the nest. She shares a flat in Granada and, as you might expect, has euphorically embraced urban life. Nothing is more likely to induce an enthusiasm for all things urban than a country childhood.

  So now there’s just Ana and me again on the farm, rattling like peas in a drum. This has been a tough rite of passage, and nobody tells you about it. You spend eighteen years living your life around, and for, your offspring in the most unimaginably close and intimate way… and then they’re gone. There’s nobody to wake in the morning and make sandwiches and breakfast for before heading off to the school bus.

  Of course, we get a lot of pleasure from Chloë’s happiness in her new life, and we’re proud of her independence and her making her way in the world. But it’s an odd stage, nonetheless.

  What is the menagerie cast these days? You’ve got the sheep, and chickens…

  * * *

  It’s the same old crew really, with occasional losses due to ‘natural wastage’, which of course is where I’m headed myself. The top of the pecking order is the wife, my favourite member of the menagerie, along with Chloë – who still, I think, sees this as her home. Then there’s there the unspeakable parrot, Porca, Ana’s lieutenant and familiar, who arrived by chance to make his home with us about nine years ago. This creature is one of the villains of my second book, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree.

  The parrot dominates the five cats, who range far and wide on the farm, feasting abundantly on rats. Then there are two dogs: Big, a hairy terrier we found abandoned by the road, and Bumble, an enormous and amiable mongrel, whose function is to monopolise the space before the fire and bark at intruders. And since we’re so remote and there are few visitors, he and Big keep in practice by barking all night long at the boar and foxes and other nocturnal creatures. Which makes it hard to sleep. The dozen or so chickens earn their keep by providing us, as you might expect, with eggs. And we’ve got a colony of fan-tailed doves, which are on the increase again after a winter when a pair of Bonelli’s eagles reduced their number from around a hundred to just seven. They are more cautious now and don’t go outside much. Paco, my pigeonfancier friend and telephone engineer, is going to get me some stock from Busquistar, up in the high Alpujarra. Apparently those pigeons know how to deal with eagles, because the crags and valleys up there are thick with them.

  And finally there’s the sheep, and there always will be the sheep, for I cannot imagine the dull silence of the farm without the bongling of the bells and the bleating of lambs. They provide us with the most delicious meat and, take it from me, eating home-grown lamb is one of the best treats of country life. The flock keeps the grass beneath the orange and olive trees neatly trimmed like a lush lawn. And then they range far and wide on the hills above the house, grazing on the woody aromatic plants that grow there: rosemary, thyme, broom, anthyllis, wild asparagus. At night they return to the stable, and there they copiously deposit the little heaps of beads and berries that, trodden into the straw, make the rich dung which goes to nourish the fruit and vegetables and, at one remove, us. The whole, wonderful circular ecological system.

  It sounds like farming is still a passion, even if you’ve become more of a writer than a farmer?

  * * *

  I’ve loved farming since I discovered it at twenty-one, but if truth be told I’m not very good at it. Maybe it is a vocational gift, like medicine or music, neither of which I’m particularly good at, either. I long for the model farm, but under my care weeds seem to get the upper hand, the livestock seize every chance to destroy the plants, and every agricultural villain seems to be stalking me – mosaic virus, red spider, scale insect, aphids, blossom-end rot. You name it.

  So it is lucky that, in terms of making a living, I’ve gravitated to becoming a writer. Albeit a writer who spends a lot more time farming than writing. If you’ve spent your life doing physical work it’s hard to take entirely seriously the idea of sitting down for a day’s work at a computer. I still do a bit of shearing, too, which is something I am quite good at – and which nobody else around here can do, except my-friend-aka-Domingo. So at least there’s something that enables me to hold my head up in an agricultural way.

  I made a living out of shearing for thirty years, but it’s hard when you hit your fifities, and now I only do a few days a year – my own sheep, Domingo’s, and one or two other jobs in the village. I dread these shearing days because I know what a physical effort it’s going to be. But when I actually get down and stuck in, it’s like dancing a dance you knew and loved long ago. Also, I get to see my handiwork year-round, idling on the hillsides, happily scratching themselves.

  And it means that people still know me around the town as the Englishman who shears sheep. I know most of the farmers and they’ll come and holler into my ear in bars. So I’ve got two different kinds of local identities. The sheep man and the book man.

  Orange trees and sheep – the mainstay of the El Valero eco-system

  You originally had a peasant farm with no running water, no electricity, no phone for miles around. Are things now very different?

  * * *

  We still rely on solar power, but more and better – enough, in fact, to run a freezer, which is a boon. Meantime, our house becomes ever more ecological. We’ve just installed ‘green roofs’ – a flat roof, lined and covered with soil and drought-resistant plants and grasses – by means of which insulation we have managed to raise the winter temperature in our bedroom to a comfortable six degrees. And we’ve got a solar water heating system that I’m currently working on.

  If it weren’t for the great thug of a four-wheel drive parked on the track, our carbon footprint would be virtually nothing at all. That has become of the utmost importance to us… and, at the risk of sounding sanctimonious, so it should be to all of us.

  You care a great deal about environmental issues. Do you think your views have become more trenchant since moving to Spain?

  * * *

  I’m not so sure about that. I was a pretty trenchant ecologist long before I moved to Spain. But one of the amazing things about writing a successful book is that people suddenly start to listen to what you have to say. This is rather gratifying, as you may imagine, but it’s not that you are saying anything different. It’s just that you no longer have to raise your voice to be heard. I think it’s the duty of anybody who finds themselves with access
to the public ear to use that platform to expound ideas for reducing the sum total of human damage and misery.

  The building of a dam casts a shadow over both Driving Over Lemons and its sequel, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree. How did that work out?

  * * *

  Well, as you can see, we’re not underwater yet. By great good luck, the authorities ended up building a dam much lower than their original plan, so unless they knock it down and start again the water level will never affect our farm. It is a sediment trap rather than a reservoir, so it’s filling up at a great rate with rich alluvial silt, which is wonderful for spreading on the land. It’s beautiful, too, the way the river meanders amongst the banks of mud, and there’s an aquatic ecosystem developing there, with ducks and herons and legions of frogs.

  Up the mast during an epic trip across the Atlantic, told in Chris’s new book, Three Ways to Capsize a Boat

  Talking of water, in your latest book, Three Ways to Capsize a Boat, you leave the land altogether to recall some epic and extremely funny seafaring adventures?

  * * *

  I’m glad you enjoyed it. Yes, Capsize is a book that I had to get out of my system. It seems odd, but I found myself writing snippets of it throughout the last ten years, maybe even longer. It was as if my mind was fixating on the sea. In buying El Valero I had to make a choice between the mountains and the coast. It’s curious how being born and raised in inland Sussex I should come to see these two types of landscape – neither of them prominent around Horsham – as somehow fundamental to my wellbeing.

  I chose the mountains, and have lived in them very contentedly for twenty years, but I do have a yearning for the sea, which comes from my early thirties when I had a brief lifechanging encounter. It all started when I talked my way into a job skippering a yacht in Greece – without knowing how to sail. So I had to learn, and one thing led to another and I ended up crewing across the North Atlantic. It marked me for life. Writing about it was fun. I didn’t have any notes, because back in those days I didn’t have the remotest intention of becoming a writer, but many of the experiences I had were so vivid that they all came flooding back. It was a great pleasure, too, thinking myself back to the sea, reliving it in a sense.

  The trouble is that it has opened that old wound, and I am now to be found at any hour of the day or night lost in a reverie, staring at pictures of wooden sailing boats and wondering if I ever might own one.

  My plan, a new gauntlet that I am throwing down for myself, is to sail around the world before I finally slip away. Not with all the ballyhoo and fol de rol of round-the-world racing and record-breaking. I’m not that sort. For me it’s a matter of ambling slowly around it and wondering at all the terrible, immeasurable beauty of it. Ana indulges these crazed notions with diplomacy and tolerance. I have suggested that she may be permitted a pot of basil on the stern rail in lieu of a farm and garden – and, I suppose, having the beastly parrot along would be most appropriate.

  It sounds like you were pretty smitten with the Greek islands, too. You enthusiastically describe sailing to Spetses, before embarking on your Atlantic adventures?

  * * *

  There’s a whole lot to be said for Greece: it has the mountains and the sea in the most glorious combination, as well as the gorgeous influence of Byzantium and the Levant. And its great advantage over Spain is that the Greeks have so far not destroyed the beauty of their coasts and islands. If they do, the old gods will never forgive them.

  I could have happily lived in Greece, with its sea and mountains, and the olives and oranges and the Mediterranean climate to go with it. But I always had a romance about Spain, its language, music and culture, and the great cities of Sevilla, Granada and Córdoba. So I have no terrible regrets.

  One final question that you are always being asked is your role in Genesis. You were in the original band. Can you tell us more about this?

  * * *

  I wrote about this a bit in A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, where I confess that I was never a very good drummer. The other members of the band very sensibly threw me out when I was just seventeen, having played on just two not very good songs on the first album. So I narrowly missed rock stardom. Actually, with me on board I fear that they would have got nowhere – and, once Phil Collins took my place, they did rather well for themselves, for which I’m delighted.

  Our paths cross from time to time, and I’m always surprised by how they’ve managed to surf the vicissitudes of celebrity life and come through unscathed. I get the vaguest sense of it even here in Spain, where Genesis have a huge following. I emerged one day from an interview in a recording studio in Madrid to find no fewer than four young recording engineers lined up to shake the hand of a founder member of the great band.

  Even the Spanish seem obsessed with Genesis – and my schoolboy career as their drummer. I’m on the right here, pouting next to Peter Gabriel.

  If you could do it all over again, would you still have thrust a wad of notes into Pedro’s hands and bought El Valero?

  * * *

  Without a moment’s hesitation. And, if I’d known things were going to turn out the way they did, I’d have given him double the asking price. If I’d had the money, of course, which I didn’t. I don’t think there’s anything better you can do in the middle of your life than to pick it up and shake it around a bit. Do something different, live somewhere different, talk another language. All that keeps your destiny on the move and keeps your brain from becoming addled. So there you have it – maybe the Spanish are right and Driving Over Lemons really is a self-help book.

  Copyright

  THE ALMOND BLOSSOM APPRECIATION SOCIETY © 2006 by Chris Stewart.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  As ever, the EVENTS, PLACES AND PEOPLE described in this book are all real, but to protect the innocent, and others, I have changed a few names and details.

  Published in June 2006 (and in this new edition 2009)

  published as an eBook 2011

  by SORT OF BOOKS,

  PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL

  www.sortof.co.uk

  Typeset in Iowan Old Style BT, THE Sans and Vitrina to a design by Henry Iles.

  304pp

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Print ISBN 978–0–9560038–2–9

  ebook ISBN 978–09563086–3–4