Spain was a blast. We stayed in Oliva about one and half hours from Alicante towards Valencia on the north east coast facing the Mediterranean sea. The sea was boisterous and warm. The GF had a relaxing time and today, the day after our return, the GF boards the Euro tunnel to Paris for a few days off with friends. While she’s there I will be flying off to Melbourne on 27Th. Nuts.
Even when our villa ran out of water Spain was good. A JBC had struck both the sewage pipes and water mains so the whole side of a valley couldn’t flush a toilet or turn on a tap for two days. . The lack of the substance which makes up ninety percent of our body mass and our dependence on it dawned. The penny dropped that we couldn’t spend a penny. Without water how were we to clean the kitchen worktops. There were six of us in all at the villa. That’s a lot of kitchen activity. Insects and all kinds of long legged things are waiting like debt collectors for for humans to drop or drop crumbs. It made me think of Lebanon.
Leave a crumb on the floor in a kitchen and within minutes a marching troop of ants, an army will set up a chain gang and slowly but surely the crumb disappears down a line of
miniature brown buzz lightyears. This is why houses in the developing world tend towards immaculate kitchens. It’s a war between them and us.
What when there is really a war and water is cut off deliberately, strategically. The baby
can not be washed. Germs are waiting, with even more war fervour than the insects. They are looking for a host and nothing more tempting than the human race. Like the lions charging after a herd of buffalo that catch the new buck the germs attack the child.
How long would it take for a parent in the bombed villages to realise what they needed most was no longer around. First the sound of bombs, then search for the children. Throughout the day each family member would report “there’s no water – the taps aren’t working” And then the phones go down. As the day wears on “there’s no water” becomes “I am thirsty”. And by the third day the illnesses, the cuts and bruises that can not be wiped, the infections that can not be stopped. The waking in the night, parched.
But after two days everything was repaired and our rented mountainside villas returned to their everyday use of water as if it had never been away. A chorus of gulping toilets harmonized across the valley in a collecting flush of relief. We cleaned the kitchen tops. Nuked any sneaky ants and returned to normal. But after the war everything was repaired and our rented lives returned to their everyday use as if they weren’t owned by someone
else. Which brings me to a programme here called Big Brother. What we don’t realise about big brother is that it is not the people who are in the house who are being controlled, it’s us.