Funny? Fanny?

The old adage goes that the simplest things in life are often the best, and this past week has been filled with some lovely, simple things from which we have derived huge amounts of pleasure.

As you may have garnered from some recent posts we, like many other people, have sometimes struggled to maintain a degree of optimism. With the ongoing, seemingly relentless pandemic and the beyond-satirical news coming out of the UK every day, there have been days when dark clouds have gathered overhead and it has been difficult to find the positive.

However, as we drove back from our little Saturday excursion to the garden centre and the supermarket, we both allowed ourselves a moment to remember that we are actually really happy!

What simple things have reminded us to enjoy the moment?

We have recently started an Intercambio de Idiomas (language exchange) group in the village. We thought about doing this some time ago, but Covid prevented us from taking it any further. Now, we know that Covid has not yet disappeared, but we feel more confident in the wake of booster jabs to get out and see our neighbours once again.

The idea behind an Intercambio is to bring together a small group of people who want to chat in both English and Spanish. Our Spanish neighbours and friends practice their English, and we (the English contingent) practice our Spanish. It’s a social event, usually with a beer or two involved, and provides a perfect opportunity for neighbours and friends to get to know each other better, for non-Spanish people to integrate into village life and for Spanish villagers to meet new residents, learning and improving language skills to boot.

To be fair, we all know each other in the group anyway, but this informal gathering allows us all to set aside embarrassment as we practice new language skills. It’s amazing how fluent we all become after a beer or two.

Last night was the second event for the group, and it was a blast. At one stage in the evening, I looked across to the group where Andrew was huddled, and he mouthed to me that they were talking about vaginas! In actual fact, they were discussing the pronunciation differences between the words ‘funny’ and ‘fanny’.

After the hour of English/Spanish chat, during which several people got up and danced (don’t ask…), we all remained in the bar where the conversation continued. We had a highly illuminating discussion with two Spanish friends that went along the following lines:

“I’m looking for a boyfriend, but for now I am quite happy with fuck and go.” Bear in mind, these lines were delivered in a mix of Spanish and English.

“All the older ladies chase her boyfriend”. Asking for clarification, we asked how old these ladies might be - Grandmothers? Great-grandmothers? And where does this chasing go on? “In back rooms”. We had previously discussed a venue just outside Alcalá la Real called Los Rosales which is a ‘club’. In Spain, a club is not a club in UK parlance; it is a club where gentlemen are ‘entertained’ by ladies.

So, we had in our minds the boyfriend of our friends being lured by a harem of grandmothers into a suspect back room in a club where gentlemen got up to naughty things.

While this story was being relayed to us, the boyfriend in question was repeatedly asking us to translate from Spanish/English into Spanish, which we did, armed as we were with the salient facts.

It transpired that what actually happened was that the boyfriend attracts lots of women (not exclusively grandmothers), and when they were in a bar one evening, a 30-something female pursued the boyfriend into a bathroom (not back room!) where she was stopped by the boyfriend’s girlfriend with a firm hand; her fingernails broke on the pursuant’s scarf, such was the tenseness of the situation.

So, sadly, there was no orgy with grandmothers in the dark room of a strip club.

We left the bar at 23:30 feeling that we knew a lot more about our fabulous Spanish neighbours, and our Spanish had advanced in leaps and bounds.

On Thursday, we went out for dinner to mark the birthday of one of our bestest friends here in Spain. There are evenings when everything just works, and this particular evening was one of those. We had a delicious dinner in Sibarius, an eclectic restaurant in the centre of Granada, and then we took our chums to Cafe Bohemia. We first went to Cafe Bohemia when we went to language school in Granada 5 years ago. It’s a fabulous, atmospheric jazz bar tucked away from the main commercial centre of the city. While we don’t go there very often, whenever we do go we always say that we have to go more.

Nick and Richard, our friends, are as comfortable to us as a pair of much-loved slippers - I’m sure they won’t object to being described thus - and we had an easy, relaxed and hugely enjoyable night.

Simple things. Being surrounded by people we love, having a chat and a lot of laughs, forgetting for a moment that things continue to be tricky, but remembering that life is most definitely for living as fully as possible. Today, we bought two more fruit trees for our garden and it’s amazing how much joy can be derived from digging holes and shoving a tree into the ground. Now, we just have to make sure the Ibex don’t venture over the garden wall…