Jerez Diary: Andalucía from the Inside

By Tim Spencer

Jerez Diary offers its readers a truly unique perspective on life in Andalucía; a perspective that eludes the average ex-pat author who rarely has insight into that most important of Iberian institutions: the Spanish family.
Jerez Diary describes the sabbatical year the author spent with his Anglo-Hispanic family in his wife’s home town of Jerez de la Frontera on the south western coast of Spain, la Costa de la Luz. It not only describes the ups and downs of a modern Spanish family - often funny, occasionally infuriating but never dull - but gets inside the life of one of Andalucía’s most culturally-important cities. Not just the home of sherry, but one of the places to see the living legends of flamenco, experience the week-long party that is feria and to observe the fascinating phenomenon of Holy Week.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291815665

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Jerez Diary: Andalucía from the Inside

Jerez Diary: Andalucía from the Inside

By Tim Spencer

Copyright © 2014 Tim Spencer

Jerez Diary Andalucía from the Inside

First Edition

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Dedicated to B. E. Spencer

Preface

There is an expression in Spanish which describes the pull of one’s homeland when someone is away from their nation of birth, la tierra tira – the country pulls. Add to this the strong and enduring influence of the family in Spain, it should be of no surprise that ex-pat españoles can only endure so long without a visit home. My wife is no exception and despite visiting Jerez twice or even three times a year since moving to the UK in 1990, a time had come when she needed a longer and more relaxed period of domicile in her beloved Andalucía.

We had been talking casually about our Spanish sabbatical for a year or so when, in the autumn of 2005, we decided that the following academic year would be the right time to make the move. Our two sons Matthew and Luke, then 5 and 7 years old, were at a good age to improve their rudimentary Spanish and we both felt ready for a serious change of scene. Although we would have to resign from our posts in order to secure a year’s sabbatical we hoped, once in Spain, my wife Yolanda would be able to fulfil her ambition of working as a doctor in the country where she had studied medicine, but never practiced.

So it was in August 2006 we headed, as planned, to our beach house on the Costa Ballena – the Whale Coast – which sits between the seaside towns of Chipiona and Rota on the Costa de la Luz, in the province of Cádiz.

I started writing an electronic newsletter to keep in touch with our friends and family back in Britain, initially in order to recount the rather eventful start to our year away. The title of this monthly communication was taken from the name of the local newspaper El Diario de Jerez.

Tim Spencer

January 2014

Chapter 1:  Matthew’s Story

It is fair to say that we didn’t get off to a particularly good start, with our youngest son Matthew coming down with appendicitis while he was in Spain; and we were still in Sussex. The plan was that my wife Yolanda took the boys to Spain at the beginning of August so they could enjoy a beach holiday with their cousins in the Casa Ballena and to get their Spanish up to scratch before they started school. Yolanda was to return to finish some duties at work and help me prepare to move house. However, no sooner had a few days passed on her return to England when we learnt that Matthew was poorly with a bit of a temperature. We thought this pretty bad luck since none of us had caught even a tummy bug over the last five years of holidays there and it was the first time we’d left the boys on their own in Spain, albeit with family.

However,  a few days later we had an early morning phone call to tell us that Matthew was in an ambulance on the way to Cádiz hospital with acute appendicitis. His abdominal pains had started the night before and, after a typical misdiagnosis of gastroenteritis, he had been admitted to the local health centre at Sanlúcar de Barrameda where an ultrasound scan had shown an inflamed appendix and he was put on strong intravenous antibiotics. On hearing the news we jumped to the phones to call British Airways and Iberia to get the first flights we could to Seville. However, it was that Thursday (10th August 2006) and all flights from Gatwick, and just about everywhere else, had been cancelled due to an anticipated terrorist attack. After a few aborted attempts at alternative routes (via Mallorca!?) we resigned ourselves to not flying that day and concentrated on the first flights the following day. This turned out to be a good decision, since not long after getting seats on the early morning scheduled flight to Seville we learned that flights out of Gatwick were all booked up as people were desperately trying to leave the UK.

The torture of not being there for Matthew got worse when, having been admitted to the hospital, we were informed that they couldn’t operate because the only appropriate surgeon had been on duty for hours and hours without a break and couldn’t possibly do anymore. [Cultural Note No. 1: medical cover in August is notoriously hit-and-miss in Spain because everyone takes their holiday in the same month]. So, almost 12 hours after his acute symptoms started he’s put in an ambulance for a 2 hour journey to the children’s hospital in Seville. This resulted in some serious pacing up-and-down back home in Fishbourne, something I only thought they did in hospital soap operas. Our thoughts were also with Yolanda’s cousin Maria, who had charge of Matthew and insisted on travelling with him in the ambulance, the rest of Yolanda’s family following in convoy on the motorway.

The torture subsided somewhat on news that he had arrived with his appendix supposedly intact and he was operated on almost immediately. Pretty soon after that we spoke to the surgeon over the telephone from the UK. He said that it had all gone well although it was un poco pasado which was a polite way of saying that it had perforated (what is it with medics and communicating bad news?).

Yolanda arrived in Seville early the next day to the wonderfully-named Hospital Infantil Virgen del Rocio; we had decided that we shouldn’t both fly on this occasion, the security situation still being at a critical level. Anyway, Matthew seemed to be on the mend and recovering well from the op’ bar a couple of complications, the more significant of which was a 4 cm abscess residing in his abdomen. This would require the continuation of the IV antibiotics for the full course, meaning two more weeks in hospital at least. However, after a week Matthew’s abdominal pains increased and they discovered that he had an obstruction due to intestinal self-adhesions. So poor Matthew had to suffer almost a week of nil-by-mouth and the insertion of the dreaded nasogastric tube to keep his stomach drained. At this point I flew over to give support to both Yolanda and Matthew and so I had a whole week of the Spanish hospital experience. Cultural Note No. 2: next of kin are required to stay overnight with patients because there is not full nursing cover during the night, so the wards are full of camping mattresses and bleary-eyed parents lacking sleep.

In the end, both the obstruction and abscess resolved themselves and Matthew was discharged after 16 days in hospital, a bit weaker and a lot thinner than we were used to seeing him. We all travelled back to La Ballena to be reunited with Luke and the rest of the family and enjoyed a day together on the beach. I hardly recognised our eldest son. He had seemed to have grown up a lot during this period of independence and, like his mother, only had to be a few days in the Andalucían sun to turn a ridiculously dark brown. Meanwhile, Matthew got straight back into building up his strength by insisting on additional bowls of cereal between meals.

By the time I returned home to Fishbourne I had only a day-and-a-half to finish clearing the house for the removals. Still, the most important thing was that Matthew was on the mend. A hectic week ensued leaving the house ready for the tenants and tying up various loose ends, not helped by a Range Rover reversing into my car two days before the flight.

I finally arrived in Spain on the 2nd September and we were both really glad to have the family reunited and enjoyed the next