Our valley was almost perfectly circular, no doubt hollowed out by gargantuan volcanic upheavals eons ago. It behaved like a Roman amphitheatre, trapping sound, echoing and amplifying it. The smallest sounds from the other side of the valley were crystal clear and even conversations could be picked up. A goat’s bell, or birdsong, echoed round the mountains, clear and loud.
So imagine the noise in July, when another sporting event took place. The mountain road was closed to general traffic and rally cars raced each other instead. From early morning to evening, car after car roared past, negotiating impossible hairpin bends at speeds that left us sweating.
The valley echoed with engine noise, but we’d noticed a pattern. All too frequently, the roaring stopped, to be replaced by sirens. Joe and I exchanged glances. We could only assume there’d been an accident. However, shortly afterwards, the race continued and the valley reverberated once more with the roaring of racing engines.
In autumn, the olives and almonds were harvested. Nets were spread under the trees and families knocked the branches with sticks to dislodge the fruit and nuts. The sound of wood hitting wood reverberated around the valley. This was soon followed by the sound of almond de-husking machines that stripped the green husk from the hard shell inside. Like an old-fashioned washing mangle, the handle was turned producing a sound not unlike a cement mixer filled with rocks. Most families owned one of these machines, and the noise of almonds being de-husked filled the village. Nothing was wasted. The families ate or sold the almonds, and the husks were fed to the goats. We were always given enough almonds to last us all year.
Weekdays and weekends were easy to tell apart. In the winter there were only about six or eight souls in El Hoyo, including Joe and me. But in summer, and every weekend, it was a very different matter. All the Spanish families piled into their cars and drove into the mountains to open up their cottages and relax. On Sunday night they reversed the process, leaving the village quiet and empty.
I experimented one weekend in autumn and wrote a list of the sounds I heard.
Weekends
People laughing
People shouting
Babies crying
Papa Ufarte strumming Flamenco guitar music
Dancing and hand-clapping
Cars
Scooters - lots of them (Many are tiny scaled-down versions ridden by little boys.)
Almonds and olives being knocked off trees
The rumble of the almond de-husking machines
Children playing soccer in the square
Dogs barking
Football matches (I mean on the TV, but our neighbours bring the TV out into the street, followed by the 3-piece suite and extra chairs. Then other villagers bring their chairs and join them.)
Hooting delivery vans selling bread, fruit and fish
Joe cracking almonds
I set the list aside and picked it up again at midday in the middle of the week. As before, I closed my eyes and listened. As before, I made a list of the sounds I heard.
Weekdays
A very distant tractor
Birds rustling in our vine stealing grapes
Geronimo’s donkey singing to his girlfriend in the next village
Cocks crowing
Joe cracking almonds
Almonds we’ve been given
In September, Joe and I knew the Log Man would appear. Winter approached, and the Log Man was a necessary visitor. His visits always meant a day of hard labour ahead and we awaited his arrival, the first of the season, with some trepidation.
11 The Log Man and the Gin Twins
Stuffed Tomatoes and Prawns
We never knew exactly when the Log Man was coming. Every September he simply turned up, usually early in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday, before we’d woken up properly. He leaned on the doorbell, and when I opened the door, he grunted, “Leña”. Not as a question, you understand. Just the statement: “Firewood”.
It would be tempting to politely say “No, thank you,” but we’d regret that. If we didn’t accept the load, we’d have to collect it ourselves, in our jeep. That meant a weekly trip just to keep our greedy wood-burning stove happy. No, it made more sense to have it delivered, even if it meant several hours of hard work.
On this particular September Saturday, the sun was particularly warm and the sky particularly cloudless and bright. Wearing our oldest clothes and protective work gloves, we waited in the street. Being the weekend, most of the Spanish families had arrived and the Ufarte twins were playing in the street. Lola Ufarte sat on the doorstep, filing her fingernails, occasionally tossing her hair back and glancing up under her eyelashes at Geronimo, who leaned casually against the wall beside her.
The Log Man reversed awkwardly down the narrow street and parked with a hiss of air-brakes. He let down the side of the truck and stood aside to allow his young helper to climb up and hurl all the logs into the street. All shapes and sizes, the logs piled up into a jumbled, precarious heap of olive wood, almond, fig, some great stumps, ragged timber wedges and perfectly round logs that bounced and rolled.
Joe felt sorry for the lad. “He can’t shift those logs all by himself,” he muttered and, panting, climbed up onto the lorry to help him.
Joe helping to empty the logs
The Log Man stood back and made no effort to assist, and the two workers soon drew an audience of villagers, children and village dogs. The log pile in the street grew. Papa and Mama Ufarte appeared on their doorstep, Snap-On clamped to Mama Ufarte’s hip. Mama Ufarte glowed with health, the rise of her unborn baby clearly visible beneath her loose top. That day, the Ufarte twins were nurses again, each with a stethoscope swinging around her neck.
When the lorry was empty, the lad leaped down. Joe jumped down too, but forgot he was probably 45 years older than the lad. He landed badly, staggered, then stepped back onto one of the round, rolling logs. Poor Joe ended up on his back, legs flailing, like an over-turned tortoise.
The spectators gasped, “¡Madre mía!” in one voice, and Papa Ufarte and the Log Man’s lad sprang forward to pull Joe back onto his feet.
“Silly old fool,” Joe chided himself, but his misery was not quite complete.
From nowhere, out shot Fifi, the Ufarte’s spiteful Yorkshire Terrier. Darting through the forest of legs, she headed straight for her archenemy. Before he’d even straightened, or composed himself, Fifi’s teeth were sinking into his ankle.
“¡Madre mía!” the spectators gasped once more.
“Fifi! No!” shouted Mama and Papa Ufarte in unison.
“Fifi is biting Tío Joe again,” observed Nurse Ufarte #1, heading toward Joe, stethoscope at the ready.
“Fifi does not like Tío Joe,” explained Nurse Ufarte #2 to the world in general, plucking a bandage out of her apron pocket.
Joe forgot there were children present and cursed, thankfully in English. “Get off my leg, you stupid mutt!” he hissed, shaking Fifi off his leg. Fifi bounded away, past the onlookers and into the dark sanctuary of the Ufarte house.
The show was over and the Log Man drove away. The crowd dispersed, and Joe checked himself. No real damage done, except to his dignity. We started clearing the road of logs. It took three hours of wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load, pushed uphill to our back gate, where each log was individually stacked in the woodshed. As usual, I broke all my nails, developed severe backache and totally lost my sense of humour.
But it was worth it. Despite the humiliation, backache and broken fingernails, by the time the sun set, we had a nearly FULL WOODSHED. Nearly enough beautiful, scented logs to satisfy our voracious little wood-burner for the coming months. One more delivery, and winter would be sorted.
Priceless!
October arrived and the leaves on our vine turned crimson and crisp, twirling and whirling in the breeze before releasing their fragile hold and gyrating to the ground with a dry rustle. The temperature at night dropped and each evening we lit the wood-burner a little earlie
r.
One unusually warm day, I scrutinised Joe closely. “You need a haircut,” I said, “with our new hair clippers.”
Joe doesn’t have much hair. It grows quite thick at the back and at the sides. But on the top...well, let’s be honest, there isn’t a lot, mostly shine. When his hair grows too long, it goes all tufty, resembling an insane professor.
Barbers charge full price whether you present only half or a full head of hair. To save money, it seemed like a great idea to buy some hair-clippers and I would take charge of the cutting. After all, how hard could it be to shave a head?
It was midday, and Joe nervously sat on a chair in the garden. I opened the box containing the shiny new clippers and graded clip-ons.
“A Grade 3, I think,” I said, attaching the guard over the cutting blades with a confident flourish.
“That sounds quite short,” Joe said doubtfully.
“No, it’ll be fine.” I clicked the ‘On’ button and the clippers buzzed into life.
All went well for a while. Joe obediently tipped his head this way and that as a gentle breeze stirred the remaining dry leaves on the grapevine. Snippets of hair drifted down to be lifted by the breeze, which wafted them across the ground in lazy circles.
KER-BANG!
A massive blast ripped through the air and Joe and I jumped in fright.
“It’s too early for the Fiesta,” said Joe, settling back into the chair. “It’s probably Geronimo. Maybe Real Madrid won a match and he’s celebrating. Why do the Spanish like such loud fireworks?”
Behind Joe, I resumed cutting, then stood very still. To my horror, a bald patch, the width of the hair-clippers, gleamed palely on the back of his head. Somehow the guard had been knocked off the clippers and the naked blades had chomped a track through his hair. I recalled my daughter telling me this was called a ‘Runway’ or ‘Brazilian’ or something, but didn’t think it a style usually adopted for men’s haircuts.
“They’ll be letting off more of those bloody fireworks when the Fiesta starts, you mark my words,” said Joe. “How’s the haircut coming along?”
“Oh, fine...”
It was a blatant lie.
I didn’t replace the guard and worked desperately to repair the damage. I tried to even out the remaining hair length, but sadly, my efforts were in vain. The more I clipped, the worse it all looked. Joe’s head looked as though a plague of starving moths had descended and feasted.
“I think that’s it,” I said, brushing off the last hair clumps from his shoulders.
Joe stood and went inside to admire my handiwork in our large living-room mirror. I counted down... Five, four, three, two, one, zero...
On cue, an anguished howl rent the air.
“What have you DONE?” yelled Joe.
“I’m sorry.”
“I look like a blasted criminal!”
“Perhaps you could wear a cap for a while?”
Fifi had always made it perfectly clear she detested Joe, but the jaunty baseball cap he now sported absolutely enraged her. She redoubled her efforts to sink her wicked little teeth into his ankle whenever an opportunity arose, hairing down the street the moment he left the house. Joe was not pleased with me.
I suppose there is a moral to this story. Perhaps, get your hair cut professionally. Or, never cut your beloved’s hair during Spanish fireworks.
El Hoyo’s annual fiesta came and went amidst its explosion of fireworks, processions, marching bands and dancing. The same band that always played at our village fiestas poured music into the valley until the small hours of the morning. Joe and I made an appearance and I noticed Lola Ufarte, dressed in a low-cut, skin-tight dress, dancing with every male in the village. Geronimo stood close by, watching, a look of abject misery on his face. I shook my head sadly, I could see no future in that relationship, it was bound to end in tears.
I also saw Sofía wrapped in the arms of her policeman boyfriend. I hoped, for Carmen-Bethina’s sake, that Sofía had finally found The One.
When the Log Man returned a month later, his timing was perfect. Our wonderful friends from the UK, the Gin Twins, were due for their annual visit. We suspected that the Log Man might appear that weekend and we were right. I collected the Gin Twins from the airport, and drove them home to El Hoyo to find that the Log Man had just left. Joe was attempting to shift the log mountain single-handed. Despite having travelled all night, the Gin Twins downed a swift gin and threw themselves into the task of stacking logs. That day we cleared and stacked the log pile in record time. Video evidence of this domestic triumph can be found on YouTube: http://youtu.be/nfMurRdX4Zo
Thinking back to that October always makes me a little giddy. Many small things happened, but for me, the big event was the launch of my first book, Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools. One day it appeared online, and life was never quite the same again.
Suddenly I was being invited onto radio programs. Reviews of Chickens popped up in strange places and complete strangers wrote to me telling me about their chickens or dreams of moving abroad. My email inbox was never empty.
Of course I received complaints, too, the most common coming from American readers who objected to two of the chickens’ names, Bugger and F**k. Many have asked why we chose these names, and the answer is simple. Our two black chickens were very tame and consumed by curiosity. Shoe-laces, every leg hair, mosquito bite, or wrinkle in a sock were investigated as soon as we entered the orchard. Joe was forever falling over those two chickens and cursing. Consequently, the swear words stuck, and the two black chickens were always referred to by those unfortunate names. In Britain, the word F**k is bad, but not shocking. I have since talked to American friends who tell me that the word is much, much worse in the States. So I apologise to you ladies in the USA, I genuinely didn’t mean to offend.
The launch of Chickens coincided with the Gin Twins’ visit, and they arrived laden with wondrous gifts from the UK. It took nearly half an hour to unwrap them all. We sat under the vine, opening gift after gift amidst squeals of delight and gin.
Question:
What do you give a pair of old fools who live in paradise and already have everything they need?
Answer:
The stuff on this table.
The Gin Twins brought:
A HUGE box of Christmas crackers
Bread sauce mix
Chocolate advent calendar for Little Paco next door
Blackboard for counting off the days until Christmas
Reindeer antlers
A Christmas pudding
Extra hot curry powder (can’t find it in Spain)
Extra hot chili powder (can’t find it in Spain)
Sag aloo (can’t find it in Spain)
Box of poppadums (can’t find them in Spain)
2 vacuum packs of naan bread (can’t find it in Spain)
A tub of E45 cream
Fancy tin
Tin of chocolate cookies
Another tin of chocolate cookies
A supply of bayonet-type light bulbs (can’t buy them in Spain)
Anti-bacterial counter spray (why can’t we buy that in Spain?)
A little book of wine quotations
DVDs for Joe (Great Escape, Battle of Britain, A Bridge too far)
A huge bag of books
Magazines from home, like Sussex Life
Packs of seeds
A small soft toy chicken
And...a copy of Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools.
I had never seen a copy, or held one in my hands until the Gin Twins brought me that first copy. I couldn’t stop sniffing and handling it, flicking through the pages, holding it, stroking the cover.
One of the nicest side-effects of the book launch was my Internet Twitter life. At first I didn’t even understand how Twitter worked and the Twitter community was a mystery to me. However, I took to it like a tramp to cider. I soon had a following of several thousand, both as @VictoriaTwead and my other identity, @StephenFrysCat. What fun I
had!
As Victoria, I met and chatted to people all over the world, many who’d read Chickens. And as my alter ego, Stephen Fry’s Cat (I’ve never had the honour of meeting Stephen Fry himself, although I’m a huge fan) I chatted and laughed my socks off.
Stephen Fry’s Cat developed a character all his own and I chose an avatar that made me laugh every time I looked at it. I named the cat Oscar (after Oscar Wilde) and Oscar the Cat was a gentleman. His greatest passion was food and I only had to tweet *rumble, rumble* for his followers to respond by the dozen, offering ><(((((((º> and all manner of virtual delicacies to fill his magnificent tum.
@StephenFrysCat
Occasionally Stephen Fry would tweet me, too. For instance, once, when he’d just returned from a trip abroad, I tweeted:
Bliss! Sitting on @StephenFry’s knee looking at his holiday snaps :-)
Back came the reply from Stephen Fry:
Holiday? Why you silly cat - I was working my botty off to put salmon in your bowl... holiday? Tchah!
As Victoria, I made friends with fellow chicken owners, expats, readers, fellow writers, food-lovers and nice people from every corner of the planet.
I ‘met’ Paul Hamilton, (Twitter name @HamsteratFrys) the steward of Driffield Golf Club, Yorkshire, who conceals an extraordinary artistic talent and a sense of the ridiculous that I adore. I am grateful to Paul for the wonderful cover he designed for this book and for the many, many hilarious ‘photos’ he tweeted and posted on Facebook over the months. They include pictures of Her Majesty, William and Kate, politicians, footballers, comedians, celebrities, animals and even a Michelangelo, each one doing something silly with a copy of Chickens. One day I think I’ll surprise him. I’ll saunter up to his bar at Driffield Golf Club, order a nice glass of Spanish wine and introduce myself.
Squirrel reading ‘Chickens’
I chatted with new Twitterfriends bearing the most exotic names: GreenMousey, HilaryLuke, BigWidu, AnitaPlum, TravelMaus, ChaosGerbil, FarmingFriends, MrsJollyRed, Malloise, Ellnhank, KnittingPuppy and IceEgg22. I compared weather observations and experiences with other Spanish expats: KierstenRowland, Nichick, JoJoNewman, InMalalagaToday, EbroApartments, NickySwain and MolinoCharrara. Some were aware that VictoriaTwead was also StephenFrysCat, others had no idea.
Two Old Fools - Olé! Page 8