The Senior Citizens' Lunch Engagement

I invited myself to the Senior Citizens lunch-date last week held in one of our finest hotels. To do this, one only needs to discover that the town hall has its annual free treat for the over-65s and to know to drop by the secretary’s office in due time to pick up their invite.

All rather fun, I’d not been before.

I’ve become a trifle deaf – it comes with age I suppose. At least I still have my hair and teeth, or at least, most of them anyway. Although it might go in some way towards explaining why nothing in the giant array of serve-yourself food was crunchy.

The queue outside was designed to be barged, so we all did – creating a tight-to-fit blockage at the door into the dining hall. Once past the ticket-inspector, I joined the noisy throng looking for somewhere to sit.

The first person I saw was Doña Beatriz, who had kindly mentioned me during her speech as la pregonera (I’m told it means ‘town-crier’) at the opening of the village fiesta back in August. I thanked her for her kind words. We foreigners often tend to get overlooked.

Then casting about, I suddenly heard my name hooted across the room, so found my way to an empty chair next to a British friend, who like me, is an old-timer here in our community.

Janie once worked as an airhostess for a zeppelin, so I was pleased to see her, and indeed hear her voice rise above the herd.

The Spanish are a noisy race, and their refectories are designed to echo appealingly to encourage the cacophony – hard walls, lots of massive windows and a tiled floor. According to my friend Colin, who writes a daily blog from Galicia, a ‘noisy bar’ is a tautology in Spain, he says, since there’s no other kind. Apparently, when we are young, our hearing can distinguish what we want over the roar from what we don’t – known perhaps as ‘the cocktail party effect’. Sadly, this useful skill diminishes as one gets older.

We went to fill our plates, after all, a free meal at a buffet means ‘pile them high’.  Three times to the trough and back. I bumped into the mayor on the second visit (he was the only person there who was underage) and thanked him for the lunch. One of the racier old girls filling her plate next to me asked who he was: ‘he’s a handsome looking cove’ I think was what she said.

A merry session, a hearty scoff and a glass of wine (one must be careful these days) and so I took my leave, slightly nonplussed as to what was the point of this luncheon. 

There were no speeches or prize-giving or a raffle for a brand-new coffee-machine from the local white-goods emporium or maybe a colourful painting of our village from the schoolchildren.

I went outside – ah bliss! So quiet I could hear a pin drop.