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.