Dave or Not Dave

Hello there. Here is an update from the frontlines of life.

I am currently at home, which looks like this. It makes it easier to accept that I am no longer in Spain, where the spring onions are so large you are only allowed one bunch per family and have to prove that you don’t wear wrist splints in order to lift them.

Spain was amazing. I really didn’t want to come home. I enjoy mucking around in fincas, wearing very few clothes, swimming for health but mostly joy, and eating an extraordinary quantity of anchovies. Books made everything perfect as they so often do. It is the life. Knowing that it is at least partially accessible does make it easier to go back into the life I actually find myself living rather than the one I believe I was born for.

We spent the last few days of our holiday doing nothing of merit, much like the first few days. We did go to the caves of Nerja (as mentioned in my previous epistle) so that I could see the cave art. I hate depths. I also hate heights. I am not an intrepid explorer. I am good in cities, Belgium and the Netherlands. Everywhere else is stressful to me. The caves at Nerja may become my shorthand for; ‘Help. I am having a nervous breakdown.’ That may be what Nerja actually means in Spanish.

I frequently attempt to be brave and equally frequently wonder why the fuck I actually bother. I spent over an hour practicing breathing and not screaming my lungs out in the bowels of the admittedly spectacular earth only to see zero cave paintings. Outside there were some blurry photos of them on a wall. I was unimpressed and irritated. I wasn’t expecting the Louvre but I had hoped for at least a small etching of a goat.

We had lunch in Nerja in a restaurant recommended by a local. The food was good but it was the most touristy place we went and I was as unimpressed by the sweaty man playing guitar in my face and shout singing Volare while I tried to eat my anchovies in peace as I was by the caves. He then came round with a hat. In the olden days I would have dropped some money into it out of sheer British politeness. Unfortunately I am now on the fuck it all side of old and he had interrupted my lunch, which is always a criminal offence, so he got nothing.

On the way back to our finca we stopped for petrol, I bought a Calippo because I was hot and thirsty. Five minutes later the bottom exploded due to my vigorous ice lolly mining and I spent two further hours in a hot car with a sticky, lime scented crotch. My review of Nerja on the whole? Sullen. 3/10.

I went to Malaga for an entire day and this poster of a fat man advertising sherry, which I don’t drink, is the only photo I took all day. Hire me as your tour guide. You won’t regret it, much.

On our last full day we went to Malaga city. Our hosts told us we could park out by one of the universities and get the metro into the city centre, which we did. The car park was a small, triangular shaped muddy field next to the train line which confused us terribly at first. Should we return in a year or two it will probably be a glossy, multi-storey affair because there was building work going on everywhere. In the meantime as long as your car could manage the ruts it was free.

There are only two metro lines and on the trains everything is announced in Spanish and English which made it impossible to get lost, which we were grateful for.

Malaga is a beautiful city with lots of things to do. We got there at lunch time and by the time we had eaten our fill and got our tourist on, most of the things we wanted to do were closed. The contemporary art museum, closed. The Pompidou Centre, closed. The food market, closed. The grisly yet excitingly bling churches, closed. Jesus also needs a siesta. The English cemetery, closed. Those dead won’t rest themselves.

The things we didn’t want to do - all open as anything. I could have gone and stared at Picasso for as long as I liked. He never let a siesta get in the way of painting four thousand million paintings of things I usually find as disturbing as stories of his genius. Godammit.

Despite our failure to be tourists, we had a good lunch, a fantastic wander around the city and a plan for the next time we visit, e.g. go in the morning. This is one of the other things I am not good at. Mornings, much like heights, depths and Calippos are not in my wheelhouse, but unlike the other things, much less traumatic as long as coffee and some kind of baked goods are available.

The journey home was somewhat dramatic due to us being delayed on the tarmac before take off for an hour while one of the passengers had a medical emergency which caused him to be unresponsive and then him and his luggage being hauled off the plane. The flight attendant used the word unresponsive like a vocal exercise in expressing an ascending flight of panic before a medic arrived. Poor man. I was just grateful it didn’t happen in mid air.

Also my stomach behaved itself impeccably on the way home. I give full credit to the anchovies.

Derek in the library looking smug.

We got home last Wednesday afternoon. I unpacked, repacked and ate fish and chips with my lovely friend Keris Fox who had done a great job of looking after queen Derek, which prepared her fully to go home and negotiate with her new foster cat, Daisy, who looks like Derek’s long lost twin and behaves worse.

Derek channelling Daisy and screaming at me for the entire twenty minutes I managed in the bath before I gave up trying to relax due to her demented meerkat method of trying to get in with me.

On Thursday I drove Keris to the station at Ashford and then hurtled off to see my parents who were, as usual, having quite a dramatic time of things. Pressure sores are a thing now which means lots of visits from district nurses. There is a further nursing cohort to deal with as dad is now also under the community heart failure nurse. This is a terrible title for a nurse because it makes her sound like she is actively helping the community in getting heart failure.

Perhaps this is a new idea to break the NHS voted in by Reform, who run my parents’ local council. I say ‘run’, what I mean is that they deliver an increasing number of environmentally disastrous newsletters with glossy photographs of all the things they are cutting to rip locals away from the dripping teat of the nanny state. Nobody needs foster care. Feral children roaming the streets will learn to pull themselves up by the bootstraps they don’t have, etc. Encouraging heart failure in the aging population to cull those who are no longer economically viable seems exactly the sort of thing they could get behind. I didn’t mention this to the nurse. She already looked harassed and she had more than enough on her plate without my helpful suggestions.

There were many forms to fill out, a lot of medication to rejig and a lot of meetings to attend. There has been new equipment to move furniture around for. There has been a lot of bed nonsense going on. This makes a change from chair nonsense, which seems to have died down slightly. This is good news because the garage looks like an abandoned function room.

In amongst all this we have had a cat incursion. Mum and I were pottering in the front garden one afternoon when a flat faced, stripy individual with a distinctive smoker’s yowl appeared. He was extremely chatty and very affectionate and decided after a brief fuss that he lived with us now.

DAVE!

He had a collar on that said ‘Dave’ and gave a phone number. After I had evicted him my mum was worried he was lost, so I phoned the number on his collar and left a very confusing message that said; ‘We have Dave unless Dave is your name, in which case we don’t. Anyway if Dave or Not Dave is lost, we have him.’ Unsurprisingly, nobody called me back.

Later that evening the carer arrived. When mum opened the front door the carer said: ‘Is this your cat?’ My mum, thinking it was Ron, who is indeed our cat, said: ‘Yes. Come in.’ Whereupon Dave strolled in as bold as brass and disappeared into the front room, which is where my dad now lives. Mum said: ‘Oh my God! That’s DAVE!’ The carer said: ‘DAVE?’ and I said: ‘Yes. DAVE is NOT our cat,’ at which point all three of us gave chase, burst into dad’s room and started running around like the Keystone Cops.

The carer finally cornered Dave behind the sofa, grabbed him and lifted him up in triumph shouting: ‘I’ve got DAVE!’ ‘Hoorah, Huzzah and Hurray!’ we all cried and then turned and realised that this whole time my dad had been sitting on the commode with his pants round his ankles trying to have a moment. The carer said: ‘Well, I’ve failed in my mission to give you some dignity there, Graham.’ and we all trooped out to eject Dave back into the night while I laughed until tears ran down my face. Bravo Dave.

As well as accidentally adopting Dave, I got to spend an evening eating dessert and failing to answer questions in quiz shows with Tilly, which was delightful. I also got to go on my first ever visit to CostCo with my friend Jenn. It was insane, and were it not for the fact that we were under time pressure I would have probably needed a bigger trolley. As it was I returned home with a huge platter of sushi, some excellent salmon pate and a tray of Portuguese custard tarts which cheered us all up. I also got a gigantic tub of Belazu sun dried tomatoes for a fiver and keep whipping them out to show people in the manner of a proud parent.

Behold the Belazu wonder.

Back in the day I would never have become so excited about sun dried tomatoes. It was all shoes and dancing on tables and hangovers for days. I don’t miss the hangovers to be fair, and I did get these excellent Camper baseball boots from T. K. Maxx so at least the shoe thing is still happening.

I have managed to be in Kent now for a whole week, in which I have been trying to cross over to the glowing side of health with various ups and downs. I am taking so many vitamins and supplements that my pee is permanently an interesting colour. I am getting reiki based osteopathy for my rigid neck and shoulders and I am continuing the march through the shadowlands of my psyche with the brilliant Tonics and Tales.

On a particularly gruelling day Jason took me out for lunch, which in itself is a bit of a gamble in these parts. We went to Stubbs Restaurant in Ashford, which is one of three dining rooms in a pub called The Cricketers, not far from our favourite farm shop. It was delicious. Thankfully it is 45 minutes away by car and quite spendy otherwise I would have been tempted to move in.

What I’m Reading:

Catching up on a Netgalley backlog I read Blood, Rust and Steel by Stuart MacBride. This forms part of the Logan McRae series of which there is a spinoff branch featuring McRae’s boss, Roberta Steel. You get the best out of this if you’ve read the others, because it’s building on the foundations of the lore that preceded it, but I enjoyed it very much. It’s less noir than a lot of his books, which I sometimes find tricky because he doesn’t shy away from horror. This is out on the 21st of May.

I’m reading Tales from the Territory by Travis Baldree. It’s a series of short stories featuring the characters from Legends and Lattes etc. It’s charming and does a good job of enriching the world Baldree is creating. Low peril and very much my kind of thing right now. It’s out on the 1st October.

I’m also reading Nina Stibbe because her arrival on Substack has given me life. Similarly, discovering AlexTSmith and his weekly Joy Parade has indeed given me joy.

What I’m Watching:

I just finished watching the latest season of The Parisian Agency on Netflix. I am fully invested in it. It’s got great properties, good human backstories, no Selling Sunset vibes and a lot of jetting around the world with French people who I enjoy viewing impossible properties with. My favourite property of the series has been a hamlet on the coast of Mykonos which sported three houses, a small village square, and a private beach. It was £70 million, which even for the people viewing it caused a visible wince. It was lovely but think of the dusting.