A Lot Of Wind...

“You’re a genius.”

My first words of the day. K has just handed me a second can of isotonic-whatever-it-is and informed me she still has a little bottle of water in her bag, and some ibuprofen in the car. The woman is a genius.

My head – or what remains of it – falls back on the pillow. It does strike me as a little odd that she would choose such a moment to tickle my feet, but then I realise she’s putting my socks on. That’s good; I wasn’t going to get around to it anytime soon. While I’m being dressed, the images start flooding in; the first of them provide me with my bearings. I’m inGibraltar.

No wait, I’m in La Linea, across the border, but I was in Gibraltar. I remember waiting at the runway after dark while a Monarch jet landed, more or less silent in the air as it slipped in from the east, but roaring on the tarmac when it touched down right in front of us and deployed its flaps. A little more waiting while it trundled back into view and towards the terminal…

…K is putting my underpants on. I have neither the energy nor the necessary synaptic functionality to feel ashamed of myself. I am, however, able to feel a lot of pain, somewhere behind my eyes. I wonder what could have caused it. Could it have been the Domaine Patrick Mauvy 2012, a Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire valley? It was certain fruity, I’ll give it that, and successfully avoided that ‘furniture polish’ thing that Sauvignon’s so often don’t, but apart from that it seemed innocuous enough…

Then the gate was opened and the barriers lifted and it was all a street again – a rush of vans and scooters as we pedestrians poured out into the open space of the runway. The sheer white face of the Rock above us and a flock of calling seabirds circling around at its base, the petrol station at the side of the runway, the football stadium, the apartments. The three quarter moon that the sloping rock seemed to point at. The palm trees…

…I am very grateful to K for getting my underwear on, so complying with her request to sit up and raise my arms while she pulls a t-shirt down over them seems the least I can do. It can’t, surely, have been the 2012 Shiraz, a treacly rich Australian bursting with black cherry? It seemed so nice at the time…

…at the far side of the airfield, Gibraltar is a bustling place: claustrophobic even, a feeling that was added to because I was on my way to K’s Christmas work bash. I always feel like the poor poet amongst professionals. A kid amongst the grown-ups.  This will be the first year with her new colleagues so I’m a little more edgy even than usual…

…I refuse to believe that I have been left in this state by a Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio mix from Tuscany. Impossible. It did have lovely toasted raisin top notes. Why have I been left to put on my trousers by myself? K is telling me something about the “state of the bathroom”, but I’m concentrating on my buttons…

…when we got there we were among the first of what was to be a small gathering in one of the low vaulted archways of the old city battlements, now given over to wine sales and tastings. The owner was pouring out some manzanilla.

“Do you know what manzanilla is?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” we smirked simultaneously, borderline insulted.

“If you give me a moment,” said K, swilling her glass, “I’ll let you know if this one is any good or not.”

“Ah. This one is a pasada, actually”

“Well, that’s a decent start then,” I piped in, and with some of the new arrivals seeming just as nervous as I was and the others appearing perfectly relaxed and informal, and the good ham and the old cheese, it was a pretty decent start…

…we’re out on the pavement and the sun is staring me down, so I keep my eyes on the concrete. When they’re open. I’m following K. There’s a street and then a roundabout and then we’re at the car. I get in and pop an ibuprofen. It would come as a great surprise to me if a 2009 Pinot Noir from Argentina could do this to a person, but I suppose it’s a possibility…

…it turned out that for one reason or another several of K’s colleagues weren’t drinking. At a wine tasting. With the bottles opened it meant that their contents had to be poured into fewer people. That was me and K and her director C and his partner J and a couple of others. At one point I had three glasses in front of me: two red wines and a manzanilla I hadn’t quite finished. The food was fine but let’s face it – this wasn’t about the food…

…Whole Berry, from the Springfield Estate in Robertson, South Africa, is an old school cabernet that delivers all the dark berry and licorice flavours you’d expect. Perhaps not quite as full bodied as it might be, there is some evidence to suggest, I have the unhappy duty to inform you, that it may be lethal…

…the non-drinkers were also early-leavers and while the night was still relatively young there were just the few of us left, all in a considerably more relaxed frame of mind than we had been at the outset. I believe we were doing accents at one point. Sorry, Northern Ireland.  Looking across the table at one point, the director, C, did not have the look of a man who had any intention of going home…

…on our way back towards Tarifa I’m hanging on to the handle above my window, so I don’t sway too much. I can’t remember the last time I felt this bad and I certainly can’t remember the end of the evening. It’s time to use my words.

“The, eh…at the end there? We took our leave…I mean, I was alright, wasn’t I? I didn’t doanything, did I?”

“No, you were fine. You were telling them about your experimental fiction…”

My hands go to my head.

“Jesus. Oh Christ. Experimental fiction at your works do. Honey, I never meant…”

But K is just laughing.

“It’s ok. I think they were interested. They’re going to look you up”

She pats my leg cheerfully.

“Nothing bad happened, honey. Apart from the bathroom thing”

Nothing bad happened. Tell my head nothing bad happened. Something bad happened, I can assure you. But what was it? My last memory of the night is of C offering me a drink.

“Go on, have another,” I remember him saying, bit of a mischievous look to him if you ask me. But another what? And how many had I had? In my mind’s eye I track down to the glass in my hand. Jesus.

Whisky.

The other day, I had a slice of bread and butter. It was very nice.

Quite a week!

It was an especially nice slice of bread and butter because K made the bread. That’s right: Casa Alotofwind has acquired bread capabilities. A major breakthrough, and not for want of trying – we’ve both been at it for years. We’ve basically been the Iran of bread making.

K has been the front runner from the get go; the results of her attempts have been consistently better than mine. Less ‘bricky’ somehow. Less evocative of the construction sector, if you will. Mine we have regularly not even bothered to eat. Bakery in general has always been her department, as is anything that requires any degree of precision or self-control.

When I say that her bread has been better than mine I should add, in the interests of transparency and candour, that the difference has not been a marked one. Neither of us ever produced a loaf that had the necessary vim to peep over the top of its tin till this week. To be honest, given that we didn’t even eat my efforts, they might actually be described as better, in that sense. Not that the bread was better but, you know, the outcome.

With K’s we ploughed ahead. Whether this was down to their (slightly) superior appearance or whether it was a personality type thing, fuelled by a fear of saying no to her, I couldn’t possibly say.

“I don’t think it’s risen enough,” she would diagnose, because she was allowed to. “It’s shit, isn’t it?”

“Not at all! It’s really good!” I would reply, anticipating the inferno of yeast-flavoured heartburn I would be experiencing that night.

“Just the right texture…”

I can say all this now (I think) because she’s cracked it. The slice I buttered this week was cut from a loaf of honest-to-god fluffy white bread that emerged from the oven bursting out of its tin. It had risen so much in there we thought it might take off. K was so proud of herself I thought she might. I don’t blame her – there’s something primordially satisfying about being able to make bread. I imagine.

Never one to rest on her laurels, she immediately set about mastering sour dough: a process which takes days and involves leaving a bowl of whitish gloop lying around on the landing, with a plate on it to protect it from the cats, or the cats from it, or whatever. I didn’t get involved.

As it happens we’ve had a strong weekend on the home front. Those of you who find accounts of middle class domestic idylls objectionable should probably look away now – this is going to get very unpleasant for you.

It began on Saturday with the tortilla de patatas. One shouldn’t boast, of course…unless that is one makes a tortilla-to-die-for, which I do, so I am. Boasting, that is.

Caramelised onions, potatoes from Sanlucar de Barrameda – ripped rather than sliced and confit’d rather than fried – and free range eggs, allowed to cool to room temperature and served with a mound of little pimientos de Padrón sprinkled with rock salt, a salad of button mushrooms in oil, garlic and a manzanilla vinegar we buy from the barrel in adespacho de vinos in Cádiz, garnished with fresh parsley. On the side a home made alioliwith the same eggs, sunflower oil for a lighter flavour and saffron. Wine from a Rondawinery, which I bought in a cheese shop on a goat farm not far from here, where we have been to meet the goats and make our own cheese.

That was Saturday. On Sunday we shifted things up a gear – this was to be the day of the sour dough bread (or not) and my challenge was to make a fidueá (paella with noodles instead of rice). We’d been to the fish shop for a little hake and some bream along with a few shrimp and once I’d got it all filleted and peeled I put two pots on a simmer, one full of a slowly reducing fish stock (carrot, onion) and the other full of the shrimp shells and a bubbling broth (carrot).

With the stocks made early in the afternoon we went down to the water to get some air and a glass of wine as the sun set over the sea, and once the evening was chilly we returned to the house to cook. K initiated a complex series of kneadings and risings before dividing the dough, filling two baking tins with it and leaving it to rise again.

I toasted the fidueá noodles in the paellera and then set them aside, using the pan to make a sofrito of onion, tomato and garlic and giving it plenty of time. When it was thick and rich, like a paste, K’s bread went in the oven and I added the fish and the noodles to the paellera along with a good glug of both stocks. Just before the noodles were cooked I dropped the shrimp in and when it was all ready I took it off the heat and covered it with foil to sit for a few minutes. While we waited I poured the separate stocks into tupperware for the freezer and K took the bread out of the oven. It looked pretty good.

With our bellies full of the fidueá – enriched with more alioli – and a glass or three of wine, we turned our attention to the cooling bread. I won’t lie to you – I was nervous. K is not known for her good grace in the face of life’s little disappointments. But I needn’t have been. A beautiful crust and all fluff on the inside, she is pickier than I am and thought it could do with more salt, but for me it was perfect: confirmation of her new found bread powers. I tried it with some jam given to us by friends of ours who have their own fruit trees in the Extremaduran countryside, this particular one made from their nisperos.

I know, I know. Could we possibly be any more loathsome…