Why I need to leave Spain. Immediately.

I need to leave Spain. Immediately.

It’s not that I don’t love it here. I do. It’s just that I can’t handle the pace.

Several months ago I posted a blog outlining my new average day as a writer. Since coming to Spain, it looks a little more like this (note that all times shown are approximate only, no guarantees are offered as to the accuracy of this information, I was under the influence of Sangria at the time of writing. It is definitely not an accurate reflection of today, 29 April 2011, as I spent all day either watching the Royal wedding, dreaming about being Pippa Middleton – gorgeous, fab dress, got to stand on the balcony, but doesn’t have to deal with Prince Charles leering at her over the Christmas turkey every year – or searching Google for Best and Worst Dressed at the Royal Wedding):

11am(ish): wake up, lie in bed to wait for church bells to ring to work out what the time is (secretly hoping it’s not later than noon, as that would be totally lazy).

Noon: head downstairs to make breakfast. Listen to neighbour yelling at two year old son. At least I think she’s yelling. Or she might just be Spanish. They’re quite animated.

12:30pm: shower. Even though I’m travelling on my own I do try to maintain some basic levels of hygiene.

1pm-8pm: any combination of writing, reading, walking, going to the beach to expose my white, flabby body on a beach overrun with gorgeous topless Spanish women, drinking bad coffee and other forms of general procrastination.

8pm: get ready to go out. This generally involves brushing my teeth.

9pm/10pm: eat dinner. Usually with Antonio, future Mayor of Vejer de la Frontera (another blog on that later) and anyone else he rounds up.

10:30pm: start acting like an 18 year old – drink a lot of cheap beer, do a lot of very bad dancing (which may or may not feature running man).

3/4/5am: eat Churros (to replenish sugar levels after strenuous dance activities). Stumble home to bed hoping I don’t get lost in the maze of white walled streets.

This may or may not be me drinking a
mojito at 4am.

It’s exhausting. Because I’m actually not 18 anymore, as much as I’m trying to act like it. That’s why I need to leave.

It all started last weekend with Easter. I scoured the supermarket shelves for even the smallest chocolate egg. Nothing. Not a chocolate egg, chocolate bilby, chocolate rabbit or Easter bonnet in sight. Because that’s not how the southern Spaniards celebrate Easter. They celebrate it with:

1. Roscos – basically a strip of bread dough twisted into a circle. Go crazy people.

2. A 24-hour street party. 

3. Letting a couple of bulls loose in the street. I joined the crowds on the street to watch, caught one look at the poor, startled bull, and scuttled off quickly to have another bad coffee, which suddenly seemed highly appealing.

Kids version of running with the bulls.
Much more my style.

One weekend of this kind of partying I could probably have handled. But then they followed it up with their annual Feria, which is like the Brisbane Exhibition only 10 times smaller with 10 times as many bars.

I feel a bit embarrassed to admit that I can’t handle the pace. Especially when last night I called it quits at 3am and had to push past hundreds of five-year-olds and all the people from the nursing home to get to bed. Honestly. The whole town comes out to party, and that’s what makes it so much fun. And I just can’t help but think that this would never happen in Australia, or Brisbane at least.

In Brisbane, if you had a child out at 3am in a place that served beer, you would be called an irresponsible parent (or at least a criminal, I think it might actually be illegal). If you also had a baby with you, asleep in its pram, someone would probably call child services. If you’re a single woman in a bar over the age of 30, people start making jokes that you’re a cougar. And if you look a day over 50, everyone’s wondering why you’re in a bar rather than sitting at home watching Antiques Roadshow.

Maybe it’s just Vejer, not all of Spain, but I think these people have it sussed. There’s no judgement. Just everyone having a bloody good time - and there’s something to be said about that.

Can I check your ID please boys?

It certainly explains why they need the siesta the next afternoon. And why you’re hard pressed to find an obese child in this place – they don’t scoff their faces with kilos of chocolate at Easter, instead they spend hours racing around the streets being chased by a boy pushing a bike adorned with a paper mache bulls head, and then they dance at the bars until the wee hours of the morning. Although I will say that a disproportionate amount of them appear to wear glasses, which I can only attribute to early exposure to bad strobe lighting.

But if I’m ever going to get this book written, I need to get the hell out of here. And soon. Besides, I doubt the people of Vejer can handle too many more nights of watching me attempt to do the Flamenco – while the ‘pick the apple, fight the bull’ strategy for my hands works a treat, I don’t think you’re supposed to do running man or MC Hammer moves with your feet. Just a wild guess.

The day I rocked the Kasbah* in Morocco

And so I went to Morocco. For the day. Because, you know, flitting across to Africa for a spot of lunch and afternoon shopping is no more difficult than nipping down to the Gold Coast for an afternoon swim.

Or so the glossy brochure said. I didn’t believe it.

Still, I signed up. When I first realised that where I am staying in Spain is close enough to pop over to Tanger for the day, I decided immediately that I would do it. I have a major soft spot for Africa, ever since I spent a year in South Africa as an exchange student half a lifetime ago (quite literally, I was 17 at the time).

Only I discovered that Morocco, or at least the very small part of Tanger that I saw, was less like Africa and more like Spain just with dodgy street wiring, men wearing dresses, buildings that look like they’ve been hit by a stray allied missile, hundreds of stray cats and people trying to sell you shit you don’t need. And lots of it.

My day did not start out well. Which was always going to happen since I just wrote a blog about how great solo travel is. Sometimes it is great. And sometimes it most definitely is not.

I was booked on a bus to take me to Tarifa at 8am – it was the only bus that would get me to the ferry on time. So I set out from my apartment at 7:30am for the long trek down to the bottom of the hill. I got there with plenty of time, enough to start thinking about how sore my legs were from the big walk I’d done the day before. I thought about stretching them out but there were a couple of people waiting across the road from me and I didn’t really want to provide them with a private yoga exhibition that early in the morning. I wondered briefly where they were going. They couldn’t be going the same place as me. I’d specifically been to the tourist office the afternoon before to ask which direction the bus would come from. The girl assured me it would come from the south and I should stand on the right. She even marked it on the map.

At 8:05am a bus trundled into town from the opposite direction. I looked at it with a small amount of interest, insofar as I looked at the destinations listed on the front and didn’t recognise any of them. I was just happy that the other people were going to be carted off so I could start limbering up. On they got and off it went. I watched it drive about 20m up the road, suddenly make a hard turn left into a small backstreet, travel about another 100m and turn right onto the highway.

The direction I was supposed to be going in.

Of course I knew at that moment it was my bus. Still, I waited another 10 minutes staring hopefully at the horizon for another bus to appear (which it didn’t) while cursing the girl in the tourist info, and wondering why on earth I hadn’t just popped across the road and checked with the bus driver instead of being so fascinated with my glutes. I knew I wouldn’t have been in this predicament if I had another, smarter person travelling with me.

Eventually I conceded defeat and walked up the road to ask a taxi driver how much it would cost me to get to Tarifa. He broke away only briefly from spit polishing his dashboard to inform me it would be 52 Euros. I stared at the bus ticket in my hand that had set me back 3.90 Euros, cursed, and got in.

On a positive note, I made it to the ferry on time. The ferry that promotes itself as Tarifa to Tanger in 35 minutes when it actually took more like 75 minutes. But no matter. We were on Africa time now.

I was one of the first to board the ferry and after dealing briefly with a surly bloke in passport control, I took a double seat by a window. For the next 60 minutes I had at least a dozen couples come and stand next to the spare seat where they hovered shooting me looks of contempt that were obviously intended to get me to decide the floor would be far more comfortable. I ignored them all and looked out the window.  Not that I could see much – the skies had opened up bearing the kind of rain you only get when you’ve left your umbrella at home. Which of course I did. I was going to North Africa for chrissakes. Everyone knows it never rains there.

When we finally arrived in Tanger, it had miraculously stopped raining, and everyone offloaded onto the dock in a manner that would have made an outback muster of wild brumbies appear tame. At one point we came across a security checkpoint. People were piling suitcases, handbags and small children one on top of each other into an enormous scanner, then striding two or three abreast through a metal detector unit that was switched off, before a mad fight to recollect all their belongings and slip off. I noticed a large number of people were not even bothering to put anything on the scanner; they were just walking straight through, suitcases in tow. This was all being overseen by five very bored looking Moroccans. What they were looking for I have no idea, but suspect it might have been something to eat for lunch.

I’d signed up for a tour – something I never do. I hate organised tours, being told where to go when and for how long. And there is truly nothing worse than being stuck with a group of people who insist of stopping every five minutes to take photos of themselves in front of rubbish bins and other important tourist monuments.

But I’m blonde and female and I’ve experienced being blonde and female in Turkey. So I booked the tour.

There were about 200 of us. And this is the off season. They gathered us together and ushered us onto a number of buses without thought to doing a roll call or even a basic head count. I realised immediately that I was at high risk of being left behind in Morocco to work my life out in an illegal spice mill since no one would even notice I was missing (another hazard of solo travel). I decided I had better quickly befriend someone who might at least notice if I didn’t return to the bus, but on looking around realised I had chosen the same bus as several former Eurovision contestants – you know, the types who wear black plastic leggings and high heel sneaker boots. Thankfully I was eventually rescued by a couple of practically pre-pubescent American university students – Sarah and Alex – the only other English speakers on the bus. Alex was young, gay and extremely confident, three things I am not, and Sarah was wearing almost exactly the same trousers as me and thought I was 27. I loved them both immediately.

The tour was interesting. I’m sure. I wouldn’t know though since the guide only spoke in Spanish. It looked like we passed a few mosques and maybe a palace – obviously things of significance because every now and then everyone in the bus would rush to take a photo of something out the window, no matter which side they were on. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there somewhere looking back on lots of photos of bus curtains and the tops of other people’s heads. After about five minutes of driving past all these mosques and things at about 100km/hour, we climbed a steep hill on the outskirts of the city where all the rich people clearly lived. He was talking quite animatedly as the bus chugged along, and I could only imagine he was saying ‘And this guy made his fortune in hookah pipes’ and ‘this guy made his fortune in ceramic tagines’ and ‘this guy made all his money through illegal arms trafficking.’

And then suddenly we happened upon a small car park where 10 very sorry looking camels, being tethered by a handful of even sorrier looking Moroccan men, were waiting. The bus parked, everyone jumped out, and all the fat people started climbing on top of the camels for a quick ride and a photo, as if they were suddenly in the Sahara Dessert instead of a car park in suburban Tanger.

Excuse me a moment while I have a little rant but I just don’t get it. Why? Why? Why do people think this it is acceptable to treat animals like this? Couldn’t they see these camels were enjoying this experience about as much as an Iraqi prisoner enjoyed Abu Ghraib? It was horrific. Yet tour bus after tour bus kept turning up to deposit more and more fat tourists who wanted to sit on these poor emaciated camels. I couldn’t stand it. I wandered off to a clearing at the edge of the car park to take some photos of the city off in the distance, only to realise that I’d discovered the dumping ground for about a year’s worth of camel poo. Delightful.

So back on the bus we went.

We were offloaded somewhere in the old town just as a monsoonal weather system hit. The water started swilling around our ankles courtesy of a 500 year old street drainage system that would give a drainage engineer a cardiac arrest. Within 30 seconds we were surrounded by a hundred Moroccan men selling umbrellas and rain ponchos. I briefly wondered how they’d organised that, then handed over five Euro (yes Euro – see, I told you it’s more like Spain than Africa) for a uniquely Moroccan tartan umbrella. It was the best money I spent all day.

Most of the tour group did the same, and once the rain slowed to a steady downpour, we all slopped off down the street together like a group of Scottish golfers.

I’m not sure what I expected the streets of Tanger to be like, but something similar to the spot where Brideshead lived during the height of his alcoholic stupor in Brideshead Revisited comes to mind. The kind of place with lovely whitewashed alleyways full of goats and men selling hessian bags of yellow spice, maybe a snake charmer or two. This was not it. The Old Town of Tanger was just another overdeveloped city full of people in desperate situations. And animals too. I rounded one corner to find two young girls kicking a feral cat for amusement before scampering off when they saw me staring. I looked around to see if anyone else thought this was wrong, but hurried on quickly when I realised all the tartan umbrellas had disappeared from sight and only a few shady men were lurking about, no doubt eyeing off my organs.

Sarah checking out some spices

I don’t need to tell you much about the rest of the day. Needless to say we ate a lunch of Moroccan chicken in five shades of yellow, then visited a carpet shop and a then spice market for a 30 second demonstration followed by a five minute sales pitch. I resisted the urge to buy a kilm to join the one I got suckered into buying in Turkey all those years ago that I then had to lug it around in my backpack for six weeks. It wasn’t hard.

We were eventually given about half an hour of free time in which to madly dash off and spend all the money we hadn’t already spent on expensive taxi rides, before we were deposited back on the ferry under the weight of fez hats, hookah pipes, bongo drums, lurid kaftans and other assorted paraphernalia that people would surely look at within about two hours of leaving and wonder what in the hell had possessed them. I was not immune. I bought about five kilos of beautiful but breakable Moroccan ceramics, which I immediately regretted and will continue to do so at every bus station and airport from here until I land back in Brisbane.

Some of the ceramics I actually left behind

Thankfully I made the bus back to Vejer (at a modest run, slowed down only by a bag full of ceramics) and arrived home at 10pm, tired and broke. I’ve dipped the corner of my big toe into Morocco, albeit a tour group organised one, and kept all my organs intact. A successful outing indeed. I can’t wait to get back one day to discover more, including hunting down some clever fellow who’s set up a shipping service for stupid tourists who insist on buying ceramics.

In the meantime, I just need to work out how to get a slice of Morocco into my novel (keep an eye out for the appearance of my soon-to-be-well-travelled ceramics in Chapter 11) and what on earth to do about all those poor camels.

* I have no idea what a Kasbah is, nor how to rock it. I assume it is a Moroccan boat. According to Wikipedia, however, it is a type of medina, Islamic city, or fortress. Just in case you were wondering.

The one thing I really hate about solo travel

When I meet people and tell them that I am travelling on my own, it tends to illicit one of three standard reactions:

1.  One of awe – as if I am the great-great-great-granddaughter of Captain Cook (or in fact Captain Cook himself) out exploring lands never set upon before by human foot, rather than travelling around Western Europe which is generally regarded as well civilized and free from most forms of cannibalism.
2. One of fear – that I must have a communicable disease or some other such thing that has scared off all possible travelling partners.
3. One of slight confusion - that I appear to be relatively normal, yet must be just a little odd to be happy to spend more than a single hour in my own company.

It amazes me how many people I meet that tell me they could never travel on their own. Who look at me imploringly and ask ‘But don’t you get…lonely?’ Sure, sometimes I do. But not any more than I do on occasion when I live in Brisbane surrounded by family and friends. I’m hardly living like a monk in a cave on a ten year meditation retreat. In fact, I tend to find that you meet more people when you travel on your own than you do with a companion. You have to really, if you want to return home with any semblance of social skills intact.

Of course, there are some real inconveniences of solo travel. Things like accommodation obviously being more expensive, never knowing who you’re going to land up sitting next to on long bus journeys, ordering a bottle of red with dinner and having to drink the whole thing on your own. But all these things I have strangely grown accustomed to. Funnily enough, many of the things that I do so easily on my own while travelling I would never do when I’m at home. Rarely will you spot me out for a casual Sunday brunch in Brisbane with only a book for company. Even rarer is seeing me fly solo at the movies. And yet I love going to the movies on my own when I travel – seeing a Matt Damon film with subtitles feels almost cultural, I swear. Although I do have one hot tip – never, ever go to see comedies that have been subtitled in the language of the country you are in. I tried this last year in Copenhagen. The problem of course being that the rest of the audience were reading the punch lines off the screen faster than the actors could say them, so while they were all roaring with laughter and rolling around in the aisles, I was sitting in my seat wondering what on earth was so funny and silently wanting to kill them all for making me miss the joke.

There is, however, one thing in particular that I absolutely HATE about solo travel. It’s probably not what you think. It’s not that I can go for days on end without having a conversation that lasts longer than two sentences. It’s not that I have at times found myself in situations that would have indeed induced mild panic in the most seasoned of travellers and I have no one to blame but myself. It is not dining alone, being unable to order Paella which always appears on the menu as a portion for two. No, it is finding myself at a bus terminal and in desperate need of going to the toilet.

On days when I know I have a long haul bus journey in front of me, I generally prefer to opt for a mild form of dehydration than a session in a bus terminal loo. But as Murphy’s Law would have it, of course, the more you don’t want to do something, the more you suddenly have to do it.

Bus terminal toilets really are filthy places. Even in the most advanced nations, they are apt to look like they have just been stormed by a group of 100 five year olds who are yet to be toilet trained, or that they were last cleaned sometime during the First World War. Finding toilet paper at your disposal is as much cause for celebration as if you have single-handedly discovered life on Mars. The whole thing reeks of a scene that says look, and indeed use, but whatever you do, do not touch.

The problem for the solo traveller, on top of all this, is that you have no one with who to leave your prized possessions for the trip into this germ riddled hellhole. So you have to cart it all in with you unless you want to see yourself hauled to the local Police Station under suspicion of planting a suitcase bomb. No thanks.

Given I am travelling with a suitcase on wheels, this invariably means I can’t actually take it into the cubicle with me, but have to park it outside somewhere near the sinks. Even if I did have my backpack, I am not sure this would be any better as there is never anywhere that looks remotely suitable for resting it on the ground. And since you can’t actually sit anywhere within at least a metre of the actual toilet seat (or toilet rim, since the seat has usually long ceased to exist), but have to hover miles above it, the laws of gravity would probably prove a small problem when you have 15kg strapped to your back.

So I always find myself having about 60 seconds of mild panic where I am trying to hold the door closed (the locks were stolen by bored youths back in the 1950’s I suspect, along with the toilet seats) with one hand, holding the bottoms of my jeans up with the other lest they touch the suspiciously wet floor, while hovering over the toilet seat and craning my neck trying to watch my suitcase under the door to make sure no one nicks off with it. Not that I’m actually ever sure what I would do if this happened, short of yelling ‘HEY!’ and trying to shuffle after them with my jeans around my ankles.

Then for hours after this harrowing experience, you feel as dirty as if you’ve just had a quick dip in a bath tub full of cow shit, no matter how many bottles of disinfectant you vigorously rub into your hands, up your arms and practically inside your ears.

It’s all quite a stressful experience really. One that I have to do often enough to ensure I will have some expensive physio bills to contend with when I get home to deal with my cricked neck.

Don’t let it put you off though. Travelling on your own is great. It’s quite satisfying to get yourself from A to B in a foreign country, even if there are no wooden boats or camels involved and you’re cunningly armed with an internet connection and a copy of the Lonely Planet. And you can do whatever you like – if you want to spend a day sitting in a café reading a book and drinking bad coffee made on long-life milk rather than tramp around a museum featuring Spanish weaponry from the early nineteenth century, you can. And you don’t have to argue with anyone over directions or questionable map reading skills which can be quite hellish really. Just go and watch a few episodes of ‘Race Around the World’ and check out the dynamics between some of those travelling buddies. Enough said.

Just carry toilet paper with you. Or cross your legs at bus stations. That’s all I’ll say.

Forget the sangria. In Spain it’s all about the long life milk.

Today I went shopping. Food shopping.

‘Well, Kath, that’s thrilling,’ I hear you say. ‘I can’t wait to read a blog about buying rice and vegetables in Spain.’

I admit it doesn’t sound in the least bit exciting. And yet it was. I can only put this down to the fact that I am now in Vejer de la Frontera in Spain, and for the first time in a month I have a kitchen. In my own apartment. To cook my own food.

Those of you who know me well know that I am not much of a cook. I only enjoy it when I have time, which, given my previous blogs about work life balance, is basically never. I have however been known to experiment on my guests with new, complicated dishes such as soufflé. I have even been known to rope my friends into actually helping me cook, which they feel inspired to do if they want to eat before midnight. So to say that I am excited about not eating out at a restaurant tonight is like saying that Nigella Lawson has started cooking without cream. Totally unheard of.

I went a bit crazy. You know, like buying flat leaf parsley even though I have no immediate use for it. To the point where I forgot I had travelled by foot, and therefore had to lug all the food home like a pack donkey. My arms still feel like they’re hanging below my knees.

But the most exciting thing I bought? Fresh milk. I had to hunt around for it, and eventually discovered two bottles hidden in the corner behind some yoghurt. Spaniards, and to an extent the Portuguese, just do not do fresh milk. I don’t know why. Maybe there’s a shortage of dairy cows in this part of the world. Maybe they simply prefer the taste of long life milk. But in a country that serves sangria, paella, spicy chorizo and truffle honey, I find that hard to believe.

I only made one wrong purchase. Apparently Ajo is Spanish for Garlic not Salt. Thank God I’m here on my own, because it looks like I’m going to have very bad garlic breath for the next few weeks.

It is now 8:30pm and I am thinking about cooking up some of my lovely, fresh food. This is almost illegal to the Spanish. We have another hour of daylight yet, and most of the restaurants are only just opening. I will have to cook on the quiet and hope none of the neighbours see me, lest they start referring to me as the strange Australian girl who cooks chicken for afternoon tea. Not that I would understand them if they did – the Spanish speak even less English than the Portuguese. I could almost write a blog just about my weird sign language and how it is interpreted. Today’s winner would be trying to ask for lip balm in the pharmacy. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but the pharmacist just kept looking at me and saying ‘thrush?’. We eventually got there. I hope. I have a tub of cream with Spanish writing on it. It looks like lip balm, that’s all I know.

Vejer is in the Spanish hills, 10km from the coast in the Costa de Luz. If you have no idea where this is, don’t worry. I don’t either, really, and I’m here. What I do know is that Vejer was voted the prettiest hilltop town in Spain last year, and if you stand on the right side of town at night, you can see the lights of Morocco. Pretty cool, even though it is getting a tad too close to Libya for my liking.

I’m staying in the old town, in a little three level apartment that has stairs that give you vertigo. There’s an amazing view from the rooftop terrace (see pic), which also has no sun protection so it’s a great spot to get totally fried during siesta.

The vibe here is very relaxed. The opposite of Barcelona, where I have just been for three nights with Lizzie. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Barcelona. Loved the food (even though with tapas you end up eating such a strange combination of food, kind of like eating at Sizzler), loved all the Gaudi architecture, loved the great little Aussie run café downstairs where we ate breakfast every morning (I know, I know, but honestly the only place in Barcelona to serve coffee with fresh milk!). And of course after being on my own for a month, I loved having Lizzie’s company. Loved having someone else to read the map and make the decisions about where to go. Loved having someone to say ‘Oh my god, look at that!’ or ‘God, I need a beer’ to. But after walking the city from end to end for two days straight, my feet were ready for Vejer, which is 10 minutes end to end.

It was also nice to have someone to take a couple of photos of me to show that I actually am in Spain and not secretly hiding in a bedsit in Brixton. Here’s one just as evidence. That’s me doing a spot of modelling at Park Guell, designed by Gaudi. That man was a genius. Or ate a lot of magic mushrooms. 

I’ll be here in Vejer for nearly three weeks. Plenty of time to get the book back on track, which will also be made easier by the complete lack of television and a sketchy internet connection. I don’t know if it’s having a few days off from writing, getting inspired by Gaudi, drinking some fresh milk, or simply the fresh hilltop air, but I read back over my second draft today and it suddenly didn’t seem quite so bad after all. 

A brief update on my book (or why 45,000 is my new unlucky number)

Over the years I’ve read a lot of bad books. Books with bad plots. Bad characters. Full of bad clichés and just plain old bad writing. I’m sure all of you have read a few of them too. You know the ones, the type that you put down when you finish the last page (if you manage to get that far) and say ‘God, I could write a better book than that!’. This is of course announced by that same voice in your head that says:

• ‘I could paint that!’ when you see some abstract art in the art gallery (even though you haven’t picked up a paint brush since high school art class), or
• ‘I could make that!’ when confronted with a $200 unlined-cotton skirt (even though you can barely sew on a button . That voice usually appears for me when I’m shopping with Mum, who can sew very well. I keep hoping she’ll take the hint.)

I actually listened to the painting voice once. It was quite unfortunate, particularly for Mum and my good friend Kriso who were both gifted the outcomes. I can only say sorry, and please accept this as a public apology.

Despite the bad experience with my ‘I could paint that!’ voice, eight months ago my ‘God, I could write a better book than that’ voice was getting quite loud and overbearing. So loud that I decided the only thing to do to make it shut up was actually write a book.

Let’s just say that that voice is now more of a quiet murmur, even a whisper really, and is saying something more along the lines of ‘I bow down and worship at the feet of anyone who has actually ever managed to finish writing a book.’ I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. But I don’t think I had any real idea of how hard it was going to be either. And it is. Really hard. Some days I think I would prefer to be in training for the world gymnastics championships than sitting at my computer trying to work out how to fix plot holes that may just challenge the Kola Superdeep Borehole for the title of deepest hole in the world.  And considering I can barely bend over to touch my toes, let alone attempt a triple back flip on the high beam, that’s saying quite a lot.

Do you want to know how the book is coming along? I’ll say it in one word for those of you who are perhaps more pressed for time, and then expand on it with a couple of hundred more for anyone who is interested in the daily tribulations of an aspiring author who is starting to develop a major ding in her forehead from beating it against the keyboard.

Crap.

That’s the one word.

If you’d asked me last week, I would have said ‘really good’ or maybe a less committal ‘ticking along’. But not this week. This week the whole things seems like the biggest load of crap since Charlie Sheen took to the stage in Detroit (I read the reviews…it did not sound good).

I’ve never really believed in having lucky or unlucky numbers. But I have officially decided that 45,000 is my new unlucky number (which is not going to do me much good when it comes to lotto, horse racing etc) because this is the approximate word count I got to with the first version before I realised it was crap, spent a week trying to fix it, and then decided just to start at page one again. And now here I am again, on the new and improved version two, with 45,000 words down, and a very loud voice in my head once again saying ‘This is CRAP.’ (I realise that I'm talking a lot about voices in my head in the same blog post that I've mentioned Charlie Sheen. Please don’t be too alarmed. My voices are relatively friendly, and definitely not of the ‘Winning’ variety.)

All of a sudden I have a far greater appreciation for the skills of all those writers whose books I have so flippantly tossed aside in the past with a shake of my head and a disparaging remark. Perhaps this is karma at work. After all, I’ve always believed in karma, only usually only when it relates to bad things happening to people other than me. I preferred it that way.

Anyway, I’m sure this is just a phase I am going through, one that will pass in due course. Like smoking Marlboro Reds (a phase that lasted for six months when I was 15) or eating only bananas for breakfast (lasted for four days when I was about 23). Hopefully this belief that my writing is total crap will be just another short lived phase. If it could end, say, next week, please, that would be particularly handy.

Until then, I’m off to Barcelona for three nights with Lizzie to eat copious amounts of tapas and drink gallons of sangria. Because if a bucket load of sangria doesn’t get the creative juices flowing, God only knows what will.

A short (shorter than requested actually) tale of a Portuguese hair cut

When I was about eight years old I had a really bad haircut. I’ve had several more in the intervening 26 years, but this one was particularly bad. So bad, in fact, that my sisters teased me, as only sisters can, that I looked like one of the characters off Diff’rent Strokes. Not Arnold. Or even Willis. It wasn’t quite that bad. But Sam. Remember him?

And yes, that does look remarkably similar to the hair cut I sported at the time. In my defence I was more interested in rollerskating, playing netball and collecting Garfield paraphenalia than I was in hair fashions. And yet my sisters took to calling me Sam (quite rightfully too) and thereby instilled in me a lifelong fear of bad haircuts.

So when I realised a week or so ago that my hair wasn’t, as I had hoped, going to last another two months until it was back in the trusty hands of my long term hairdresser Hayley, you might appreciate why I felt a certain amount of trepidation about getting my hair cut in a small Portuguese town where the majority of the inhabitants sport perms, blade one crew cuts or salt-water dreadlocks.

Not wanting to leave it totally to chance, I decided to ask at reception for a recommendation. The girl who was on at the time is really lovely, though speaks very little English.

‘Can you recommend a hairdresser nearby?’ I asked.

She looked at me blankly. I realised I was going to have to employ my best sign language techniques, so I grabbed my pony tail with one hand and made a scissor motion with the other hand, pretending to chop off the ends, saying ‘Cut? Cut?’

‘Ah! Cut!’ she said, finally cottoning on.

‘Yes! Si!’ I nodded encouragingly, watching as she fished out a pair of scissors from amongst the pens in the cup on the desk, held them up, looked at me and said ‘Me cut? Cut hair, yes?’

Err, no.

Anyway, she finally figured out that I wanted a professional to cut my hair, as adept as her scissor skills might be. She even pulled out her mobile phone to look up the number of her own hairdresser, and as she wrote down the number and drew a map for me, I tried not to stare at her hair which reminded me suspiciously of brown fairy floss.

Armed with the map and my Portuguese phrasebook, I headed off to the other side of Sagres, practicing how to say STOP and NO. From the outside, the salon looked like a proper salon, the type with a qualified hairdresser at least. When I opened the door I was relieved to find there was lots of professional equipment around, even if it was all in muted tones of pink and grey. I tried to ignore the seemingly large number of flies, as if this was some sort of butcher shop, as well as the fact that the hairdresser spoke even less English than my friend from the hotel.

I did, however, feel a little unnerved by the 20 sets of eyes that were staring at me. Perhaps if they had been the eyes of other customers, I would have felt a little more confident – the same way you feel about eating at a Chinese restaurant full of Chinese people – but no. These were not people. They were hairdressing dummies (a bit like this one on the left), strategically positioned all around the salon, each displaying a haircut that could only have been delivered by the deft hands of a five year old bearing blunt paper scissors. 

Still, I sat down. I figured that at the very worst, if it was a complete disaster, I could just hide away for the next 12 months under the guise of being a tortured, reclusive writer. Come to think of it, I’m convinced that’s why Emily Dickinson stayed inside for all those years. That really is quite a bad haircut.

I did some complex sign language to indicate how much to cut off (fingers about one inch apart), and then closed my eyes so as to avoid the stare of the dummy sitting between me and the mirror who had a strange hairy black helmet on. I hoped the hairdresser had not placed her there for inspiration.  I was the only customer, and since the usual hairdresser/client banter about the weather/my love life/what I’m doing for Christmas was not an option with the language barrier, we sat in silence bar the noise of the flies, a couple of dogs barking on the street, and the sound of her chopping my hair off in a way that could only be described as vigorous.

When she finally unclipped my fluorescent pink cape to indicate the cut was complete, I was quite rapturous to find that, although it was a fair bit shorter than requested, I wasn’t bald, nor did I appear to have a helmet on or look like any known sitcom stars, child or otherwise. I could have hugged her really, for averting what I was sure was going to be the biggest hair disaster known to man-kind since Sam and I took on the bowl cut in 1984.

Now that’s what I call $18 well spent.