Fuengirola. Not much rhymes with Fuengirola.

Today I went to Fuengirola. I had pretty much the same experience waking up this morning as yesterday, and was really not feeling inspired, so I got dressed, remembered my mask, and wandered out to the bus stop. A few things happened in-between, including an hour-long phone call with a friend living in Benicasim, who outed himself as an anti-vaxxer. Actually, that is not fair, he’s not an anti-vaxxer, he just hasn’t taken the vaccine himself.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. He’s been a friend of mine for a long, long time, but the more I age (and let’s be honest, how gracefully I age) the more I feel that you have to have certain base commonalities with those people you have as friends. I used to pride myself on not caring what people thought. I had friends who were right wing, friends who were left wing, friends who were religious, friends who supported Everton. But now, I feel somewhat different: maybe it is the past 2.5 years coming out, but I’ve already ditched friends who supported the convoy in Ottawa, including a close one (although admittedly, having supported him through a lengthy and protracted separation, I was more miffed at his likening me to his ex-wife), and I cannot imagine sitting down with people who believe the whole “Bill Gates is tracking us all” bullshit. He’s not in this category, and the call was friendly and civil, but still, it left me a little uncertain as to our future.

Maybe it was that call, but I got onto the bus to Fuengirola (and by the way, 69 cents is what they charge over here for a pre-paid journey, 20 minutes plus, on an emissions-free bus with built-in Hepa filters – it’s around $4 in Ottawa now, and you have to walk for miles and wait till your pension comes in) and was in a strange mood.

I sat there and heard a voice. In my head. It was the voice of my narrator. Only everything had changed and the narrator for once is coming through loud and clear. Guess who didn’t have his notebook with him. So, I sat there writing down the story as being told to me on the bus on the back of an envelope. In future years, it might be worth a fortune. It solved the huge problem I had had in telling the story, so I was exceptionally happy… even if it means more rewrites.

(By the way, when I say “voices in my head”, I am not talking about the “kill, kill, kill” variety, I mean I can hear the character speaking to me. Not literally. But I have an image and I can imagine the voice. It’s usually very faint, but this time it was crystal clear. It’s more of a consciousness voice than a flow, but it is past midnight now and I have been out all night. (I do see aliens though, and if you turn around just… NOW, there is one behind you.)

Anyway, FUENGIROLA. What can I say? Well, I liked it. It has a lot of the same problems as these types of resorts usually have – and there are more beauty salons/hairdresser salons/ nail salons than I have ever seen anywhere, ever. Every second shop was advertising “uñas acrilycas” or PEDICURA! (always in capitals for some reason) or something similar, quite strange. But other than that, and a general unkempt seediness (that I actually liked), it struck me as a very nice place to be.

There were the ubiquitous flowers, even in the most unusual places (like roundabouts), and the bullring was in the middle of being repurposed, and there were plenty of tiled mosaics everywhere (even a very nice one of Our Lady of the Gozzy Eye or something (see extra) which was new to me. There were also a couple of lovely squares – and some very poignant statues, including one to victims of something or other, which I will look up but cannot remember for some reason, which had no faces. I think it was Plaza de la Emancipación...

Above all, it felt Spanish. And that was something I had been looking for. The people were going about their daily lives and shops all closed at 12.30pm so people could go and eat and have a nap and generally live, and so everyone was sitting and talking or walking and talking or eating and talking, and it all felt perfectly natural and perfectly lovely. Even the expats were fitting in, and as I sat nursing a café con leche at a plaza café, I heard an elderly couple from Rochdale urging each other to “try and say it in Spanish”. I mean what more can you want?

Well. Let me tell you what more you can want. The local sports store to carry a kids XL shirt of its local football team. I asked for CF Fuengirola AND Malaga, and they had neither. Real Madrid or Barcelona, yes. Spain, yes. Manchester City and Liverpool, yes. So, I set fire to the whole rack of shirts and ran off as fast as I could.

No, I didn’t – but only because of my hips.

Home on the 69-cent bus, shower, couple of errands, and then another evening out.