La Vieja Remanona and Other Picnics

Here in Mojácar, the weather is always good, so we used to take some food and drink, a few pets and friends and the kids would all trail up to the top of our mountain... or amble along the paths and off into a shaded part of the campo, for a good time with the family. Maybe it's time we did it again!

A Fun Day Out (1990)

Here are some pictures from a long-forgotten fiesta we had down at our stables; back in the days when we just had fun and there was no competition. See how many people you recognise.

Maria, Corey, Rudy and Charlotte. Didi's birthday fun ride. At the top, Swiss Michel and then Juanico from Bédar clears the jump.

Ken and Sarah in Madrid

Ken and Sarah, great friends and Mojácar residents, accompanied me to Madrid in early February. We took the train from Murcia on Sunday morning so we could get in as much sight-seeing as possible on our two day trip. I wanted to try and show my gratitude to them for all that they have done for me, by giving them a look at the Madrid most tourists don’t see. Ken is a photographer and Sarah was complaining that she didn’t have any pictures of Ken, so he bought her a little camera of her own but the one thing they didn’t have were pictures of themselves together, so I made it my project to get a picture of them together at each place in Madrid. I know they felt I started getting a bit annoying, but after I figured out how to use Lenox’ camera, we got some great travel snaps. We started with the obvious like the famous post office, which is now the City Hall, fronting onto the Plaza de Cibeles; then on to the Puerta del Sol, the Plaza Mayor and some excellent draft beer and a few shrimps at Santa Barbara, the most famous beer house in Spain. The weather was beautiful and the streets and shops were full. The plazas were filled with musicians and actors.
We saw Spain’s oldest restaurant, the Casa Botín, the famous hat shops, the Gaudí building and the nearby renovated apartment block decorated in professional graffiti. There was color and activity everywhere: the atmosphere was wonderful. We were all exhausted by the time we got back to our hotel. The next morning was hospital for me and the huge Corte Ingles on the Castellana for them; we met for lunch on Serrano, and then continued shopping down Serrano and up Goya. The shopping was exhausting but we stopped for lots of drinks and tapas along the way. We had lots of laughs and fun, we couldn’t help to observe what a difference between the lively streets of Madrid and the dead streets of Mojácar. I wanted this trip to be something special I could do for them but it ended up that all my simple plans went awry and once again they were there to save the day. If they hadn’t come with me I would probably still be sitting in a street gutter crying with the frustration of the Spanish hospital system. Instead we had a great time. There were so many things that we didn’t have time for like a Pisco Sour at the Inca or the lamb at the Asador so we decided that the next time we should stay for a week, in a hotel near Colon, so that we could go out and see some of the jazz clubs, the famous Viva Madrid and Chicote bars, the Casa del Retiro (the large and busy park in the centre of Madrid) and get to see so much more that Spain’s capital city has to offer.

Alan Simpson

Alan wrote this himself.

Alan Geoffrey "One Wine" Simpson 1930 - 2011  A native of the leafy lanes of Hertfordshire, Alan Simpson traversed jungles and deserts on his way to his final home and resting place. He first came to Mojácar in 1968, when Bill Napier and old mayor Jacinto were beginning to put it on the map. A child in World War Two, he was machine-gunned in his village school playground by a cruising aircraft (The only casualty was a boy who ran into the road and was brushed by a passing car) and rendered homeless by a V2 rocket before he had finished his Sunday lunch, thereafter being probed for broken glass on top of a piano in a snowstorm. That is why the title of his on-going autobiography was "Naked in the Snow". {It was serialised in Talismán magazine and later printed as a book of "the-story-so-far". Each chapter was written to be a stand-alone, anectdotal tale, but together they form a fascinating and humourous account of a true adventurer.} An infantry commander in the Korean War, he was commended for his part in extricating  casualties and the dead from a minefield in No-Man's-Land. After the war he aided Malaya's path to independence, seeking out terrorists deep in the Malayan jungle. Travelling with headhunters for companions he explored distant headwaters in Sarawak by dugout canoe, sleeping at night beneath bundles of human heads.  He later sought out remote parts of tribal Africa and the Sahel before moving to West Africa, where he commanded part of a 650-strong  security force protecting the diamond fields, which later funded Sierra Leone's twenty year civil war; the setting for the film "Blood Diamonds". Still in West Africa, he became a chief of police in the diamond mining areas, and was later a miner of diamonds, gold and tin. His memoirs mention the Zanzibar bloodbath instigated by "General" John Okello, and the attempted overthrow of the Moroccan monarchy by General "Name of a Nightmare" Mohamed Oufkhir, both of which situations caused him some inconvenience. Alan Simpson was an occasional magazine contributor, and a talented photographer. An "honorary" Mojaquero since his first visit, Alan became the real thing when he settled into Mojácar Village in 1990. His partner, the artist and potter Janet Le Bretton, predeceased him in 2001. 

Gifts from the Heart

I always felt that it was important for our children to understand the meaning of giving and putting something of them into what they gave; also we didn’t have much money in the beginning: but even when we did, I continued the tradition of home-making all our gifts. They mean so much more than just going out to the store and buying something just because it is the done thing. We would start a few weeks before Christmas and usually a few of the children’s friends would spend a few weeks with us working on their presents. A lot of parents forget how important it is to children to have a gift for the grown-ups, and since the parents are usually the ones buying them they don’t buy a gift for the children to give back to them. We would bake and make cookies that they painted or make cheese balls with a pack if crackers or decoupage pictures on wooden napkin holders to be used as letter holders on the desk. Every year we would do a few favourites and a few new things like sand-candles or pillows. They would make their own wrapping paper with potato-prints or ironed leaves. The kids always got up to their elbows mixing something while learning about measuring and math and how to taste things and add ingredients that suited their fancy. A great learning experience and some very funny conversations took place, as usual when you get a group of children together. We had lots of fun making all of the things and most of them were treasured by the grandparents or eaten as the case may be. Sure it made a big mess but we would listen to music and the kids were great at helping to clean up. The gifts all looked beautiful and the children had such a sense of accomplishment and pride in what they had made. It made them understand the meaning of Christmas, or at least what it meant to me, which was to give something of yourself to someone you love. I know it takes a lot of time and patience but if you have it, it is well worth the time. I hope my children follow the tradition because not only was it fun and a learning experience but they got the true feeling of giving.

Turkey: When Thanksgiving Came to Mojácar

I have always felt that it was important for children to know where their food comes from but I had never intended that their first experience to be so graphic. When we first moved here, we didn’t have all of the goodies that we have now. Most people didn’t even have a refrigerator, so food was what you brought in from the garden or had stored on a shelf. My friend Jane decided that we should celebrate thanksgiving, so we started to look around for where we could get a turkey. After weeks of searching, Chencho from the bar told us about a farmer nearby who had turkeys and that he would sell us one. We went along to put in our order. It turned out he had one old laying turkey but we said we would take it and be back the following day for it. The following day Jane, a farmer’s daughter from England, and Jessica, Amber and I all arrived in Papa’s old Seat 127, only to find that the turkey was far from cleaned and plucked. As a matter of fact it was in the middle of a tug of war between the farmer and his wife. It seemed that she didn’t want to sell the turkey because she was a good egg layer. The farmer sent her crying into the house and handed us the turkey. I was horrified. Jane calmly explained that he would have to kill it first as it was dangerous to drive with such a large bird in the car. He agreed with her logic and the horror began, right in front of my two innocent girls aged three and six. He tried to wring its neck with no luck then he stood on it but the bird kept going, all the while the girls and I were in the car, not believing what we were seeing, as Jane yelled advice to him in English. Finally Jane had had enough and picked up a rake and put the birds head on the floor and stood on the rake and with one pull the deed was done. She threw it in the back of the car and told the girls to get back there with her as they had to start while it was still warm. Soon the girls were happily plucking feathers and throwing them out the window. As you can imagine, no children’s seats were available or required back then. I was in a state of shock and horror as I drove back to the house. Once at home, Jane very professionally cleaned, gutted and dressed the turkey. The next stumbling point was the oven. Most cooking was done outside on wood stoves or in big clay bread ovens and there was no way this bird would even get through the door of our little oven. Not a problem for Jane, she took it outside and with a hammer broke its back and cut it into four, thereby fitting it in. We ended up with a great Thanksgiving, shared by many grateful friends. That is when I decided from then on I would raise my own turkeys, just as I had bought a cow because there was no fresh milk. Being a vegetarian I found the whole thing rather distasteful, and knew why I had become a vegetarian at such an early age. After having lived on farms my whole life and hand-raising or bottle-feeding most of the animals, the idea of eating them was too much for me. At the same time, all of our children have participated in the matanzas of the pig and other festivals here and felt perfectly happy eating the meat. They are all still meat eaters even though their daily diet at home was mostly vegetarian in those early days as they got meat elsewhere.
I raised six turkeys the next year in with my chickens and promised not to name them or get attached to them. I knew they were for eating. Now my problem was how. I heard about a very famous turkey farmer from England that had just moved out here so I set about finding him. Once I did, the deal was made. He would come and take care of three turkeys, leaving them oven-ready, one for him, one for us and one as a gift. The other three turkeys got to live until Christmas. The day he arrived, Baltazar the plumber was at our house vaguely fixing something when a huge Roles Royce pull into the driveway and out stepped the butcher and his in-laws. The women were dressed in fur coats and had all sorts of diamonds dripping from them and high-healed tennis shoes. That was the first time I had seen high-heeled sneakers. Baltazar was duly impressed at my butcher because he only had a Renault 4. My regal visitors didn’t look like they were a group on their way to slaughter three turkeys. I was wrong. Off came the furs and the whole family disappeared into the chicken coop. A few minutes later, without a sound from inside, they appeared carrying three clean birds. The turkey farmer told me they were some of the finest turkeys he had seen. In England he raised hundreds of thousands of them a year, but he said they were very hard to raise in England and that maybe I would like to go into business with him and turn my farm into a turkey ranch. He told us that up to about five hundred birds he could kill them one a second then he started to slow down, and the girls were equally fast at plucking while his son did the cleaning. I declined with thanks.
I still had the problem with the oven though. That is how thanksgiving came to Mojácar. The following year I had redesigned my kitchen around a huge French stainless steel double oven with eight burners. Even though there were only a few Americans living in Mojácar, we always had the house full of children, so the whole village enjoyed the new feast, up until then the only turkey anyone had ever seen came from the US Military base. Now turkeys are easy to come by, all clean and oven-ready but until just a few years ago I always raised my own, because a turkey to one of the locals meant four or five kilos and to us it meant fifteen to twenty kilos, plus I knew what my turkeys had been eating. I think it is a healthy outlook for children to understand the food chain and to realize that what they see in the supermarket, it is not what it appears, in a plastic wrap with a pop up American flag when it is cooked. That way they can make up their own minds how they feel about eating meat.

Stomp Stuffing

For a twenty lbs turkey, more or less

Three children
Three bags of dried toast
1 lg box margarine
3 onions
Celery
1 grated apple optional
2 pkgs onion soup
Basil, sage, salt and pepper to taste
Stock but not from the giblets since that is just yucky

Get three kids to stomp on bags of dried toast until they are crumbs.
Melt margarine in large wok.
Add onions, celery and seasoning until onions are clear.
Stir in bread crumbs and add liquid until moist.

Stuff bird, both cavities.
Cover turkey with butter and make a tent over it in tin foil.
Cook until legs move easily.
Remove foil and let brown.
There will be plenty of stuffing left over for a casserole and for the kids to eat like popcorn.

Two Pictures

Here are two pictures that I just found that illustrate some of the stories written below. One is of mi cortijo and Lenox with all his wives and children, together with a black dog and Tony Hawker standing in the door. The other is of the trampoline that followed me around the world and ended up here. As you can see, there were always a lot of children in our home.