The way we were

As look-back-and-cringe moments go, walking around town with a copy of the Spanish sports (mainly football) paper Marca tucked under my arm when I first arrived in Malaga must rank near the top. I'm still not sure what I was trying to prove or achieve with this idiotic display of hubris (I couldn't understand a word that was written in it and didn't know who any of the players were) but I'm pretty sure the end result - looking like a halfwit - was never part of the plan.

In my more self-forgiving moments, I put this folly down to wanting to be seen to be trying to integrate, although in the rather more frequent less self-forgiving moments I put it down to being a halfwit. Anyway, what's done is done and I'm pretty sure there's no photographic evidence anywhere, so we can move on.

The thing is - and at the risk of stating the obvious - things were a lot different thirty years ago. These days, anyone taking a gentle stroll around Malaga city centre can be sure of being treated to an astonishing array of middle-aged foreign people eating and drinking things on terraces; in the nineteen nineties, in those very same places, children played football with doorways for goalposts and drew hopscotch grids on the streets in coloured chalk. (If I'm sounding a little wistful at this point, it's because I am.) Anyway, it was clear as day that if you wanted to stick around the city as a foreigner at that time, you had no choice but to integrate as fully as you could into Spanish life.

Thus, I found myself sitting in teterías (Moroccan-style tea rooms), ostensibly taking part in tertulias (some kind of conversation/debating thingamajigs) understanding next to nothing, nodding sagely and wishing I was in the pub. I went to a Spanish wedding that seemed to last for about three months but suspect it was just one very long Saturday, to flamenco concerts so intense that my teeth got a headache, to pop and rock gigs where everyone knew every word to every song except guess who, and beach parties where my skin turned the colour of the tinto de verano I was drinking while yearning for a pint of lager.

Meanwhile, on the rare occasions I found myself actually at home, I attempted to watch as much Spanish TV as possible. This seemed to consist of three main categories: films involving fifty-year-old bald moustachioed men pursuing twenty-year-old Swedish blonde women to no avail, quiz programmes with impossibly difficult questions (the few I could vaguely understand anyway) and televised screaming matches where people with lots of facial plastic surgery would jab their fingers at each other and turn a fetching shade of purple 'debating' the relative merits of the private life of some bullfighter's wife or other.

Weirdly, I sometimes miss those early years in Malaga.

Not the paper-under-the-arm thing, though.

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