I have been waiting for good news on the house: pink champagne won in the bottle tombola of the Fairwarp fete ominously taking up room in the fridge waiting for a bank to decide that our 65,000euro request is a safe bet. But nothing, so rather than wallow, I’m going to count my blessings. My mind’s default setting is negative-I am always looking on the dark side of life, I was brought up like that, but my lovely husband was not- he always sees the positive. So this is for him:

Reasons why it’s worth it-

 The other day an 18 year old boy walked down the street and stood back in mock shock and awe gasping, ‘spiderman de verdad’ (‘ the real spiderman’) as my 4 year old leapt past in his favourite outfit.

Vermouth- drunk with an olive, plenty of ice and a big wedge of lemon served in a shady café in the square.

That local premiership footballers take their kids to our school and park, and that ‘abuela’ our friend’s mother walked right up to one of them  and asked if a controversial foul given in his favour in the previous match was down to his acting skills.

The chance to dream: buying an old country house in a beautiful village, popular year round with walkers for less than 150,000 euros and being in a position to renovate it. Although the re-payments will be difficult, it’s not a project we could even consider in England. In England this kind of dream is the preserve of burnt out city types who downshift their million pound London pads to buy sprawling Cornish farmhouses for a song, before totally gutting them and refitting them with whatever locally sourced organic shiny stuff happens to be on that months in-crowd must have list.

That people take an interest in our lives (well, the children’s), elderly characters now people my boys’ lives like Betty Lollipop, John The Bike Mender and Agnes Shuffle-bottom did mine back in Whalley Range in the 70s and 80s. They stop to talk to us and to marvel at the boys’ progress; the boys at first squirmed at the idea of engaging with gnarly fingered Spanish strangers, but now they will answer their questions, wave and not whizz past them at eye watering speed on their scooters. I have a soft spot for the older generation, there is something both heart-warming and breaking about the way their eyes light up when they see children, as if rejuvenated briefly by their absolute potential. That we are part of some sort of community makes me happy.

That fruit is seasonal: at the moment the first small nectarines are in the shops and in a couple of weeks they’ll be big and juicy and by the end of July they’ll be gone, that cherries are in crazy abundance for no more than 2 weeks, and that the fleeting strawberry heralds  the beginning of summer.

That we live in a kind of cultural bubble, that there is no expectation or pressure to be part of the shitty X factor generation, I don’t just mean X factor, I’m more than happy to watch people who can’t sing willingly humiliate themselves on national TV, but there is no escape from endless derivations of the same inane, ego driven nonsense. There are intelligent people who think that Cheryl whats her face’s hair is a suitable conversation topic or that it’s ok to laugh at Gypsies now because they’re doing it in an ironic way. There is no-one here telling me what’s cool, so I make up my own mind feeling slightly uneasy about some of my choices wondering if they would be panned as cheesy by friends in the know.

When I arrived in Spain 6 years ago, the reasons were clear: swimming in the sea in October, living on my paltry Spanish wage and saving my husband’s UK one for holidays and weekends away, eating a huge plate of steamed mussels with a bottle of chilled red wine for the price of a packet of cigarettes … 6 years on, last week a student asked me what I’m doing here. Lashed by 3 days of consecutive wind and rain, scrabbling around for the 33rd consecutive month for the rent, choosing between buying a coffee or paying for the bus to work, trapped by the demands of 2 small children, surly with the effort of making friends- I don’t know.  

In the last 2 weeks I have watched Kate and Wills get married and my football team win the FA cup, alone. I don’t even like the royal family( i no longer think that they should be evicted to make way for the homeless, but i am at least indifferent and could probably come up with a better way to spend the 20 million the wedding reportedly cost.) but I found myself wallowing in the significance of watching the event alone, pulling my misery up around me like a blanket.  Watching City finally do it after 36 years in my husband’s office squinting to pull the picture of his crappy internet connection into focus was a killer- my friends were there, my brother was there; these are the days that cement relationships and make memories and I am here thinking of the long term.  More and more at the moment I find myself longing for the place, dog- eared grey and miserable though it may be, where I am understood without effort, where I don’t miss 30% of all important information and have to fill in the gaps with an idiot’s smile on my face.

I don’t know  why I’m chasing all this debt, getting so stressed that my jaw aches from holding it set,  all so that we can go and live in a rural village and be more isolated than now, more different, more dependent on my family.

But then I’ve always been a ‘grass is greener’ kind of person.

‘If you don’t relax about this, you’re going to take all the excitement out of it,’ my husband said after he’d told me that he didn’t want to talk about our financial problems any more. I stormed out, those words ringing some touchy bells. The obstetrician had said those exact words to me 3 years earlier in my 41^st week of pregnancy, only he was saying that if I didn’t relax my baby would never come out. Well he didn’t come out and at 42 weeks pregnant and after 12 hours of labour pains but not a millimetre of dilation, he was cut out (like his brother before him). Is it possible to be so uptight that you can’t give birth??  Is there a support group I can join?

So I have decided to pretend that I’m not worried. I tell friends that it’s fine, that the money will come from somewhere and that the house is going very nicely and we’re very excited about moving in in 2 months (two months  f***ing hell…oh my god, I’m panicking again, we’ll never find it, we’ll have to tell the builder to down tools mid job, get a book out of the library and finish the job ourselves. It can’t be that difficult right? And I did want to be involved in some of the work, so I can just as well re-roof a building and plumb in 2 bathrooms and a kitchen as make a cusion cover right?)  No, no I’m not going to worry, I’ll leave that to my husband.