By Craig Scott
THEY tell us Spain has no seasons, and that Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without festive snow, and chestnuts roasting on the fire!
Obviously, those twerps have never experienced an Andalucian thunderstorm.
Seasons??? We have seasons all right. Where else in Europe could it be 36C one day and flash-flooding the next?
We’ve literally gone from raging forest fires to torrents of wild waters – all in the space of 48 hours.
Strangely, these torrential showers coincided with my first attempts at yoga. I genuinely hope the two weren’t interlinked.
Knowing my luck, my wonky backbend was probably mistaken for some kind of tribal rain dance.
Anyway, true to form, after enjoying the longest heat wave in living memory, the heavens duly opened the minute my sun-starved friends touched down on Spanish soil.
Yep, to their dismay the Costas were cold, and their Primark pumps and straw hats suddenly seemed as pointless as speed limits on Spanish motorways.
Still, at least the bars were buzzing!
The problem for Brits is that we’ve heard so many degrading jokes about Spanish waiters and crippling eurozones that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For instance, my pals were stunned to see dressed-to-the-teeth locals, swarming restaurants, and luxurious land-cruisers parading down smooth, well-lit highways.
“How do they afford it, nobody’s got any cash here?” Says who? The News at Ten, hellbent on pacifying British taxpayers – by exaggerating Portuguese poverty and suggesting that ‘starving’ Spaniards have resorted to cannibalism?
Anyway, we don’t need wads in our wallets. The rich rub shoulders with the poor here, and you can still pick up 12 bottles of Amstel, a decent bottle of Rose, and 20 Marlboro Lights all for under a tenner. The same purchases in Britain would require taking out a small bank loan.
Seriously, the way my Brit pals raced around Carrefour’s booze aisles, you’d swear they were contestants on Supermarket Sweep!
To one of my pal’s delights, even the gay scene is booming. Just check out the listings in those free, English language directories. I’m no Friend of Dorothy and couldn’t tell a Lipstick Lesbian from a Paddy’s Day leprechaun.
In fact, you could say my ‘gaydar’ is about as active as Lardy…..oops, I meant Lady GaGa’s thyroid gland. Did you see the latest pictures in the Daily Mail? Holy smokes!!! Poker face? More like porker face!
Anyway, under one gay club listing came the promise of ‘bears’, ‘labyrinths’, ‘slings’, ‘glory-holes’ and ‘dark rooms’. Wow, whatever happened to cottaging and handjobs in saunas? These days, the LBGT ‘experience’ has clearly moved on – and now involves mythical trips to kinky ‘Narnias’ (albeit Narnias where The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have been replaced by The Bear, the Bitch and the Ball-grope.)
Anyway, after a fortnight of drunken debauchery, my amigos have just returned to Blighty. Don’t get me wrong – it’s been brilliant hosting these 24-hour party people, but juggling pub crawls and full-time school-teaching has aged me 10 years.
Naturally, this lack of sleep has led to more faux pas in the classroom. The other day, I told Year 9 that I’d been up half the night thinking about them and downloading videos from the internet. Of course, these videos were educational – documentaries about anti-capitalism – and the ‘thinking’ revolved around Belen’s disappointing B- in the latest mock exam.
But, like everything else these days, an innocent remark was met with suspicion and I was made to feel like Jeremy Forrest at a St Trinians slumber party. Until the next time, adios amigos!
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