Just before our short Easter break, I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for an age in the Martel post office. We once worked together briefly at a local chateau on behalf of the inmates who'd been royally screwed by an Australian property developer. A crook by any other words. She asked me, 'Qu'est ce que t'es devenu?' or some such construction. It's not a phrase I've ever come across before, but the Good Wife who has experience of such things tells me it means roughly 'What have you been up to?' Being a literal sort of fellow, I translated it – literally – as 'What have you become?' I told her 'agé' – which is exactly what I've become. She laughed. When I told my wife, she laughed even harder – and promptly sent a message to our daughter, who replied 'that's classic', or words to that effect.
In the car during the long drive south to Cadaqués, a town of renown on the Costa Brava, not too far from the French frontier, Frank Zappa's 'Willie the Pimp' popped up on the USB random playlist. I realised with a short sharp shock to the system that I've been listening to the Hot Rats album for over 50 years. I have become truly old. When I was much younger, maybe 16 or so, my mum caught me playing along to Zappa's protracted guitar solo on my Slazenger tennis racquet. My Slazenger Les Paul was 'plugged in' to a little fan heater that served as an amplifier. It was all rather embarrassing.
Earlier that self-same morning, I had gone down to the Salle Polyvalente (the room of multiple uses) for a kind of open day for the commune to explain about all the local services on offer. As I went around the various stalls gathering up literature, it struck me that many of the services were geared towards the older members of the community. Assistance with your IT problems; an app for your mobile phone to enable you to check the state of your health; domestic help. That kind of thing. I nodded thoughtfully as each of the eager, charming women in turn went into more detail, then availed myself of a free cup of coffee and croissant, thanked his worship the mayor for such splendid enterprise and high-tailed it back home to finish packing for the trip to Catalonia.
It's a long way to Cadaqués, it's a long way to go for four nights and three days with our dog. While we had our music to entertain us, Daphne sat stoically on the back seat, watching south-west France evolve into north-east Spain. With the price of diesel here at nearly two euros a litre, I did my best to impress upon my wife the need to keep it steady at or just under 100kph. But she suffers from a complaint that could derive from an accident on a bicycle. It's called See lorry, chase lorry. I have suggested psychiatric help.
Cadaqués is a lovely place, its whitewashed houses, old but mainly now new, climbing up the rocky hills that wrap around the bay. It's a Spanish equivalent of Collioure on the French side of the frontier, where we've stayed on a couple of occasions, the first time back when you could have picked up a little apartment for little money and the thought crossed my mind... only to evaporate as is my custom when a shrewd notion enters one orifice to hang around for a day or two before leaking out of another. Still; the Easter crowds on the Catalan coast suggested that maybe my lack of practical action was a good thing.
Our break didn't start too promisingly. The woman at the agency gave my wife a series of printed photographs to find our Airbnb lodgings, but didn't make it clear just how difficult it is to find anywhere to stop and unload. In the end, we found a parking slot on the very edge of town, so had to haul our baggage – including Daphne's cumbersome mattress – half a kilometre or so through the human throng and up the cobbled alleyways to our billet right in the heart of the old town. The apartment, on the second floor at the top of a precipitous staircase, was much smaller and more rudimentary than it looked on the site. More like a studio flat. But hey, it was a prime location – wasn't it?
Well, yes and no. We were ideally situated for all the bars and restaurants, but both of us had forgotten how late the nightlife in Spain goes on. That first night in a bed, with no headboard for inveterate readers, was fairly disastrous. For a start, there was a strip of LED lights all the way along a shelf above the bed, like something that you'd find at Christmas time draped around a window or a door. We couldn't figure out how to turn them off and were tempted to rip the wires out of the transformer on the shelf, but didn't want to be liable for damages. In the end, I wrapped a T-shirt around my head in a vain attempt to create darkness. Secondly, Daphne isn't used to sharing a building with other residents, so she barked (loudly) every time someone came back in the middle of the night – whereupon one of us would have to leap out of bed to quieten her before she woke the dead. Thirdly, sounds resonate around the narrow passages of the old town. Nice as the Catalan people are, they seem to have little conception that people might be trying to sleep above them as they wend their noisy way back to their lodgings in the wee small hours.
And they are nice, the Catalans. They are the perennial good guys of Spanish history. Ever since reading Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as a teenager, I've seen them as a bastion of liberalism in the constant struggle against a country seemingly dominated by the church, bull torturers and fascists. It's Barcelona over Real Madrid in the El Classico every time. The hip logo seen around the town of Cadaqués is Transmontana Republik, in recognition of the famous frisky wind as well as the spirit of independence.
Since their language has certain similarities to French, everyone
has either a smattering of French or English or both. They smile, too, when
they serve you in a shop or pass you in the street. We found out just how nice
they can be when we went to see the Dali house the day after our first unfortunate
night – and our first fortunate morning, when Debs discovered a switch and a
dimmer on the opposite wall that operated the LED strip. Well, really! Why
would you locate a switch on the opposite
wall?
We'd reserved our tickets for the house online in advance of our stay. Because we were reluctant to leave our dog alone in strange lodgings, we walked up and over and down the headland that separates the town from the surrealist showman's former lodgings. Half-expecting the kind of reception she'd receive in France at such a request, my amiable wife enquired at the ticket office whether we could split our allocated visit, so that one of us did a quick tour while the other hung around on the beach with Daphne before swapping over. Of course, no problem. Just remind me when you come back this afternoon.
In fact, we didn't have to remind her. The woman remembered us and did everything possible to make sure that we both had as much time we needed and more for our respective tours. When my turn came, I tagged along with a group of Spaniards and Catalans. Our guide, a darling man they might have called him in Ireland, with the air of an off-duty librarian or primary school teacher, gave his spiel in three different languages. Because I was the only English visitor, I had a personal dialogue with him, which made me feel like visiting royalty. The house was every bit as quirky and as fascinating as one might imagine a surrealist's domain to be, but we both agreed that the swimming pool was the pièce de résistance.
On leaving the house, our guide queried his opening gambit: 'It's not a guided visit, but an accompanied visit.' Was this good English? I said it was perfectly reasonable, but suggested that 'It's not a guided tour, but I will accompany you' might be a little better. He was touchingly grateful and, like a pair of well-mannered duellists, we traded thanks. The winner was he who outdid the other, but I think it was a draw.
After two leg-sapping return trips to Casa Dali and a fabulous lunch in the artist's favourite quirky Lebanese restaurant, we slept better that night. Daphne was more accustomed to the noise and the fairy lights served this time as a night-light, not a bright light. Nevertheless, we decided to go home early. We'd walk to the lighthouse and back on the Saturday, have our seafood paella in the restaurant tucked around the corner and travel home on the Sunday – when there were many fewer lorries to chase. That's the thing when you wind down and get stuck in your ways. Why be uncomfortable somewhere when you can be comfortable in your own home? Our bed has a headboard and the prospect of Easter Monday chez nous seemed the right thing to do.
It was a nice enough break and the Dali house was memorable, but we will bear the shame of the light switch for the rest of our days. Next time someone asks me what I have become, I'll tell them: old – and rather stupid.
