The Tapas Tradition

.I have heard a number of accounts of the origin of the tapa. I don't know which one is true,if any of them, so I'm not going to go into that. However, in a local online newsletter the other day, a lady posted quite a harsh criticism of a bar she had visited with friends. She complained that when they asked for tapas they were told that they could not have them outside, only at the bar.

So, for those of you heading down here for a visit, here are a couple of things you should know. Traditionally men would drop into their local bar after the day's work to share a drink or two and a chat with their friends. They would sit or stand at the bar. With their drink they would often be served a morsel of food - a tapa. After a couple of drinks they would head off home to eat.

Occasionally - very occasionally in the days I'm talking about - they would want something more substantial than the tapa. In that case they would sit down at a table and order a 'ración' ( a portion) or a 'media ración' (half portion) of whatever was available. A half portion is about the size of a starter, and a portion is equivalent to a main course.

So the lady was offended by a simple fact of life in a Spanish bar catering mainly for Spanish customers; you eat tapas at the bar and tables are for people who want something more substantial. Foreign owned bars and bars aimed at holiday makers may very well serve you with tapas wherever you sit, the Spanish probably won't.

Something else that is useful to know. If you order a drink and the owner or waiter brings you a tapa without being asked then it will be free. And if he brings you something with every drink, those too will be free. You will pay only for the drinks. Of course you are perfectly entitled to browse the tapas display and ask for whatever takes your fancy, but if you do that you will be charged for your tapas. It's no longer a gesture of hospitality; it's a purchase.

I hope you get to sample lots of tapas standing with the crowd at the bar.

Described By A Cake

Forty years ago we were living on a new estate in the northwest of England with our two small daughters. Next door were another couple, also with two daughters, though three or four years older than ours. The four children became firm friends and that friendship has continued down the years even though three of them have moved south. The fourth, and eldest, girl remained in the North, but through our own daughters we have kept a contact. One of the highlights of our recent stay in the UK was the opportunity for my wife to celebrate her seventieth birthday at a lunch for family and close friends. Which brings me back to Deb, the eldest of the four girls. One of her passions is making and decorating cakes, to which she brings a very high degree of skill and artistry. As two of our friends were travelling down from Lancashire, a thought occurred to me. I would ask Deb to produce a 70th birthday cake. But what should it be like? Here I drew on long unused market research skills, when I used to conduct what are now called focus groups, and in which you would ask people strange questions like, “If Gordon Brown were a car, what car would he be?” I emailed everyone on the invitation list and invited them to email Deb with their answers to the question, “If Mary were a came, what kind of cake would she be?”. Once Deb had had time to digest all the suggestions, a final brief was agreed, the cake was duly made, handed over to our friends to transport to Surrey - they tell me that at every service area stop on the journey down, they gingerly opened the boot of the car to make sure everything was OK - and smuggle into the restaurant where it was put on display ahead of everyone arriving. It came as a complete surprise to Mary and she was delighted with it. From the photo above, I guess you can see why.

Homeward Bound

Four weeks have flown by and on Sunday we head back home to Frigiliana. As you can imagine, it has been a real pleasure to spend an extended period with our granddaughters, one of whom moved up to secondary school on Wednesday. That was a prospect that she faced with some trepidation, but is now taking to like a duck to water, and is already making new friends. Of course as a secondary school pupil she has to have her smartphone - officially so that she can ring Mummy or Daddy if she has any problems, such as missing the school bus, but in reality so that she can join the texting generation; she was highly amused to tell me on Day 1 that she had spotted her friend Martha at the other side of the playground and had texted her to ask how she was, and then Martha texted back and asked where are you, so L texted again to say, “The other side of the yard, and I can see you from here.” We’ve also enjoyed a pretty good English August with temperatures in the low to mid twenties and only the occasional rainy day. That has allowed us to get a lot more exercise than is possible in Spain’s August heat, although that has inevitably been offset by the holiday spirit which involves eating and drink ing more than we would at home. Awaiting me in Spain is an outpatient’s appointment at the local hospital on Thursday and a meeting the following Monday across in Benalmádena at a hospice that I support. A team is to be assembled that will be available throughout the hospice catchment area to visit groups and talk about our work, what services are available and how we are funded. I’ve volunteered to be part of that team, and am really looking forward to it as in the past I’ve done many talks to various different types of growps in the UK about my work, both as a hypnotherapist and later as a magistrate. So I’ve a lot to look forward to, including of course, meeting up once more with friends in the village.

A Wonderful Family Week

It's just the two of us for the rest of today and until we leave to head back to England tomorrow; my daughter and her two children have driven up to Glasgow and fly back tonight to avoid a very long car journey. The weather has been mixed, but the pleasure has been total. Particularly interesting is to see L and N enjoying the self-same activities that absorbed their mother and aunty some forty years ago when they holidayed here at much the same ages - scrambling on the rocks, playing on the putting green and the children's playground, visiting the lifeboat shed shop, spending their money in the amusement arcade (maximum stake, 2p), enjoying watching the farm animals in the field adjoining the cottage, and, of course eating out, especially the fish and chips. Probably I and my two brothers delighted in similar things many more years earlier on our own seaside holidays, and so did my wife. However we try to fit them into the current fashionable educational straitjacket, children - if you let them just be children - don't change from one generation to another.

A Long And Winding Road

One way to deal with the August heat of Frigiliana is to go somewhere else. Which is how I come to be sitting in a conservatory in southern Scotland looking out across brilliant green, sheep-dotted fields to the cliff edge and the Irish Sea beyond. The remedy has turned out to be more painful in many ways than the illness, as it were. Instead of a ferocious sun shining out of a cloudless sky and inflicting temperatures of 35 to 40 degrees upon us, it’s heavy, grey clouds cud dins across the sky at breakneck pace, dumping frequent heavy showers on us and driven by winds of 40kph gusting frequently to 80kph. All this to the accompaniment of 14 degree temperatures, and yes I am talking about daytime. And yet…. I’m delighted to be here where the story of Frigiliana began. Back at the beginning of the 1970s we had recently moved from Oxfordshire to Ramsbottom, north of Manchester. WE had two small daughters and an uncomfortably large mortgage, and holidays did not feature on our list of spending priorities. Then my wife’s parents came up with a suggestion; if they rented a suitably large holiday cottage, could we afford the petrol to get to it? We gratefully said yes we could and they rented a cottage on a farm two miles south of Portpatrick in the extreme southwest of Scotland. That cottage is no more than 200 metres from where I am writing this, although I cannot see it as it sits into the side of the hill. The welcome we received from the farmer and his family, the surroundings, the harbour in Portpatrick ensured a fantastic holiday, and as a family of four we came back and back, sometimes with family members, sometimes with friends, and sometimes just the four of us. Then one year we were late booking and the cottage was already let. This was a terrible disappointment because my wife and I had concluded that it would probably be our last visit; the girls were getting to be that bit too old to be happy stuck on a farm two miles from what passed as ‘the action’ in those days. But fate was on our side. We chanced upon an ad for a holiday apartment actually in the village, yards from the harbour and so Portpatrick took on a new life. We also became friendlier with Eric, the farmer who insisted that we should join him at The Old Mill House, a bar restaurant on the edge of the village, popular with locals and with families from the nearby caravan sites. That, in turn, introduced us to Pat and Judy the owners and good friends of Eric. Pat had spent his working life in the advertising industry in the creative departments of several major London agencies. He was also a gifted water colourist and his paintings were displayed throughout the restaurant. My life at the time was in market research and involved a good deal of contact with ad agencies and so we had much in common and became good friends. Then Pat and Judy, who hitherto had spent the winter cruisingg, decided that they would rather invest their money in something that would give them a holiday facility, but would also be an investment. The outcome was that they bought an old village house “La Casa De Los Arcos” in the Andalusian village of Frigiliana. Shortly afterwards they invited my wife and I and our two daughters to visit them in Spain so we could spend proper leisure time together - Portpatrick for us was holiday; for them it was the busiest time of the year, and so they really didn’t have much time to pause and chat. Well, that first visit, back in 1983, worked its magic on us and led eventually to us coming to Frigiliana to live. Portpatrick turned out to be the unknowing progenitor of this blog. I have just been handed a gin and tonic. I shall go and sit with the others in the conservatory, look out across the grey Irish Sea, and raise my glass in gratitude to the place where it all started.