Village life in Andalucia

Here in Almachar it’s lovely April and the start of the dog shagging season. Every Spanish house dog feels the nasty itch of springtime in one of its repulsive crevices and before you can say “Ole!” has found itself locked into a gang bang of unlikely partners. The annual shag proves definitively that dogs lack a sense of humour. There they stand, presumably waiting for the earth to move (which, in fact it did in the 1775 earthquake).

If they only looked at themselves – a terrier in an alsation on a boxer in a terrier and so on, they might at least burst out laughing. Instead they look as though, had they known what they were getting into, they would never have started. Their mournful faces  remind me of my grandmother (may God give her rest) who used to describe sex as ” a lot of pushing and shoving to no good purpose”.

Spanish people, unlike granny, have a refreshingly benign attitude to sex – an example of their divergence from the views of the Vatican and the Rat. It was recently proposed by Council at Velez Malaga for example, that the lights should be turned off between 11 and 12pm on the beach at Caleta so that young people, forced by unemployment and penury to live with their parents, could go down the beach to have it off. To a Spaniard, what is good enough for a young person is certainly more than enough for a dog and thus villagers are inclined to edge carefully and respectfully around those bundles of mournful ecstacy that clot the streets at this time of year. But I digress.

I’m having a feud with the animal in the house opposite – a lozenge of middle aged dog fat with a leg at each corner that has conducted a campaign against me ever since I moved in. Day and night it stands and howls at any passing thing that doesn’t smell of its own backside. This war of attrition is punctuated by criminal activity such as chewing the ends off my very expensive fly curtain, or simply shitting on the step. “Its because you are a foreigner” explain my neighbours unhelpfully.

I know that he who rises to petty provocation is destined to look ridiculous in the eyes of his neighbours. I am aware that lobbing rocks down a concrete street with concrete walls is a pointless and dangerous exercise and that running after an animal with a bucket of water screaming abuse is unlikely to contain, let alone resolve the issue.  I have learned that Spanish people, observing this outburst from an otherwise phlegmatic  northerner,  treat me as though I’m  ill. “Are you alright? Would you like to sit down? Can I get you something? What on earth happened? Well. . .obviously. . . its because you’re a foreigner” they say unhelpfully.

This dog is an unfortunate. It’s from what English social workers call a “chaotic” family background. Its owner, the optimistically named Juan Carlos, was the “El Dupe” (driver of the Dumper truck) of Almachar. He emptied the rubbish every day and carried materials from bricks to fridge freezers all around the village. The   “lozenge ”  would trot ahead of him, shrieking and howling that the dumper truck was on its way. One day he got a better job as the driver of the school bus, and the lozenge’s world fell to bits. It couldn’t manage to run ahead of a bus, so it took to hanging around on street corners and taking up with bad company .

Our house in Almachar stands about fifteen feet above the street in which this creature lurks. I have tried lobbing buckets of water at it but it simply stops barking, watches the water descend and at the critical moment, calmly sidesteps and avoids a soaking. It then looks up as though to say:

” I am only a dog of the streets. I have not been chosen by God to rule over His creatures or to attain the crown of  glory – eternal life, yet in the face of your pathetic and intemperate rage I myself am able to remain both temperate and cognate, to perceive the consequences of your action, assess and time the descent of the bolus of water and avoid it with the minimum expenditure of energy on my part.”

Closeley observing the “lozenge” in the act of coitus  however, I have noticed that packs of dogs thus engaged are totally unable to move. A well placed bucket of water over a coital clump might seem reasonable to  a Spaniard given that English people are supposed to be shocked by sex. I know in fact,  that you can’t interrupt a shag by throwing a bucket of water over a dog because its penis swells into whatever crevice it has stuck it and can’t be removed until it ejaculates. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea, and revenge is certainly a dish best served very very cold. . . . .

I have decided that it would be inappropriate to illustrate this post