Home life
Goring story
Alice Thomas Ellis
then I started humming a song about the snow-clad Sierra Nevada until Janet told me to stop it. When I got home a friehd rang and suggested hopping on a plane and going to stay in a hotel situated between Granada and Malaga called La Bobadilla, and here I am.
Now there are hotels and hotels and most of them I do not care for. They tend to have an impersonal, institutional feel about them and as I stow away the free wee gifts in case they might come in useful in an emergency I feel the gloomy resignation of the recidivist — well, here we are again and why don't I think before doing these things? This is rather different. I don't mind crawling out of bed to sit in my own little garden looking out over shrubby slopes and olive groves to the distant hills. There are rabbits and hares and partridges going through their allotted span out there, and small birds fly through the marble hall. The vegetables come from the garden and the lamb has grown fat on Andalusian herbs. If you wish you can sit in a sort of outhouse built on the lines of a 16th- century church, and listen to a man giving an organ recital, and you can leap on a horse and go for a ride through the aforesaid shrubs and olives, and in the evening you can listen to the bull-frogs and the grasshoppers whilst drinking something cold. I've seen a horse dance and watched the owner feeding bread rolls to his trout and I haven't really felt homesick for Camden Town at all.
In a moment we're going to a farm where they make frocks, for I feel the daughter might look rather distinguished in a flamenco outfit with a rose between her well-tended teeth. How — I ask myself do I describe her dimensions? El bust, I know, is not the correct term, but these are minor inconveniences. More serious is the suggestion that sharing the terrain with the little furry and feathered creatures are wild boar. I don't think it's true but it could be and I've had an irrational aversion to wild boar ever since I read a book when I was a child. It described how somebody was gored by one of them and it sounded most unpleasant. One of St Perpetua's co- martyrs had the same sort of feeling about bears. He could more or less settle for being eaten by a lion but something about bears made the hair rise on the back of his neck. Silly he knew, but there it was. I'm aware I could get just as killed by a madman on a moped but I don't think I'd mind so much.
I've got to go home tomorrow and I really don't want to. I've discovered that the Spanish make the best black pudding in the world and I'd like to stay close to it and pick an orange off a tree when the need for Vitamin C arises. It beats Sainsburys by a long chalk and I can see why the Moors got their feet under the table. Still, I don't want everyone coming to La Bobadilla so I recommend the Costa del Sol. I'm told it's remarkably free of wild boar down there.
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