A road to nowhere

When I was younger, my friends and I used to dream about doing a road trip, just heading off somewhere, stopping when we wanted, the freedom. But things got in the way (okay, then, boys got in the way. Damn them) and it never happened.

However, one of the good things about upping sticks and moving to a new country is suddenly everything and anything seems possible. Dancing till six in the morning when you’ve got work the next day? No problem. Sneaking through the open gates of a football stadium to see what it looks like? Piece of cake. Running from the security guard who’s just spotted you? A little more difficult with the passing of years, I grant you, but do-able.

So getting in your car and heading off who knows where for a weekend? Easy-peasy.

Leaving the cats in the capable hands of friends - honestly, I think finding babysitters is easier - we packed up the car and headed off for Valencia. The route, thanks to our trusty mapreading internet site, looked simple enough: go to the roudabout on Plaza de Alsacia and then turn left. Except when we did this, we ended up at the Carrefour supermarket we always go to. Still, it gave me the chance to stock the car up with all-important sweeties for the journey and then we retraced our steps.

Carrefour again.

Obviously, Ged was reading the instructions wrong. So we stopped, shouted at each other, then headed off in the opposite direction which at least took us to a motorway. A toll motorway, and the guy wasn’t too happy when we handed over a 100 euro note to pay the 1.75 fee (we’d spent all our change on the jellies we were now happilly chewing. Perhaps I should have offered him one?)

Still, we were back on the open road, fulfilling my dream of years, even if we were now heading to Andalucía and not the Valencian coast.

Aware that the furthest I’ve ever driven in a day was Edinburgh to Inverness, I decided frequent stops for coffee were called for. So, when we hit Jaen, we called into a service station.

I should have realised something was up when even the cockroaches were walking out the front door, but I was tired and needed coffee - NOW - and something to take away from the sugar rush of all those sweeties.

The menu was large and it took a few minutes to decide: bocadillo de lomo for Ged and one of calamares for me. “They’re sold out,” said the surly girl behind the counter. Okay then, jamon and tortilla. “They’re sold out.” We tried a third time. “We’ve only got bacon and cheese.”

“Well, one bacon and one cheese, please.”

“No. Bacon and cheese.”

“Aha?”

“Together.”

“Ah. We can’t have a bacon and a cheese?”

“No.”

As Ged hates all cheese except parmesan, we left. So far, my road trip wasn’t really thrilling me. But never mind, we went to get petrol and decided to stop at the next cafe for something to eat.

I struggled with the security-first safety catch of the petrol cap and popped the nozzle into the hole. Nothing. I put the nozzle back in place and tried again. Nothing. I looked around for help. Nothing. Eventually, a voice crackled over an intercom telling me I had to pay for the petrol before filling up. “But I've never filled it full before so I don’t know how much petrol it will take,” I objected. Answer - nothing. I struggled with the security-first safety catch again and drove off, cursing with every gear change.

Four hours and one successful pitstop later, we pulled into a little town in the mountains of Granada. There was a mirador - somewhere - where we were going to spend the night. But Ged was map-reading again and “somehow” we’d ended up a narrow lane, on a gradiant of God-knows-what, with nowhere to go. “I’ll have to reverse,” I said through gritted and very tired teeth. Ged hid behind the map as I tried to make my way down the windy road, aware of a local watching me with keen eyes.

Yup, the scraping sound told me something wasn’t right. “You’ve hit something,” said the helpful local who’d watched every movement without saying anything. “I know,” I answered. “And you’re leaking,” he went on, pointing to a trail of liquid following us up and then back down the hill.

I jumped out and looked under the car. Yup, there were two distinct drips coming from underneath. Thankfully, the small bollard I’d dunched had been all sound and no action - it left no mark on the car.

But that was it. I lay my head on the top of the car. Not even Easy Rider Peter Fonda had this much hassle on a road trip.

“Hey,” said Ged, who had used my breakdown to have a chat with a group of guys nearby. “They say the leak is just the water from the air-conditioning. Look, it’s already dried up. We’ve had it on all the way from Madrid so they say it’s natural for it to drip. And, we’re twenty minutes from the sea - how about we spend a nice night down there, then head back to Madrid tomorrow?”

It was the best thing I’d heard all day. And so, we joined the old fogies enjoying the late autumn sun on the beach - and you young things can keep your road trips.

Medical mayhem

Being British, I was born to queue. Nice and polite, one behind the other, waiting quietly until the person in front has had their turn. Yet all it took was a visit to the doctor’s waiting room for me to turn into the queuing equivalent of Paris Hilton at a meeting of Nobel prize-winning scientists - completely out of my depth.

Just getting to the queue was a hurdle in itself. In almost three years, neither Ged nor I have been ill enough to need medical assistance (the power of positive thought - three years of thinking: “I’m positively petrified of going to a doctor in Spain”) but I could not put it off any longer. Spain is very strong on preventative medicine and after the hundredth student told me off for not going to any sort of well woman clinic (“after all, you are in your 40s” - muchas gracias for that, Pilar) I decided the time had come to take the bull by the horns and pop into our local medical centre to register - taking a book with me: I have by now, after all, had lots of experience in Spanish red tape and how long you have to wait.

Five minutes later I was out. Organised? Efficient? ¡Claro que no! Turned out that the medical centre only ten minutes walk from my house wasn’t the one for my area. No, the one I needed was a ten minute bus ride away. Course, that makes perfect sense. After waiting for the bus and then waiting in the queue, I was sent home to queue at the town hall for a certificate, after which I was back waiting in line at the medical centre. After registering, I asked for an appointment. “Sorry,” said the woman behind the desk, “I don’t do appointments. You need to queue up at the window next to me.”

With all this practice, by the time I actually got my date and time - Thursday, 11.15, number 27 - I was an old hand at queuing in Spain.

Yet it all went horribly wrong. The place was packed, the patients waiting outside their specified doctor’s room rather than in one general waiting area. Ged and I sat down and I checked my number again. It was then I realised there was a fatal flaw in my queuing procedure - I had a number, but there was nothing displaying numbers in the whole building . “The doctor must call it out,” surmised Ged.

A few minutes later, the doctor’s door opened. A woman came out. Another woman went in. Then it happened again. And again. A steady, silent stream of patients moved in and out of the consultation room, all in perfect sequence as if taking part in a silent dance. How did they know when to go in?

I was starting to get desperate. Then I had an idea. Some of my fellow waitees were holding their appointment slips. “Try and see the numbers on their papers,” I ordered. Surreptitiously, squirming around on my seat, screwing up my eyes and contorting my body, I tried in vain to make out the tiny writing. After a couple of twists and turns, I realised a few people were looking at me. Others were looking at Ged in sympathy. The woman next to me was edging away so nobody would think we knew each other.

“Stop it,” Ged whispered out the side of his mouth. “They all think you’ve got a marble loose. Or piles.”

Suddenly, the door opened and a kindly looking woman in a white coat appeared, clipboard in hand. She read out a list of names and I watched anxiously (listening is no good - have you ever heard a Spaniard pronounce Carr-Ellis?). These were the next group of patients but it wasn’t until after she’d finished that I realised I’d been expected to see who was before me so I would know my place in the dance. I’d failed the audition miserably.

But I wasn’t the only imbécil. An old man turned to me and asked: “Was I before or after you, young woman?”

“No, no, no,” said another woman. “She was after that woman in the red trousers over there...” she pointed to the woman I was to follow in a manner my mum used to tell me off for “... then it’s you.”

He nodded thoughtfully, and then decided he had time to go home and have a coffee (it was 12.15 by now). Ten minutes later, he was back. “I’m after you, true?” he asked. I nodded, ecstatic that someone else was worse in the Dance of the Doctor’s Queue than me.

Eventually, the woman in red trousers - the only time I’ve ever been glad to see red trousers - finished her turn. I stood up - just in time to see my original old man come through the front door, smiling broadly that he wasn’t too late to lose his place. The place I had now told another poor waitee was his.

I scurried in. Then scurried out five minutes later, turning my ears away from the argument growing behind me: “But the English girl told me I was after her.” “No, estúpido, she told me I was after her.”

Not having had the foresight to ask the doctor for some tranquillisers after my thoroughly stressful morning, I popped into La Terraza for a beer and checked the hospital appointment the doctor had given me. Three weeks later at 13.10, queue number - 72. Another day of it.

But this time I have just what the doctor ordered - I’m taking a bottle of gin in my handbag.

A kiss is just . . . not on!

Love is in the air - and on the escalator, the Metro seat next to you, the middle of the pavement . . .

One thing I’ve noticed in my time here is that the Spanish love snogging. Everything you’ve ever heard about Latin lovers is true (well, almost everything. Thankfully they’ve left the medallion and the skintight leather trousers far behind, although, sadly, hairy chests are still proudly puffed out whenever a J-Lo lookalike is in view) and believe me, they leave Parisians in the shade when it comes to romance. Young, old, straight, gay, couples everywhere in Madrid take any opportunity they can to tickle each other’s tonsils, no matter where they are. I’ve seen elderly men “old enough to know better” balance on their walking sticks to give their wives a kiss in the middle of their evening paseo, middle-aged couples giggle like schoolchildren as they snuggle up together in the supermarket queue, and even the youngsters in the playground drop their toys to pinch a peck when it’s time to say goodbye. The only ones who don’t seem to snog are the expats, who make sure it’s only their stiff upper lips that are on display as they cough discretely and push their way pass the passionate pairings.

However, sometimes you’ve have to join in - whether you want to or not,.

Ged and I recently celebrated our wedding anniversary with a meal at one of our favourite restaurants, Bazaar, in the centre of Madrid. It was a lovely evening and we billed and cooed as all good Britons do - discreetly holding hands and lovingly offering each other a taste of the fabulous food before scoffing the lot (although I did notice the mouthful Ged gave me of his beloved chocolate dessert was so small it made our free tapa at the bar beforehand look like a four-course meal). At one point, hubby looked as if he was going to buy a rose from the flower-seller who came round the tables but Scottish sensibilities (and an overdose of hair gel on my part) prevailed and we watched on as all around us, women proudly placed their floral tributes of love in their hair in a way that you just can’t do when your barnet is short and spiky rather than long and luscious. Things became even more loving when we realised that our local, La Terraza, was showing football on TV that night and we could make the second half if we got the Bingo Bus home.

The Bingo Bus? You know the one - in Britain, it’s the second-last bus home on a Saturday night which is always filled with older merrymakers making their way from the Gala. We have the same bus here, except it’s usually bullfights instead of bingo. The noise level is about the same. Being a late-night bus, it quickly became full, leading to Ged offering his seat to a woman who was standing, and, being a late-night bus full of people who’d just been to the bar, it wasn’t long until she started a conversation with me. (I learned several months ago that saying “I’m sorry, I don’t speak very good Spanish” to a Spaniard makes absolutely no difference. They’ll fix you with a smile, acknowledge what you’ve said, and then babble away fifty-to-the-dozen regardless. All you can do is nod, smile manically, and hope they’re not saying anything too tragic.)

The woman asked what I had been doing and I explained I’d been out with my husband. “Aaaah,” she replied, turning to give Ged her full, unashamed attention, “Con guapo? (With handsome?)” “Yes,” I answered. “It’s our wedding anniversary.” “Aaaaaaah,” she squealed with delight. “Your anniversary? How sweet. How loving! How long? So young! You should not be apart tonight. Come, come - you should be sat here, next to your wife.” And, despite Ged’s protests, she began giving orders to the rest of the passengers to move so she could give the seat back to him. And with every order, she announced it was our anniversary, until it seemed the entire bus was grinning at us and we had no choice but to look loving, grin back, and count how many stops we had to endure until we could escape.

A few days later, I recounted this tale to my friend Carlos, who has also just been married a few years. “I once read about a British couple who had just celebrated their 80th wedding anniversary,” he said. “But the newspaper didn’t say how many affairs they must have had to make this life sentence bearable.”

After so much loving, it was good to find a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek, British-style cynicism. So good, in fact, that I could have kissed him. But I didn’t. I am, after all, an expat . . .

Getting into a tight situation

With winter full upon us, a girl’s thoughts turn to only one thing - tights.

For as long as I can remember I have worn thick, black tights every winter. However, when packing for sunny Spain, I didn’t imagine such things would figure highly in my new life and gaily threw them in the bin. With my permanently tanned legs, I’d never need such things again, I thought.

Que idiota!

I should have been prepared. I can remember, in those distant, permanently-blue days of September, sitting in La Terraza and asking Paul and Santi about the photograph hanging on the wall showing the bar covered in a thick layer of snow, the sunlight sparkling brightly. “That was just this year,” said Paul. “Middle of February, I think.” Santi agreed. I looked again at the photograph; it was very picturesque. They both laughed when I told them this. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d been here.” I pooh-poohed their words. Paul’s lived in Madrid for more than ten years, while Santi is Spanish. What did they know about cold, pampered by sunshine all year round?

Fast forward three months to our first Madrid winter and I’m beginning to think I didn’t have it quite so hard in the UK. It’s cold. If I could say the words “brass monkeys” in Spanish, then you’d get my drift just how cold it is. Yes, the sun shines, but it gives out very little heat and my mum is sending across the long johns as we talk. Cold rioja has been replaced by hot chocolate (oh all right, perhaps that’s no big hardship), the jumpers are out of mothballs and the search for the thick tights is on.

But how hard can that be, I hear you ask, after all, tights are hardly the most taxing thing to buy. Well, welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Spanish tights.

I first ventured into this world with my Spanish friends Conchi and Pilar, two willowy, elegant women who would make Gwyneth Paltrow feel like Giant Haystacks. However, being a nice person I’ve learned to forgive them such perfection and they’ve become good friends, bucking me out of my British ways of dress towards a more feminine look (aka taking the effort to wash my hair before I go to the supermarket rather than jamming on Ged’s baseball cap). So it was a surprise when one night, over a drink, Conchi crossed her legs to reveal a glimpse of brown and yellow tights underneath her trousers. At first I thought I was imagining it, I mean, brown and yellow striped tights? But no, a second look confirmed they were definitely there. What’s more, now I had noticed them, I began to see brightly-coloured tights every where: red tights, blue tights, red and blue tights, checked ones, lacy ones, mauve, orange and pink stripey ones – you name it, someone somewhere had thought it was a good idea and turned it into a fantasy in nylon.

But not everyone is as subtle as Conchi. Instead of hiding these shocking stockings, some display them with pride. Women in business suits will accessorise with bright orange handbags and matching tights, while those who are “dressing down” will team lime green tights with electric-pink shoes. Sitting on the metro one morning, amongst a sea of sleepy faces and traffic-light legs, I found myself regretting pouring so much scorn on my mum’s penchant for wearing 30-denier, American Tan pop socks. Where are Trinny and Susannah when you really need them?

Things came to a head the other week, when I went shopping with my friends. I was looking for a new outfit for work and, after standing firm against some lime-green monstrosity, bought a very smart black jumper, black skirt and - hidden away in a corner - a supply of thick, black tights. (It’s not that I don’t like colour, it’s just that I’m British. We don’t do colour until July.) I paid for my purchases with joy, ignoring the looks being exchanged between Conchi and Pilar.

Two days later they sprung their surprise. Sitting over coffee, they produced a gift-wrapped package. A long, rectangular gift-wrapped package. In fact, the sort of long, rectangular gift-wrapped package you used to give Great-Aunt Aggy for her birthday - that’s right, the sort of package that hides a pair of tights.

I opened it up gingerly, looking nervously at Pilar’s red fishnet-clothed legs, and pulled out . . . a lilac scarf. “To go with your new outfit,” said Conchi. “Sí,” agreed Pilar. “We thought it would look nice and make you look more Spanish.” I stammered my thanks and was about to offer to pay for all the coffees - and order cakes - when Pilar added: “And now people won’t think we’re friends with someone who goes to funerals all the time.”

“OK, you can get me some colour, but I’ll never wear coloured tights,” I laughed. They joined in my laughter - but then gave each other a knowing look . . .