Is it a bit like having Asperger’s living in a foreign country? Wikepedia’s definition of Aperger’s is a person with significant difficulties in social interaction (along restricted patterns of behaviour and interest) . Outside of Foreignland, I am the living opposite of Autistic: I like mess, things that match make me uncomfortable, routine makes me want to chew my own leg off, I am constantly checking out non- verbal communication for signs that I’m boring the living hell out of someone, and if a child so much as scrapes its knee within a 2 mile radius of where I am, I can sense it and am immediately there like a kind of very low level superhero.

But here it’s different. I’ve learnt to communicate in a prescribed way, I can deal with set situations, but if I’m thrown a curve ball, my world comes crashing in and my inability to cope is completely exposed, the linguistic version of coming out of the toilet with you skirt tucked in your knickers. Last month I took my husband to the hospital to have the last of three scans to find out if anything is wrong with his brain following an epileptic fit in a supermarket 20 miles from home. Bearing in mind this scan had been delayed three times and re-booked by telephone, there was precious little paper trail. After the scan, we were sent to reception to book a time to meet with the consultant and discuss the results. I asked the receptionist for an appointment, all smiling and open gestured (foreign, but friendly and capable- nothing to hide, see?) She asked me for the paper referral and I tried to explain that there wasn’t one; that the whole 6 month process had been carried out on the phone. She became increasingly aggressive, shouty and repetitive and I became increasingly panicked and jammed like a broken photocopier (doesn’t she know you have to ease the paper out gently to avoid a complete breakdown?). I couldn’t process what she was saying, the shouting and pointing short circuited me.

When my neighbour very first offered me eggs, she shouted at me, ‘You don’t want eggs? Don’t you like eggs?’ I was very confused. She was shouting and waving her finger at me, but at the same time it was possible that she was offering to give me something. Argh! How to react? Am I being told off? Do I shout back? Do I just wait for her to give up? (but I really want the eggs) In the end I waited it out, smiled politely and told her a good 4 or 5 times, that yes, I did like eggs, then just like that she walked off leaving me on my doorstep a little shaken up looking around to see if anyone had witnessed the egg tyrade or if I’d made the whole thing up. I stood for a few minutes not sure how to play it before she came back, with a dozen delicious eggs all scuffed up with poo and feathers, handed them to me without ceremony or eye contact and left.

Significant difficulties with social interaction.

But I at least I have the sensory oasis that is my house, where I can read every gesture, marry the tone of voice with its situation and speak without thinking it out and getting lost 3 times first. But even that is slowly seeping away from me as my kids, by osmosis, leak through into the other world. Sitting at the kitchen table taking biscuits out of a tin for their snack,  the other day, the eldest one did the double tut head shake which in Spanish means, ‘Thanks for the generous offer of biscuits mum but I’m full.’ But which in English means, ‘Call that a biscuit? You should be ashamed’, which in turn brings out my feelings of ‘you ungrateful little shit’ and so it goes on.

I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a long 15 years or so.

My husband is so optimistic that if, one day, you flushed your wallet down the toilet then accidently cc’ed your boss into an email calling him an incompetent fool before backing over your cat on the way home, he’d probably say, ‘well never mind, it might do your boss some good, the cat was old and anyway, this time next month we’ll be millionaires.’ He can’t help it, it’s in his genes. It’s infuriating.  I, on the other hand am a born pessimist, I can’t help it, it’s in my genes. It’s infuriating.  My husband blames it on my ‘churchy upbringing’; the constant affirmation of failure in your formative years. I can’t help but see the negative in everything. This month we’ve scraped through, but I’m already fretting about not being able to pay next month’s bills.  It’s a fraught way to live when you’re both self- employed without a guaranteed income between you.  But in my favour, I am trying. I’m trying to keep in the forefront of my mind pictures of the here and now; of the good stuff.

On Sunday we drove to the border between Asturias and Leon 1,600 metres up, to where there was more snow than I’ve ever seen before, to take the children sledging. Walking up hills falling up to our thighs in snow, the children thankfully too light to fall so far, screaming and whooping down the hills, my husband throwing himself at the kids’ sledge to stop them  flying off the hillside into the road below. The kids, red faced and glittery eyed saying, ‘this is the best day ever’ in between falling over and hooting with laughter.  We built a 5 foot snowman, ran until we fell face first into the snow, made snow angels and planted a tupperware full of chocolate biscuits at the top of Biscuit Mountain, and then sat exhausted, gloves off, fingers tingling, stuffing them into our mouths. There were only a handful of people there, but on turning a snowy corner, we were completely alone; brilliant blue sky, snow saturated peaks as far as the eye could see, with only the sound of the wind, dipping briefly into complete perfect silence; the sun on my face and the slight sting of cold on my back as I lay looking up at the sky.

When I was a child, we had a tortoise: Tilly. And every Autumn, we packed her into a large cardboard box filled with shredded newspaper and a couple of slices of cucumber in case she woke up peckish, and tucked her into a shady corner of the shed for a really good long sleep.  March the 7^th is a day for thinking about things for me and today I thought of her and her clever ancient body. She went to sleep just as the nights were starting to shorten and missed all the grey loneliness of winter. She knew it would pass; she just didn’t want to be awake during the process. And today, i feel like it has passed. The sun is shining, there are glimmers of pink peeping out of the tips of the peach tree, the daffodil (!) is up and the phone has started ringing, friends want to visit and guests want to book.

Time to get myself out of hibernation.

I’ve spent a good deal of my adulthood dreaming- about writing a best seller, fostering a raggle tag of loveable kids, buying and doing up a house in a beautiful village. Dreaming, I find is much safer than actually going out and doing anything. But then, here I am, with a beautiful house in a beautiful village…and sometimes I hate it.

My favourite place to sit and look at what we’ve done is in the corner of the living room next to the fire; that corner with the blue and white striped window seat, contrasted with a long golden cushion making the stone sparkle, a circle of family pictures hung around a pale blue map of Britain, the 200 year old stone basin raised from underground and now sitting in the corner nursing a large aspidistra, the flash or turquoise wall that makes it warm and homely. This part of the house makes me proud. But then each time I go up, I look at the 200 year old stairs- rotting and gnarly, falling apart, new holes appearing daily in which all manner of bugs and grimy things live, if only in my imagination. The glass in the windows is paper thin and cracked in places and the cold gets in your bones, freezing your brain. There are still naked light bulbs in our bedroom, the tri colour wooden ceiling, peeling with paint, stained by damp, home to the many dangling threads of woodworm make me want to fling myself at the mercy of the home makeover god and ask, ‘when will it be over, let some magic team come in and finish it all while I’m eating cake somewhere warm’. And, of course, nothing is helped by our next door neighbours’ winter tradition of moving 2 cows into the barn next door and saving all their kuxu (shit) up over a 5 month period (it really does get the potatoes off to a flying start). The smell seeps in through the walls and lingers heavy and vaguely embarrassing all over the house, but particularly under the stairs, which is exactly where we have our posh coffee machine and home-made cakes for the guests to help themselves to.

at times like this, i like to recall the serenity prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things i can and the wisdom to know the difference. (at the time of going to press, still waiting for wisdom to be granted.)

I didn’t get where I am today without a certain affinity for humiliation.

Coming home on Thursday night exhausted after another evening  of what feels like trying to teach thai chi to cows I reflect on one more  humiliation in a long line of humiliations that comes from mixing teenagers and a foreign language.

Standing at the blackboard, chalk in hand 4 teenage girls close in on me shouting and screeching excitedly in ‘Bable’ youth speak.  For me to understand the Queen’s Spanish, it must be delivered at a sedate middle aged pace in an otherwise silent setting, ideally supplemented with a white board and a stick for ease of following. In short, I didn’t stand a chance. Add to that the simultaneous talking of which the Spanish are particularly fond and I decided to sit tight till the whole episode had run its course. Out of the melee one girl in particular reared her head, bringing her khol smudged eyes level with mine shouting loud clear and slow, as one might to an elderly relative temporarily confused about where she’s left her boiled sweets, her fingers jabbing in the direction of a  boy at the back, ‘He… prest…yey…ball…or’ …? What could I possibly say?  I said nothing. Another girl rolled her eyes to the heavens and said as if I were not there   ‘ Ves? que no habla espanol. (See? I told you she doesn’t speak Spanish’ .) Tenemos que Speak- English- yeeaas?’

The flaw in our great plan to teach young people stuff, is that we are fighting against their very essence, which depending on the developmental stage, seems predetermined to either skidding on the floor whooping or running round hitting members of the opposite sex whilst looking at you as it you were dog poo.

It is one of life’s great tragedies that I as my 40^th birthday looms, I can think of little better than sitting in a cosy room being told stuff, interrupting the teacher only to say, ‘ fascinating- just a moment while I jot that down’ and yet I remember all too clearly spending a great proportion of my actual school life in an on-going contest with my friend to see who could crawl the furthest  around the  classroom without the teacher noticing.

A recent conversation with my husband went like this:

Me- You know when you were younger did you ever use to work out until you felt sick?

Him- (withering look) No…

a short while later…

Him- You know if you hadn’t met me you’d be one of those mad women who goes to the gym every day and regimentally counts out the number of raisins she has for  breakfast?

I’ll admit there was possibly a time in my past when I relied a bit too much on the gym. Sadly those days are over, so now I look at any physical activity as potential exercise and will do it to its maximum. Am I the only one who does a few bicep curls with the shopping on route from car to kitchen? Anyway, a little bit of heaven came to me in the form of 14 mature trees dumped on our front yard, less than 48 hours before our first British bed and breakfast guests arrived, needing to be split and piled neatly to dry. The chain sawing had been done (by a nice local man with a massive vertical scar on his chin), so all that was left was the axing.

On the first lift, the axe nearly took me back with it. In the proper rural world, this is man’s work. Woman is to be found in the kitchen or vegetable patch. It’s all about technique (and summoning someone who’s wronged you with the subborn ones) my husband told me, and once I got it, I was good. Our lovely neighbour, a man made sturdy from years of chopping and piling wood, smiled at me at first with warnings of how I was going to chop my foot off. On seeing me still there 2 hours later, dripping with sweat with a nice pile of well-split wood, said with a more respectful kind of smile, that he would contract me to help with his wood from now on!

We cleared all that wood in one morning, readied ourselves for winter and got that exhausted but satisfied feeling that only comes from real graft.  How to explain the shaky hands to my students that afternoon was a bit of a problem.

You know you’ve not been home for a long time when on your arrival the cats freak you out. There were enormous glossy coated, pet insured, scaled down tigers prowling the streets of London confidently lolling on pavements inviting passers by to ruffle their ample stomachs. I am used to cats, skinny and wary like Dickensian workhouse children scurrying about in the shadows looking for scraps; a raised voice sending them skittering off giving you the evil eye. Once over the cat shock, I sank into the sense of comfort that comes from being instantly understood, from only half listening to the news but still taking it in, from the welcome distraction of other people’s lives. The number of people who described us as living the dream-I don’t know, right now my dream is to have someone to talk to; hills and mountains only count for so much. So for the first time since moving to Spain, I came back from England reluctantly.

Then on the third day back, my eldest son at school, my husband and youngest out doing the shopping, I got one of the phone calls that we all dread: the emergency services explaining that they had my unconscious husband in an ambulance and had left my 4 year old son in the supermarket 25 miles away. My husband had suffered a fit and remained unconscious for a long time.  In the end, after various tests, he’s home and until we see the neurologist, it’s just one of those freak things that can’t be explained, but it brought home to me how vulnerable we are. Thankfully, the staff in the supermarket were good enough to whisk my son away from the worst of it, thankfully they had the smarts to phone around the area looking for an English family of our description, thankfully it didn’t happen while he was driving and thanks to the lovely student who, on her second visit to my house, drove me 25 miles to the supermarket and then to the hospital. Thanks to all those people- but it doesn’t help my recent feeling of wanting to go home.

…while the sun shines everyone is making hay; either literally or figuratively. My much treasured, and often put upon, mother in law has taken the kids to England for 8 whole days and I’m amazed by the hay making possibilities. 24 hours didn’t last this long before I had kids: it’s like they permanently expand you and when they leave, you are left with all this extra time that wasn’t there before they were born. Like our bellies our days are permanently stretched. Tomorrow I start a 2 week children’s camp- a fantastic opportunity for me. I have free reign and all manner of material to design a 2 week course. I’m planning art and dance and theatre. Wish me luck.

The village is full of the smell of cut and drying hay, the neighbours, men, women, old and young are out in the hills until late in the afternoon collecting- from the balcony yesterday I saw a mound of the greeny yellow stuff bounce along over the roof of the merendero across the river, not realising it was our neighbour with a big raggle-taggle pile skewered onto a pitch fork slung over his shoulder, until he emerged to heft it onto the trailer. Piled high tractors rumble past the house and I share what I like to think is a small nod of solidarity with the female farmer majestically steering her load to its destination. Yeah- we’re all making hay.

I never intended any of this to happen. We left our town in Catalunia because it was too small too isolating and we moved to the city breathing a sigh of relief imagining all the things that city life brings: entertainment, a mix of cultures and exposure to new things. And  little step by little step we’ve ended up living lock stock and barrel in a village with a population of less than 150, the kids signed up to the local school with  15 other students.

We will never fit in, but I try not to stand out too much. I didn’t flinch when the neighbours tipped a barely born kitten clinging to the inside of a hessian sack into the pitch black barn, locking the door and leaving her mewing alone into the night.  There’s a baby donkey up the lane that we take carrots to at the weekend and I don’t comment on the way it flinches pitifully if you make any sudden movement. This is the country and country ways apply; I know that. So I was horrified when we were out for a walk on Sunday night and we saw a horse so heavily pregnant that the outline of the foal was clearly and painfully visible sticking out of her side. She was standing completely still and as I approached I realised that she was tangled in barbed wire, her previous attempts to escape scored in painful cuts across her legs. I watched for a while hoping to god she was going to free herself and I wasn’t going to have to be the crazy interfering foreigner knocking on doors looking for rescue. I stood and stood and hoped and hoped, but she couldn’t free herself and her poor enormous eyes were locked in knowing resignation. What if she went into labour trapped in a fallen barbed-wire fence? I’ve given birth and you don’t need any extra obstacles to deal with.  This was worth standing out for- I headed into the village, knocked on my neighbour’s door and shouted up to her on her balcony in the pouring rain. What would she do, I asked, whose field was it? She told me she wouldn’t do anything, that a passing car would probably see the horse and do something (I didn’t point out that a passing car would see no more than a horse standing still in a field, which is pretty much what one expects when driving through the country side and therefore unlikely to cause alarm and rescue this poor mare). She  did, however, tell me that the field belonged to the slightly scarey man who lives in the house with the broken windows, with the three rangey barkey dogs chained up outside with old food, machinery and tools piled high outside the door. Pretty much a text book house you don’t want to knock at, so I stood outside his door in the still pouring rain, geeing myself up for the knock. I did; quite quietly, possibly hoping not to be heard and I was rewarded with nothing. My husband went later to look for him, calling in at the bars too, but he wasn’t there. So we told each other that horses are valuable things and that he would definitely check on one so pregnant very frequently.  The next day driving to school, we slowed the car down as we approached her field, wondering if she’d had her baby. And at first we couldn’t see her at all but she was standing  in a hidden corner with her still wet, scrumple- furred baby nuzzling at her for milk, its long knock-kneed legs wobbling at the newness of it all. We put the window down for a closer look, ‘welcome to the world baby horse’ we said as we headed off for school.