Nought So Queer As Folk by David Clement Davies

Since the Spanish year has just foot-tapped to a close, in the gulp of twelve grapes as the Spanish counted in the New Year, I thought I’d dish up a culinary interlude and do what we all do best up here - let you into some gossip. Or rather, introduce you properly to the folk on my hill. I hope I won’t be shrived and forced to swig my Sangria in solitude.

You’ve already met Raphaelito and his aubergines. He runs the bar and does all the cooking and his wolf-grin charms everyone out of their socks. Greeting you with him of a sunlit eve under the delighted vines is Manuel, who is also thoroughly nice, not least because he hates bullfighting and feeds the animals bread and milk.

Then there is Pepe, ‘El Alcalde’ or the mayor. That’s the running gag at least, because what ‘El Alcalde’ Pepe does best in our four person hamlet, apart from cooking Gaspachuelo, is watch with brandy in hand and laughing clear blue eyes, from a face as gnarled as an olive branch. His favourite topic is girls and to see him dancing ‘till dawn the other day, wiggling around in Clarie’s fluffy pink hat, with eyes that had almost gone to the great olive grove in the sky, you’d think he was sixteen again, not sixty six. Dignity was a rather silly word.

Clarie comes with Zoe, the two English girls who have been best friends since Kindergarten, have been here for eight months doing up a house in the campo below. Quite understandably they can’t decide whether to return to London or build a life out here, but they have become the centre of much activity. Not least because just as the house has been finished the sewage tank has overflowed on the very day they were planning to roast a whole goat to thank the workman.

Enter, pursued by a bear, James the English estate agent who believes in his own particular brand of reincarnation and at 48 has been through a couple of past lives already, or at least past wives. He actually looks like a huge cuddly bear himself, especially down at the discotheque on Saturdays when he’s trying to show me how to get on down with another of our serried procession of nubile teenagers. He has a theory, which is not to be sniffed at, that all we’re all really looking for in life is permission.

Parents at least had given permission, on bits of graph paper, to the line of 10 year old boys that suddenly trooped through the discotheque’s doors into the strobing mayhem, like a line of brill-creamed ducklings quacking confusedly at the wonder bras. Sonya, who’s from Brazil and was a witch in a past life, didn’t bat an eyelid as she let them in but then, like James, she’s wondering why any of us are here too and in the meantime has to make a bit of cash working on the doors of perception.

There too was Ivor, a bearded author who used to write gags for Morecombe and Wise and, until now, hasn’t been able to scribe for the sixteen years he’s been in Andalucia. He asks for his glass of water with a dash of Anis in such a bizarre Northamptonshire burr echoing beneath his straw hat you’d think Thomas Hardy had moved South. He tells me I wouldn’t believe some of the things that go on at the Costa. He’s wrong though. I would. Rising above it all are ´Lord and Lady´ Shore who own practically the whole of my hamlet, which they’ve restored very well for tourists and a return to their slightly jaded dreams of the sixties, with a summer music festival by the swimming pool. They seem intent on buying up the whole of Andalucia, despite competition from Maria’s daughter in the shape of a huge castellated thing in an absurdly prominent position on the mountain, which remains unfinished because over-ambition has sapped them of cash.

On the radio the other day, if you can stomach Spectrum FM catering to the Costa Ingles, there’s Chris Stewart, the author of the Peter Mayle-like ´Driving over Lemons´. He’s actually further to the East in Alpujarra, long standing haunt of English artists, but he gave me my own idea for a book which, because travel writing is rarely so true or so jolly, I might just call ‘Reversing over Olives’. The picture wouldn’t be complete of course without the animals. Several cockerels, eight cats, a large white rabbit and the dogs. Mowgli is my favourite because he’s the only one who goes wild when I get back home, bumping back through the old railway tunnel sliced through a bit of the mountain under sunsets so bruised with pinks and mauves they could break your heart. I know with Mowgli it’s not love, and only ham from my fridge and shelter from the rain when his master Raphaelito won’t let him in, but who cares. Then there’s me, a writer on the hill. But that’s another story.