Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Ahora Caigo

HOLIDAY! CELEBRATE! And other words that end in an A sound...

We recently returned from a week in a teeny, weeny, holiday bungalini. It's been the making of this month. I calculated before we went that we hadn't been away on a holiday, just the two of us, without any computers, wifi coverage, nor much in the way of mobile phone reception, for the best part of 16 months. We didn't even....shhh... take any conditioner. (Straggly, unruly hair is a small price to pay for inner peace.)

The truth is we've not had much time, or many euros to spare. Oh, eff off, you live in a sunny place, I hear you protest. You can walk to a beach, you lucky biscuit. ¡Callate, puedes caminar a la playa, eres afortunada! OK, I admit, we can see palm trees from the living room, but we have chirruping emails to answer, rooms to clean, laundry to dry, ironing to do and several weekly food shops just like everyone else. Add some recent life/family/health/job insecurities to the mix and well, Little House on the Prairie it ain't.

So that's why ditching the city for this place for a bit was much needed. See how it makes the Mister look positively catalogue-model winsome?

The best bit was that there were two best bits: we could walk to a choice of two unspolit beaches along a rocky coastal path pretending to be mountain goats, and also - we had a barbacoa to put chicken on, something that took us right back to gnawing on jerk chicken with blackened fingers in our beloved Brixton. 
Oh, and a bonus thing. We learned loads more colloquial Spanish from the truly alien pleasure of watching telly in our little bungalow. We haven't owned a telly in more than a year. 
Ahora Caigo (quite literally, Now I Fall, or Now I Get It! - a game show where competitors fall through a hole in the floor at breakneck speed if they answer incorrectly - and  Millonario Anónimo (you know the format, but did you know it would be even more tear-jerking in Spanish? It's la crisis, you see) - were our favourites. 


I tell you what, we needed that holiday. Because the real work starts here. You remember that New York job I went for two posts ago?

They only went and gave it to me.

That's right, we're moving to NEW YORK FFS OMG ETC ETC.

I'll go first in August, and the Mister will follow in a few months, so now we are on EMOTIONAL HIGH ALERT and are bobbing wildly up and down like crazed trampolinists, veering between elation and woe at the thought of separating our lives - the ones we've just spent 11 months soldering together in this live/work space that has been our business and our home and our adventure and our comfort blanket all in one.

This is pretty big, yo.