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First Edition Design Publishing - Ben Tideway

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101 pages

English

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Gone To Aragon takes the reader into and out of the sunlight in Spain via the author's easy-going account of taking risks and finding contentment in the wilds of Aragon. Ben Tideway pulled up stakes, burned bridges and fled from London to have a different life in a little pueblo in Aragon, NE Spain. The book is not a clichd telling of hilarious incidents with builders and plumbers. It is focused on adapting to the ways of living in a small community in a rural part of a foreign country. A lot of ground is covered in the factual narrative which is interspersed in a seamless way with set pieces about some of the more colourful characters encountered during the twenty-five years he has spent in Aragon. This is a story about a man lucky enough to have found what he was looking for.

Sujets

Travel writing

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Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	01 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	4
EAN13	9781622878833
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Gone to Aragon
(On A One Way Trip)

By
Ben Tideway
Gone to Aragon
Copyright ©2015 Ben Tideway

ISBN 978-1622-878-82-6 PRINT
ISBN 978-1622-878-83-3 EBOOK

LCCN 2015TBD

March 2015

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .
For Asia
So here I am, sat by the swimming pool sipping a cold beer and wondering how this agreeable thing in the South West of Aragon ever got started. I don’t want you to get the wrong image. It’s not a posh pool like those in glossy magazines promoting Spain as hedonist heaven. It’s just nice and roses grow along the wall on one side of it. It’s a good place to sip a cold beer before having a siesta in the old gold light of late afternoon.
Of course all this started one dreary morning in East London, that clichéd departure point for many an escape to the sun saga. Nevertheless, that’s where I was, quite a few years ago and a thousand miles north of here, staring out of a grimy window at the rush hour traffic. It was getting difficult to breath and my distaste for everything around me became so intense I found myself saying out loud – That’s enough! Enough what? Well, enough dirty air, enough noise, enough concrete and certainly enough of not enough trees, grass and open spaces.
Not a unique experience I’m sure. Most folk have a grass is greener scenario going on but getting to the other side of that hill is the problem. Mine was solved rather quickly when, a couple of weeks later, my wife got offered a job in Spain. We needed a large scale map to find the place. We were gone within a month. Straight into the deep end of the middle of nowhere, our only assets being Asia’s fluent Spanish and her, yet to be earned, monthly pay cheque.
Me, well I didn’t speak the lingo and I didn’t have a job, it being well-known that writers don’t actually work. The company employing Asia was based in a small pueblo. She would be working as a translator but had been given some time to sort out a place for us to live.
‘It’s the best piso in the pueblo,’ proclaimed Pablo, more than once, as he showed us around a totally modern, totally charmless flat. The kitchen was a tiny shiny convenience unit for stuffing processed food into a microwave. The bathroom was designed for persons of restricted growth and the sitting room, which was large, had a vista window offering an interesting view of the flat opposite. We thanked Pablo and moved on. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.
After three more viewings everybody in the village knew about the strangers and speculation was rife. However, the newcomers were somewhat unusual by local standards, what with him being much older than her and never saying a word, just standing close, like a minder.
People from Aragon call themselves Maños but they can’t remember why. It is a common greeting. ‘Hola Maño,’ they shout at each other across the street. The women are Mañas. They are proud of this name. They are proud of Aragon. Elsewhere in Spain they have a reputation for being stubborn. Well, you’d have to be stubborn to farm the land around here but they are also regarded as stubborn in matters of opinion. A typical Maño joke tells of two men standing in front of a market stall which was selling bars of hand-made soap. ‘That’s strange looking cheese,’ says one of them.’ ‘It isn’t cheese, tonto, it’s soap.’ ‘No, it’s cheese.’ And so it goes back and forth for a while until the one saying its soap suggests that the other eat some. So he does and, foaming slightly at the mouth, says to his friend, ‘it might taste like soap but it’s still cheese.’ There you have it. Maños just don’t give up easily.
Little Pueblo, as it will be called in these pages, has a population of fourteen hundred and because there is local employment it has not been abandoned by the young people in their general rush to the cities in search of work and opportunity. Even so, the young ones don’t like living in the old part of the pueblo. Not for them the crumbling stucco and geranium covered balconies, the old wooden shutters and plumbing fatigue of the tall houses in the narrow streets. The young Spanish want modern Spain, everything new and sparkly. Here I am speaking of the days of the great ‘boom’, when all over the land millions of flats were being constructed to house this migration to the cities and the banks were irresponsibly throwing wads of money at people on low incomes in a frenzy of financial optimism never seen before – or since.
So, in accordance with all this ‘boom’ madness, the Exmo Ayuntamiento, which translates as Town Hall of Excellence, constructed four rows of new people hutches close to the small industrial estate on the outskirts of the pueblo. Identical inside and out they appeared to be the dream houses of the younger generation who moved in with enthusiasm.
This, of course, left many of the older properties vacant and so it was that we rented a large flat for a price that would get you a cheesy bedsit in a cheesy part of London. We had seven rooms and no furniture. We had left our native shore in a rented van loaded with books, paintings, a futon and an antique table. We slept on the floor and woke up on our first morning to rays of winter sunshine slicing through the slats of the wooden shutters. We had found what we were looking for.

***
Aragon is enormous. These days it comprises the provinces of Zaragoza, Huesca and Teruel. In medieval times it included Catalunia, the Balearic Islands, Valencia, Sicily, Naples, Andorra and a big chunk of Provence. Catherine of Aragon, unhappily married to the disagreeable Henry VIII, came from a kingdom many times larger than England. Today there are forty-seven million square kilometres of Aragon embracing every kind of terrain from permanent glaciers to the desert of Monegros. Drive round a corner and the whole landscape changes. It is a place of constant surprises. With approximately one and a half million inhabitants, half of whom live in the capital, Zaragoza, it has a population density of twenty-six people per square kilometre.
Wild, untouched, majestic in its toughness, Aragon is not the best place for those who suffer agoraphobia. The vastness of the land can be intimidating and perhaps this explains why the rural population huddle together in the pueblos. There are no farmhouses scattered across the landscape. The farmers go to the fields, orchards and vineyards on their old tractors and return to the security of their pueblos when night falls.
After London, indeed the United Kingdom, the amount of space here can be unsettling. The land rocks and rolls away into the distance, not a house in sight and high above the vultures circle effortlessly on the thermals of ‘El Cierzo’, the strong, dry North Westerly wind that has been known since ancient times. Cato the Elder, in the second century BC, described it as a wind ‘that fills your mouth and tumbles waggons and armed men.’
For the first couple of months, while battling with the language and the cold, cold winter, I explored the area in the beat-up Audi I’d driven back from London. English number plates and a steering wheel on the wrong side got me plenty of those long, blank, campesino stares as I motored around.
One afternoon, off the beaten track, I got stopped by Trafico. Buzzing around like a couple of hornets they sandwiched the car with their motorbikes and pulled me off the road. Well OK, what with a foreign vehicle, the sun-roof open and Credence Clearwater banging away at full volume maybe I did look a bit dodgy.
My more than limited Spanish seemed to exasperate these guardians of the peace but we somehow struggled through the formalities until it got to identification. That’s when they arrested me. Presidential style I was escorted to the nearest police station where I was interviewed by the chief who spoke some English. He rather irritably explained that I had to carry identification papers with me at all times. He asked where I lived. I told him. ‘Well who do you know there?’ I told him I knew the mayor and the doctor, which was untrue. He wasn’t impressed anyway. ‘I’m from Andalucia,’ he said. ‘I don’t know these people.’ I was beginning to wonder how much trouble I was in. I’d heard some of the British scare stories about the Guardia Civil. Then, with a dismissive shrug of his epauletted shoulders, he suggested I go back to my pueblo. So we all shook hands like we were the best of friends and he told me he had been to London once and had paid seven pounds for an ice cream near Vestminster Bridge.
Who you know is important in Spain and particularly in Aragon. It’s a verification of who you are. If you know somebody even as remote as a person’s third cousin things get smoothed out. If you don’t know anybody you become a stranger and strangers are regarded with suspicion.
***
The weeks became months. The winter gave way to spring. The flat was filling up with an eccentric assortment of furniture, stuff the Spanish call ‘rustica’ meaning old but not yet antique. Asia put geraniums on the balconies and, after a few disappointments, I found the bar serving the best coffee in the pueblo. All pueblos have a bar, but Little Pueblo has several more than it needs and it appears to be the custom for the local men to go from one to the other until they fall over.
My bar of choice turned out to be the one where all the