Jansport

Some years ago, I had a nice girlfriend called Jan. Jan was an urban girlfriend. Unlike some people I knew, she was not given to excessive exercise, hikes, skiing, biking, that sort of thing. These pursuits did not interest her and in fact she knew very little about them. She liked the more normal activities of hanging out, watching TV, going to malls, applying make-up, driving around the suburbs, parking. One day, I was discussing backpacks with a common friend who was about to set out on an extended hike in the Rockies. As we got into the meatier part of the discussion, the brand name Jansport came up, and Jan's ears pricked up immediately. She wanted to know more. Did this have anything to do with her? What was Jansport? We laughed about it at the time, but later, having driven her home, I began musing on the real meaning of the word, and I composed the following more complete explanation for her.

Jansport was first discovered by primitive man many many years ago. When he had advanced to the point when he no longer had to spend every minute of the day hunting and gathering and protecting himself from his enemies, he began to look around for more pleasant ways to spend his time and energies. Jansport was one of his favourite pastimes. It involved the carrying of Jans (Jan is an old Uro-Scandinavian word for the female of the species) to secluded spots, often within hearing distance of the main campfire. The stronger the man, the more Jans he could carry, and, of course, the more fun he would have. The man who could carry the most was known as the Janman of that particular camp and this position gave him great respect and privileges.

Young boys, who had not yet carried their first Jan, were somewhat strangely known as Jans, or Jeunes, and the ceremony by which they attained manhood was known as Janning. For a reason we do not quite understand, this ceremony was always carried out at the coldest season of the year, whence our January. (Some believe that January was named after Janus, the god of the doorway, but since these primitive tribes did not have doors, this appears doubtful; unless of course, we're talking metaphor.) Anyway, as you can see, Jansport was once a very important part of our culture; not surprisingly, some aspects have survived to this day. For more details of the sport, and the fascinating variations it gave rise to across different camps and tribes, you may wish to consult one of the many specialized volumes devoted to the topic.

Travelling by bus

Altea is quite far south on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, about 500 kilometres below Barcelona, so to go anywhere else in Europe you usually take the plane. I did take the bus once though, to Paris. A friend had come to see us on a bus and painted an appealing picture of the experience, with views of the sea and the countryside, comfortable seats, movies on big TV screens, toilets, and, importantly, a much cheaper ticket.

I have to say that the trip did not start off well. My wife dropped me off in Benidorm near the bus stop with a little piece of paper headed Bono de servicio on which the travel agent had scribbled that since the computer wasn't working I had, not exactly a reservation to go to Paris, but a return that was open. Go figure. The words 28,000 pesetas were also written on the bottom of the sheet, and that was indeed what we had paid the previous day, but I wasn't sure it actually proved I had paid for a ticket. It could have been the price I should have paid. Anyway, my wife was now on the road to Madrid with the kids and I was alone waiting by the side of the road for a bus that was supposed to arrive "around noon".

In fact, the bus did arrive at noon. The driver, a small slim young man, dapper in a dowdy French sort of way, jumped down and addressed me without hesitation in French. "C'est vous Fernandez?" he said, without a bonjour or a monsieur or anything. He obviously thought I was Spanish. No, I said, and I held up my Bono de servicio. "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" he said, then, peering carefully and deciphering the Spanish: "B o n o d e s e r v i s i o" He looked up. "C'est quoi votre nom?" I pointed to it on the paper and read it out. "Et Fernandez alors, où est-ce qu'il est?" As if I was somehow responsible. We both went into the little ticket office and he asked again for his Fernandez, his Spanish strongly accented, hardly understandable, but showing the woman a printed sheet he was holding. He seemed quite angry. The woman said nothing but looked at my piece of paper as well as his, picked up the phone and explained the problem to someone. Maybe when the computer had started to work, the agent had made the reservation under a different name? (Dream on...) There was a very long silence as the woman listened carefully to the person on the other end of the phone, then she hung up. "Fernandez no sé", she said, "but this gentleman needs a ticket. Do you have tickets on the bus?" "No, we don't carry tickets. We'll have to see in Valencia. Bon, d'accord, c'est bien." He looked at me with just the slightest hint of a smile, though still angry, and said: "Bon, eh bien, je vous prends à la place de Fernandez alors." He'd take me instead of Fernandez. I boarded the bus, feeling slightly guilty.

The bus was almost empty, so I chose a seat conveniently situated in front of the TV screen, which, smaller than I had imagined, was not yet switched on. The bus pulled away and after a few minutes the TV started suddenly, part way through a video. It was a bullfight, and after a while I realized it was going to be a complete bullfight, six bulls and long periods of waiting and looking at the bloodstained sand and sweaty spectators with white handkerchiefs. When the bullfighters were in action, there was excited commentary in Spanish on technical aspects of the passes and other matters that were difficult to appreciate on a small screen in a moving bus, especially for a non-expert whose tauromachian vocabulary in Spanish is limited. On top of that, the image was in purple and white. I hoped this might be just a problem with the bullfight documentary, which I wasn't really interested in, but no, the set in its present state obviously couldn't display any other colours. So I watched in purple and white both the two Kung-Fu movies and a long French film about how two surprisingly taciturn climbers get to the top of a peak near Chamonix. The whole video part of the bus trip was something of a disappointment.

It turned out a few more disappointments were in store: the individual seat lights didn't work ("Eh non!" shrugged the driver when asked, as if it was something I should have expected), the toilet continuously overflowed, leaving the bathroom floor covered in two inches of water. Where all the water came from I couldn't figure. Then there was the poor old man who, as his wife explained loudly to all of us who were interested, had just had his leg operated on, and who fell headlong in the central aisle, banging his head painfully on a metallic seat arm, as the bus braked hard in a street in Valencia. His wife, who seemed unusually talkative for someone whose husband obviously never listened to her, had kept saying "Eh oui, c'est ça les autobus, c'est ça les autobus" (Oh yes, there's buses for you), over and over again, as if to herself, ever since she got on, though it wasn't at all clear what aspects of the buses she was referring to. She repeated it again, not inappropriately now, after her initial cry of horror, while helpful passengers were trying to get the poor man back on his feet, "Eh oui, c'est ça les autobus."

I wouldn't like to give the impression that the trip was a complete disaster. Some things definitely went well: I got my ticket in Valencia, finally throwing off the spectre of Fernandez; I ate quite well at the restaurant we stopped at, and had time to buy a newspaper. It's true that the first Kung-Fu movie was put on immediately after the meal, which had been somewhat oily, and my stomach became a tad unsettled. Gore and violence, even when the gore is purple, sometimes do that to me, and the knowledge that the toilet was unusable probably didn't help.

But the rest of the trip wasn't bad, once I'd become used to things. The driver got completely lost in Barcelona, twice even, according to the woman in front of me who spent a good part of her time complaining to George, her husband, about this bus company and the various strands of its incompetence. In any case, it took us an hour and a half to get out of Barcelona, which meant that we didn't stop for dinner, near Gerona, until half past ten. It's true that one advantage of buses over trains, I thought at the time, is that you get to stop in real restaurants and eat in relative comfort, instead of in a rattling dining car where things move around and the food is expensive and not at all good. Of course, with trains, there's not the problem of hearing your driver, at his little table close by, ask for a second bottle of wine. The lady who sat in front of me in the bus really took exception to that, and George almost had to intervene. I had a coffee and brandy, still affordable in Spain, and slept most of the night.

Crossing the border between Spain and France was a welcome distraction. There were several black men on the bus, each one taller and blacker than the next, and the lady in front of me had already told George in the restaurant that we'd lose a lot of time at the border because of them. She hadn't mentioned them explicitly, but had made several very obvious jerks of her head in their direction while she was explaining. In fact, the customs officials only kept us long enough so they could watch through the window of the warm bus as four swarthy-looking men were pulled from a little car and a dog was sent in to sniff around. But this dog was definitely not interested in sniffing. His handler would get him into the car and he'd jump out right away. He'd put him back in, encourage him with words and gestures, and he'd jump right back out. Then he actually ran away and both we and our bus's customs officials laughed at their colleagues as they ran around incongruously after him. In the end, the men were allowed back into the car and they left at the same time as us.

In Lyons, at five-thirty in the morning, we didn't manage to find the Perrache bus station where we were supposed to leave some of the passengers. The driver did his best. He asked several people - there weren't many around at that time in the morning - but no one seemed to know where it was. In the end he just left the passengers at the train station, which had the same name, which was something.

I slept some more, and around eight-thirty I was feeling a bit peckish. It was an hour or so before we finally stopped at one of the motorway service areas. The lady in front of me leaned back to confide that the driver hadn't even planned to stop for breakfast - "Vous imaginez!" - and so George had had to go and talk to him. We got lost only once in Paris, but were able to do quite a successful U-turn in heavy traffic on a wide boulevard, and we arrived just an hour late at the bus station after a twenty-four hour journey.

I don't know if I'll try the train next time. I still have an open return ticket from Paris to Benidorm, which I'll probably end up using in a week or so, maybe on a different bus with a different driver. I wonder what that will be like.

Dinner with Ruby

I'm in our house in Spain on my own for a couple of months. One week, I arrange to have dinner with my British friend Ruby at my place on Saturday night. She'll bring a starter and I'll supply the rest. Spending time with Ruby, who drinks and smokes heavily and has a wealth of personal problems, including an exploitative grown-up son, is always stimulating. She is piercingly frank in her relations with people. I have stopped going to restaurants with her because she invariably upsets the waiters within the first few minutes (Has the paëlla man been changed? Because the last time I was here the rice was hard). Then she goes on to float happily on top of the underlying tensions for the rest of the evening, while I cringe. But she's refreshing. She has a great sense of humour and an infectious laugh.

On Saturday afternoon, I notice a text message from her: “Annabella has turned up. If i bring more starters, can u stretch the main course to 3?” I think she's mentioned Annabella once or twice but I've really no idea who she is. They arrive just before 10. You can never tell when Ruby will arrive. Annabella is a large, heavily sunburned Norwegian woman with short dark hair on top of an oversized round head, who looks around the same age as Ruby, sixtyish, and speaks English fluently with a strong accent and the occasional unusual expression. We sit down for a drink and slowly get into the meal, slowly in part because although my contribution has been ready since 7, Ruby's starters arrived raw so we had to prepare the garlic shrimp and steamed mussels after our initial drinky-poos.

As Annabella gets to the bottom of her first bottle of white (Ruby and I are drinking red), she begins to proffer all sorts of information about herself without being asked. She's 69 years old, yes 69, and she doesn't need a man, she doesn't need a man, only sometimes. She looks accusingly at Ruby, who we both know is desperate for a man. Annabella's husband died. She was swept off her feet by him, a man of the world in Oslo with a Mercedes convertible, thirteen or fourteen years older than her, what could she do? The men her age couldn't compete. You know? And he was a very handsome man, very handsome. Do you know what it is, a Mercedes convertible in Oslo in the fifties? Her father said if she went off with him she could never go home again. But they got married, went off to Africa.

Did I love him? She looks at me intently and sips her wine as if waiting for me to answer. I don't know, she says finally. Did I love him? Anyway, they divorced. He was a woman killer, lots, lots of women. You know? You understand? Did she have children? I ask. She holds one hand up with all her fingers open as if about to grasp a bunch of something and says grandly “Two”. The first when she was 33, in Liberia. That was a lovely hospital! And now they blame her for everything. After her divorce she had to bring them up by herself and she knows she made a lot of mistakes. But it's difficut being a lonely mother. You know? A lonely mother? She draws a square in the air with her two index fingers and says “Life is a circle. You know? A circle.” Her daughter told her she'd ruined her life. Was it my fault she found the wrong man and got pregnant? Was it my fault? She's quite upset now, and we try to reassure her. Having finished the white wine, she begins on the second bottle of red which we've just opened, and lights another cigarette. She's already on her second pack.

She doesn't like this part of Spain, too many Brits, too many tourists. She lives in a tiny village in the interior. She came here for the sea, because she's from the sea, Norway is the sea, and now she lives in the interior. She laughs to herself. She lives in a cave, she says. A real cave? (I have a friend here who used to live in a village of cave-houses so it's not that unusual...) No, explains Ruby, it's not a cave, it's an old house, falling to pieces, basically a whole block, 400 square metres, that she bought to share with her daughter and her American son-in-law, but only a small part is liveable and there's no natural light, so it's like a cave.

“I love my urine” Annabella says, unexpectedly, smiling at me. “I love my urine.” I look at Ruby for clarification, but Ruby's concentrating on opening her second pack of cigarettes, her fingers fumbling with it, trembling. It seems Annabella's daughter and son-in-law have now split up, so they won't be sharing the house, and she's looking to sell it. With no warning, as if she were voluteering some new item of information, she begins to sing, powerfully and with a heavier accent. Looking around, I worry about our Dutch neighbours, very nice people, with whom I have so far had very good relations. It's now way past midnight and we're sitting outside on the front terrace, in the intense quiet of the summer night. She loves to sing, says Ruby, with a big smile, puffing contentedly on her latest cigarette. Encouraged, Annabella begins another song. Then another. All sad English or American love songs, sung with great feeling, though because of the amazing accent I have an uncontrollable desire to laugh (and I do, can't help myself). No, no, stop, says Ruby. I don't want to hear any more. I'm temporarily relieved. The decibel level was really very high, the deep voice seemed to penetrate everthing.

But now it's Ruby's turn to talk about herself, her problems finding a man. She's subscribed to an internet dating service where she described herself straightforwardly as a 59 year-old who likes to discuss literature, indulge in nude sunbathing, and the like. But who do they suggest as compatible? A 72 year-old dentist who dies his hair and has false teeth. He says he likes to swim in the nude but he lives in an apartment. I asked him “Where do you swim in the nude, in the communal pool?” She throws her head back and laughs uproariously. I suggest he might be an interesting guy. She gets angry. But I don't want just an interesting guy. I want sex! She shouts this out loudly and I look again towards the neighbour's house, all dark and silent. I need to have sex, she shouts, articulating the words very clearly. Annabella serves herself her third or fourth glass of red and nods her head. Ruby repeats very loudly. I want sex. I'm at my peak. I need sex. I don't want an old dentist with false teeth. She laughs again. Annabella asks soothingly if we'd like her to sing in Norwegian, and without waiting for a response begins another sad ditty. After three or four lines, she apparently forgets the words and apologizes. She finishes the bottle of red. But I love my urine, she says. Ruby laughs. Ruin, she says, ruin, it's pronounced ruin.

A Chippy

I'm sitting alone at a little table in my favourite Chippy in Benidorm, waiting for my cod and chips to arrive and vaguely watching Sky news on one of the small dirty TV sets they have perching on old wooden crates. What a dump this place is, badly furnished and decorated, run-down, smelly even – there must be a sewer opening somewhere - and yet what surprisingly good fish and chips they make. Probably the best I've found since I left England thirty years ago.

The news on Sky is boring as hell, and repetitive: some aged celebrity accused of assault in an Indian restaurant, the race to find a candidate to run against Gordon Brown, the search for poor little Madeleine... Then they announce that some guy, the manager of Wigan Athletic Football Club, is leaving. Big deal! I think. What a huge event for national news! Wigan Athletic. Wigan! Who on earth is this guy, and so what if he's stepping down, or being fired, or whatever it is? I start musing on the amazing sorts of things that interest people. This is like hearing that the coach of some Saskatchewan minor hockey club has quit, or left his wife, or gone into municipal politics. No but really, who cares? On the other hand, I think, always reasonable, there must be people in England for whom this really is a big deal. Wigan supporters, of course, all the tens of thousands of Wiganians, but probably others too. Wigan must be in what, the third division?

As I'm musing thus, a very large man with red arms and fat legs the same thickness all the way up, in shorts and moving with difficulty, grasping a thick colourful cane, gets up heavily from a nearby table and for some reason chooses me to tower over and address in a loud voice. Did they say Paul Jewell was leaving? From Wigan? I ask, not sure of the guy's name or his position. Yeah. Yes, I think that's what they said. Bloody hell! He stares intently at me as if I should be overcome with grief or pain or astonishment and must communicate the depth of my feelings to him without delay. He waits a little for some reaction, staring stupidly. Couldn't hear much, I say, gesturing towards the tv set. Lots of noise.

Bloody hell, he says again, and he just stopped them from going down. He stares at me with aggressive, bloodshot eyes, unsteady, balancing on his cane, and I worry he might fall on top of me. I can't think of anything to say. Bloody hell, he says again. Bloody hell, and mercifully hobbles off back to his wife, casting at me a final reproachful backward glance. As he sits down, they're giving out the same news item again. Jewell, he's called, that's right, Paul Jewell, and he just helped Wigan to stay in the Premier League.

An Apartment

Make yourself at home. No one's going to be using the apartment for the moment, so you won't be disturbed. Here are the keys. The funny one with the little holes or pits is for the downstairs entrance, the outside and the inside, then this one with the round end is for this lock and the other one is for the bottom lock. There's also a security chain on the door here. See?

And this other key?

Oh that one I'm not sure. But the other one, the silver one, it also opens the storage room just outside the door. This is the intercom. You push this button to open the downstairs door.

Which door? Both of them?

Yes. And there's the little peephole. It doesn't really work well but at least you can see more or less if anyone's there. Don't open to the gypsies. I have to go now, I'm late already, but I have to explain a couple of things first. Come to the bathroom. Here, this tube that goes into the back of the sink, it began to leak. That's why we have the pan there. It began to leak and so I asked the woman in the bakery downstairs and it seems you can turn the water off using these taps up here on the wall by the tub. So the water's turned off now, that's why you don't see any dripping into the pan.

So we can't use the bathroom?

What? (Slightly angry) What do you mean?

Well, if there's no water?

No, no. I didn't say there's no water. There's no water from the cold tap, which unfortunately means you mustn't use the toilet. But the hot water tap works fine still.

Yeah, but it's hot...

No, no. It's only hot if you turn the water heater outside on the balcony on, and it's off. Dolores is the one who knows how to light it. It's like the one my mother had, you know, very tricky.

So what about the toilet?

The toilet?

Yeah.

Well, you use the other one.

A Wall

Work on the wall was progressing quite smoothly. Francisco had taken down the first section he'd built, which was leaning over just a bit too much for our liking, though he saw no problems with it (“Oh, don't worry, we'll make it up on the parging.”), and the rebuilt part was now almost vertical. We had also come to an agreement about where exactly the wall should be in the garden, and where it would end, although that was still subject to change depending on how high we eventually decided to make it. Then, just as everything seemed to have fallen into place, the police arrived. We had not taken out a permit to build the wall of course. For minor jobs like this, people never bother, and this was not only minor, but a replacement for a previous wall, parts of which had been falling over on us from time to time. However, apparently someone had lodged a complaint against us. In fact, whoever it was had made at least two complaints, one against us, and one against Bertha, our nice German neighbour opposite, who was having her terrace repaved.

The two policemen spent quite a while at Bertha's. This was understandable because even after living in Spain for twenty-five years, apart from being able to count to ten in Spanish and say perro as she points to her dog, she speaks only German. For Spaniards, communication with her, such as it is, depends a great deal on gestures, intuition and good will, which it must be said the policemen seemed to have in abundance. Finally though, they left her and appeared at our gate, and Francisco went down to see what was up. One of the policemen was Moses, his ex-unofficial-brother-in-law, and as we watched from inside the house we could see them go through preliminary greetings with what appeared to be considerable bonhomie. There followed a lengthy discussion and much serious gesticulation, which we watched with growing concern.

When they finally left, Francisco reported back to us in an uncharacteristically sombre mood. Not only had someone complained, they had done it by phoning the chief of police that morning, a man who we now discovered lives just down the road. He it was who had immediately sent Moses and his colleague to investigate. This was serious stuff: the complainant obviously had connections. It's not just anyone who can call up the chief of police and get something done right away.

We had noticed that poor Bertha, who apparently doesn't know how you can treat policemen in Spain, had actually let them enter her garden and look at the work that was being done, so Moses and friend had served her with a formal complaint, which meant all work had to stop at once and she would probably have to pay a fine. In our case, Francisco had of course not let them past the front gate, and he had described the work he was doing – much broader in scope than Bertha's - in such a way that they laughed and gave us a friendly verbal warning, although we were still supposed to stop. They told me I could use up the mortar we've already made, said Francisco, looking around wistfully at the blocks waiting higgledy-piggledy to be added to the wall. He paused and smiled, happier now. But this afternoon and tomorrow the police don't work. We can get quite a bit done.

According to Francisco, as long as we rushed down to the town hall and applied for a minor building permit right away, all would be well. They're open until three, he assured us. Surprisingly, this being a Saturday, they were. We got the forms, each one in triplicate, addressed to his excellency the Lord Mayor of A***, and very complicated, and showed Francisco that there were parts we couldn't fill in ourselves, about the type of work, a plan signed by an architect, no less, the name and details of the contractor, etc. He looked at them suspiciously – he can only just read – and reached for his cell phone. Moses, he said, we got the forms. Pause. Yes. You're going to have to fill them in for me. No, no, no. No, you have to do it. Right. Pause. Ok? Good. He snapped his phone shut and turned to us with a big smile. Moses will fill them in. He knows how to do it. We apparently looked surprised, because he found it necessary to explain: He does it all the time. He has this ongoing battle with his neighbour, she's a terrible woman. As soon as he does anything, she complains about him, and he has to get a permit. Then he complains about her, she gets a permit. It's been going on for years. He's filled in these forms so many times and he has to do it really well otherwise the lawyers get hold of it and she wins. They just hate each other. They're always at it.

When he'd left for lunch at around two-thirty I went to see Bertha. My German is not too good, but I looked up the words for permit and complaint in my dictionary before leaving the house and partly because she speaks beautifully clearly things went pretty well. When I asked if she had a permit, using the long word I'd found in the dictionary (Genehmigung), she snorted loudly. My wife and I had assumed that being German she would respect the rules, but either she had been in Spain too long or our stereotypes were outdated. Eine Genehmigung? Of course not, she said, lifting her eyes up towards heaven. But aren't the workers German? I asked, thinking that they at least, or the company they worked for, would be law-abiding. She looked me in the eye. Polen, she said, pushing her lips forward in a way I maliciously saw as disapproving, Polen. She threw up her hands, then pointed to the little patch of terrace next to the entrance that remained to be finished: they had to stop everything, she said, alles gestoppt, and just two square metres left. And I might have to pay a fine. Then suddenly, she laughed. Good thing they don't know about the apartment, she said, her mood now changed. Bertha is a very upbeat sort of person. She'd just had a completely separate apartment built underneath her house which she'd showed us proudly a few days before. Apparently sans Genehmigung.

So who do you think complained? María, she said at once, nodding in the direction of María's house. It must be María. But why? I didn't know you even knew her. We knew María because she'd tried to sell us a house once. She is a real-estate agent, very well-connected, a wiry high-pitched woman who is incredibly pushy. She and I hadn't got along at all well and we'd ended up buying our house from someone else. I could see her ratting on us, but why on Bertha? Bertha snorted again and began to speak more quickly. Do I know her? Of course I know her. She sold me the house, she does my rentals, I've known her for 25 years. But why would she lodge a complaint against you? Well, real estate's not doing too well, is it? and she does a lot of construction, renovations, and stuff like that. She always did things for me before but she's very expensive, so I stopped using her. It would have cost more than twice as much if I'd done this with her instead of the Poles. It's María, for sure. I mentioned that whoever complained had apparently phoned the chief of police directly. She raised her elbows in a sort of shrug and briefly closed her eyes: María! Of course.

Go figure

Even though I am a university professor, subject to many of the failings of my profession, I have always prided myself on a certain level of practicality. Unlike some of my academic colleagues, I paint walls and drill holes. I have been known to build small pieces of furniture which do not wobble. I can do simple plumbing and electrical stuff, and am sometimes able to determine why a vacuum cleaner or a coffee maker no longer works. Experience and considerable success in these matters have induced me, in normal circumstances, to attempt to figure things out for myself before calling in a professional, and this has almost always paid off, not only financially, but in the satisfaction one draws from a job well done and from the cluckings of envy one occasionally hears from the wives of less gifted colleagues. A few years ago, when I took a sabbatical leave in France, I was confident that these abilities would be directly transferable from Calgary to Paris.

On my arrival in Paris, after overcoming the usual administrative and practical difficulties, I finally managed to rent a small apartment in the 1er arrondissement. It was situated just under the roof on a sixth floor and accessed via a narrow winding staircase with a cast iron railing and well-worn wooden steps which the concierge, not a small woman, carefully polished on her knees every week. I remember the first night in the place was very cold. It must have been October or early November and Paris can be freezing at that time of year. The apartment had a modern heating system, much vaunted by the proprietress, a perky, petite young woman who had been living there alone until her recent mariage to an up-and-coming plumber from the suburbs. It consisted of two electric radiators on little wheels which you plugged into wall receptacles, so connecting them not only to the electricity supply but also to a thermostat mounted on the kitchen wall. Unfortunately, the thermostat had been wired in such a way that when the room reached the temperature you set on the dial, it turned the heating on, instead of off. At first, of course, I didn't realize this. The room was cold, and it seemed that whatever temperature I selected, the thermostat would not turn the heat on. I imagined that the thermostat might be broken, but fortunately this was not the case. For the thermostat to turn the heat on, the room had to be warm, or the thermostat had to believe it was warm.

One way to achieve this, which I discovered later, quite by accident, was to turn the thermostat down to whatever temperature the room happened to be at. The thermostat then turned on the heat and later when it was warm you could reset the dial to give you the impression that the temperature was being maintained at a constant level. Of course, this was not really so. Once it turned the heat on, the thermostat would not turn it off unless the room cooled to below the temperature at which it was set. And the only way to get this to happen, short of a power cut, was either to unplug the radiators, or to open all the windows on a sufficiently cold day, and wheel the radiators as far as possible away from the thermostat.

Now there was another way to get the thermostat to turn the heat on, though it was not immediately apparent, and that was to make constant use of the refrigerator. The inside of the refrigerator, which was maintained at a low temperature by its own internal thermostat, would then warm up, because slightly warmer air from the room would enter each time the door was opened. When this happened, the fridge's thermostat, which worked perfectly, would turn on the fridge's cooling system, situated at the back of the unit and directly underneath the room thermostat. As the inside of the refrigerator was cooled, heat escaped from the cooling unit to the outside and rose to the level of the room thermostat, inducing it to believe that the room was warm, and therefore to turn on the heat. The physical properties of heat, which always tries to rise, and of cooling systems, which give off heat in one direction and cold in the other, were reasonably well known to me all along, but the way in which they worked together in the flat to get the thermostat to turn on the heat did not become clear to me for some time, so keeping warm was a matter of luck, blankets and patience for several days.

In order to keep the above description simple, I have purposely omitted mentioning the water heater control unit, also situated on the kitchen wall underneath the room thermostat, and which, due to some internal malfunction of a kind which I believe is common in electrical switchwork, heated up when in use and also affected the thermostat. Whether it affected it more than did the refrigerator cooling system, so that instead of opening and closing the fridge door, I would have been better employed running hot water for baths, or less, as I first assumed to be more probable, I cannot say for sure. In any case, the role of the water heater control unit did not become apparent to me until after I had repaired the room thermostat, so a choice was not really open to me at the time.

When I finally realized that the reason for my problems was that the thermostat turned the heat on instead of off when the desired temperature was reached I at once borrowed a small screwdriver from the concierge and reversed the two wires which connected the thermostat to the rest of the circuit. This operation was really very simple and I was helped by the diagram clearly printed on the inside of the thermostat cover, with instructions in English, which the installer had obviously not noticed, understood, or seen fit to follow. Apart from a small spark which flickered across the two contacts when they closed, or opened, the thermostat now worked perfectly. When I set the dial, the radiators turned themselves on, and they clicked off when the room was comfortably warm. I returned the screwdriver to the concierge and lived for a while in smug satisfaction.

I was taking a shower, just a few weeks later, when the water suddenly ran cold. This was unpleasant of course, but also unusual, because the hot water tank was large - it took up most of the space above the bathtub where you might have wanted to stand up when showering - and it worked automatically. Like the fridge, it had its own internal thermostat, which switched on the heating element whenever the water fell below a certain temperature. This it was obviously no longer doing. Over the next few weeks, I discovered that it hadn't actually stopped working, but that it now worked intermittently. Since it had worked well before I repaired the thermostat, and since it was now clear to me that the different parts of the electrical system were highly interdependent, I at once suspected that my repair might be the cause of the trouble, and that when the room thermostat worked properly, it might be impossible for the water heater to function, although I could not imagine why.

It was at this point that I discovered, upon careful inspection of the whole circuit, that the water heater control unit heated up when the water heater was in operation and combined with the heat from the refrigerator cooling unit to affect the room thermostat situated above it, as I have already explained. However, the effect now was the opposite of before. With the thermostat working properly, the heat rising from the cooling unit and the water heater control unit together caused the thermostat to switch off the radiator before the rest of the room reached the desired temperature. Instead of working for me, these units were now working against me, though I had not been noticing this because by the time I had understood the fault in the thermostat wiring and corrected it, spring had arrived and it was much warmer.

So the problem now was not so much the heating of the room as the heating of the water, and it was still not at all clear to me why the water heater no longer worked properly. The fault was all the more difficult to detect because the heating element was quite inaccessible and had no tell-tale light or noise which would have allowed me to see or hear whether it was working or not at a particular time. A sudden cold spell provided the solution. During the cold weather, the water heater worked very well. As soon as it became warm again, it stopped. At first this obvious connection with the weather caused me to abandon my original hypothesis, which was that my repair to the thermostat had caused all the trouble. It was not my reversing the polarity of the thermostat wires that had caused the water heater to stop working, I now thought, but the warm weather. This new hypothesis got me nowhere. I racked my brains, but could not imagine how a water heater, which is simply a heating element in a tank of water, might be affected by the arrival of spring.

At last, it was a combination of the two hypotheses which gave me what I now believe may be the correct solution. The water heater worked well when it was cold because that was when the room thermostat turned the heat on. There was some complicated wiring relationship between the water heater and the room thermostat such that when the room thermostat decided to turn the heat off, the water heater was turned off too. Since, as I have explained, when the water heater began to work, its control unit heated up and induced the thermostat to turn the heating off (originally on, of course, so the heater worked fine then, but now, since my repair, off), it couldn't work for any length of time, and neither, now, did the heating. Only when it was very cold were they both switched on frequently enough for the water to heat up and the room get warm. In the summer, I would not be able to have hot water at all.

It turned out to be impossible for me to redo the wiring of the water heater, much of which was hidden behind plasterwork. Of course, I considered calling in a professional, but it was late in my sabbatical by now and in any case I knew it was hopeless to attempt to explain to an impatient Parisian worker not only the various electrical interdependencies but the role of the weather. The French half close their eyes and can be very cutting when they judge your explanations inadequate. In the end I just switched the wires on the room thermostat back to where they were when I arrived, unplugged the radiators and set the temperature on the thermostat to zero. The water heater now worked perfectly all the time, which was all I needed for the summer. In September, I returned to Canada, leaving the apartment to a brash American youth with a hauntingly pretty French girlfriend. After looking around the place, while she sat fetchingly on the little bed, he explained to me with wide, powerful gestures how easy it would be to improve it, recaulking the windows, adjusting their catches so they wouldn't fly open at night, fixing the wall plugs so they all worked, and stopping the drip in the toilet. The pretty girlfriend seemed impressed, so I chivalrously refrained from mentioning any problems the young man might have missed, and wished them a very pleasant stay.

¡Qué calor!

Madrid is always very hot in the summer, yet incredibly the people who live there still don't seem to have got used to it. ¡Qué calor! they say all the time. ¡Qué calor! My God it's hot! They even sell ¡Qué calor! T-shirts to the tourists so they'll know how it's written, with an exclamation mark before and after, emphasizing their utter astonishment.

In the family I was staying with for a month while I took Spanish classes, the little grey-haired grandmother appeared to base a good part of her verbal behaviour on this expression. At first, this did not surprise me. I was astonished at how hot it really was, and that she too should find it hot and attempt to communicate her impressions to me in this wonderfully simple and comprehensible form, without irregular verbs or complex syntax, seemed to me quite normal. By the third or fourth day, however, meeting her several times a day, it seemed to me that she tended to overdo it, for our conversations were limited to this subject, and indeed to these words. While I appreciated the linguistic benefits that were accruing to me from the pattern repetition, I was also a trifle miffed, in fact, more and more miffed. She obviously considered me either congenitally incapable of dealing with other subjects, or a desperately slow learner, so that despite the intensive lessons she knew I was taking for eight hours a day in the blazing heat, I could not be expected to make any improvements to my understanding or production of her language. ¡Qué calor Juan! she would say to me as we met in the corridor – whenever I left my room, I met her in the corridor – ¡qué calor Juan! Juan is of course not my name, but the one she had chosen for me after deciding on the first day that my real name was unpronounceable, ¡Qué calor Juan!, and I would say, si ¡qué calor!, or sometimes just si, si, in my rapidly improving Spanish.

On the morning of the fifth or sixth day, I met abuela in the corridor on my way to the bathroom at 7:30 or so in the morning when it was really still quite cool. I was at that very moment laboriously composing a sentence in my head to indicate to her how nice and cool it was, providing a variant on our usual topic, showing my real interest in it, and practicing my Spanish at the same time. But then, quite unexpectedly, she looked at me and said ¡Qué calor, Juan! ¡qué calor! At this point I realized that my still emerging sentence would be quite useless. It was not possible to communicate rationally with abuela on this topic. Either her mind was made up, or the words were simply an automatic response to the stimulus of seeing me. I grunted my usual si and continued on my way to the bathroom.

The following morning, the remains of my prepared sentence still coursing through my mind, and having spent no little time reflecting on the subject, I met abuela in the kitchen and managed to reply to her usual greeting with a statement that it seemed to me still really quite cool. If her behaviour thus far had been completely conditioned, my statement obviously shocked her out of it. ¿No tienes calor? she said, incredulous. No, I said, in my best Spanish. Abuela was speechless, and having no further sentences prepared, I went to the dining room to have breakfast. As I sat down, abuela's daughter came into the kitchen, which you could see from the dining room, and I heard abuela say to her, her voice trembling, ¡Juan no tiene calor!

As a way of dealing with the heat, abuela herself had a fan, as most Madrid women seem to do, and fanned herself continuously. One evening, in an unusually talkative mood, she told me that if my mother didn't have a fan, a hand fan like hers, I should take her one back as a gift. I explained through the English girl who was helping me understand these longer, conditional sentences, that my mother in Leeds had little use for a fan, and we smiled knowingly at each other, a nice girl. However, abuela could clearly not get her mind around this. The expression on her face, even more than the words she used, and which the girl chose mostly not to translate, clearly showed that she had now added to her poor opinion of my linguistic and intellectual abilities, and her scarcely veiled disapproval of my unnatural insensitivity to heat and cold, the damning conviction that I was an ungrateful son.