The Pain in Spain

I’m currently somewhere in the middle of the second of two summer holidays, having spent last week with Caroline at Thorness Bay on the Isle of Wight. This week I’m at the Infiniti Beach Resort at Vera Playa in Spain’s Almeria province with my daughter Rosie, having been wrongly informed that there was no availability at my preferred port of call – the Clube Praia da Oura in Portugal, my regular Iberian haunt.

No matter, IBR is a beautiful place – a quaint holiday village a few hundred yards from the wide and relatively unpopulated beach at Vera. The resort itself is tiny by comparison with CPO – the apartments are to a similar standard but boasting two medium-sized pools and a small bar/restaurant which closes at 9pm, in contrast to CPO’s bustling portfolio of facilities and activities, pool parties, ballroom dancing and big screens.

The town itself reminds one a little of the Mid West, at least the one of popular televisual mythology. Wide streets and hazy, arid horizons overshadow bars and small stores which spill out onto the road. Trading and social interaction, mostly indigenous but some of it English, combine to lend character to Vera which is quite unlike anything I have experienced in the course of my admittedly limited travels.

But my short Spanish adventure has been hampered by the advent of a debilitating malady which began to afflict me during the latter days of my Isle of Wight holiday but which has asserted itself with a vengeance over here. Attempts to self-diagnose have thrown up such options as sciatica, proformis syndrome and a slipped disc, but whatever it is it is damned painful, and make attempts to walk even the few hundred yards to the beach or into town a real ordeal, and a thing to be dreaded whenever I contemplate a move, no matter how slight or unambitious, from the settee in my apartment.

Perversely, it has also made me consider how lucky I am that my pain is not (I hope) permanent – that I can, usually, walk good distances without pain in spite of advancing years. It has forced me to remember that for many, pain is a regular fact of life and that not having to endure it is a privilege, not a right.

Sometimes it takes a little suffering of our own to enable us to understand the much greater suffering that others have to put up with in their lives. I hope I will remember Vera Playa for the pool and the palm trees, the beach and the bars, and not for the itinerant pain which travels with impunity from my hip to the base of my spine and back again, stopping to rest at various points in-between. The doctor will tell me more, I hope, when I get to see him on Monday.

Facing My Fear of Farewells

One thing that really saddens me more than anything else, and a thing I handle particularly badly, is farewells. Not only from people, but from places too. Some places just don’t do it for me but there are others where I seriously believe I pick up a spirit, and I feel a strange, almost “goosebumpy” sensation when I am there and that spirit is around me.

There is no rhyme or reason where some of these places are concerned. Abingdon in Oxfordshire is a pretty town in places, but there are prettier ones all along the Thames. Ham in Surrey is fairly nondescript. Cliftonville near Margate in Kent, once a cheerful seaside town, is but an empty shell. And yet for me they all have an inexplicable gravitational pull. Some people believe in ghosts in the form of human spirits, but for me there seems to be an energy generated by some past event or period of time that seems to linger, and which I reconnect with when I set foot in these places.

There is more logic to the affection I have for my little bolthole in Portugal. It is a very pleasant place, both aesthetically and in terms of the life I enjoy when I am here. I visit Portugal for a week every year. In fact this time around I was fortunate enough to have been able to enjoy two weeks in very quick succession, but that was sadly a one-off. I can’t afford two weeks every year, and timeshares are frankly a rip-off anyway.

For my last five visits my wife Caroline and my son Joe have not come over with me, for various good reasons, although my daughter Rosie has been with me for the last two. Of course I think the world of them both, but they can look after themselves and being away from them for a week doesn’t tug at the heartstrings all that much.

Being away from here for 51 weeks is a different matter. All sorts of irrational fears invariably report present. Will I be healthy enough to travel, or for that matter alive, this time next year? Will they have knocked the place to the ground? Will all the friends I like to think I have made here have found better jobs and moved on?

Because, obviously, it is about people too. On most holidays we meet people casually and sometimes we become friends with them. Then we all go home and usually we never see nor hear from them again.

The worst example of this I can think of was a coach trip that Caroline and I took to Austria back in 1996. For ten long days the same coach party is together, long journeys from place to place, meals together at restaurants along the way, all in the same bar at the hotel in the evening, quiz nights and talent contests. Then the long, long journey home, a last evening as a group at a hotel in France, a few drinks on the ferry and then, at Medway service station, suddenly the realisation strikes that you will never have anything to do with any of these people again. For a soppy old romantic like me it can actually be quite a devastating experience.

This being a timeshare we do sometimes see the same faces from one year to the next year, and I take comfort from this. This year though the clientele was a little different, the week having a Country and Western theme and the usual karaoke folk and talent showers presumably having swapped their bookings for a different week or jetted off elsewhere. I hope they will be back next time.

I am reassured by the work that is going on around the pool, noisy though it is. They wouldn’t be doing all this, I guess, if they had plans to turn the site into a multi-storey car park or an international airport.

So for me it’s back to the grind tomorrow, hoping that I can raise the price of an “in-betweeny” for September or October, and hopefully also we can be here then as a family.

Back in Portugal

I’m back in Portugal, chuffed to be able to spend an extra week in the sun due to the fact that we didn’t use the timeshare one year back in the dim and distant past.

This time my daughter Rosie is with me. On Sunday she earned a lot of respect from balcony dwellers by jumping into the outdoor swimming pool. By comparison with England it is warm here (t-shirt and shorts), but it isn’t that warm!

I’m very embarrassed that I still can’t speak the language, other than to order a beer and say “Thank You”. I keep promising myself that I’ll take a crash course, but with three jobs and counting I never seem to find the time. It seems so disrespectful to travel to another land year after year and just to expect everybody to converse with me in my native tongue, even though everyone at the site is completely fluent.

Timeshares are for mugs, in this day and age non-owners can enjoy all the facilities we have for half the price. But I do recommend the Clube Praia da Oura to anybody looking to spend a week away from the rain and the cold.

Tomorrow we are off to Seville, partly so that Rosie can at least tell her posh friends that she has been to a new country. Hasta la vista (or is that Italian?).

Can You Hear Me Major Tom?

Major Tom, you may recall, was the astronaut who featured in David Bowie's classic Space Oddity.

Whether through accident or choice (it wasn't entirely clear in the song) he became disconnected from Planet Earth and drifted hopelessly away into space, never to be seen or heard again.

I felt a little bit like that earlier this week.  Having arrived in Portugal for my annual working holiday my mobile telephone, which Virgin had promised me had been set to roaming, hadn't been set to roaming.  True, my business 'phone did have roaming enabled, but as I only use it for incoming calls it had no credit.

The booster package that I'd purchased for £40 from T-Mobile to provide me with mobile broadband for 30 days with "normal usage" expired after two days, meaning that either T-Mobile or I have a strange idea of what constitutes normal usage.

It took an age before it occurred to me that I could use the telephone in my apartment to call home.  Psychologically I had for some odd reason convinced myself that it would cost millions of pounds to use, when in actual fact it is only a few pence dearer than using the mobile.

For the most part I have been communicating with my family through Facebook chat.  I have also been placing myself under far too much pressure than is healthy, having assumed that with a week to myself it would have been easy to get so much done, only to realise (for the second year running) that there is only so much one can do even in a week.

As it happens I spent the first few days looking and feeling busy but in actual fact doing very little of real value and then, having subsequently got most of the urgent stuff out of the way, decided to live a little.  As I am writing this I am by the pool, enjoying the last hour or two of sun on my penultimate whole day.  In a little over 48 hours I'll be stepping onto the transfer bus to take me back to Faro.

Contrary to what certain people would have others believe I do not own a "holiday home".  Indeed unlike most of those who like to peddle these stories I don't own any home at all.  What I have is a timeshare, for which I pay over £600 each year to enjoy a holiday that, due to the financial climate, non-owners can purchase for not much more than £100.

But as the saying goes, I'm not bitter.  I really do love it here at the Clube Praia da Oura, doing my thing during the day and wandering off to Amanda's Bar in the evening.  I feel terribly selfish with my family being at home (our timeshare week is not compatible with the school holiday timetable) but I'm hoping that in a few years, when the kids are grown, Caroline and I will be able to enjoy it. 

As for myself, whilst I enjoy my holidays very much and look forward to them with an impatience that is difficult to contain I do like the familiarity of returning to a place I know and seeing people I recognise, even I do not know them much at all.  It is quite difficult for me to describe the inner emotions I experience when I return to certain places that I have been away from for a while.

My next challenge upon returning is to make sure I have enough in the kitty to return with my family in December, when we are "owed" a week.  Boa noite.

It's a bit rich, but I sure ain't

As I write I'm taking a little bit of time out in Portugal. For a short time today the weather was actually quite fiercely warm, then the sun disappeared behind a series of clouds and suddenly it was February again, albeit a Portuguese February.

I've received a few negative comments about the fact that I spend a week here most years during the low season, even one or two from people I like to consider friends. I think I've remarked before that others seem to be able to tour the world month in and month out and yet when I board my humble easyJet A319 all of a sudden I am Roman Abramovich. If only they knew!

In actual fact this year has been particularly spartan. Thus far, since Saturday, I've ventured from the complex twice. Once to the supermercado to spend €20 on my provisions for the week (trust me, it's not easy being a skint vegetarian in this part of the world) and on the second occasion to purchase some credit for my local broadband connection. Other than that it's been just work, work, work - no restaurants, no souvenirs, no excursions, no beer.

Okay, skip that last one. When one spends all day punching a keyboard trying to catch up with casework, organising election stuff and attempting to eke out a living there is no way I'm not going to enjoy a caneca or two at the end of the evening. It's when I do most of my thinking. The difficult part, of course, is remembering the next day precisely what it was that I had thought.

For some peculiar reason I like the familiarity of seeing some of the same people year upon year. There are a couple of guys here who like to get up onto the stage and sing. I've barely said half a dozen words to either of them in the four years that I've been coming here and yet I feel reassured by the fact that they keep coming back. It can't be my imagination, this must be a nice place.

Last night I found myself reflecting upon what kind of courage it requires to do a thing like these fellows do. I have spoken at meetings with two or three thousand people present and I've not been in the slightest fazed. I mean not nervous at all, it's as perfunctory as cleaning one's teeth or taking a bath. I knock on the doors of complete strangers and talk to them about things they often don't want to talk about, until the "Go away I'm watching telly" vibe overwhelms. And yet could I climb onto the stage in Amanda's Bar at the Clube Praia da Oura and sing a song in front of fifty people? Not a chance mate.

Tonight is Happy Hour but if anything I'm feeling slightly morose. I've had half my time here and yet 95% of the work I'd intended to do still seems to lie ahead of me. I guess it's time for me to do some thinking.

Reflections on the English abroad

There is a holiday apartment complex in Margate where all the staff, although English, are required under the terms of their employment to speak fluent Portuguese.

All the guests at the complex, and I mean all of them, are Portuguese. No Spaniards, no French, no Germans. All the entertainment is in Portuguese, and for those for whom the stage act holds no appeal a wide-screen TV at the rear of the bar beams out Benfica versus Sporting Lisbon and other offerings from the Super Liga.

Along the Margate seafront every other retail outlet is a restaurant offering Chicken Piri-Piri "just like home" and, during Happy Hour, dois canecas can be purchased for the price of um.

Actually I made that up. Margate, like any other English resort, speaks only one language. Almost all the visitors are themselves English, and cockle and jellied eel stalls abound.

And yet at the Clube Praia da Oura in Portugal, where I am away on a (very heavy) working holiday, everybody is trying their hardest to make me feel at home, even though I flew hundreds of miles for the express purpose of getting away from the place for a week.

On a short stroll into town this morning I must have counted twenty outlets (out of no more than a hundred shops) offering a "Full English Breakfast". One proudly advertised its own ethnic speciality "Chip Butti" whilst another tried to tempt me with a "Cheese & Ham Sandwich and Chips" (I promise I am not making this up). Worryingly, at one stage I found myself pining for the Civic Centre canteen, where at least one can sometimes get a half-decent curry.

Last night’s entertainment was Johnny Cochrane, an admittedly classy fifty-something singer and guitar player who belted out a succession of ‘50s and ‘60s (English language) rock’n’roll songs. When I went to the bar and asked for a caneca the Portuguese barman looked at me a little strangely (it could have been my pronunciation) before responding with a knowing smile: "Oh, you mean a pint!"

Every time I walk into a shop, and before I even venture to speak, I am greeted instantly by the proprietor with a "Hello". I don’t wear a knotted hankie on my head, roll up my trousers to the knee or carry a can of John Smith’s, and yet instinctively my Englishness is recognised within a split second. Either those Portuguese who are not shopkeepers have all moved out of this place, or else they just boycott the shops. I can’t think of any other explanation.

I don’t know whether I’m the only person here who feels slightly guilty walking into a bar or a shop and expecting everybody there to speak my native tongue. My sorry efforts to converse in Portuguese are usually greeted with either hilarity or impatience. The last time I came here I stopped off at a well-known bar along The Strip. There the barman listened attentively as I tried to order a beer then, thinking I was a local, went off to fetch a Portuguese colleague because he couldn’t speak the lingo himself!

What really strikes home is, by comparison, how intolerant we English are with others who speak our language with anything short of total fluency. Only an Englishman could, without any hint of irony, contemplate emigrating to Spain to get away from the foreigners.

I refuse to eat a Full English Breakfast, far less a Cheese & Ham Sandwich and Chips, for the remainder of my time here. And now I must away, as there seems to be something going on down at the bar. Does anyone know the words to "Here We Go"?

In English, of course.