The Occasionals in Spain

(from 2019)

When contemplating this essay I decided to take a leaf out of Mr Arrowsmith’s book. Who? James Arrowsmith was a publisher. In the late 1880s he received a manuscript on the history of the River Thames. It was a boring travelog incorporating the history of England’s most famous river. The writer had thrown in a few anecdotes among the serious bits, and Arrowsmith ruthlessly cut out the serious stuff and kept the anecdotes. The result was the British classic Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. It helped Jerome pay his gas bill for nearly forty years.

I can’t rise to the heights of Jerome K Jerome, but I can avoid his original mistake. Because unless it is something historical (George Borrow’s Wild Wales comes to mind) no-one wants to read about places they can visit every day on their TV. Nothing turns a page quicker than a flowery description of ancient architecture. The Occasionals went to Spain and saw lots of it; but if you’ve seen one Moorish arch you’ve seen a thousand, and that’s about it.

For years we were not able to travel far because of family responsibilities. Mrs O lived some years in Spain in a previous life, working for a banned religious group in the days of General Franco. Yes, she is THAT old. Which means that Occasional is EVEN OLDER. But she had rarely ventured down to the south of Spain, so we did this special trip, six nights, three hotels, four cities, vino, paella, flamenco, more vino – to coin the title of a long forgotten film – if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium…

Mrs O was able to use her Spanish again, and I amazed myself how much Spanish I could remember from those heady days when I would use cheap holiday flights to get to visit her when we were courting. I was able to order drinks in a bar, point at things in the supermarket and ask how much, and even ask directions. The ability to remember the words for left and right and a few numbers meant I could even understand the answers sometimes.

Of course, now I am in my dotage I am trying to learn Welsh. But there is only so much of my brain that can cope with “foreign language”- and I’d start off with Spanglish and Wenglish and end up some horrible hybrid that no-one could understand – Welshspan perhaps? Or was it Spanelsh?

Our first night I confidently walked Mrs O into the restaurant to be shown to a table. The Spanish for thank you is “gracias” (and the pronunciation will give away whether you are from Spain or America). The Welsh for thank you is “diolch” (pronounced dee-ock). Somehow my Welsh-wired brain came up with the perfect combination “Dee-ass” – which when bawled at the waiter came over as “Dios” – the title of the Deity, usually used as an expletive. It was not Occasional’s finest hour…

Spain has changed since I was last there. Mrs O had taken school parties over on cultural exchanges when working, which was mainly a case of trying to keep the sexes apart and stopping the students getting blotto. But I was last there over 40 years ago and went on a train journey from Valencia to Barcelona, which I still remember as the journey from hell. But Spain now has decent railroads, decent highways, and a cost of living to match.

So – the touristy bit – we saw the one surviving Moorish baths in southern Spain – the Christians re-conquered the country and flattened all the others, since apparently Christians didn’t wash. (One is mindful of the famous quotation about Queen Elizabeth I of Britain – she bathed once a month, whether she needed it or not…) Moslems and Jews had actually co-existed quite happily for centuries, but when the Christians got the land back they gave them three choices – leave, convert – or die. We saw the Alhambra Palace where a strange hybrid of Christian and Islamic art nudged each other along with ancient graffiti.

Of the places we visited, Ronda, Cordoba, Seville and Granada, probably Seville stand out best, and actually for something from the 20^th century. They had a huge world class exhibition planned for 1919 to try and generate trade with their former colonies in the Americas. World War 1 put paid to that, so they worked on it until 1929. The Wall Street crash torpedoed it again, but at least the site was created. Huge parkland, beautiful buildings in various styles – still used by government and education bodies today – and of course by film companies. One – the Plaza de España - has appeared in Laurence of Arabia, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones. Its curved frontage tells the story of Spain with all the key players sculptured. People like Ferdinand Magellan (who was Portuguese) and Christopher Columbus (who was Italian) but don’t say it too loud…

So the time went very quickly. When you work hard and are on call constantly you often don’t realise the stress levels – until you stop. But we stopped in Spain. We had no real internet connection to distract us. A glass or three of vino and we were zonked. We piled in the tours, and came home absolutely shattered.

It was a memorable vacation. We just need another one now to get over it.