Running Wild

Before taking in a pet, it’s always wise to wonder if you have everything in place for them and you’re covered for all eventualities. Do we have insurance? Do they poop where they should and not all over the kitchen floor? Can you smack them with a newspaper if they’re naughty? I’d like to venture that taking ones in-laws in should be subject to the same degree of checking, if not more so. True, my mother-in-law does have a wet nose and a shaggy coat, but that’s more to do with post-nasal drip and €10,99 not-so-wisely spent at the market in Arteixo, Galicia.

And so it was that on 17th August 2016, our octogenarian lovelies landed at Gatwick Airport, straining at their leashes to be let out for a run and desperate to mark their new turf. That didn’t take long. Within a couple of weeks, my father-in-law was digging up the lawn to create a new border in which to plant vegetables. The problem with that is that we are currently renting this house and are supposed to hand it back as we found it. His argument is that it now has more features than it did when we took it on and we’ve therefore added value, although I’m not quite sure how I’m going to explain a wonky border dug out by an 89 year old, that houses a few potatoes. And tomatoes. And garlic. And butternut squash. You see, instead of keeping everything in one place, Pepe, for that is the name of the aforementioned octogenarian, decided to spread his seed far and wide and see where it landed. So we have tomatoes in the wonky border, tomatoes in the raised beds and just for fun, tomatoes by the shed door next to the wild garlic. Which in turn is next to the potatoes (which are also in the wonky border), which in turn is next to the peppers. Oh yes, we have peppers too! Our garden is a constant voyage of discovery.

They scared me, these new pets of ours. I would look out of the upstairs window to see Pepe leaning on his crutch (the metal kind mentioned in episode one, not the other kind from the Art House movie “Confessions of a Geriatric Market Gardener”), bent double, straining to poke his marrow into the soil and lobbing anything he didn’t want over the fence into the farmer’s field beyond. Maria, the 87 year old spouse of said Pepe, would be also bent double. The problem with that was that the dresses she chose to wear could also have featured in the Confessions film, as they rode up at the back in a rather alarming manner and with frightening ease. The thing is, the village people - as explained in the original “I Am Spinach” blog, wouldn’t think twice about this. Seeing an elderly lady’s nether regions is not something to be worried about when one has a small-holding. In fact if anything, it reminds them to collect the eggs from the hen house!

And so they set to work, planning to make us city folk self-sufficient by the end of the year. The most alarming sight of the whole venture was one evening as I was heading for bed. I went into their lounge to bid them goodnight, only to see them in coats, armed with a torch and heading into the garden. Fearing that we had two elderly cat burglars in the house, I frantically called José through and asked him to ask them in Spanish what in heaven was going on (my excuse is that I don’t know what ‘cat burglar’ is in their language). It turned out that as well as the torch, they had an industrial sized pot of salt and were going out to kill slugs and stop them nibbling their cherry tomatoes. Every night for several weeks we were treated to the sight of two people who can barely stand upright in full daylight, pottering around the garden by torchlight, looking for things to kill. I couldn’t bring myself to watch and would go to bed convinced that the next morning, we would find them face down on the Japanese patio (it’s only about four foot square, so don’t get excited), drowned in the bamboo pots. But no, dear reader. The next morning we were greeted with tales of derring-do and the number of kills. Thankfuly they didn't bring them to us as a trophy, like cats do. I've woken up next to a slug before - but enough of my sex life - but several withered, salt covered slugs on the duvet whilst two old people looked on with smug smiles waiting for our affirmation would be pushing the envelope a little too much.

“16 and your father got his crutch stuck in the woman next door’s overhanging bush”

“Eh??”

“We killed 16 of the little buggers. AND we ripped a load of that hanging stuff down because your father walked right into it and it nearly knocked him over”

“What hanging stuff?”

“That stuff from next-door’s garden”

“What did you do with it?”

“Well, we put it over the fence at the back. What else would we do with it?”

Keeping pensioners is not for the faint-hearted. Once I’d been bribed with offers of cooking dinner for a week (so, I’m cheap and I know it!), I wondered how difficult could it be? We would rent a house large enough to keep them secure and warm, put some Spanish TV in so that they were kept amused and distracted and take them out for the occasional bit of fresh air. The problem is when you let them out, they don’t come back. And why don’t they come back? Because they can’t hear you! Over time, both of them have become harder of hearing, but neither of them will admit it.

“Dad, I think you may need your hearing aid looked at because you’re not hearing so well”

“Eh??”

“I said you can’t hear as well as you used to”

“Of course I can, nothing wrong with me. It’s your mother who’s going deaf”

So we speak with Maria, because we’ve also noticed a deterioration.

“Mum, I think you probably need a hearing test because you’re not hearing so well?

“Eh??”

“I said we probably need to get your hearing checked”

“Why? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s your father you should be worried about”

And so the conversation between them is a joy to behold....

“I’m going to cook dinner Pepe”

“Eh?”

“I said I’m going to cook dinner”

“What are we having?”

“Eh?”

“I said, what are we having?”

“Oh, I’m going to make a tortilla with some chorizo”

“Eh?”

“Dear God, you need your hearing checked!”

“Eh?”

And so it goes on, ad infinitum. It reminds me of Julie Walters as the elderly waitress in the brilliant Victoria Wood “Two Soups” sketch. Compounding that particular auricular issue, at this very moment in time my own mother has come for a week and she’s just as bad. She has her own hearing aids which are the ones that fit directly into her ear without any external tubing, but I’m convinced that all they do is totally block any sounds going in as well as constantly squealing like a banshee. The other night during dinner, I asked her how the meatloaf was that I’d made. Her response? “Oh.....if you want”.

And so, here we are. Another weekend has come around and there are now (temporarily) four of them to take out. We tend to let them out for a longer run at the weekend because, well, we have the time and there are two of us to round them up if they get a little out of control. Thankfully, they don’t try to dry hump other pensioners like the Jack Russell we used to have (other dogs – not other pensioners in case you were thinking we had a dog with some kind of weird fetish), but the moment they do, I’ll be checking to see if Dignitas do gift certificates.

Cooking with Spinach....again!!

Some people have what are known as Salad Days, a time of youthful exuberance, naiveté and inexperience. For just under 18 months, I had what are now known as ‘The Spinach Years’, a time of squirrels, plastic flowers and shouty post-menopausal women on a dreadful TV magazine show (with a couple of gay men lobbed in for ‘balance’) slagging off other post-menopausal women because their bosoms had been so pneumatically enhanced they could take your eye out if they turned too quickly to look at you. My salad days were well and truly behind me by this time. My lettuce had become lifeless, my tomatoes were no longer red and plump and the least said about my cucumber, the better.

For those of you who have no idea what I am wittering on about, buy yourselves a pack of fondant fancies, pour a large tonic wine and pop along to http://iamspinach2011.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/my-very-first-blogor-how-me-and-jose.html It will explain why I Am Spinach and give you a potted history of the life and very peculiar times of an Englishman who once lived in Galicia...and survived. I won’t say unscathed as that would be manipulating the truth just a little too much; I still can’t do the hokey-cokey without getting flashbacks. But I am here!

So why am I resurrecting the Spinach dream after all this time I hear you both ask? Of course I no longer live in Spain, having swapped the sweeping, majestic, rugged Atlantic coastline for the denture-wearing delights of Channel-facing Bexhill; a town so full of elderly people that when we both moved here, we brought the average age of its citizens down to 73. 

I remembered Bexhill from when I’d previously lived in the area, just up the road in St. Leonards-on-Sea. I rarely came to Bexhill as there was nothing there to see, although I have to say that things have changed since we went away. There’s a tapas bar that serves mainly burgers and steaks, the post office is nearly all self-service which confuses the life out of the residents here and the explosion of funeral directors in the town means that the hearse is now the preferred mode of transport for most people. To be honest with you, the self-service post office is hilarious on pension day and far better than the local theatre. 

We do have a theatre here, the rather beautiful art deco De La Warr Pavilion on the seafront and to be fair it does have a few good turns on. We recently saw Jason Manford there (“I laughed until my truss disintegrated” – Bexhill Herald) as well as comedians Alan Carr, Alan Davies and Count Arthur Strong. Of course this is Bexhill, so amongst all this ribaldry are turns from The Dulcie Bickerstaffe Quintet and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa doing her best to breathe life into George Formby’s back catalogue, but you have to take what you can in life. And she did play a mean ukulele!

The De La Warr is also an exhibition space and we did go once. There was a show with covers from all of those Ladybird books we used to read as children, which was great fun. “Peter and Jane play make believe”, “Peter and Jane try heavy petting”, “Peter and Jane have an argument about why he never checks after flushing”. Along with these, we do have to put up with some very strange ideas for exhibitions, including (at the moment), a wood scaffold that looks like a pier. Inside! To commemorate this, the artist has created a limited edition wooden light bulb. Really? In a town full of people who are bordering dementia?

And just as New York evokes memories of taxi horns blaring and the smell of freshly cooked sidewalk food, Bexhill has a sound all of its very own; the distinctive click of metal on pavement. You may think I’m exaggerating this dear reader, but I can assure you that this is no stereotyping. Bexhill is the Patient Zero of stereotypes from which all other stereotypes are moulded. When zig-zagging up the street, taking one’s life in one’s hand by weaving in and out of walking frames, sticks and electric buggies, one is reminded of the sci-fi films of the seventies. They thought that in the brave new world of the new millennium, half of the population would be made of some form of metallic object. Well, in Bexhill, that’s true. A sizeable majority of the population that don’t have replacement joints use some other form of metallic object to remain upright as best they can, mainly whilst attempting to use the self service in the post office to get their pension out or trying to pay for a cup of tea with old thru’penny bits and moaning about this new-fangled coinage. The local scrap metal dealers here have dodgy under-the-counter deals with the local undertakers! At a concert I went to some years back where The Three Degrees were headlining, they summoned the audience to get on their feet in order find their groove. In the ensuing five minutes of chaos, both I and the talented ladies on stage thought that the audience had burst into spontaneous applause, until it became evident that the noise was 700 pairs of arthritic knees clicking into place simultaneously. 

It was into this cacophony of metallica and confusion that the lovely José and I made a fateful decision just over two years ago. His parents, being too selfish to have any more children to spread the burden, were getting older. With age comes infirmity, an ottoman full of cellular blankets and an inability to bite into an apple without a cupboard-full of denture fixative on standby. As an only child who loves living in this country, no matter how much Theresa May tries to destroy it, he asked if I would mind his parents coming to live with us. As the dutiful husband I am I threw a tantrum, whinged about it for days on end, attempted to blackmail him by telling his friends that he used to play the tambourine in a Salvation Army band, but I knew when I was beat. I said yes. And so began the long day’s journey into night whilst its teeth soaked in Steradent in the bathroom. On August 17^th 2016, his parents flew with us from Spain for the last time and landed in Gatwick, ready to make their new life in Bexhill. With us! My Spinach days were no longer behind me...............