An Inconvenient Phone Call

Posted on January 23, 2017 by Paul

Amanda and I returned to Spain on Sunday afternoon after a first joint trip to England in over two years. We’d been for a special meal, dinner suit and posh frock, held in honour of one of my old mates who had the privilege of captaining my old golf club this past season.

It was a fleeting visit, flying in on Friday morning and back on Sunday afternoon with just enough time to; do a bit of shopping for essentials (such as Paxo stuffing, PG Tips tea bags, and Bisto gravy granules), have a fleeting visit with family, and stuff our faces with a fried breakfast and marvellous fish and chips (not at the same sitting).

I’d developed the snuffles and a dry throat as we drove down to Stansted Airport, and by Tuesday morning it had developed into full ‘Man Flu’. I know that many women believe that this chronic disease is a myth but I am reliably informed by a good friend (male) that the only female equivalent to this heinous illness is the pain and discomfort of childbirth.

So, by eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning I was wrapped up in a blanket, dosed up to the eyeballs with Ibuprofen, clutching a big cup of Max Strength Lemsip, and settled down for a day of TV, perhaps a feel good film or two and an early night. And then the phone rang.

It was Facundo our builder who explained that his team had the rest of the week free and that it would be the perfect time to undertake the works on our bread oven (Horno) which comprised; levelling the floor, pouring a concrete plinth, and re-lining the bread oven to allow us to start using it for its intended purpose. He’d quoted us months ago, and we’d accepted his price, but he chose this, of all days, to arrange to start the works.

My heart sank. The bread oven was full of machinery and materials amassed over the last two and a half years which needed to be moved to my new workshop, which was currently doorless and very insecure. Facundo explained that it was ‘either tomorrow, or it could be a couple of months’.

I arose, like Lazarus, from my death bed, changed into my work clothes and went to fit the door and lock.

Five hours later, and with only half of the contents of the bread oven moved into my new workshop, I collapsed into bed, exhausted.

Facundo’s boys arrived at 7:30am the following morning, helped me clear the rest of the horno, and set about their work. Four tonnes (60cm at its deepest) of rock were removed with a heavy duty jack hammer, drainage channels were dug into the floor to drain the four natural springs which emerge when the water table rises, gravel and membrane were laid down before a couple of cubic metres of concrete were poured. In the meantime the old floor from inside the bread oven itself was removed and a new set of earthstone tiles fitted by Facundo, who spend a couple of hours physically inside the oven, swearing under his breath as his head regularly came into contact with the low ceiling.

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There is still plenty of work to do with a stone floor to lay, electrics to install, a steel oven door to have fabricated, and a sink and running water to connect. But at least we now have a level floor and a functioning bread oven.

Time to get some lessons in making the local ‘pan Gallego’.

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Falling In Love Again

Posted on January 2, 2017 by Paul

Liñeiras has a new resident, and I’m desperately in love.

She’s twenty-eight years old, of a chalky complexion, some might say she’s a bit of a looker, will go anywhere and do anything, likes to get dirty, is a bit rough round the edges, and weighs in at just over two tonnes.

Ever since I was a young child I’ve had a love of Land Rover Defenders (and of course, Ford Transits). The ultimate utilitarian vehicle, driven by mechanics and monarchs, farmers and financiers, hunters and hooray Henries.

Five years ago I had a brief affair with a 1986 petrol Defender which I drove to Spain and used around the house for three months before bringing it back to the UK and sadly selling her. In Spain she spent a lot of time broken down, the never ending catalogue of mechanical disasters can be read in earlier blogs. It is not possible to re-register a right-hand drive agricultural vehicles in Spain so the only option was to let her go, and the last I heard of her she was being used to transport dogs for their daily walks to save the leather upholstery of her owner’s brand new BMW.

After my long contract in Belfast last Winter I promised myself a ‘runaround’ for Casa Liñeiras and the only real option in my mind was a Land Rover. After all of the problems that I had last time with a British built, right hand drive petrol, I was determined to do it right and get a Santana assembled (under license) Land Rover, with a stock Diesel engine, and standard Spanish parts.

I’ve spent months scouring the small ads for one at the right price, decent condition, sensible miles, and in our part of the country. I’d been to see one previously but it had been to the moon and almost back and the chassis was in awful condition due to extensive farm use. In addition they wanted €2,000 and I could see it eating double that over the next year to keep it mobile.

Many hours searching equalled many hours of frustration.

img_1316Then, on Christmas Day, a miracle.  Someone just up the coast near Burela put up a new listing online with the site Milanuncios. The Santana on offer was a two door (just what I was looking for), a diesel (just what I was looking for), white (which was tolerable), totally original (just what I was looking for), and after a few SMS enquiries had a reasonable mileage and according to the vendor it had no faults. From the photos it looked pretty good, almost too good, and we arranged to go and see it on Wednesday morning.

It was love at first sight. It turns out that she’d had one owner from brand new, had spent her life on the roads of originally Madrid (not in the fields), latterly Leon (before the sad death of the aged owner), and had a fully stamped up service history to go with the original toolkit, manuals, keys, and working locks. It was like a time capsule, back to the days of Kylie and the Pet Shop Boys, Rainman and A Fish Called Wanda, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

I couldn’t get my money out of Amanda’s purse fast enough. I’d seen worse condition Santana’s advertised with higher mileages for double the price. I must have been the first to see it over the sleepy Christmas period. We shook hands and agreed to return on Thursday to jointly visit a solicitors with the vendor and officially complete the transaction.

However, nothing is ever straightforward here.

When we met the actual vendor, the father of the guy who’d shown us the car, he wasn’t sure whether he really wanted to sell and it appeared he’d been bullied into it by his sons. He’d forgotten his Identity Card (perhaps deliberately) and my paperwork, despite only being six months old, was deemed too old for the authorities necessitating a re-issue for me to email over after the A Pontenova bureaucrats had worked their snails-pace magic. After a tense hour, and both promising to chase up our absent paperwork, we managed to prise the keys from the vendor, hand over the dosh, and drive her the 65km home.

The neighbours love her, including Oscar who was keen for a test drive and managed to get her stuck in a ditch for five minutes. She’s a car for life for me, and I already have a long list of wants and improvements, but she’ll be handled in the same way as the house, ‘poco a poco’ (little by little).

The top speed is just under 100kmh (62mph), 0-60 acceleration is measured by a calendar, and she has plenty of idiosyncrasies. But I’m besotted, she’s a belter.

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Self-appointed Water Monitor

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Paul

For a short while I’d been milk monitor at school. I didn’t like the school milk as it was healthier than chocolate, so cold in winter that it numbed your mouth and hurt your teeth, and so warm in the summer that it had almost turned to yoghurt before you had the teachers permission to consume the contents of the small foil topped glass bottle.

But the experience stood me in good stead, as I am now the self-appointed village ‘water monitor’ and I rule with an iron hand that Margaret Thatcher would have been proud of on the day that she stripped school kids of their daily free bottle of the white stuff.

One aspect of rural Galician life that two years has failed to normalise is the occasional total lack of water.

img_1305When we purchased the property back in 2010 we were told that it was supplied by town water, in addition to having its own spring. The town water turns out to be a large spring fed deposit of around 50,000 litres which we share with the rest of the village of twenty houses, and our own spring is a useless trickle of water which emerges next to the barn and does nothing more than flood the surrounding ground.

Since moving here in 2014 we’ve had two summer water shortages, which bizarrely happen late in the summer in September and October, a month or more after the usual long dry spells have ended. What appears to happen is that; as the summer goes on the water table drops drying out spring fed pasture, and as a result the local livestock owners open their cattle trough taps and leave them running around the clock.

With 750 litres an hour entering the deposit but at its worst over 1,500 an hour being used by some of our inconsiderate bovine, ovine and equestrian neighbours, it doesn’t take too long for the deposit to be emptied. The outcome is that we’ve no water to flush the loo, wash clothes, or brush our teeth.

We’d had a shortage in early October but as a key holder, and self-appointed ‘water monitor’ to the deposit, I’d soon diagnosed the problem and started a regime of cutting off the supply to the village between the darkness hours of 9pm and 9am. With my diligent water management we managed to keep the village in water during the day throughout the month, finally able to cease the rationing after a few days of rain when our neighbours felt that they could safely close their 24 hour a day livestock watering.

But then in mid-November we awoke to a non-flushing toilet, the stuff of 21st century nightmares.

Having been informed of the crisis by Amanda I quickly dressed and made my way, torch in hand, up to the communal deposit half a kilometre up into the forest. As I peered over the top of the two metre wall I could see all the way to the bottom, we were totally empty. I was furious and a little scared at knowing how furious Amanda was going to be.

I closed off the taps that feed the village to see whether the deposit would start to refill and we immediately penned a memo for the rest of the village telling them if the situation, our temporary resolution, and that we would inform the local council (who whilst accepting no responsibility for the villages water mismanagement still did have some responsibility for ensuring that we had a supply of some description).

We let the water build until lunchtime at which point Amanda needed to shower before going to work. As I was in control that wasn’t going to be a problem, I’d open the supply for just long enough and then close it off again. I took the phone and went to the deposit having made the arrangements that I’d text her when I reconnected the supply and she was to text me back when she’d showered so I could switch it off again.

Around 4,500 litres had accumulated in the six hours since I closed the supply pipes, so at least the deposit wasn’t leaking, but in the three minutes that it took Amanda to shower and text me that she’d finished, all four and a half thousand litres disappeared down the pipe, gurgling and hissing to indicate an alarming rate of water egress. Now I realised that we’d got a catastrophic problem somewhere on the network, and it seemed that it was along our supply pipe.

Pepe, from the local council, visited over lunch and I explained the situation. We agreed that we would allow the deposit to refill overnight and he’d bring a team of people up the following morning so that we could reconnect the supply and use spotters to see if they could detect the source of the leak.

We survived the day, dirty plates stacking up on the worktop, and at first light the following morning I went up to the deposit to check that it had refilled sufficiently for our experiment. But to my anger and amazement it was empty again. Overnight someone, without the experience of a ‘water monitor’ like yours truly, had opened one of the supply pipes and the ’emergency evacuation’ pipe which is used to drain the deposit should it need cleaning.

I closed both taps, tried to control my anger, called Pepe to cancel the team of spotters, and constructed another angry note for the rest of the villagers which Amanda translated and we took out to hand deliver.

Forty-eight hours after the start of the crisis the council finally arrived, mob handed. They determined that; we had a problem, which side of the network the problem was on, determined where the leak was (it was a fractured valve down near the old school house), and replaced the offending bit of iron. All in the space of about ninety minutes.

My faith in the council is restored and my reputation as ‘water monitor’ enhanced. We should now be alright until next summer, when I’ll start the rationing all over again. In the meantime we need to find a local solution to be self sustained in water, either our own well or our own deposit. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, the joys of Spanish country life.

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Single Handedly Ending The Spanish ‘Crisis’

Posted on November 28, 2016 by Paul

We’d planned to go to the stone masons near Mondoñedo on several occasions and on one occasion had even got part way there before turning back. We were interested in a couple of things; an old stone trough to go under the outside tap on the overhang (where there was a big concrete and brick clothes washing contraption which we wanted to demolish), and a quote for carved stone quoins and lintels for all of the windows and doors on the big house.

Then in mid-June we looked up the relevant Spanish words, and finally completed the forty-five minute journey to middle of the Galician countryside, navigating solely from the memory of a visit with Facundo the builder about four years ago, and located Canteras Licho, although at the time we had no idea what it was called. But rather than buy an antique stone trough, or solicit the required quotation, we bought a massive granite table and two benches, and in doing so we gave ourselves a whole load of hard work.

We both fell in love with the white carved granite table and despite it costing as much as a small car, and weighing considerable more, we decided that we must have it. It was a proper ‘grown ups’ table, seats ten in comfort, and we decided that it would look fantastic under the overhanging roof. The area we had in mind is sheltered from the midday heat and perfect for an al fresco lunch, but also gets the far less ferocious late afternoon sun until it dips behind the barn.

Canteras Licho had made the table and benches around six years ago, just as the financial crisis struck in Spain. They told me that they’d been selling around one a month prior to the ‘crisis’, replacing the sold one with a newly made one, but this one had remained unsold since then. I think that they hoped that it was a signal that the crisis was coming to an end.

Eventually it would be in a communal area and guests using the apartments would be free to use it for family meals or simply sipping a glass of local wine and picking at tapas.

We negotiated a price, to include delivery and installation (subject to the boss coming to our house and ensuring that he could get the necessary crane close enough to lift it into place), and set a delivery date for the second week in September, just ahead of a visit from my Mum and cousin Sue. We would keep it a secret from the world until then, no social media, no hints to anyone, and much care when Face-timing and SKYPE-ing relatives.

But now the real work began.

Over the next seven weeks we; cleared the area, raked out and pointed the walls, moved the tap to a different wall, put in drainage and built retaining walls, backfilled with hard core, laid a metal reinforcement bar mesh, mixed and poured forty-five wheelbarrows full of concrete (with a slight pause for a trip to Neil’s for him to weld the cement mixer back together), faced brick walls with stone, built stairs down to the barn, and cut and laid fifteen square metres of old roof tiles as a floor.

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The second week in September arrived and good to their word the installation team arrived with the table. After much head-scratching, and the construction of a ‘Heath-Robinson’ contraption fitted to the truck-mounted crane to enable it to get underneath the overhanging roof, three hours passed very rapidly and the table was finally swung into place.

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The antique trough, bought elsewhere, arrived the same day courtesy of our builder who collected it and helped us install it. The electrician attended to fit the lights, that we’d had shipped over by a UK company, and some electricity sockets. And now we have a proper grown-ups seating area.

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Mum and Sue were amazed. They were amazed at the change since their last visit, but more amazed that we’d both managed to keep our exploits off social media for the duration.

From mid-September the table has been put to use on many occasions for snacks, drinks and we even forced our English friends to sit outside for a chilly evening meal, but sadly it is now too cold to spend much time out there. We’re looking forward to the Spring and taking full advantage of our new outside room.

We’ve still not got a quote for the quoins and lintels.

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Getting Back In The Saddle

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Paul

I’ve sat down to write a new blog entry on many occasions since my homeland voted to leave the European Union.

Sometimes I’ve managed a few paragraphs, other times just a few words, and it has always inevitably led me to a rant at the patent absurdity of my countrymen voting to reduce their personal rights, willingly crash the economy, and isolate themselves from our continental neighbours.

But last nights events in the United States of America have just gone to show that the whole World has lost its marbles, not just the United Kingdom. How a majority of people of a supposedly civilised country can cast their ballot in such a way as to knowingly elect a misogynistic, homophobic, bigoted, racist to the lofty position of the leader of the free world simply takes away my breath.

After agonising and worrying about our future since the momentous decision on the 23rd June, I have now come to the conclusion that we should keep quiet, keep our heads down, get on with our lives, and be prepared to fight with every ounce of our strength should someone want to take away what we’ve earned. I am quietly confident that, whatever xenophobic actions the UK decides to take against European citizens, Spain won’t reciprocate and force our repatriation.

Spaniards that have been willing to discuss our predicament all assure us that we’ll be okay because ‘Spain is a more enlightened, tolerant, liberal, and forward thinking country.’ While I would have argued for the UK in all of these categories in the past, I now find myself conceding on all points, and hoping that they are right.

So…we are going to get on with it. We will plough what is left of our life savings into our property and business, and we will trust that the Spanish government will treat us like human beings rather than the shameful ‘bargaining chips’ approach that the UK government has decided to take to EU nationals.

The last time that I prepared a dispatch the roof was under construction on the big house. After ten weeks of hard labour of a team of four, with me watching on and supplying beer and water, it was finally completed in the middle of July. It looks superb, no longer the hobbit house with a natural shower or two in each room. It is dry for the first time, possibly ever, and from the outside it looks fantastic.

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We’ve done a few jobs since then, which I will bring to you in blogs over the coming days and weeks, but I’ve been hampered by injury. I’d been suffering with a freezing right shoulder since just after Christmas, but a couple of months ago it took a turn for the worse with very limited mobility and a constant aching pain. After a month of sleepless nights I acquiesced and agreed to go and see a physiotherapist.

Vanessa is the daughter of one of the local village matriarchs (a lovely lady who organises regular dinners at a local community hall). We’ve bumped into Vanessa several times in the past and since Amanda found out that she was a physiotherapist she went out of her way to spend a few minutes at each fiesta complaining about my posture and general malaise.

We arranged an appointment at her practice in Vegadeo (a twenty minute drive away) and Amanda tagged along to translate. An initial consultation was followed by the attachment of some pressure pads around my shoulder and twenty minutes of relaxing electronic massage (it feels a bit like ants running over your skin) to loosen the muscles around my shoulder. With the machine switched off I thought I was finished for the session, but Vanessa had not even started.

How such a petite lady can inflict so much pain on an ageing and overweight ex-rugby player is beyond reason. She stretched and cajoled, kneeded and prodded, squeezed and twisted, bringing me to tears on one occasion, and prompting me to cry ‘Please Stop Vanessa’ twice. She then prescribed me; deep heat gel, magnesium and turmeric tablets (the latter of which costs €45 for a fortnights supply) all to aid in my recovery.

Four sessions, and a great deal of pain, later and I’m starting to notice some improvement in shoulder mobility. The downside/upside is that I was banned from any labouring for the first three weeks, and am only now re-assuming light duties.

So very little has been achieved in the last month as I have worn a groove in the arms of my favourite chair and tried to write this blog on several occasions.

After a break of six months I will try and report more frequently…promise…while keeping my head down and not watching the news for fear of another global disaster.

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