Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 23
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 23: Get Orf My Land
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
Historians reading this chapter in future years might be forced to marvel at the ease with which we moved a family of four British people to our new home in Catalunya.
It’s over-simplifying it to say that we just thought to ourselves that it would be nice to live somewhere else and then the next day did it. But there was no citizenship test to take, no financial declaration of status to be made, and we didn’t have to demonstrate we were eccentric aristocracy with a ready supply of cash we didn’t need. No lawyers were involved, no one challenged us about our occupational status, and it took us precisely three minutes to walk through passport control, pick up our luggage, smile at each other and announce to passers-by that we lived here now. Someday, hopefully not too far in the future, there will be a proper inquiry into Brexit, shortly after which it would be a thoroughly good idea if we all gathered in a town square armed with some rotten fruit and got our revenge on the charlatans and liars who sold it to sections of a gullible British public.
The One had done a few visits under her own steam and found a flat in a town called Vilanova i la Geltru, a temporary place we thought we could settle in while we decided where we eventually want to live which had the added bonus of containing the old friend who had first brought us to Barcelona. The flat is about ten minutes walk from the beach, and you can see the sea from the balcony. Our furniture is still on a truck somewhere in France, so on the first morning we wake up, eat breakfast off our laps, then walk down to sea and put our feet in it, even though it’s December.
After my return to London I don’t think I had anticipated ever living anywhere else except a city ever again. In the late nineties, we had engaged in flights of fancy about moving to New York, or any one of a dozen or more of the world’s greatest cities. The arrival of children, however, does quite a lot to your perspective on the world. In London if you see a small child fall over everyone nervously looks around to see where the responsible adult in charge of them is, then finds something they are super busy doing. Walking up the central Rambla of our new home on the second day of being residents, Daughter A takes a slight tumble and people rush in from all directions. It’s the kind of place we need to be for our family.
Christmas is approaching, and we get a variety of lessons in the new culture we will need to integrate ourselves into. Firstly, Christmas isn’t that big a day. The spread across the globe of Santa Claus as the legendary bringer of good cheer has faltered somewhere near the border with France, and although kids in our new homeland are keen to exploit the potential for additional gifts, they remain mainly focused on the twin Catalan traditions of the Kings, their day being 6 January, and Caga Tio, who makes an appearance on Christmas Eve. You might want to check the next bit on Wikipedia to prove to yourself I’ve not made it up.
Early in December, sometime around the 6th, a log wearing a hat and with a smiley face painted on one end of it appears in most Catalan households. This log must be fed daily, and enjoys treats such as the skins of mandarins. On the morning of the 24th, once it has become fat and bloated from all the delicious pericarp it has gobbled down, its body is covered with a blanket and gets itself ready for its starring role in the evening’s festivities. At the appropriate time, which, this being a nation which prides itself on a lack of sleep, might be as late as 11.59pm, the children of the household gather around the log armed with long sticks and sing the following song:
Caga, tió
ametlles i torró
no caguis arengades
que són massa salades
caga torrons
que són més bons
Caga, tió
ametlles i torró
si no vols cagar
et donaré un cop de bastó
Caga, tió!
Allow me to translate the general sentiment, rather than the specific words. The children are encouraging the log to poo out the presents they would like, offering the opinion that if the log fails to deliver tasty sweet morsels of goodness, preferring, perhaps based on its wood-based nature, to offer up salty rubbish like hazelnuts, or even herrings, then the log should, and the children are quite clear on this point, expect a bloody good beating. The log never delivers on first try, resulting in excited thwacks raining down on it from all directions. Eventually the log will relent, and a pile of gifts will have magically appeared under the blanket. “Caga Tio!”, to be clear, translates as ‘Oi, Uncle!, Shit out my presents!
This is not the only fascination with bodily functions that has infested parts of the Catalan Christmas tradition. We take a visit one night to the large nativity scene model which occupies pride of place in the Town Square. Lurking round the back of the stable, filled with Jesus, Mary, Joseph and various other figurines familiar to us, is an important new character we haven’t been aware of before who is apparently central to the tale of the birth of the Christian messiah. He’s called the Caganer, and doesn’t feature much in the Bible which appears to have glided over his presence at this important moment in history. The Caganer can apparently take various forms, all intended to represent the peasantry, the farmer, the workers of the land. Every year in Catalunya famous people have Caganer figurines made out of them, so it’s not unusual to see a Caganer that has the face of Lionel Messi or the current President. The one we encounter in our first Christmas in Vilanova is a simpler representation, just a plain faced, average looking, older man, wearing a red hat. Like all good Caganers, though, he is squatting on the ground with his trousers round his ankles taking a rather large dump. The resulting pile he is depositing is about the same size as the model of the baby Jesus. I’m still not sure what this is supposed to signify, but suspect it may not be a gleaming endorsement of the story of the nativity.
Notwithstanding all the excrement flying around, we very quickly learn the importance of community in our new home. There is a festival, a day, an event, a gathering, a happening, for just about everything. In January all the horses and donkeys for miles take over the whole town and complete the Tres Tombs, three times round a route that closes everything down from 8am and is accompanied, as we will learn pretty much everything is, by the consumption of surprising amount of alcohol at very weird times of the day. February or March brings Carnaval, a week or more of increasingly odd activities that start with people covering each other in meringue and eventually result in Comparses, thousands of people drinking and dancing through the streets throwing four or five sweets politely at each other. This, in turn, concludes with the Guerra de Caramels, where, having consumed enough alcohol to make the owner of the local brewery the richest person in a two hundred mile radius, any attempt at being polite with the sweets is abandoned and you gather in the town square to hurl massive handfuls of them at each other hoping to inflict some sort of candy based mortal wound. After that they bury the sardine. Don’t ask.
There are, of course, still places in England that have maintained a local tradition across many centuries. The Lewes parade, the Ottery St Mary tar barrels. But these are increasingly rarities in a country where your home is your castle and you’d much prefer to stay in it, thank you very much. Vilanova i la Geltru has none of this reticence. There’s always a party going on somewhere and everyone is invited. They’ve even be kind enough to arrange a special event on the eve of my Birthday in June when the entire town decamps to the beach to set off fireworks, jump over flames, and dance about until the sun comes up.
The One has made stringent efforts to learn some Spanish, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is the third choice language locally, parked neatly behind English which most of the local population speak to an embarrassing level. Signs are in Catalan, conversations are in Catalan, in the presence of an British person they attempt direct translation from Catalan to English in preference to passing through Spanish on the way there. This language issue is forced to the forefront of our thoughts when Daughter G and Daughter A start school shortly into the new year. Everything is in Catalan, the lessons, the teaching materials, the conversations in the playground, the invites, the school gate discussion. The One enlists herself in emergency Catalan lessons, mainly so she can have any idea what any of the friends they start bringing home might be asking for.
From our flat to the beach is a short hop across a major road, an amble through a small forest, then cut underneath a railway line and stick your feet on some sand. Just this side of the tunnel to the beach there is a small school, literally carved out of the edge of the woods, and it is here that the kids have been enrolled. Daughter G begins picking up the language immediately, offering up interactions and pointing at things she’s learned the names of. Daughter A decides to hold her fire, saying little, if anything, for four months, then suddenly dumping a huge number of questions, suggestions, criticisms and helpful hints at a teacher that had assumed she was struggling to comprehend the language. Discussions in our flat start to be conducted in a mish-mash of words drawn from, and subsequently conjugated, in whichever language offers a word and ending which feels like it makes the most sense. In this new idiom of Spancatlish, you need to finish acabaring your feinas before you put your bambas on. And don’t forget to put your ezmorzar in your morcilla.
Every morning one of us walks the two of them across the road, down passed the trees and up to the school gates. In the middle of the forest, on the left hand side of a track that’s barely big enough to get a car down, sits a grand old summer house, surrounded by grounds that include an orange and lemon grove, an odd looking old structured fountain, various huge trees, an outhouse and a great big hole in the ground which plainly used to be a swimming pool. It’s dilapidated, seemingly almost beyond repair, and from the gates you can see bits falling off it and holes in the roof. Sometime in spring we start seeing groups of workmen ripping bits out of it and fixing bits up. I jokingly say to The One that we should see who owns it and if they want to sell it. She pulls the face she usually makes when one of my ideas is not only a pipe-dream but also a little bit bonkers.
Every day we walk past the gates and we can see the house being improved and repaired, and every day I spend a bit more time looking through the gates and imagining myself living there. One morning there’s a man stood looking through the gate with a clipboard making some notes, so I decide to ask him who owns it. It’s a local family, they are doing it up to rent it out. So I walk the kids down to school, walk back to the flat, collect The One and insist that we should go and look at this house now before they finish doing it up and see if we can secure it to live in. She still doesn’t seem very certain about this as we persuade the workmen to let us in to look around. It’s a five bed-roomed ‘masia’, a huge old summer house in extensive grounds with a massive living room, a separate study, an outdoor paved patio covered by vines to sit under in summer, a lawn, and two or three spaces which would make the largest allotment you’ve ever seen. It’s all seen much much better days, but I instantly know it should be ours and that we almost certainly cannot afford it. The workmen give us a number to call, and in the very worst Spanish they’ve ever heard I call up and falteringly ask if the family want to sell or rent it. They are just about to put it on the market to be rented out once the work is completed, so expecting it to be out of our price range I tell them we are a great family looking for somewhere, we will be excellent tenants, they don’t need to pay any estate agents, and ask what price could they do it for. They tell me the price and I ask them to repeat it. We do this three or four times until finally I ask The One to listen to what they are saying because it doesn’t sound like it can be right. She listens and it is right. They want 850 euros.
It’s a running theme of this story, and partly the point of the whole book, that I have never really done anything specifically to make money. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy making money, there are some types of money to be made that are among my very favourite things to do. Taking money off any major corporation and employing it on behalf of community based art and creativity, for example, is something I get a really positive thrill from. However, just about every job I’ve ever made for myself began with a starting salary of zero, and in many case actually a minus number. Sound engineering - did it for about a year before I got paid for it. Opening a venue - put a bunch of money in that I never got back, eventually started earning the sort of money no sane person would work for about ten years later. Managing a band - sorry, we will have to pause this story for a moment while anyone who has ever done that has a long lie down after they finish laughing themselves into a coma. Despite this interesting approach to a ‘career’ I have, somehow, arrived at a point in my life where I can rustle up 850 euros a month to live in a veritable mansion, even if it does leak in various places and has a multitude of oddities waiting to be uncovered. We tell them they have a deal and we move in three months later.
In the corner of the land, right by the entrance gate, is a casita, a little one up, one down, outhouse. The entire upper front of this building is a long french window that has an interesting approach to its principle purpose of keeping the weather at bay. From this first floor, you have an uninterrupted view across the grounds, out through the forest, and all the way down to the sea. It is here that we decide to install my first ever actual office, a proper set up with an actual desk, chairs, shelves and a rubber stamp that says ‘Outstanding’ on it. This is the name of my new company, and of the artist management, record label, and publishing company that will be the main purposes of its business.
I’ve accidentally, through a series of daft decisions, unlikely people, borderline criminality and a massive amount of good fortune, made a success of working in live music. Time to see if the same chaotic, misled, and misjudged approach might work for the recorded industry.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: