Maypole
It has been a very tiresome winter; long, damp, windy and generally cold. I can't remember spending so much money on gas bottles and firewood to keep fairly warm. The electric blanket has been on, against all regulations, twenty four hours a day since the beginning of the hostilities of winter and the cats have not moved very far from it for the same duration. Pots of soup have been simmering on the hob every day ready for anybody to dunk a ladle in it and fill a mug. I make winter soups that need a fork and knife as well as a spoon. When it gets too thick I use the leftover as a sauce for pasta. Well, it might need a little cream or tomato puree to help along but I strongly recommend thick vegetable soup lightened up with a couple of spoons of cream or a plain yoghurt poured over spaghetti. Just a sprinkle of grated cheese and there is a meal costing very little.
But May is here or just gone. The spring has sprung and hopefully we can put those horrible looking (but very effective) portable gas heaters away. If you are like me you would have ordered yet another load of logs just before the weather turned balmy and now there is a small capital stacked in a corner waiting for the next onslaught. It is always a wise thing to check the air-conditioning system at the end of the winter and clean the filters but I don't know many people who do it. These days the spring lasts about two days and summer pounces on us overnight. This is when you switch on the A/C. It makes a terrible noise, water drips on the floor. You fiddle with its insides and get sprayed all over with a fine mixture of foul water and oil. Swearing quietly you put the kettle on. Nothing happens because the air-conditioning unit has blown the fuses. The swearing gets louder and you grab the phone. It just happens that the very nice man who sold you the unit in the first place has switched off his mobile. Back to the fuse box and the kettle. Except that you have forgotten that you did not turn the unit off and it screams again, there is a flash and the fuses give up the ghost again. You ring your neighbour. Yes, his unit is working perfectly (you mentally kick his backside hard), yes he knows a man with a van who does electrical repairs. No, he does not know his telephone number but he lives at the back of Villanueva in an old cortijo. No, he does not know which Villanueva (we have quite a few around our Malaga Province). By now, you are sweating like a pig and screaming abuse to the kettle. Your partner suggests a beer from the fridge and to unplug the unit before it blows the whole of the neighbourhood power down. You sip the beer in the shade, forget to pull the plug out because you are busy figuring how you are going to find the backside of so many Villanuevas. There is an eerie silence in the kitchen and the telephone rings. The neighbour bellows in the earphone that his electricity has gone off at the mains and were you messing around with that blasted unit of yours??
The emergency service of Sevillana is finally called and the engineers arrive the following day. What were you doing immediately before the cut? You point guiltily at the faulty unit. The big guy with a Soberano potbelly and the kind of breath that could have kept you in fuel the whole winter states the obvious. You start swearing again. Unfortunately he understands a bit of English, rams his screwdriver in the back pocket of his jeans, tells you that it is not Sevillana's problem and departs in a cloud of smoke. The company has not had his vans serviced for a long time because of the cuts in its budget. In any case they have got the monopoly so to hell with the customers. They can put their plugs where they like.
Two weeks later we are in a heat wave. An electrician is found. He takes one look at the unit and declares it defunct. You start swearing. He smiles because he doesn't understand English. Finally he gives you the address of a cousin ten times removed who has a shop in Alhaurin and sells a well-known make of cooling unit.
The neighbour is not talking to you.
In the old days the young girls used to skip around the maypole in celebration of the coming summer and their own, yet hidden fertility. Charming and ludicrous images of beautiful and prude virgins with flowers in their hair surrounded by randy Morris dancers beating their sticks and ringing their bells somehow do not seem to fit in our sorry world. We have very little to dance about.
Or may be there is: both UK and Spanish governments have very generously increased the pensions. Between the two states we are better off to the tune of 4 Euros monthly. Not quite enough to dance around the maypole.
Thanks to the mismanagement of both the State and the private pension funds we are facing lean times ahead. Have you heard this definition of PENSION? Generally understood to mean monies grudgingly bestowed on ageing hirelings after a life time of occasional devotion to duty. (Small's Enlarged English Dictionary. 12th edition).
In our case we have not been lead all our lives around a maypole but down the garden path. Still, we are a generation of survivors. We can cut the bread thinner, dribble olive oil on it instead of expensive spreads, make magic salads with whatever is cheap and in season, add a boiled egg cut in quarters, a small tin of tuna (good for the heart), some croutons made with stale bread and fried in olive oil, a few olives, plenty of parsley ( it is free at most supermarkets and full of iron) and you have a cheap and healthy summer meal.
And remember what Mark Twain said: Water taken in moderation cannot hurt anybody.
Happy summer.
Jocelyne
