Village life in Andalucia

The south wind has been bashing up the countryside for the last week. In autumn we get benign winds that come from the north and pernicious winds from the south. Last year a ferocious 100km per hour wind blew sand from the Sahara desert across southern Spain, turning our white villages pink. A haze hung around the rising sun as though a meteor or a bomb had struck the earth and shifted the climate.

This year we have had nothing so theatrical. The weather is positively Welsh – oppressive, relentless, depressing. We have had not had a drop of rain since the small cloud burst in early September.  Nothing at all substantial since mid June. The sky is positively constipated. Clouds gather, condense, there is the beginning of an eerie silence, the wind suddenly calms and then . .and then. . the sun comes out again! The clouds disperse! It is as though, in our little valley the sky cannot gather a sufficient weight of water to let it fall. It is depressing. oppressive. We are all living under the shadow of something that is trying to happen – but not trying quite hard enough. As though God could deliver divine relief but he just can’t be assed.

Wind itself is a miserable element. Wherever it predominates the suicide rate is high. In Tarifa for example. They all kill themselves there, sooner or later. Anything to stop the relentless whistling and banging and splintering. We sit in our flat and watch the wind gently test all of our summer work to destruction. A little greenhouse gently smashed to pieces, a sun blind made of canes slowly taken apart like a delinquent child unpicking a cardigan. It is the day-after-dayness of it that makes you want to beat out your brains on the wall. The beshitten spanish dog population, too dim-witted to distinguish between a strange wind and a stranger, begin their howling . . .

Oh yes I know there are benefits of the wind if your electricity is run by turbines. Even so you may blow your brains out while your batteries are charging. And these so called benefits can only be appreciated intellectually. Water you can drink, sun you can bask in, but wind?

We live at the bottom of the village, so every fag packet and fag butt, every bit of discarded packaging, every ripped up bag of household rubbish is wafted in our direction by the autumn winds. I feel for the local dogs who parade down the hill every morning to shit in the street and on our doorstep. They have to pick their way through the rubbish, poor things. . .

I long for the moment when the first cloud bursts, and torrents sweep everything down, down, down and away in one mangificent watery gesture . . .