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.
