Old Properties

Things to think about when buying a farm in Spain: On any old farm the property was measured in ‘fanegas’ – a sort of rule-of-thumb measurement - and every village had a different size ‘fanega’ so the size of one ‘fanega’ in Mojácar was, likely as not, different from that in Turre. Now things are measured in hectares or square meters so it is standardized but the old properties aren’t. This makes it complicated when trying to read an old property deed. Another thing is your boundary. Years ago a farmer might have traded a donkey for an olive tree on their land, the donkey will have long passed on but the olive tree now – at least in theory - belongs to someone else. It depends, of course, on whether somebody wrote it down. We ourselves, for example, have a reasonably clear and evident spread of land, plus, according to an old neighbour, an extra five or ten square metres, not existing on any document, about half a kilometer away. One’s land usually stops at the top of a ‘barranco’, a level of once-arable land supported usually by stones (the dictionary isn’t very helpful) and not at the bottom. As I have mentioned before, if you have an ‘era’, that is, a round threshing place, you should find out if it is yours or communal. Or better still, if anyone thereabouts still owns a donkey. Rights of way and animal paths are another problem. For example, we have a piece of land behind ours that gives the owners the right to pass over our land to get to theirs so we cannot fence it. It is just for the land-owners in this case and not the public but it is evidently something of a nuisance. The water or electric company also may have a special right of way so if you fence the land you must put in a gate wide enough for a vehicle and give them a key. An animal path, called a ‘vía pecuaria’ (or, in Andalucía, ‘una vereda de carne’), is for public use and may go right through the middle of your garden. They may not be used much any more but you may not fence or build or barricade it in any way. No, not even the notary. It is not just open to shepherds or farmers with land on the other side but it is in fact a public footpath. Get your property surveyed because the piece you were shown might not actually be the piece you are buying, you might be buying the side of a cliff. An old trick usually played on one foreigner by another was to get a ‘papel del Estado’ – a fancy-looking watermarked paper dripping with seals and everything on it from the ‘estanco’ – the government paper, stamp, seal and cigarette shop - for twenty-five pesetas and merrily write your contract on that. If you didn’t know any better it looks pretty damn official. I think now with the notary and lawyers that has pretty much gone out of fashion but a lot of people ended up paying a lot of money for a paper they could have gotten at the ‘estanco’ and then finding out they didn’t own a house. Check who has been paying the taxes for the last ten or so years because they might own the land now. Most old farm-houses or ‘cortijos’ have been inherited by a number of family relatives sometime along the way, so you need written consent from ALL members of the family in order to buy. Lot of times, there’s someone in Argentina, another in Barcelona, another dead or in prison and there is always one ‘clever’ family member that holds out and winds up still owning a room in the house. It may not seem like a problem if it is an old ruin but once you have remodeled and are living in your new house they can put pigs in their room or try and sell it to you for a vast amount of money now that the property is worth something. Does your farm come with ‘tandas’ or hours of irrigation water - from springs or the town fountain? If it does you need to know how many hours and what days your land has (it’s usually out of a cycle of ten days), then you go to the spring and change the water-ways to go to your farm and irrigate or fill a ‘deposito’ for use later. This can mean a very early start, depending on the timetable. Many farms have three or more springs that they are entitled to but it is a lot of work to walk down the water channels and move the gates so that the water reaches you. Another thing to find out is if your land is protected archeologically, meaning you can’t under normal circumstances build at all. The land is registered with the ‘registro’ and also with the ‘catastro’. These two offices are mutually exclusive. The first is the Property Registry - think old bits of curling parchment and lilac ink – and the second is the Tax Register. Often, the property is different in one from the other: the vital one – often as we have seen rather lost in the old pine-tree and the large rock which boundaries with Paco el Loco’s land – is the true record of ownership. An ‘escritura’ or the rather shorter ‘nota simple’ are the receipts of the ownership: copying the salient points from the Register.

A ‘Fanega de tierra’ – after looking it up – has the following distinctions. ‘In Andalucía, equivalent to 6,440 square metres. In Castilla y León, it measures 2,000 square metres. In Madrid it goes up to 3,330m2 and in Albacete, it’s between 5,000 and 6,000m2 of cultivated land, depending'.

The Golden Years

A large number of people have joined a Facebook page called 'Mojacar Golden Years', where they post photographs of the times when the pueblo was still either 'interesting' or 'beautiful' (take your pick). You will find all the old 'characters' there, or maybe you can add your own.

The Milk Tooth

Barbara with her milk-tooth. Eating an ice cream many years ago on the Costa del Sol. Lenox' favourite picture.

Do You Want Grated Cheese With That?

It was a warm summer evening about fifteen years ago and Lenox had decided to take two new employees out to dinner. The couple evidently came from a deprived background, wore matching outfits and spoke a rather hard to understand English.

We arrived at the particular restaurant, a smart looking place with a terrace run by a Spanish couple. The husband is a great cook; although rather keen on fancy and peculiar combinations – the kind of food that no one in their right mind would ever think of preparing at home. The owners seated us and gave us our menus in Spanish and withdrew. We had never been there before (although we slightly knew the owners) and cast our eyes over the various peculiar dishes available. I forget now, but the simplest one was along the lines of lark’s breast stuffed with an olive. The faces of our guests fell as we translated the choices and it became clear they were more at home with the meat and two veg school of refection. To save ourselves from further discomfort, we launched into a melodrama of a forgotten child and an emergency with the baby sitter, all duly translated to Rocío, the owner’s wife; and with that, we left for the MacDonald’s around the corner.

Oddly, far from remaining under our wing, these days they eat lobster.

Two points more about this story. The first is that Rocío’s command of English is as good as or better than my own. The second is that our guests soon picked up a few pointers about expatriate life in Spain and shortly after, relieved us of a great deal of money. 

Our Romantic Trip

I was writing a special for our newspaper on romantic get-aways and contacted the head of tourism for the small town of Lanjarón, Granada. Lanjarón is a beautiful village, high in the Alpujarras and famous for its natural spring water and hot springs and old Moorish baths. After speaking with the head of tourism, he invited me and a guest to stay in his hotel and spend a weekend taking in all of the wonders of Lanjarón. It was late November and Lenox’s birthday so I thought it would be a wonderful surprise that would normally be out of my price range. We arrived at the hotel, having driven that day from Granada south over the top of the Sierra Nevada on an alarming and stony track, through little villages and hamlets at the very top of the Alpurrajas. Arriving in the town made famous from its bottled water, we found the hotel to our surprise to be chained, locked and bolted. The neighbors said maybe the manager (and acknowledged expert on tourism) had gone into Granada to go shopping. We spent the day wandering around the town and finally decided to take a room, at our expense, in the only hotel that was open. It turned out to be a hotel for senior citizens where the Spanish Social Security system brought elderly people by the bus-load. We checked into our room and were told that dinner was at seven. Our room was large, freezing and filthy. The view from our bedroom window was of snow; not a beautiful snowy landscape but of packed snow up against the window. We went to the dining room around 7:15 only to find that, in a most un-Spanish way, they meant dinner was served at seven not started around seven. Every course was a type of purée; soup, vegetable, meat and pudding. After a rather disgusting dinner we went out to find a bar and something to eat but along the main and indeed practically only street, everything was firmly shut; so we returned to the hotel bar. The only beverage on the shelf behind the bar was an elderly bottle of Licor 43, so Lenox ordered one and, to his gratification, was given a huge water glass full of this sticky liqueur. I asked for a coke and the bar tender had to leave the building and ten minutes later returned with a can of coke he must have got out of a friend’s refrigerator. Some of the other guests were gloomily playing dominoes while others were watching the TV. We decided to retire to our room. We were wearing every piece of clothing we had packed while all of the blankets and towels were spread on the bed and yet we were still freezing. Lenox suggested adding the rug on the floor but it was covered with heavy clumps of what appeared to be human hair.

After an unsatisfying breakfast of purée and with our hitherto benevolent opinion about Lanjarón firmly in retreat, we decided to leave the town, as even the hot springs and baths were closed for the season. We drove down the mountains towards the coast looking for somewhere beautiful and interesting. To our surprise, we came across a place called Orgiva – looking like the Santa Cruz Mountains of California wrenched directly from the 60s, with long-haired hippies wearing outsize velvet caps, a reek of patchouli oil, painted VW buses, the lot, all apparently moved in woozy bulk to the Alpujarras of Granada. We broke out trip briefly in another notable village, Yegen, where Gerald Brennan had lived for many years. Our conclusion? Don’t visit it in November. As we were arriving at the bottom of the mountains, still in search of a nice hotel, we coasted into Trevélez and came across a restaurant apparently famous for its trout so we pulled in to the parking only to find three bus loads of German tourists parking in mathematical precision in behind us. That would be a lot of trouts for one day, we thought, so we left. The only rooms we could find in the town – tourism evidently still not being a strong point from Lanjarón onwards – was above a gas station, so we decided to go home. When we regained the coast we chose not to let our romantic weekend be completely ruined so we went to a hotel on the beach in Aguadulce, Almeria. It was full of English and German tourists and, by chance, it was “Dress in Drag Night”. Nice to see the two nations coinciding for once – if only in complete idiocy. I have never been so happy to return to the beauty and comfort of Mojácar in my life, and until now, twenty years on, I never wrote the article about Lanjarón.

Note to the Lanjarón Tourist Board – please feel free to use this essay.

Promotion

December and January are probably two of the nicest months in Mojácar. The weather is beautiful and warm. You can immediately distinguish the tourists from the local residents. The tourists are all in shorts and flip-flops and we are all bundled up. Mojácar has never been properly promoted as a winter area yet we boast the best weather in Europe at this time of year. I see that our town hall has done a brilliant job on their promotional campaign and actually come up with a rather effective advert. But WHY ARE ALL OF THE ADVERTS IN MOJACAR????? We are flooded with the best campaign we have ever had but it is aimed at us and we already live here and love the place. It should be all over Norway and Germany and England; where they are all freezing and soaking wet. We would know that they had spent the advertising budget properly when we started seeing northern Europeans coming to visit, fill the hotels and restaurants and buying houses. No, we didn’t even get one advert placed in Turre, the town next door. While I am on the subject why don’t you listen to Bernard Cribbins' version of “Hole in the Ground” I think it is very appropriate considering what is happening in our village.

Escargot and a peach juice, PLEASE

When Megan arrived in Mojácar, I took her up to see the old village which towers over our house. We walked up the hill then up some stairs, through a narrow passageway which led to the shop of one of our daughters, Peque: I guess you have to be from around here to understand the family relationship. Anyway while Megan enjoyed the wonders of Peque’s shop, I played with my granddaughter, Luz. Upon leaving, Luz said she wanted to go with me, Mima. Peque said she would only stay a few seconds and would then want to come straight back. Luz had just turned three years old. Well, not only did she not want to go back, she wanted to buy things in all of the shops that we visited. Finally exhausted, after swinging her in the air all around town, I took her back to her mom. The sneaky little girl let me intentionally walk right passed her mom’s shop and told me she couldn’t find it. I knew better and tried to return her to her mother, but no deal, she was staying with Mima. We ended up spending a lot of time at Pasha’s Moroccan shop, next to the Taberna, smelling all sorts of incense and little blocks in colored bags. Megan, Pasha and I were all speaking sign language so Luz zipped her mouth and just started moving her hands all around and didn’t utter another word until we went to the Taberna for a drink. This tiny tot, climbed onto a bar stool, ordered Escargot with garlic and parsley with a peach juice; please, then she zipped her mouth again and watched herself signing in the mirror. Megan said “what did she order’” when I told her she was shocked because for an American two amazing things happened; one a three year old felt comfortable enough in a bar to sit and order a drink and second that she ordered something that to an American, only rich French people eat. We had a short conversation with the cook and then convinced Luz that upside down mushrooms with garlic and parsley were giant snails and she was content. Luz went home with a bag full of presents for her mother and left a big impression on Megan. I had lots of fun with all of them.

Charlie and Ric

I was clearing out an old box of junk (anyone want to buy some pre-revolution Russian railway shares?) and came across this photo of Charlie Braun and Ric Davies. Charlie arrived in Mojácar in around 1969 after a brief career as a stunt-skier and later an actor in spaghetti westerns. He was German, although claimed Swiss nationality when confronted by my mother, and was born, he claimed, in Japan at the Second World War's end.

Ric originally came to the area, drafted in by the American Government after the events in Palomares in 1966 (a B52 crashed with four thermonuclear devices) when it was thought to be a good idea to build a desalination plant for the locals. Ric was the engineer but quit to start a new life as a layabout.

He took over the El Patio beach-bar and ran it for many years.

Both of them are dead now. We won't see their like again!

Insects and Spiders

Spiders have a head and an abdomen with eight legs, while an insect has a head, thorax and abdomen with six legs. My husband has always been fascinated by bugs of all types and knows most everything about them. He has tried to pass this passion on to our children. Daniel caught on at a very early age and he and his father would spend hours in the garden looking at bugs. Daniel has maintained his interest and increased his understanding of these creepy-crawlies. He and his father still show each other bugs they have found. I use the word bugs so that I don’t have to keep differentiating between spiders and insects. When Daniel was in his twos he could tell the difference between a good spider and a bad one. We found this out one night when he came into our room, late at night, to tell us there was a bad bug under his bed. We were sure it was a Wolf Spider; they are very ugly and hairy but harmless. We went to look and sure enough he had a tarantula under his bed. How he knew the difference I will never know. When Lenox didn’t know what the bug was he would give it a name and it sounded very real and are called that to this day. Like one the girls found upside-down in the ash tray and asked daddy what it was, he said, without hesitation, that it was an ash bug and so it became. Lenox has named several bugs here: one of his favourites he says reminds him of me. It is the Golden Splendour beetle. When you touch it, it lets out a shriek, rolls over on its back and sticks its legs in the air. I have no idea how that reminds him of me or what the beetle is really called.

I don’t know if they have them everywhere but here we have Stink Bugs. They look like little beetles and come in three fragrances: pine, lemon and shit. This keeps any predator from eating more than one, so by preserving the species.

I can take bugs or leave them as long as they aren’t in my bedroom. Living in the country it is inevitable that you will get bugs in the house. That is one of the great things about geckos because they eat the bugs, until the little lizards get so fat that the stickers on their feet don’t work so well and they fall to the floor or onto the bed. They also shit like birds and it is very hard to clean. Geckos usually hide behind pictures or mirrors, and make a little screech noise during mating season. They are considered good luck to have in your house here in Spain. It even used to be the custom to bring a gecko to a house- warming to start the house on the right foot. Whenever I see a spider I ask my son or husband to please release it into the garden, which they do while having a long discussion on the wonders of the thing. My husband has a thing about mothers. A mother spider will carry hundreds of babies on her back until they are ready to go out on their own. Lenox has a strong feeling that they should be left alone until such time but all I can think about are the hundreds of new spiders I will have in my room.

Our daughter, Amber, suffers from severe arachnophobia. If she sees a spider, she becomes hysterical, can’t breath and has an instant panic attack. Insects don’t bother her so much. Our house is so big that the children lived on one side and we live on the other. One night she saw a spider. It was in her room, in the corner of the ceiling and she had a panic attack. She was screaming for an hour or so and couldn’t breathe. We couldn’t hear her. Finally she screwed up the courage to slide passed the spider and run to our room for comfort. Before we could comfort her we had to slap her a few time to get her to breathe and then came the cuddles. She said she had been screaming and crying for hours and why hadn’t we come to rescue her. We just hadn’t heard her. Our other daughter Jessica has a more normal take on them. They don’t bother her but she has no real interest in them. She will however gladly move one outside for you.

Orgasm on Aisle Three

I was having lunch with some friends, long time Mojácar residents, when one started to recount her recent experiences in a new supermarket that has just opened. Having lived here for so long, she told us, she was at first amazed by the size and amount of well-known products that she hadn’t seen or thought about since her time in England. After having put her coin in the trolley, she had slowly started to wander aimlessly, her mouth wide open, just admiring and reminiscing over all of the goodies. The only problem with the giant store, she admitted to us, was that every time she touched the trolley she got an electrical shock. Not to be deterred from her adventure, she gingerly pushed the trolley around the shop, still getting a shock every time she touched it. A salesgirl came up and asked if there was a problem since she had heard my friend shriek several times. My friend explained about the little shock and was politely treated as the girl’s dotty grandmother. The typical middle-aged woman who probably lived alone and most assuredly had a dog that absorbed her world, the type of client you treat with respect but underneath it all are silently laughing about. My friend - I will call her Linda for the sake of the story – thanked the girl for her concern but bravely said she would continue, and began to carefully push the trolley around by just touching the little plastic pieces on the corners of the push-bar. When arriving on aisle three, just in front of the butchers’ stand, she leant over to look at some frozen goods in a glass top freezer when –ZAP- she got a shock to her nipples and, to her unalloyed pleasure, an instant and unexpected orgasm. Linda said that her nipples shot up like a chapel hat-peg as she shrieked in delight, much to the consternation of the butcher. The butcher for his part had just thought it was rather odd without knowing the real reason for the shriek. A dazed Linda tottered to the check-out stand having hardly bought anything; still in a dreamy smile over what she had just experienced. The salesgirl kindly asked if she had enjoyed her shopping and hoped that she would be back. Linda said that she had and would also tell all of her friends about her experience. Linda went straight home and e-mailed everyone she knew about her experience and told them that they must try it. On Linda’s return visit to the supermarket the following day she still had the same problem with the shock from the trolley. The manager noticed and came up to ask her what the problem seemed to be. As it happened, they were standing just in front of the butcher on the famous aisle three. Perhaps Linda had made her way there on purpose. She told the manager about the electric shock she kept receiving from the trolley and about the remarkable and invigorating experience served to her by the freezer on aisle three. He opened the freezer and nothing happened so he asked her to try; a little embarrassed about what might happen, and not wanting him to think she was just another dotty old woman, she opened the freezer; and –ZAP- another instant orgasm. The butcher was wetting himself with laughter, as the manager said he would get it fixed right away. Linda told him that there was no need for that and that she really loved his new shop. When arriving at the check-out again, the salesgirl asked once again if she had enjoyed her shopping. Linda replied “more than you will ever know”.

The girl said that they had attached ground wires to most of the trolleys and that on her next visit she should look for a trolley that had a long dangly bit that touched the ground, and politely said I hope you will return. Linda said “Oh! I don’t worry any more about dangly bits, but I will most certainly be back and I have told all of my friends about it”. I don’t think the sales-girl really quite knew what she meant as she started helping to put Linda’s shopping into a bag.

Another Boost for Mojácar

Barbara talks about therapeutic riding to the crowd

Loli poses with Wendy, a Dutch Miniature Shetland

Juan Carreño gets his bottle of wine from Lenox

Mojácar was represented at the 7th annual Horse and Wine Fair in Almería by the presentation of my new manual on the basics of therapeutic riding and the presentation to all of the promoters from the equestrian world, of the traditional, organic wine made by Miguel Egea. Miguel makes his own wine from grapes from his own vineyard near to the Rio Aguas. Miguel’s wine is called Alberquilla. He uses no pesticides and the fertilizers come from animals that only graze, and are not fed on ready-made pellets, which contain hormones. It’s a truly honest no-chemical brew. In my speech, together with Loli Berenguel Gálvez, from the equestrian center ALBERO in Almería, we pointed out the importance of working in a team to get the best benefits for your special-needs students; the importance of having a medical certificate and insurance. We also spoke about our eighteen-month investigation into how the horse can help improve the quality of life for people suffering from terminal illness or toxic medication and its side effects. Our Town Hall didn’t help (it never does), even though Mojácar, with its own National Association for Animal Assisted Therapy, ANIMO – a pioneer in Spain for the teaching, practice and investigation in all areas of AAT, which has been promoting on an international level for over twenty years – is based here. The Town Hall has never taken advantage of a few things that have been offered free, to them, that could have made a big difference to the whole community; like ANIMO, Burro Baseball, the arts, archaeology, geology and efforts, knowledge and experience that the international community has been willing to offer in so many ways.

Tunas in Mojácar

Recently, there was a competition of Tunas from all over. They were here for three days, brightening up the village with their song and friendly attitudes. Tunas are made up of university students from different fields; each field has its own group. They are usually men and they play mandolins and guitars and several other traditional instruments. They all dress in the same ancient outfit, of velvet bloomers and full sleeved jackets. The jackets are adorned with different colored ribbon to distinguish one group from the other. They didn’t just come from all over Spain to compete; there were groups from Mexico, Holland and many other countries. This year there was even an all girl group. On the night before the competition, they were all out serenading the bars and restaurants. Most of the bars were closed and the restaurants too. No one was about. It is something that the whole family can enjoy and what a shame, no one knew about it. Traditionally they were given tips and this would go to help with their university fees. Now I think it is just more for fun and tradition. Wherever they go they make fun, music and laughter. These are all events that could bring so much to the area but Mojácar seems unwilling to let people know what is happening.

While wandering the streets on the night of the competition, we bumped into Julia Hope. We happened to be sitting at the Taberna which, back in the sixties, was a disco run by Julia called the Zurri-Gurri. Julia was driving her electric wheelchair and we were commenting on how nice it would be if cars were removed from the village and only golf carts were allowed, that way she and her husband Russ, could ride together.

The roving Tunas, about 500 of them, is just one in a series of disastrous promotions that the Town Hall has made. So many talented artists, musicians and groups come through Mojácar yet go completely unknown to the community. Hands up those who knew about the Serón ham and Laujar wine tasting in the plaza of the Post Office yesterday! You see what I mean - not only did the residents miss out but the exhibitors went away feeling that Mojácar was not worth promoting.

Even Puppies Like Laundry

We have a problem with laundry here. The water is so hard that even with softener, clothes come out stiff. Then there is the sun, which fades the colors and eats the elastic. So where does one dry one’s laundry? I started with a clothes-line among the trees, only to find that snails love damp, wet laundry and leave a silvery trail across your clean clothes. Birds sit and nest in the trees, leaving their droppings all over your washing. I moved my drying to two clothes racks in the middle of a patio, only to find that the big black olive-eating birds fly by and leave huge purple stains that don’t come out. The puppy has just found a new friend to play tug-of-war with: my clothes on the rack. He doesn’t destroy them; he just drags the wet clothes through the dirt and the foxtails to bring them to me. Having finally taught the puppy that those are Mama’s clothes and not a toy, I moved the clothes rack under the cover of my patio; fine for the winter but in spring the swallows come back from Africa and build their mud nests in the beams under the terrace roof, to make matters worse, when the babies hatch, they automatically know to hang their back-sides over the edge of the nest to do their business, leaving huge piles on the terrace or smaller dabs on my laundry. So, ever ready to come to an arrangement with Mother Nature, I moved the clothes rack to a corner where the birds don’t nest. However, in life, nothing is perfect and our pet chicken, Valentina, she of the delicious morning eggs, must join this tale about now.

After an enjoyable forage about the garden, and a chase with the puppy through the flower beds, she will rest her feet and gossip with the sparrows while perched on our clothes rack. And, if the mood strikes her, she’ll poop.

Maybe it's time to get a dryer.

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.