Granada Blue Skies

New Years with R&M. My aim when I booked my flights in October was New Years with R&M.

Even then I don’t think I expected I’d actually be able to get here. I anticipated another lockdown. A winter mess. Borders shut and no way to Spain. There were covid passes (quick to expire and slow to replace) and covid tests  and transport issues to the airport that needed sorting over the patchy public holiday days. In the end, the sketchiest bit was the bus to Bristol airport from Exeter, delayed by an hour and a half. The bus stop had no shelter and I stood in the pouring rain with four strangers feeling like totoro.

And now, suddenly, I’m sitting at Malaga airport. The sky is blue and the clouds are high and far away. There's a heat wave hitting the UK at the moment and its come here too. 

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R&M have four kids. Their lockdown experience is the hardest of anyone I know. The kids did fine. R&M are incredible.  After a 4 month lockdown where the kids weren’t allowed to leave the apartment, they installed a climbing frame in one of the bedrooms so they could more literally be climbing up the walls. 

Tonight before tea, their youngest at 2 years old, casually climbed up the frame, mimicked her siblings, reached out to the loop of material, planted her bum in it, swung for a few minutes, then dismounted and climbed back down. It was a quietly mind blowing moment. 

They have taken me exploring, picking old burst pomegranates off the trees by the playground and picking the gem seeds out as we walk down the road. There are orange trees everywhere and heavily laden, looking stunning although their fruit is apparently fairly bitter. 

Their apartment on the 9th floor overlooks a building project abandoned in the financial collapse of 2008, and a Lidl which sadly was closed last year to make way for one a few blocks away. It sits forlorn with an empty parking lot. Oh - it also overlooks (and it over looked by) the Sierra Nevada.

Stunning Alcazaba of Malaga and Sacramonte Abbey are steeped in history; but not as interesting as finding footholds and steep edges to climb.  It’s fun seeing the world through the kids eyes- and accompanied by their many questions. Good to catch up with old mates and be warm in December.

The city smells of oranges, the mountains of rosemary and pine.

We went walking in the hills, to avoid crowds, to avoid Omicron. To make it easier for me to get home, to get back to work. 

When we drove back from the peaks of Andelucia, we passed hillsides of greenhouses, valleys of avocado. Spain: the dry yet verdant breadbasket of Europe and the UK. When we went out we had a salad that included the following cacophony of ingredients: Apple, tuna, goat cheese, walnuts, pomegranate syrup, black sesame seeds, spinach leaves, lettuce, carrot, olives, dates, olive oil, vinegar, persimmon and tomatoes.

M made Paella in a wide dish and the kids inhaled it.  We poured olive oil on everything, and tried to imagine where we might find some as good, as cheap, back home. R and I rode our bikes at sunrise past the Alhambra and looked back across the valley toward the Abbey, over the caves that people have lived in for centuries.

I tried Gazpacho from a carton (divine) and repeatedly mispronounced Salmorejo, my second favourite liquid bread after beer. 

The night of New Years, we sat trying to play one of the kids' board games but we were so tired the rules felt too complicated. R&M turned in and I snuck out into the city to feel the air of it all. The soft yellow shadows and the quiet formations of people gathering against advice. 

I wandered the streets talking on the phone to Katy and listened to the boom of the fireworks echoing against the walls of the Alhambra. 

Bring on the New Year.