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Diary of a Downshifter – Part 14 Downshifting to Spain
After 18 happy months in Finca Granadero we decide to move on. There was no rational explanation for this other than the fact that we had got itchy feet and I wanted to live nearer Gibraltar and in better bee country. We looked for many properties in an area stretching from Rhonda down to Gib and finally found a small hut situated down a steep, near vertical slope. The views were amazing. From the sitting room we could see Gibraltar and over the Straits we could see the African shore dominated by the other pillar of Hercules, Jebel Musa or Musa’s mountain. (Gibraltar is a corruption of Jebel Tarik or Tarik’s Mountain. Musa and Tarik were the Muslim generals that first invaded Spain under the Caliph and brought Islam to Spain for over 700 years). Below us was a huge valley populated with cork oak trees and cattle through which ran the Victorian rail line put in by the British in the 1800s from Algeciras to Rhonda, and to our left we could view the Rhonda mountains dotted with small white villages all with Arabic names. At night, these same villages looked like small jewels sparkling in the dark mountains. To our extreme right we saw the brooding presence of Castellar itself, a Moorish castle which housed the main part of the village and which also housed an exceptional bar.
However, we first had to sell Finca Granadero and arrange to stay in it until the birth of our daughter. We used the original etate agent but also went about this by placing an ad in a German newspaper to see if there was any foreign interest. Knowing no German we asked a neighbour to write the ad for us stating that we wanted the Deutchmark equivalent of 6 million pesetas (we had bought the house for 4 million). Due to a mix up in numbers the ad put it at 8 million and that’s what we got. A very nice couple came to see it and fell in love with it immediately. They did not intend to live in it permanently or immediately and so we were able to stay in it until March 1995 when our duaghter was two weeks old.
In the meamntime I had gone down to our proposed new place to assess it for alteration and to get some ideas from a French friend of mine (a builder) and an English friend about altering the new hovel to make it fit for a family to live in. After a very successful day out we returned to find that our houses had been evacuated due to the approach forest and scrub fires. When my wife and others had phoned the fire brigade, they were unable to respond quickly due to most of them being in bars watching on televisions Spain playing in a world cup match. Eventually they turned up however and the house and surrounds was saved.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 13 Downshifting to Spain
We had been in Spain for 18 months and for some reason we had itchy feet. The small house called Finca Granadero that we had bought was now a beautiful Andalucin cottage with beams and nooks and crannies that the previous owner had blocked up and that we had opened up and revealed. The plumbing was good and worked (by this stage I was a master plumber) and even the electricity worked as well as could be expected. We installed a brilliant little wood burning stove and built a chimney, which kept us warm and generally we were becoming comfortable. The authorities offered each house a radio phone and we quickly took advantage of this and so were finally contactable. This communications ‘improvement’ in our lives actually turned out to be one of those brilliant, modern ideas that can end up destroying the closely knit fabric of communities. Now we had our own phone we didn’t have to go to the ‘telephone man’s house anymore. Going there was like going to a form of social club. We met others waiting to make their calls and chatted and got to know them, and we caught a glimpse of real Spanish life as we became part of the telephone man’s family life. We were there for their meals, their rest periods, their arguments, their television (which was always on) and they would tell us of their triumphs and disasters. Because there was no instant communication we learned to wait; we learned patience and we learned about the rest of our community. They were all interested in us of late because Annabel had become pregnant and this news caused quite a stir.
The bees were now established in two apiaries and having got over the problems of varroa – which was in Spain but not in the UK at that time and so caught me by surprise – we were able to plan our next business moves. We survived the swarming season – just. The first swarm hung up in a tree just below the house and I went up a ladder with my box to collect it. I banged the branch with my hand and the bees dropped into the box. Holding the branch with my right hand and the box in my left, I was about to descend when the ladder fell away and I was left hanging. I called Annabel who arrived centuries too late and by this stage I had hit the ground nd was covered in bees. Even swarm bees get angry if you mess around with them enough and these got angry. As usual I hadn’t put any protective clothing on so the pair of us fled. A small gang of them got up my trouser leg and were moving rapidly upwards In this circumstance it is important to stop them at the knee, and as I hopped around holding my trouser leg Annabel rushed inside the house and locked the door citing unborn child and so on. I’m still not sure how I survived.
But as I said, we were getting itchy feet (all our lives we had moved every year or so due to military backgrounds and in my case a military childhood as well) and so we decided to move and we began looking around at suitable sites and locations that would be good for us and good for the bees. Little did we know that we would end up in the centre of a bunch of hippies in a hovel half way down a cliff with no water, no electricity and no approach to the ‘dwelling’ other than scrambling across a near vertical rock face with foot holds carved into it – with a two month old baby! But more of that later.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 12 Downshifting to Spain
My next move in the Sharam electricity saga was a visit to the company offices in Velez Malaga accompanied by grovelling explanations about misunderstandings, absences of mind, invalidism; genuine error of judgement and so on but all seemed to be of no avail. The electricity was to be cut off in two days and legal proceedings commenced. There appeared to be only one solution and that was to go nuclear. The next day, Sharam drove me down to Velez and after having generally scared me to death, parked on the yellow lines outside the glass windowed offices of the electricity company. He then emerged from the car, sticks akimbo and hobbled painfully into the office where he fell flat on his face. I hadn’t actually asked him to do that but it was very effective. Numerous staff members rushed over to help him to a chair and untangle his sticks and limbs. He grinned at me as he was solicitously sat down in a comfy chair and immediately we were at the head of the queue. I explained to a harassed supervisor that here was the criminal himself and that he was expecting the electricity to go off the next day and that if he fell over in the dark and broke his head open or disappeared down the gorge, he deserved it for being bad, but that it wouldn’t stop him suing the electric company for their inhuman practices in depriving a handicapped man of the essentials of life. Sharam nodded his head in agreement as I spoke. The Spanish are very particular about this sort of thing and would go a million miles out of their way to avoid impeding someone who is disabled and within minutes the by now horrified supervisor had organised for a new electric meter to be installed at the house, a new reading to be taken in two weeks time, the line paperwork to be regularised, apologised for any inconvenience and giving me a knowing smile said “obviously a paperwork error seňor. You can take the gentleman home now.” No mention of legal proceedings, fraud or nameless other charges. Sharam and I hurried out swiftly in case anyone changed their minds and just to be on the safe side, I drove home.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 11 Downshifting to Spain
Sharam’s new home needed to be remote because of his continuing requirements for daily challenge and I knew that the small place down the track from us belonging to an English couple from Birmingham might well do the trick. They only frequented the place a once or twice a year and upon enquiry were delighted to have someone look after it in the meantime. It had electricity and more or less mains water and was perched on the side of a steep gorge. Having secured permission for Sharam’s move we negotiated a reasonable rent with a consideration for me, and Sharam happily moved in. Unfortunately, this coincided with one of those rare periods in Spanish country life when ‘the system’ decided to start being efficient and just after Sharam’s move, along came the authorities in the form of an electric meter reader, who noticed that the shack had no meter but it did have electricity because with Sharam in it, it had a light on. Rules and regulations in the countryside of Spain were often sidestepped and few people took much notice of them but every now and again failure to obey the rules did have consequences and the consequence of this particular sidestepping was the arrival of an electricity company inspector on my doorstep. He had with him proof that electricity was being siphoned off from a mains line and not being paid for and that as I was responsible for the building, I was responsible for the theft and fraud as well as Sharam and the owner of the property. He informed me that the electricity would be turned off in two days and that the owner, me and Sharam would all be prosecuted for fraud and other nameless charges which he would think about in the meantime. The fact that just about every other house in the area was doing the same and had been doing so ever since electricity reached the area was evidently of no importance. This was out first tricky time with the authorities since we arrived in Spain and it was case of learning fast how to deal with the bureaucracy. I immediately went up the track to the telephone man’s house where the local public phone was situated in the family sitting room and over the blast of the TV, I contacted the house owner. “Oh yes, David, we did fix up some electricity a few years back. Took it off the mains. Why, has the line broken?” I explained the situation. “Oh well,” he exclaimed cheerfully, “I’m absolutely certain that a man of your calibre can sort it out. Keep in touch though; let us know what happens. Annabel can phone if you’re in prison.” When I had put the phone down, the telephone man’s daughter turned the TV down so that we could negotiate payment for the call and after paying and exchanging the usual niceties with the assembled family, I hurried off home.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 10 Downshifting to Spain
Within a year, we had turned a very pretty Andalucian country cottage that had been turned into seaside villa back into a very pretty Andalucian cottage only now with better facilities such as electricity, water, a wood burning stove and an operational septic tank, and we had started some basic landscaping. Things were getting easier all round. We had established our bees in several places but found that they weren’t thriving very well. Also, I lost hives due to varroa, something I had no experience of in Lincolnshire. I should have known it was in Spain and I should have taken precautions but I was new to the game and hoped that it just wouldn’t appear in my hives. Some hope! But that’s another story.
Our nearest neighbour was a man in his 70s who was renting the house just above us. He had some terrible muscle wasting disease and couldn’t walk without sticks and even then not for long. But, we would see him struggling over the uneven ground on his evening walks and giving cheery waves to all who passed. He always had a smile on his face and seemed at peace with the world. His name was Sharam (he was Swiss but had taken on a Buddhist name) and he told us that he lived out in the wilds because it presented a constant daily challenge and this challenge and the hardship that went with it prevented him from giving up. He was too busy trying to keep moving to die. He had a small car in which he went off to town every now and again and he usually returned on the back of a transporter after rolling in the ditch somewhere due to his inability to drive because of his disease. I always wondered how he managed to keep renewing his licence and one day after he had arrived back in a particularly battered state I called round for a glass of beer and eventually got round to the subject. “Oh that’s easy”, he replied to my question with a huge grin. “I just send the renewal forms off to Switzerland with this photo” – he handed me a photo of him at the age of twenty – “I white lie, obfuscate and blur all the other essential details on the form, obviously no one checks anything and eventually another license appears. What else can I do? If they take my license away that would really be the end”. A true downshifting expert I thought and my opinion of the Swiss bureaucracy rose 100 points on the spot. I had thought they were efficient!
One day however, much his distress, Sharam was told that the cottage was to be sold and that he had a couple of weeks to move. The subsequent shenanigans nearly caused us all to be arrested.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 9 Downshifting to Spain
Now that the house was literally out of the mud we were able to start turning it back into a small Andalucian country cottage. We wrecked and re-did the bathroom; we ripped out the false plasterboard arches which concealed beautiful wooden beams; we placed wood and glass doors between the sitting room and the stairs area and we built another toilet near the stairs. Old Antonio the retired goatherd from up the road came to visit frequently. He limped up the driveway with his black and white cat which had an identical limp from an identical injury and would talk for hours about the times when he lived in the place. The new glass and wooden doors between the stairs and the sitting room were one of our last luxury items. We had them made to fit by Ernesto Crespillo a small scale master carpenter from Velez Malaga. He used pine that he explained came from abroad by ship, plane and train and he assured us it wouldn’t swell or warp like local pine. His work was superb but expensive and a new local factory called ‘The Black Cow’ started to mass produce ready made pine doors of all shapes and sizes and very much cheaper prices. Sure enough, Ernesto went out of business and the area was flooded with Black Cow doors which either wouldn’t shut or if they did shut, wouldn’t open again unless it was hot and sunny in which case the pine shrank so much that gaps appeared between the frame and the door. Consumerism was rapidly advancing in Spain which one the one hand made life easier but on the other, products were dumbed down to a more trashy level which I guess most people now accept as the norm.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 8 Downshifting to Spain
I’d never done any plumbing before but I did have that book – The Readers’ Digest Book of DIY and so armed with this I set about re-plumbing the entire house whilst Annabel knocked down false walls with hideous arches, revealing the beautiful and original eucalyptus beams that held the house together. Within a week we were able to test the plumbing. I had sore, stained fingers from the flux, burnt clothes from the blow torch and I was totally fed up with the whole thing and vowed never to do this again. The test was an abject failure. Water shot out from every joint – some of them inside walls and the shower head shot off with such force that it cracked the porcelain and I knew that I had to start all over again – but first I needed a drink or two and headed for the bar on the road to Benamargosa. I drew in and bumped straight into the car in front of me smashing his bumper. After announcing this in the bar, a worried Spaniard rushed out to see the damage but was back in minutes wholly unconcerned. ‘You hit the bumper seňor, that’s what they’re for,’ and he returned to his drink. I grabbed my beer and wondered for the millionth time about the mind of the Spanish. If I had even slightly scratched his car door there would have been hell to pay, but smashing a bumper? He was right. That is what they’re for! Soon the barman had found out that I was the English beekeeper up at la Peňa and announced that he too was a beekeeper, but he pitied me. His bees were near orange groves where nectar abounded whereas mine only had scraggy little wild flowers to forage off. His only trouble was he claimed ‘the disease’. His bees died from it every year and other beekeepers suffered from it in the area. Did my bees get the disease he asked? I told him that my bees didn’t suffer from this particular problem because they weren’t near crops such as oranges which were sprayed with insecticide each year. No one bothered to spray ‘scraggy little wild flowers.’ He hit his forehead and exclaimed,’ the spray! You think it’s the spray. The one that kills insects? You’re right, you’re right, bees are insects. It must be the spray. You seňor must be a professor; you must come and look at my bees immediately– but no. First you must have a drink to fortify your brain. He poured a generous measure of the local mosto and handed it to me. Mosto* is a deadly brew and within minutes the whole bar was engaged in a discussion about the effects of sprays on bees and as is usual in Spain, everyone had something to say about the subject. Very much later and with some difficulty I made my way home. I never did look at his bees but I did eventually finish the plumbing, Annabel mended the large hole in the wall in the bathroom with mud and stones and we set to building up our bee stocks.
*There are two types of ‘mosto’ in Andalucia. The first is the local ‘homemade’ wine, deadly and wholesome, but there is also the grape juice variety which is sweet and free of alcohol! Be careful which you choose.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 7 Downshifting to Spain
In common with many old Spanish houses in the countryside, ours was dug into the bank. This meant that when it rained, the back wall of the house would become damp. When it really rained, the wall would start oozing water and when the rain increased, a steady flow of water would flow through the wall, across the kitchen floor, through the dining and sitting rooms and finally exit in orderly fashion out of the front door. As the plumbing hadn’t yet been sorted out I suppose that it was a source of water but you don’t imagine this when you first view the house on a nice summers day. Anyway, we realised soon that the house needed digging out. Spain is full of JCB diggers rumbling around everywhere but of course when you need one, so does everyone else. We were advised to leave a message at the bar Ortega in a nearby hamlet and wait.
Over a week later we awoke to find a large yellow JCB parked on our land and about an hour later the owner arrived in his small white van to explain that he a just off to the bar for breakfast. Another hour elapsed and he re-appeared reeking of anise and we explained the task required but after less than 10 second he waived us away, mounted his steed and rumbled forward to the back of the house where his front tyre was immediately punctured by the spike of an agave plant. Off again in the van with the tyre in the back to get a repair and have his morning break from which he appeared an hour later reeking this time of brandy. During his next break, I determined to go with him. This time though, he actually managed to start digging into the ground and as the rain started again in earnest we hoped that he would get the job completed swiftly, but it appeared that that very thought prompted an avalanche of tomatoes to fall off a truck and block the track a few kilometres away, shortly after which the Civil Guard arrived and ordered him to go immediately and sort the situation out. It was several days later that he reappeared and for over an hour he regaled us with tales of the great tomato saga, and the water continued to flow from our front door. However, eventually, all ended well and within four or five days, we had a large gap between our house and the bank and the house began to dry out. Now we were able to really get to grips with the plumbing and continue with the bees.
Sustainability in all aspects of our lives is a laudable aim in my opinion, but what has this got to do with downshifting. Take an example: Mike and Lynn decide that they’ve had enough of the stressy jobs, the grumpy bosses, the commuting and the sheer lack of time to enjoy life. They look at their circumstances and decide to go to Spain and set up a small but interesting business providing proof reading and translation services to expats on the Costa del Sol. They buy a small place just out of town in a semi rural area for the peace and quiet and work almost entirely by computer/internet. They work their own hours, set by them, don’t commute to anywhere unless it’s to the local tapas bars; go to the beach every weekend and summer afternoons; have two children who grow up bilingual in the only two truly global languages, and they all live happily ever after. Hard work but less stress and they are in control of their lives. They are typical downshifters.
Now that is as much downshifting as anything else, in fact more so, but at no time did they raise chickens, buy organic produce, plant their own vegetables, or recycle their waste; yet so many websites/books/newspaper articles and ‘downshifting days’ now simply provide offerings of green wisdom and advice to do all of these things if you are a serious downshifter and these sites merely seem to be off shoots of green politics. There is even a ‘National Downshifting Week’ in the UK. The website offers little except the usual green sustainability message (which is good, but isn’t necessarily downshifting). In fact one of the suggestions on the site is to use ‘……preferably organic ingredients’ in a simple meal, indicating to my mind that you need to work more hours for your grumpy boss to increase my income to pay for these very expensive ingredients. And in general, they are more expensive. These sites seem to suggest that if you aren’t green, you aren’t a downshifter.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a drive for sustainable living, but don’t you think that the Downshifting Movement or ideal has been hijacked by the greens. Downshifting can be all about going green, but it doesn’t have to be, and often isn’t.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 6 Downshifting to Spain
Everything started out as it should have done. Antonio and Carlos picked me up an hour late and we went immediately to a bar for some fortification. Had I known how the rest of the night was going to pan out, I’d have had ten more and stayed there.
To cut a long and painful story short, it soon became obvious that my colleagues were both theoretical beekeepers and knew nothing about any of the practical issues. They loaded the hives up without strapping them so that bees leaked in all directions; they didn’t do their protective clothing up and so were stung constantly; they used their smokers so frantically that blasts of flame were coming out of them which set fire to one of the hives and finally, the site which Antonio had chosen was on a near vertical slope down which we slipped, beehives and all. Finally Antonio decided on a new site which he reckoned would be perfect. It involved a stiff climb up rocks carrying the by now really angry bees in their leaky hives and finally, as dawn broke, we placed the hives on a rocky ledge sticking out from the side of a cliff. We sat down exhausted and looked at the sun rising over the sea in the distance. I said to Antonio that this was probably the worst site ever known for bees and his reply was, “yes David but just think of how much they will enjoy the view”! He had a point.
Life settled down after that into more of a routine and we began our dip into the world of DIY which lasted non stop for the next 13 years – and in fact still hasn’t stopped. The small house we lived in was very old and was once a typical Andalucian peasant’s cottage with all of the features that made them so pretty such as beams and alcoves. Ours however had been turned into a Costa del Sol villa with false arches and all of the nice beams and features covered with plaster board. The existing fireplace had been stripped out so there was no heating and the part of the roof that was flat had battlements put on it making it resemble miniature castle. The drains from the bath required water to flow uphill and the septic arrangements were very septic. All had to change but firstly we had to find out how. The answer came in the form of ‘The Readers Digest Book of DIY’ which had been given to me by my father. It saved us and putting all our doubts aside, we started off wrecking the house. Annabel started it off. I was away beekeeping for the day and when I returned, it was to see the bath tub lying outside on the ground with a hole in the wall of the house where it had come out! No bath tonight I thought and I knew from then on that things would only become more painful. Our main requirement actually wasn’t the bath, but was to have the house dug out of the bank that it was set into so that water didn’t flow through the house when it rained. For this we needed the help of a digger and this in itself in that part of Spain where there were so many JCB diggers rumbling around is a story in itself.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 5 Downshifting to Spain
It was now time to acquire some bees. After all, that was why we were there. We heard from a friend that an old boy was downsizing his bee stocks and contacted him in Velez Malaga. He turned up about an hour and a half late for our appointment and immediately took us off to one of his favourite bars for a pre-work brandy and a gossip about bees and how there was so much future in it and wasn’t I lucky to be able to buy at very reasonable cost his bee hives full of specially trained, hard working, completely tranquil bees. As usual, reality was different. We approached his apiary along a horrendous series of narrow tracks with million foot drops on either side and on arrival were nearly pasted into oblivion by the bees which attacked on sight. I’d heard about the Iberica bee and so wasn’t unduly surprised at their ferocity, but it was explained to me that it was all due to a series of low pressure systems crossing this part of Spain that had upset them. The television had said so. Usually you could stroke them as though they were flies! What ever that meant! I was never able to stroke an Iberica without having to run for it!
I purchased 40 stock to start off with and we were then rushed to the old boy’s house in town to celebrate with several or more glasses of the local filth drawn up from a deep amphora set into the ground. I took more than I should have (I needed it) and was eventually forced back home, mumbling and scratching my many stings, by my wife.
Now all we had to do was move the hives to some new sites. Three of the locals offered to help me and from the way they spoke I thought they were experts on the subject (another thing I found common in Spain). Bees are moved at night and so one late evening off we set and very soon reality again hit me in the face when I found out that none of them had ever had anything to do with bees before and so another adventure of the Keystone Cops look-alikes began. Only this time the horror lasted all night!
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 4 Downshifting To Spain
After stalling this potential thief who was the owner of the supermarket in the nearby village of Los Romanes, we contacted our lawyer. Once you have a set of deeds in Spain, you can keep them, even after you have sold the property. New deeds are made up for the new owner and in the deeds register, it is only these latest dated deeds that count. The grocer had simply tried it on with a set of old deeds and a letter from the lawyer threatening a court case shut him up immediately. He assumed that we were rich and ignorant and found that we were neither. We had passed the first of many tests that would try us in Spain. Sometime after this event, we mentioned the incident to some Spanish friends who far from being surprised actually said, “Well he had to try didn’t he. He owns a supermarket. He is an important man!” It was our first realisation that, however well you thought you knew these people, their 1000 years of different history to ours just made them think so very differently. It was a continuing theme throughout our time in Spain.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 3 Downshifting To Spain
So we had arrived. It was unnerving to think that this was it. The cottage was fairly sound but still lacked electricity and in fact compared to what was to come over the next few years, it was pure luxury. Many days later the electricians came and in the meantime we begged jerry cans of water from neighbours. Our water was pumped from our water tank by electricity. Had we thought about it properly we’d have made sure that the line from the tank to the house was down hill. Instead it was uphill. Then 5 days into it all the heavens broke and we went from a deficit of water in the house to a huge surplus. Water came in through the back wall in rivers, flowed through the house and out of the front door. We battled it by night and day and in the meantime all our boxes in the sitting room became sodden. There was no relief though. Any fixit job had to be major and we couldn’t do that until the rain stopped. Essentially the house had to be dug out of the hill at the back (where we should have had our water tank). The stone walls of the house were no protection against ground water at all. I went from bar to bar chasing JCB digger drivers but of course after a rain storm of that intensity they were all engaged in digging out roads and farms. Eventually however we got one and it was a cause for celebration when a big yellow JCB came and parked on the land. The driver looked at the problem, grunted and promised to return the next day – but he left his machine on our land which re-assured us. Sure enough he arrived promptly at 8 the next morning, powered up and disappeared. A spilled load of tomatoes was blocking a road. But he returned after a day and two days later the ground behind the house was now level with the house. The first problem was solved. Another miracle occurred when the electricity boys arrived the next day and connected us up. We had light and we had water where it was meant to be, and we had a neighbour who claimed that half our land was his and he had papers to prove it. Not only that, he was going to drive a track through to it on an ancient track way through our land and build a house almost next to ours – unless we bought the land off him at an extortionate price.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 2 Downshifting to Spain
On October 3 1993 we set off for Plymouth and the ferry to Santander in a Luton Van driven by our friend Graham and us in the lightweight Landrover and trailer. It was strange to think that ‘that was it’. No more salary. No job. No England and all the English things, and even harder to imagine that this wasn’t a holiday. It was for real. Remarkably very little happened of note and we boarded the ferry without incident and went on to enjoy the 24 hour journey to Spain. It’s really well worth while travelling this way even if a bit pricey, but you avoid the exorbitant cost of motoring through France (toll roads/campsites/fuel/refreshments/drinks). We’ve been through France many times but delightful as it is, it’s just so expensive. That hasn’t changed over the years. Two years ago I crossed the Pyrenees into France by car. En route, I stopped to have lunch in Spain where for eight euros I had a meal of roast Pyrenean rabbit with all the trimmings, half a bottle of white and a coffee. Eight euros! On my first stop in France at the end of that same day, three small beers in tulip glasses cost me nine euros! (I had to have three because the glasses were so small!)
Anyway, back to getting to Spain. The Picos Mountains were our first site of the country and we arrived in that delightful port on a perfect autumn day and set off up that hill along which all travellers have to go. After shuffling drivers around we lost Annabel near Burgos. Graham and I stopped for a drink at a road side inn and even though she nearly ran us over, Annabel passed by without seeing us. We set off after her and it took three hours to catch up. She thought we were ahead and was going at speed to catch us.
Our first night was to be in the campsite at Aranjuez, but it was closed so we made our way back towards Madrid and stayed at Getafe in a not so salubrious place, but it had a bar and for the moment that was enough. During the second day we lost Graham who thinking he had passed us went back to Bailen to find us, then realised he didn’t actually know the route or where we were going. He ended up in the police station where we found him many hours later. We spent the second night on the outskirts of Granada.
On day three we finally ground our way down to our small cottage behind the big rock known as La Peña near Los Romanes in the province of Malaga.
By the time we had burnt out most of the gears on the Luton van after it got stuck in the valley, we were desperate to unload before dark, and we finally moved everything into the now grossly overcrowded cottage. We were to spend the next 13 years wondering why we had brought so many belongings with us. In fact we still have most of it in the original boxes. We had been warned to take nothing and we had ignored it. At the end of the day we went straight to a small bar in the nearby hamlet and tucked into an excellent meal and copious amounts of wine. This was the right thing to do. It relaxed our frayed nerves and set us up for the days ahead. As we wandered back to the cottage, Annabel looked at the dark, isolated non electric cottage and said, “I’ll give it a year”.
Diary of a Downshifter – Part 1 Downshifting to Spain
This diary tells the ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies and daily routines of a typical overseas downshifting couple which grew into a downshifting family. All of it is true and it all began in November 1993 when my wife Anna and I left the UK for a small cottage in the Spanish hills. We had decided to get out of the rat race in the UK and become honey farmers. The main reasons for leaving the UK were not that we were anti British, but just anti living in Britain. We believed firmly that we were simply not being rewarded for effort in our jobs; the jobs themselves were boring (although decently paid); we dreaded Mondays; we dreaded Fridays because it was the weekend and time increased in speed dramatically and it would go in a flash and Monday would on us again; We dreaded Thursdays because that was the day before Friday and so it went on. Out on the streets, nobody seemed to respect anybody or anything and the decent people (and they were and still are the majority in the UK) had to shut up in case they offended someone. A glass of wine in a pub and a couple of beers required a mortgage and the cost of petrol to get to the pub required another. We were frazzled, overtaxed, totally fed up, powerless to do anything about it and knew that something had to change. In fact everything had to change. We had always liked Spain – real Spain that is, not so much the Costas, although they too provide a very happy place to live for many Brits and other Northern Europeans. So we decided to go there and because we had two beehives in our garden and were therefore ‘experts’!, we decided to go abroad be commercial honey farmers. We were very naïve. Looking back now, I think that it would have been easier to build a space rocket and colonise the moon. But, something had to be done and so we did it. No plans – or rather nothing substantial in the way of planning, but we did go to evening classes in Spanish. That was our only practical preparation for what was to come, and thank God we did that. But we also did a few daft things in the way of preparation including going on a buying spree! We bought a stone sink, a dining room table, antique chairs and an antique sofa and a host of other equally useless junk that we then had to spend thousands getting to Spain, where none of it fitted. On a prior visit to Spain when we decide to buy the cottage there an expat said, ‘bring only what you can get in a suitcase plus your record collection’. We laughed, took no notice and have regretted it ever since.
On the 3rd of November 1993, we set off from Lincoln in an ex military Landrover and trailer, with a friend behind us driving a Luton van, both full of stuff most of which we would never need, and headed for Spain. Next week I describe ‘The Journey.’
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