One day we were at the bar when Pepe López came up to us and asked if we could help a British woman with un problema (neither could speak the other's language). Adrian went to where she was standing and it turned out we knew exactly who she was. She was a woman around 40 with a couple of young children in tow, whom we'd come across a few times. Both she and the children looked like they hadn’t washed in a million years. However, we'd heard she had a tidy sum of money and didn’t need to work. She owned a house in Adreimal and another in La Gloria. In fact, we'd bumped into her the previous month walking in the street in La Gloria.
'Hey. Can you tell me if the school in the village is any good?' she asked, without bothering with the social niceties. 'Because I'm thinking of moving down here, if it is.'
Adrian said later: 'I hope to God she doesn't move here. I was hoping the Adreimal lot wouldn't get wind of this place.'
She was 'woman with white van.' This was a phenomenon in Adreimal – there were loads of them, women who could be seen riding high up on the leather seats, using all their might to tug and pull on the stiff steering wheels. They had scraggly looking kids and good-for-nothing men, who would lounge about in the crusties' bar.
On another occasion when we bumped into her in La Gloria she was attempting to manoeuvre said van down a very narrow street.
'Hey. Is is possible to take the van as far as my house down the end of this road?' she asked Adrian. 'Because I've got a whole load of gear I want to unload.'
'No it definitely isn’t,' he replied. 'There's nowhere you can turn at the bottom. You'll have to park here and walk down or you could get into a right mess.'
The road tapered to a point and we'd seen a few people get into bother; if your car didn't have a lot of guts it was a hell of a job reversing back up the hill.
She drove straight down it and got stuck. We watched as she then got some of the local men to help her get the van back up the hill. My question is: why bloody ask if you’re not going to listen? Anyway, that pissed us off and we decided there and then that she could just get on with it. We’d left Adreimal to escape drippy hippy types like her (who only spoke to you when they wanted something).
Anyway, back to the bar and Adrian being taken over to speak to her.
‘I’m in a bit of a fix,’ she said, ‘my van has broken down and I need someone to give me a lift back to Adreimal’ (which was a one and a half hour round trip).
‘I can't think of anyone here who could do that,’ Adrian said, although I could tell he was wavering. He can't resist a woman in distress.
'You can't do it,' I warned him. 'You've been drinking. You can't drive up dark country roads for the likes of her or anyone else, when you're over the limit.'
He told her he couldn't help.
'We're hungry,' she said then.
'Well, you've got time. If you're quick you can get stuff in the Coviran across the road. It shuts at 9.'
She ignored that.
‘I don’t know what to do,' she said.
Adrian explained what was going on to Pepe.
'Tell her to call her breakdown service,' he said. 'It comes automatically as part of your insurance policy.'
So Adrian translated.
‘No, I haven’t got any insurance’ she replied. (She could buy two houses but not car insurance)
‘And the children are hungry,’ she added for effect.
‘Well, if you don't want to go to the shop,’ Adrian said, 'they can easily do you some raciones here in the bar. They're still cooking.'
She didn't seem to hear.
‘But I’ve got to get back tonight,’ she continued,' and I’ve ‘phoned and asked everyone I know in Adreimal if they can come and give me a lift and none of them can.’
That didn’t surprise us; those people didn’t have friends just people who mutually tried to use each other.
‘Well, if I were you,' Adrian suggested, sitting back down at our table, 'I’d sleep in your house here and then get a bus in the morning,’ and with that, he turned his chair back to face me.
'I know what she was after,' he said to me. 'She knows I can't give her a lift so she wants us to offer her a meal and a bed for the night. Well, she's got money and she's got a house.'
We'd had our fingers burned so many times in Adreimal that we just weren't having it. We'd allowed ourselves to be used so many times, that we'd lost count.
The usual way had been the amount of meals we'd made for people who rarely or never reciprocated. We kept doing it, because we liked company and I was a 'feeder.' But we started to get cute about it.
So one day, when Vicky and Harry had a friend and her son staying, Adrian and I took a liking to these Cymrophiles (people who like all things Welsh, including us, having lived in Cardiff - they even liked my accent, which was a first) and invited them all down, with Ingrid (Vicky's sister) and her son too, and Vicky and Harry's kids, making twelve of us in total. I set myself the challenge of making the cheapest meal with the cheapest ingredients that I possibly could, just because they so rarely had us back. So I made vegetarian spaghetti Bolognese with two jars of lentils, at 17 cents a jar! And I used the cheapest spaghetti I could find, at 30 cents a packet, times two, courtesy of Lidl. A couple of cartons of frito, onions, some peppers I had to use up, and lashings of our own olive oil. I reckon it didn't come to more than 10 cents a head.
I did splash out slightly on the dessert because of the visitors, buying sultanas for the Welsh cakes, which are quite expensive in Spain. But I used cheap flour, sugar, cinnamon and a bit of margarine (not butter). It might have come to 30 cents a head.
It was all washed down with cans of 25 cent beer and cheap lemonade (they hadn't brought a bottle), and some of the Costa which our Spanish friends always gave us (they made wine every year even though a lot of them were teetotal). They also ate piles of our delicious nisperas fresh from the trees and went home laden with bags of the loquat and avocados (Vicky and Harry always raided our trees).
Thus they had the pleasure of a full stomach, lots of freebies and a lovely sunny day next to our cortijo pool (they lived in a house without a garden); not a bad afternoon from their perspective. But the main thing for me was that I tightly controlled the budget. It showed I was learning. And it amused me. It was a kind of damage limitation.
Another time we did this was with Hannah and Bobby, some Brits who lived in a nearby village and whom we got chatting to now and then. I had a funny feeling that they too were unlikely to reciprocate. So this time I made a cheap vegetarian lasagne, with the cheapest lasagne sheets and 20 cent tins of red kidney beans and a fruit crumble for afters, using up left over fruit and cheap flour and margarine again (I should go into catering; I'd have fantastic profit margins). Over the course of the afternoon, next to our casa pool, we had to listen to Bobby regale us with various tales, including his greatest achievement; having £60,000 of mortgage debt written off by a bank during a previous financial crisis. He was as proud as punch about it.
It was to be six months later, just before Christmas, when we finally received our return invite, not for a meal but for 'a glass of wine and a mince pie.' Since I'd just made a batch of 36 delicious mince pies (if I say so myself), and we had an invite to our friend Carmel’s for a slap-up meal on the same day, we declined their kind offer, later finding out from Simon and Charlotte who had also been invited that they cancelled at the last minute anyway – one of their children was ill.
(NB. They had already told us the story of how they’d fallen out with English friends in their village who had had them around several times for dinner, but they'd never succeeded in reciprocating because they'd unfortunately had to cancel several dinner invitations at the last minute because their children were ill; of course you can't argue with that.)
To see our current properties for rent take a look at. There is still one week available in the second property during the summer holidays (10th to 18th August):
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p86636
And also another of our completed projects:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p475271