Low life
Fishy story
Jeffrey Bernard
ISarraco, Majorca
came over here for a ten-day break at the suggestion of my ex-wife Jill, the moth- er of my daughter, who fixed me up with a room in the house of an expat English pen- sioner.
It is all a little odd. He is an elderly, slightly eccentric ex-naval architect given to drinking lager for breakfast and thence all day and who has a compulsion to eat sar- dines in small proportions on toast every single night of the week for supper. It is not my idea of the last supper and last night he paid the penalty for skimping on food when he cut his finger on a sardine tin and had to be taken to a clinic to have five stitches put in it. The hand, not the tin.
He worries about money to a depressing extent and remarked just now, as he added some mineral water to my own supply of vodka, that it was terribly good value at 110 pesetas a bottle as opposed to 60 pesetas for the small bottles.
There are, though, compensations that accompany the lager breakfasts. Leslie plays Bach and Mozart which is transmit- ted from a satellite every day, so that plus the dawn chorus of cockerels crowing, pea- cocks screeching and pigs squealing in the distance is something of a rural rhapsody. At 11 a.m. every morning two spar- rowhawks glide over his garden, which resembles the Sahara after a severe
drought, and then, with my first drink of the day, he begins trivial post mortems on the previous night's behaviour of the other English expats in the village. It is tiresome and he bickers. I care not and am not inter- ested in whether Tom, Dick or Harry got drunk last night.
But there is an interesting-sounding bank manager in this village. I hear that he is a good man but he is a mess due to his habit of sitting at the desk in his office and eat- ing bread which he dips into olive oil and which then drips down his shirt. We need more like him at Barclays. The other day he told Pedro, who has a friend called Vic- tor whose telephone was about to be cut off, 'I have paid Victor's telephone bill with money from your account. Get it from him when you can.' He also pulled out 50,000 pesetas from his own pocket and handed it to a woman who was late on the HP pay- ments on her car.
But the food is not up to much in Sarra- co. Luckily Jill drives me to the neighbour- ing town of Andraitx where there are good seafood restaurants and excellent tapas bars. I think I shall take up homemade tapas when I get home next week. Chopped-up liver, chicken, meat balls in tomato sauce, prawns, broad beans, salads and sauté potatoes — who needs roast beef and two veg all the time?
And last Thursday night in the bar there was bull-fighting from Seville on television. What a marvellous change from the end- less and boring football. One bull had horns that looked as sharp as needles. I was told after the fights that an aficionado fond of eating bull's testicles went into a restaurant to eat some, complained about the smallness of their size and was told by the waiter, 'Sometimes the bull wins.' Still, better than one of Leslie's blood-spattered sardines.
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