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A day to remember, Part I: The big drive, the service stop from hell and our arrival in heaven

We had been accustomed to most of our days over the previous few weeks in Jimena de la Frontera being somewhat similiar in their content and structure. Apart from a weekend visit from friends, the days began with Rudy getting up at about 9am and having a coffee and cigarette outside, and myself spending a few hours to read the morning news in bed and rolling out of bed significantly later at about 10:30. This would be followed by spells of aimless pacing around the house and garden, thinking of ideas, occasionally writing them down, (often forgetting them), walks down the Hozgarganta river, walks to and from the shop, painting with watercolours, more cigarettes, lying in the sun with the increasingly needy cats, reading, cooking, listening to Desert Island Discs and watching Breaking Bad. Ideas for pitches came to me sparingly, money went and didn’t seem to want to come back. The environment didn’t inspire for ideas, but it did inspire me to relax. Rudy wrote in his books and on his typewriter down in the smaller house at the bottom of the garden, and sang songs on his guitar. It was altogether a blissful time spent in the tranquility of our own noise with no one to answer to but ourselves. 

The day we left the casita in Jimena de la Frontera and the cats that we had mentally adopted is a day worth documenting. Rudy had picked up a car rental the day before and we were to drive from Jimena to our new destination somewhere within the Sierra Nevada mountains. Rudy’s brother had put us in touch with his friend who lived in the hills, and would let us stay for two weeks for free in return for caring for her two dogs while she attended a retreat in Italy. 

Rudy is a nervous but thankfully cautious driver, and occasionally a highly stressed hothead when stalling at traffic lights or in the middle of roundabouts. Of course, that’s understandable, but I couldn’t help but seeing the humour in his use of profanity in a voice notably posher than my own that only increases under stress; sometimes directed towards me and sometimes directed to nothing at all. I would have no choice but to purse my lips at his frantic two-handed tugs on the handbreak, while asking the car what the fuck it thought it was playing at. Having passed his test only a week before we left for Spain, he had virtually no real-world driving experience, let alone experience driving in a foreign country. I had no concept of how the 250 mile drive from Jimena to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and then back to Granada in time to return the car that evening would pan out, but we both hoped for the best. If anything I admired his bravery and willingness, and silently ignored my internal concerns for our welfare. Despite a slow start, a scattering of stalls here and there and a lot of Spaniards overtaking on difficult stretches, the drive faired up once we reached the motorway. You remain at the same speed, in the same gear, even in the same lane if you insist on it. The motorway stretch took us along the coast of the Costa del Sol, a journey that reminded me of childhood holidays but it was now somewhere we now wanted to avoid like the plague. The last thing we needed to see were hoards of English holidaymakers, in their poloshirts stretched over protruding beer bellies, sandals, trunks, caps and blacked out sunglasses that didn’t find the shape of their wonky heads properly.

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What happens in Orgiva, stays in Orgiva

The 31st of March 2017 is a day I won’t forget in a hurry, but will certainly try my best to do so. The day began early - and when I say early, I mean not early for everyone else in the world who has to get up and go to work, but early for two unemployed drifters on a prolonged holiday in Spain. We’re talking 7am. We shower, eat cereal, get dressed, I leave half a mug of tea on the side; the usual routine. We then leave the house and begin the five mile walk to Orgiva to catch the 10:30 bus to Granada. We give ourselves the recommended 1 hour and 50 minutes according to Google maps to reach our intended destination, knowing that from our journey two nights beforehand, it takes us a little less time than that.

The walk was satisfactory. It felt quicker than the nighttime hike, perhaps because we could now see where we were walking and that we were deep in discussion about England’s public schooling structure, as well as recounting tales of when we both used to work in pubs. We slept on the bus, I dreamt about my mother dying followed by another, separate dream about green beans. From Granada we took another bus journey, this time all the way to Malaga Airport. Apparently there are no direct routes from Orgiva to Malaga Airpot, so we had to travel north before being able to head south, much to our irritation. 

It was at Malaga Airport that we would then collect a car, of which belonged to the owner of the house we were now staying in. The car had been offered beforehand, but it was only when we realised how much effort it would take to carry a weekly food shop five miles back through the Sierra Nevada mountainscape in the blistering heat, that we decided to go through with it. We needed that car, there was no question about that.

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There’s nothing more awkward than two young Brits trying to convince a Spanish long-stay carpark service at the BP petrol station next to Malaga Airpirt that they should allow us to drive off with one of the cars, with no note or proof that we were allowed to do so. “What car is it?” they asked, “we don’t know” we replied. And we really did not know, we had travelled for hours on the pretence that they would just let us off with one of their vehicles. It didn’t take long though, around 10 minutes, before we were stalling our way out of the vicinity in a model that Rudy had never driven before in his life, on his third day of driving since passing his test.

The journey was smooth, despite the circumstances. The motorway is simple enough, and the winding hillside bends that followed seemed like a doddle compared to the journey in the car rental two days prior. But of course, this day could not have been complete without some significant cock up that would warrant a post of its own. We’d travelled so far, we’d came all the way to Malaga Airport for Christ’s sake. 

There’s only one thing that’s going to happen to you if you drive a car that doesn’t belong to you, and you don’t get yourself insured. You’re going to crash. It’s just a fact, and one we refused to acknowledge until we did exactly that. Crash. Somewhere in the desperate search for petrol on Orgiva’s first day of Holy Week, we ended up corned by the narrowest corridor of a road in the centre of town, surrounded by Spanish locals; a couple of men, a handful of kids. In a panic of realising we should never have brought a car of this size to this route, surrounded by onlookers and no real knowledge of how to escape it, we stalled. The natural reaction to stalling in front of an audience - a scenario we’d come to know all too well in the the days that led up to this event - is to start the engine and get out of there as soon as fucking possible. And naturally, that’s exactly what we did, meanwhile tearing up the front-right of the car as it dragged against the white wash walls of Orgiva, which suddenly transformed into the last place on Earth we wanted to be. The sound of it - my memory of it fills me with dread. A hundred years could have passed in those 3 seconds. The ears to my subconscious heard car-parts falling to the cobbled ground, children screaming in shock. In the sheer horror of it, and in true British form, we accelerated down the new route faster than a jackrabbit, not stopping to apologise to the owners of the property we collided with, or to collect the debris of our self-inflicted disaster.

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The journey to Spain and the days that led up to it: Part II

Granada is a wondrous place. Granada is also a mysterious place to understand. A week in Granda is not long enough to understand what makes it tick. 

The first thing I noted when we arrived off the bus in the city was an orange tree. This pleased me because it felt like we really were far away from London now. I had read previously that Granada is home to 3 million orange trees, but the ones you find in public places and on the sides of streets are not the kind you want to eat. They are bitter in taste and are used in marmalades - rather it is the sweet oranges that are grown in orchards that behold the most satisfying experience.

We scrambled up cobbled streets; I dragged two black suitcases full of books to inspire, pencils to potentially draw with and clothes to wear in +30c conditions, the best I could. With black velvet boots, black tights, a black turtle neck dress and a white sheepskin coat, smudged eye-liner and bloodshot eyes, I couldn’t have looked any more London if I tried. What fool only brings black velvet boots as their only mode of footwear to Spain?

The room exhibited an unusual mix of interior decor. One wall was exposed brick and the others clad in Spanish tiles. There was a replica print of Mona Lisa on the wall. Her ugly head each day reminded us of the complex and often absurd dynamic between beauty and vulgarity. Nobody quite understands the significant of the subject Mona Gheradini or the answers to the many questions posed about her life, and after starring into her beady eyes for an entire week, I have come no closer to finding the truth myself. For what it’s worth, I did however enjoy my week spent in that room. And it was almost a week, for half of the time it was raining and most of the time I was attempting to busy myself with work-related issues, because no matter how free you are, in any city you may find yourself in, you’re always going to need some cash.

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The journey to Spain and the days that led up to it: Part I

The metaphorical journey to Spain was no less simple and straightforward than the physical journey to Spain itself. Although I had almost left my two suitcases in the doorway of a friend’s flat in Victoria the night before, the procedure the following morning from Clapham North to Calle Elvira, a street in Granada, was without any major blunders. 

My first thoughts when stepping off the plane were a combination of “where exactly are we” and “what now?”, for I had no idea of what airport we had arrived at or what journey we must now take to get to the city, or in fact where we were to stay. I suppose it is only my fault for not asking these seemingly crucial questions, but the point is quite frankly I didn’t care where we were or where we were going. I just wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere other than London, which wasn’t offering any immediate respite from it’s own claustrophobic environment and unnecessarily high rent against salary ratio. London had been fun in the lead up to my departure, but unfortunately fun and being out of pocket around the clock don’t go hand in hand. I was also well into my twenty-third year on the planet - some would even say I’m an adult now. I had to get away, and moreover, I had to re-evaluate. 

The air was warm and clammy. I always look forward to the first gush of hot, unstirred air once off the plane, which is difficult to process for any British set of lungs. All we know is air colder than our own breath, the kind that when you were a child you would exhale to look like you were smoking in order to mimic your parents or your undeserving year eight idols that you put on a pedestal at secondary school, for reasons you no longer understand. On the occasional hot summer’s day in London, the air is so riddled with pollution that you try not to inhale it at all. It wasn’t hot like Ibiza in July air, but it was considerably more satisfying that the frozen blizzard that almost toppled me over the rails of the stairs to the plane back at Gatwick, and blew my boarding pass out from my very hands and sent it fluttering into the path of the aeroplane’s jet engine. Even the Spanish air in Spring feels tropical compared to what we were leaving behind. I was wearing the same make-up from the night before, in fact I was wearing the same clothes also. Needless to say, 5am starts don’t agree with me. The only way I could meet this one successfully and arrive at the airport in good time, was to enter and leave the bed in the exact same state - physically and mentally - and continue my precious sleep from the confines of the heated taxi.

I can’t quite depict the moment I first considered leaving my job and escaping to a country I’d only dabbled in for week-long holidays here and there. I’d never expect I would ever try to stay out here for a long period of time, nor was I especially attracted to doing so in Spain. Paris, Scandinavia, rural Italy - any of them would have done. I also knew not a word of Spanish, and to be perfectly honest, I still don’t, but since I am virtually illiterate in every language other than my English mother tongue, I didn’t see this fact as an issue of any particular significance. I can however, depict the exact moment this choice became a definite certainty. We were spending a weekend in Surrey, and I had told myself that during that specific weekend I would decide on whether to stay at my job, or simply vacate the country. The offer was there, the world was my oyster. The birds were chirping, they were telling me what to do. I was heavily intoxicated for the first evening of our stay, and spent the rest of the weekend recovering, but somewhere deep, deep within my self-pitied hangover, I pledged to myself that I would hand in my resignation and scarper for the hills of Granada. Why Granada, you ask? The answer was simple. My boyfriend was already going, and that is quite literally the sole reason I now find myself here.

My job had left me feeling bewildered. Puzzled about myself and what I was doing on this Earth, I felt as though I was falling further and further into existential despair - but remained totally nonchalant on the surface. Or at least that is how I hoped I would be perceived. The motto I try to live my life by is: “and whatever you do, act completely nonchalant.”* I’m not sure it’s done me any favours so far, and whether it ever will. In fact, I’ve found as a result people find me difficult to read, almost emotionless. Dead as a dodo inside, or impartial at the best of times, but this observation is ironic. I think acting nonchalant is just a good way of gathering your true thoughts and feelings on certain topics before something inaccurate and irrational has had a chance to rear its ugly head. That’s what I was doing this time last year, I have a different outlook now.

It was only by heavenly chance that as soon as I would return to the office the following Monday, I would be invited to a meeting with the CEO of the company I worked for. This is the second one-on-one conversation we had engaged in, other than “hello” and “how are you?” pleasantries in the office corridors, the only other time I had spoken to him about my job and how it was going was after my first week, almost half a year beforehand. In short, the CEO told me that he had noticed I was unhappy in my position (I thought I had been acting nonchalant), and that myself working alone while my boss worked overseas in New York was simply not working. I could have told him that would have been the case for free. He told me that unfortunately - and with remorse - he would be issuing my notice, and that in exactly one month I would be set free from the shackles of my (at times) overwhelming and unachievable responsibilities, and cast back into the sea of unemployment from whence he had fished me from not so long before. He offered to set me up with some of his valuable contacts, in a hope to find me new work. I left, after not saying much and ran home to my flatmates to share the news of my contract termination. Upon exclaiming that I had been fired (I use the word ‘fired’ here for dramatic effect), I felt a tear of joy leave my right eye. What a blessed thing it is, to be relieved of a job you already planned to leave, without having to fill in the required paperwork and hassle a whole evening over a letter of resignation.

*N.B.: The original source of this quote was initially unknown, but after some light research, I have come to find that I have in fact pulled this motto I now live by from Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). I am now working on finding a new motto.