The Airport Run

Sat in the car at the airport, doing a swing past the guards every so and along so as not to get stuck in the expensive park and queue to pay and lug the suitcases across and up the steps. It’s worse inside with huge hangers full of marble and Germans. I park on the flowerbed for a piece. My old mate and his companion arrive. The girl looks nice. I help haul the suitcases. We leave with the windows down and papers blowing around and out. No air-con in this old car.

With friends staying you want to show them around and impress. That’s right. It’s too early though. I was once in the airport bar having a drink, you know as one does, and Dennis Hopper came in, so I pretended I didn’t know who he was then we bought each other beers and stuff, and laughed at the girls, then it turned out it wasn’t him anyway.

Right, come on, they’re a lot cheaper just down the road here than they are on the coast and, frankly, the company is nicer.

Sandwiched between a tour-bus and a cement truck, we pull off the road at the first opportunity. A few houses stand around, looking unconcerned. The car cools down over another flowerbed, this one rather tatty, as we enter a building through an enormous barn-door. We’ll have a couple of beers and tapas. I’m all knowing as the host; role-playing as a tour-guide with witty answers to all the queries. 

‘…That’s right, donkeys!’

Some blond fellow watches us from the far end of the bar. He probably works down at the nearby cowboy town film-set. A young girl with a bruised face works the beers and the customers. The blond looks like he wants to start something. The foreign residents here have an easy way to measure themselves against each other: how long you bin living here? You must watch their eyes when you face up for this one. It’s a kind of pissing contest where there can only be one winner.

After better than fifty years man and boy, I try and avoid this, as the loser can get sore.

My friends are looking at the sad range of pickled entrails lying under the glass counter.

‘Sí, una ronda de cañas. ¡Oiga!’ The little barmaid brings the drinks and goes ‘t’ree beer?’ and I’m deflating like a spare tyre on a Renault. Kinda place is this anyway? ‘Thank you, dear child. And where are you from?’

Rumania. Well, I’ll be buggered. All these years living here, trying to blend in with the locals and to pick up a few words of various languages as one does, and do you know, I couldn’t even say in her gibberish: ‘I am a secret policeman, where is your sister?’

A Russian friend had been telling me about his work permit and the paperwork he’d given in. He’d prepared and written up the document himself on a sheet from a Saint Petersburg cigarette company with fancy headed paper and had covered it with stamps made with ceiling wax and a melted metal top from a Chivas Regal bottle.

We need people like this in Spain.

By now, we’re into some of those beers that come in dark glass bottles and feeling the kick. The blond fellow has joined us. It’s too hot to take an attitude.

From the terrace you can see a piece of a wide, sandy riverbed. It was here that they shot the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. Well, a small piece of it. A Welshman, cashiered from the Horse Guards, once told me the story of how the producer, Sam Spiegel, had obtained a thousand horses and camels to attack the papier mâché town of Aqaba on the Carboneras coast. The Welshman led the charge dressed in suitable togs but for some reason, with no saddle. ‘One mistake and I would have been trampled to death’ said the Welshman sadly as I solicitously bought him another drink. It is told that, after the single take was successfully filmed, they asked Mr Spiegel what was to be done with the animals.

He answered laconically: ‘Give the horses to the gypsies and shoot all the camels.’

The whole bloody lot. Some reward for being in an Oscar film.

My friend notices that the bar has a sign to say that This Establishement has Complaining Sheets. We order a few to take away with us.

A man in a string vest comes through a door behind the bar. He’s scratching himself with a kind of reserved enthusiasm. ‘You boys look like you would fit in perfectly in Mojácar. You ever been there?’

It’s about an hour’s driving to get to my place. I reckon it’s going to take us a little longer. 

 ...

(I published an earlier version of this in 2009) 

Putting Them Through Their Paces

 I bought my first car from a dealer in Almería. I was eighteen and had recently (that morning, probably) passed the driving test in Huercal Overa. The car was a kind of old Renault van called a 4F with the push-pull gears but fitted with an Ondine engine rather than the usual 4L couchez-avec egg-beater. This meant that the old girl could thunder along at a rather better speed than suggested by the body and was just the ticket for me. The passenger seat was removable; it merely hooked in at the front, so it offered a rather nasty surprise to anyone sat next to me when I stepped on the brake, but with the seat parked on the tarmac, I had room to stretch out full length on a thin mattress for a snooze. That’s right: my first vehicle was a camper.

I remember belting one day down the wiggly line on the map laughably called a road which connected Mojácar with Murcia and all points north. In those far-off times, roads went through towns, rather than round them, which meant you could stop for a libation every hour or two. Trucks would work their winkers to let you pass. There were no discernible speed-limit, and no one took any notice of the signs anyway. There were drain-channels across the road which, if hit with sufficient speed, would cause you to leave a dent in your roof as the car dipped and you didn’t. On this occasion I was approaching Murcia at somewhere over a hundred kph when I saw two cops on the side of the road, just at the point where the road itself dropped about six inches and turned into a rutted track. No warning signs, of course. Spoil the fun. There wasn’t time to slow down nor was I inclined to, as the two grinning policemen waved me past, like fans at the track. I think I broke a kind of automotive long-jump record that day.

The car took me to England in about 1974 on an early adventure in my life, the only time I have ever driven from here-to-there, all the way through to Calais and across the channel. Crossing into France caused me some embarrassment as I stopped at the frontier and whipped out my passport at the desk with a merry ‘Bong-jour’ only to see a small package arc across my line of vision. It was a single and rather elderly prophylactic that I had kept in an inner pocket ‘for emergencies’. To my horror, monsieur le flic saw it as well. ‘Is ze engleesh gentleman goin to defloweur one of our fine French beautees?’ he asked kindly, picking it up and returning it to me. Sadly not.

The front axle of my passion-wagon fell off in Norfolk and a mechanic friend of the family told me that it would cost 50 pounds to repair and that the car wasn’t worth it. Yea, right. So, once fixed, and driving back home, again through France and into Spain, the old Renault van proved him wrong. It lasted another couple of years before I sold it on to the Bédar town hall. 

A few years later, a Spanish friend with an odd sense of humour told our family of how he had just bought a strange foreign car: a brand he couldn’t remember (you could only buy Simcas, Renaults, Citroens and Seats in Spain in those days, peppered vaguely with a few enormous American Dodges and a strange kind of Austin making sure that the British car industry would remain a world power forever). He had left this car, he continued, in Almería, parked on some side-street and the problem was, as he explained to the police, he couldn’t remember where he had left it and, as they attempted to take down some details, he admitted that he had no idea what sort of car it was. Despite this unforgivable lack of crossing one’s tees and dotting one’s ayes, the car was eventually located and returned to its concerned owner… who promptly sold it to my father. It soon became mine. 

It was a two-tone Karmann Ghia 1500 Special and easily the worst car ever made. It had a rear engine hidden under a false boot and a large and empty space in the front, empty, that is, except for some rust and a sack of cement. Without this aid, the front wheels would lose all contact with the road once you got up to about sixty, which may have helped improve my reaction time and general driving skills but must nevertheless be seen as a major design flaw. Sometime along the way, a school-friend came to stay and asked to borrow the car. He seemed a decent sort, and he played a lot of polo. He wanted to go down to Marbella for some amorous reason. I gave him the keys. I have never heard from him or the car since. I hope he’s all right.

I met my fastest and most terrifying car for the first time when wandering around in Madrid and suddenly saw her sat in the window of a second-hand car studio. This was a red Italian super-car, a 1967 Iso Rivolta with a gigantic American Corvette V8 engine in it, making the car capable of breaking the sound barrier. I was about 30 and in the mood for some muscle and so I bought it from the suspiciously grateful dealer for a million pesetas. The car brought me down to Mojácar in a personal record time, helped by not having any brakes at all. It was quite splendid. It turned out that the car had belonged to a political nutter who had shot some left-wing lawyers dead in a famous attack in Madrid in 1977. He obviously wouldn’t be using it for a while. To give you some idea of how fast this luxury four-seater was, the speedo – while unfortunately broken – went up to 300kph.

 But that was then, before they invented air-bags, satellite navigation and eight-track. Today I drive an old Mercedes lovingly made in 1984 which, at a top speed of around 100, is a bit slower than I’ve been used to, but it does mean that the traffic cops and those ugly speed trap gizmos on the motorway will leave me alone as I chug effortlessly past.

These days, that’s enough for anyone.

 

(From Spanish Shilling, 2010) 

Sticky Cakes

 Do you remember ‘the Twinkie Defence’? This was the story of some lunatic who ran into the mayor of San Francisco’s office many years ago and shot several people to death, including Hizzonor. The Californian police, failing for once to shoot the ‘alleged perpetrator of this heinous and unprovoked attack', carted him off to clink instead.  

Well, the pesky defence lawyers got hold of him and discovered that he had munched on a couple of cup-cakes before bursting through the doors of City Hall. Their defence was based on this simple meal – the sugar in the cup cakes (or ‘Twinkies’ as the Americans call them) had gone to his head.

 Imagine what he might have done if he had eaten an entire box of them.

 Here in Spain, traditional cakes – found above all either at the village fiesta or behind glass at the back of a roadside restaurant – are to be seen and admired, but, at least until recently, never eaten. They would vary from the ones created from sugar, flour, lard and some confectioner’s kreme, drizzled with cheap honey, while the better ones might have had a glass of sticky rum splashed over them to make them even more scrumptious…

No, I’m kidding. They were (and are) horrible. 

We had to buy one in the pueblo the other day for a child’s birthday. ‘Hapy Birhtday to Jhonahton’ was lovingly picked out in vermillion paste across the top of this monster. Luckily Jonathan isn’t much of a reader and failed to notice the errata. He nevertheless picked up a valuable lesson after finishing his second piece of the confection: 

 Always sit near the door.

 At home, we disagree about cakes. I like a fruit cake prepared several months before, stuffed with cherries and whatever else it is they put in those things and covered with marzipan and icing, while my wife prefers something chocolaty with nuts.

 But the Andalusians veer from this, preferring to use oils and lard (that’s to say, rendered animal fat) to butter. The best place to start with genuine local cakes is at the village fiesta where you can admire a range of er, sweet things usually covered in enthusiastic if incautious wasps. Ask for a media-luna – a marvel of the cakemakers' art which is usually designed more for show than for tell.

Other varieties might be tooth-breakingly hard and maybe stuffed with ‘angel hair’, also known as sugared pumpkin mush. The icing will be generous, but free from milk or butter. I think it’s fair to say that the entire cake, built to both look good and to last during the several days of the fiesta, should never be eaten on an empty stomach.  

There’s a notorious cake made in the south called Torta de Chicharrones. it’s made with pork-fat, flour, yeast, an egg and small chewy bits which turn out to be chicharrón – pig’s crackling.

The best time for cakes (apart from during the village fiesta), is the Christmas Season which brings polverones, which are cookies made of crushed almond-dust. The also popular roscones are round cakes made with cream, milk, sponge, with bits of angelica root and other dried fruit and they will follow the erstwhile British custom of the sixpence in the mix by putting a small metal virgin or the representation of one of the three kings, a collectable, somewhere in the confection.

A fashion no doubt introduced by dentists. 

In all, Andalucía, under the control of the Moors for many centuries, enjoys something a bit heavier than a sponge cake covered with icing. The usual fillings (which in Morocco or the Middle East can be quite delicious) include dates, nuts, dried fruit and lashings of honey.

But the most likely place to find a cake is with one’s breakfast. We have ‘Napolitanas’ which are buns filled with cream or chocolate. They vary from warm and good to dry and old. You can dip them in your coffee – sometimes, indeed, you are obliged to.

The most popular bun is the ‘Madalena’ which is a simple and rather tasteless sponge scone. Well, spongy anyway. It comes wrapped in plastic. The ‘Cruasán’ is the Spanish croissant, made with pork fat rather than butter. Not very good as a rule, especially when it’s been on the cake-shelf for a couple of days. There are a few brand-name cakes in their eye-catching packets, chocolate Swiss-roll types of things, including a frightening looking pink one called ‘Pantera Rosa’ which I both imagine and hope is banned in the Greater San Francisco area. 

Lastly, the ever popular and industrial doughnut, the ‘Donut’, which comes in assorted flavours and a truly alarming collection of chemicals, food additives, colourings, flavourings, preservatives and conservatives. Personally, I love ’em.

It's hard to escape the fact that the best places where lumps of sugared sponge-drops are served with your coffee are usually heavily patrolled by diabetic sparrows, destined to die at an early age in a blissful sugar-rush. 

As our area has enthusiastically grasped the nettle of the Twenty-first Century, where you can no longer find a simple salad on the menu, or pig n’ chips without an endless complication of sauce and adornment (I had slices of strawberry surrounding my lamb chops the other evening in a Mojácar hostelry), so, too, our coffee shops have improved in the cake department. We have Italian, French and British cakes, scones, pies and bonbons which are a far cry from an earlier age when the aerodynamic ones were prized by discerning customers above all others.

I think that the new trend started with the introduction to Spain of the Italian tiramisu (a soft and chocolaty little number).

The other day, I rounded off my dinner with a delicious ‘Grannie’s Cake’ (‘pastel de la abuela’) – very good it was, although packed with around 1,000 calories. 

Cakes, ice cream (delicious in Spain), chocolates and sticky things in plastic cups. I wonder if they have an effect. Perhaps they’re just there to make us fat.