A Foot in Two Campos

The score is currently standing at Joanna Lumley 1 : Tamara Essex 0.  But I'll even it up some day.

There was just one thing left on my Bucket List.  And this month I set off to achieve that final "tick", on an evening flight from Bournemouth up to see the Northern Lights.

It was a Christmas / birthday / Easter / Hanukkah present all rolled into one for my friend Margaret, who has wanted to see the Northern Lights for years.  I don't know how I'd managed to keep it a secret for the six months since I'd booked it.  I'd told Margaret she had to keep the evening of March 26th free, and preferably not book an early meeting the following morning.  She was intrigued, and begged to know what was planned.  Indeed, she was so curious that she Googled the date, and discovered that boy-band One Direction were performing a little way along the south coast.  She spent the next five months wondering how she could possibly look adequately grateful!   Finally I had to tell her to bring a camera and her passport (I told her that security required a passport because I'd got us backstage passes to meet "the boys").

At the airport we were given a presentation on the stars and planets we would see.  The astronomers, who would accompany us on the flight, explained that there had been 21 "Lights Flights" so far this season, and good views of "the wall of red" had been seen on 20 of those, a success rate of better than 95%.  This is because on a land-based trip to see the Lights, there is a high risk of cloud cover, but on these flights we remain above the cloud so should get a good view as long as the lights are doing what they do to create those amazing walls of green and red.  It’s all to do with magnetic polarity – I understood it when he explained it with PowerPoint but the finer details seem to have slipped my mind just now …….

On board there was a long explanation of how to ensure our cameras were set to not flash, and every bit of light from phones and cameras needed to be covered with black electrical tape.  The cabin went dark.  Even the wingtip lights went out.  We all had to hold our cameras above our heads, and on the count of three we pressed the shutters.  Not bad, just one person had one remaining orange focus light that needed covering with tape.  Then we were in total blackout.

As we reached the site, just south of Iceland, the stars were extraordinary.  With no distracting man-made light sources they seemed enormous, and ridiculously bright.  The constellations and clusters we'd been told about were there, right outside the windows.

The astronomers pointed out all there was to see.  But the real star of the show eluded us.  The 22nd flight of the season became the second to fail to see the Northern Lights.  We saw a bit of a red dusty tinge, and stared desperately at it, willing it to burst into the amazing light displays that greeted Joanna Lumley in that wonderful documentary.  But the polarity refused to reverse itself (which is what would have kicked off the display) and eventually the pilot had to turn for home.

I genuinely enjoyed it, and just being up amongst the stars in a totally blacked-out plane was a great experience.  But I still want to see the Northern Lights.

And one day I will.

So then it was back to Colmenar, where in my absence Laura had cleaned the smoke-damage from my walls and repainted the room a bright white.  Except for the end wall.  I missed out this time on the Northern Lights, but Laura has given me my own "wall of red".

© Tamara Essex 2013

Soy extranjera. I am a stranger.

Their children grow up with the poetry of Lorca, and the writings of Cervantes, Márquez, Mendoza, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Not Shakespeare, Dickens, Enid Blyton or Winnie the Pooh. The universal experience of childhood is divided by twelve hundred miles and a different frame of reference. My heart enjoys but does not stir to the music that stirs their hearts. Soy extranjera.

Over time conversation becomes easier. Groups and higher volume continue to exclude. The larger the crowd, the louder the conversation, the more the words run together and become no more than sounds, noise. A bubble forms around me and the noise creates a cocoon of silence in the middle of the swirl of language. In a foreign land it is easy to be alone in a crowd and allow the stream of words to wash past, unaware of nuances. I discover that this creates more time, more thinking time. 

I'm definitely a "cup half full" type of person. Just as well, really. I nearly burned my house down ..... but I didn't and I'm turning it to an opportunity.

So each evening that I lit the wood-burner, I took a few logs off the carefully-arranged stack, and replaced them with more of the damp ones. It looked like a massive game of Jenga resting above the air-vents. What I hadn't worked out (duh!) was that the ones at the bottom of the criss-cross of logs weren't getting used. So four months on and they were dry. Definitely dry. Tinder dry.

I shouldn't have left the dry wood stacked around the chimney, of course. And I shouldn't have gone out and left the fire. Lessons learned. The smell of smoke lingers to remind me.

While I'm back in the UK running training courses in Devon, Laura will be my life-saver. A young Spanish woman working three jobs and looking after her little boy, she is a painter and decorator with an eye for colour. Instead of just going for the usual blanco on all the walls, with Laura's encouragement I have bought a tin of dusky deep pink, terracotta, not quite red, paint. Just for the smallest wall behind the chimney. I daren't risk more colour just yet. Poco a poco - little by little.

"Lluvia, nieve, viento y frio.  El invierno mostrará mañana su lado más duro en la provincia."   Malaga Hoy, 27 febrero 2013, the day before Andalucía Day.  "Rain, snow, wind and cold.  The winter will show its harder side in the province tomorrow."

Dawn on Feb 28.  An auspicious day.   The end of the pope's time in office, Andalucía Day, and snow in the village.  The first of these passed me by entirely without impact. The other two mattered.  Snow in the village!  Yes we're high up at over 700 metres but usually the snow starts at 800.  It settled in the square and on the cars, and the views of the surrounding mountains were stunning.

So the woodburner was lit, soup taken out of the freezer, and I hunkered down for a day indoors.  Andalucía Day, normally a time of great celebration with music, dancing and free paella, appeared to be cancelled.  "No hay dinero," the Ayuntamiento had told me.  "Hay un crisis."  But at least most people had the day off work and despite the weather could get together with extended families.  By 10am cars were loaded and with much waving and shouting the neighbours slithered off on slippery roads for shared eating, drinking, and general merriment.

By mid-morning the sun was out and the distant views of La Maroma capped in sunlit snow were being captured by cameras from all directions.  Facebook exploded with pictures of snow in Spain.  Michael Soffe’s picture of the road near Antequera caused a flurry of panic amongst drivers. 

I loved the contrast between Colmenar’s flower-covered hillsides and the snow on the surrounding mountains – what a difference a hundred metres or so makes!   The goat on my regular circuit was staring at the snow with a baffled and disgruntled expression, but the fat golden chickens seemed to enjoy pecking at the small patches that had settled behind their feed trough.  Despite Andalucía Day the bakery was open as normal in the morning, so after my walk I had warm fresh bread to take home.  

I met with a fellow blogger in the afternoon, and her husband told of the snow they'd had in their village last year.  "First snow in the village for twenty years!" the locals had gasped then.  Snow had fallen for them too that morning.  "Ooh, first snow in the village for thirty years!" gushed the locals.  "Umm, apart from last year?" he pointed out.  There is that tendency here, too.  "It hasn't settled in the square for over ten years!" I was assured.  Really?  I'm sure John, the previous owner of Bar CO2, had mentioned snow in the square, and he wasn't here ten years ago.

Later Lorenzo (my neighbour's brother and a professional builder) popped in to quote for damp-proofing and re-plastering the wall that the estate agent had promised he was fixing.  Since the road has been resurfaced the water is no longer routed directly onto my window-sill so the problem shouldn't arise again, but the damp that was so obvious when I viewed the house still needs to be sorted.  Why does one ever think estate agents might suddenly turn out to be honest? 

So in the end Andalucía Day was as irrelevant as the exit of the pope.  But my friends and I enjoyed tapas at the Balcón de los Montes, the snow was pretty, and my home-made asparagus soup was delicious.  The "harder side" of the winter was not as unbearable as the newspaper had made out.

© Tamara Essex 2013