los niños del bosque

This post is in Spanish. Less blindingly obvious is the fact that you can get a hilarious English translation online by clicking here.

Bueno, prometí a algunos que iba a hacer la próxima instalación del blog en castellano porque oigo que hay gente que pillan poco de lo que escribimos en estas paginas y quiero arreglar esto. Ademas, me da buen excuso para hacer un poco de esfuerzo y pensar (o más) escribir en castellano. Me tendréis que perdonar bastante cosas, a ver... mi grammatico fatal, la falta de áccèntos y si caigo en el Spanglish un poco, esto también!

Son muchos y varios las cosas que tengo que contar, así que os pido paciencia!

Primer, volver aquí, a un sitio donde nunca pensaba volver fue difícil. Me costo adaptarme a algunas cosas, pero me siento mas cómoda ahora, después de 2 meses. La experiencia de culture shock mas fuerte para mi fue los supermercados. Yendo al Esclat en Vilafranca, sabia donde estaban las cosas y estaba muy orgullosa que podía hacer una compra en 20 minutos o menos! Aquí, ves al súper y buscas por ejemplo azúcar, pues tienes como 6 marcas distintas para elegir, vaya confusion! Es igual para todo, leche, harina, atún en latas - pero casi no hay aceitunas ni embutidos del tipo de que estoy acostumbrado, y si hay, cuestan un huevo! Estoy mas acostumbrado ahora pero vamos a varios supermercados para las cosas. Hay mucha competición entre ellos, y hay cosas mucho mas barato en algunos que en otros... bueno, esto fue un cambio muy grande pero ahora me cuesta menos tiempo y confusión que en el principio!

La Elly va a un colegio muy cerca al piso, y le encanta! Este si ha sido un cambio por lo mejor. No es que quejo del colegio en Canyelles, pero hacen las cosas en maneras distintas aquí. Su horario es 9 a 15:15, con una hora para comer. Esto quiere decir que podemos hacer mas cosas después del cole porque no esta tan cansada. Los lunes vamos a la piscina, y me da pena que no podéis ver como nada el Oscar! Que bien. La Elly ha mejorado mucho también, y hace un poco sin los flotadores. He sido esperando para que el tiempo mejore (o por lo menos que no llueva cada día...) para ir al parque después de cole. Hay mas luz por las tardes, la noche no cae hasta las 9 casi. La Elly esta aprendiendo leer, y me hace mucha gracia verla sonar las letras para leer las palabras. En el principio no quería hablar castellano y no le gusto que yo la hablaba en castellano. Ahora esta un poco mas relajada, y supongo que se siente mas cómoda, que empieza a cantar y jugar un poco en castellano. Que pena me daría si perdiera su castellano. El catalán, a ver, intento leer El Patufet para ella, pero nunca tenia yo el catalán como el castellano. Leyendo esto vais a decir que el castellano tampoco tengo, pero bueno! Sé un poco mas!

Oscar también sigue en su salsa. Si tengo trabajo va a la casa de mi madre. Ella tiene un perro como el Monty, se llama Benji, el pobre, porque el Oscar no le deja en paz! Va detrás el, dandole patadas y gritandole 'fuera'! No tiene miedo de casi nada, ni unos rottweiler gigantes que tiene un tío mío. Digo casi nada - le compramos un coche con mando y le da un miedo, le da unos sustos cuando va solo y empieza a hacer sus ruidos! 'Allá vamos!' grita, y el Oscar va corriendo detrás del sofá!

Tengo bastante trabajo, y me gusta; es poder hacer el trabajo que me encanta sin tener la responsabilidad total de planificar etc. Entro los colegios, hago lo que me dan y me voy, parece un lujo! Y como me pagan para hacer esto, parece una barbaridad! Esperamos ahorrar y poder venir a veros todos en el verano. Mick esta bien también, y el viene a España la semana que viene para unos días. Tiene que ver un par de clientes y vender el Landrover... El Ford se vendió en semana santa, pero el landrover sigue en su sitio fuera de la casa del Ingo. A ver si mIck tiene suerte y lo vende... Los vuelos están muy caros ahora para venir todos, y no poder trabajar, nos parecía mas prudente esperar hasta el verano para venir toda la familia. Aunque le tengo unos celos, y unas ganas para venir en su sitio!
Pues por fin salió el sol hoy y yo y los niños jugábamos en el jardín a burbujas y saltar con la cuerda. Que bien ver el sol. En el principio hasta me gusto el tiempo, hacia frío con cielos azules, pero hace 3 semanas ha llovido mucho. Salen las flores de los arboles y empieza a salir las hojas - difícil imaginar que allí todo esta ya muy verde y caliente.

Las cosas para Australia van muy lentos, y todavía estamos buscando opciones para poder ir lo antes posible. Parece que necesito los 12 meses de experiencia antes de que podemos hacer una solicitud para un avisado pero estamos buscando soluciones para no estar aqui mas tiempo, la verdad es que no nos gusta mucho, y sentimos un poco como tenemos la vida en pausa. La Elly me pregunta, 'Cuando vamos a vivir en Australia?"! Y busca sus cosas, juguetes etc que hemos dejado alli. Cuando las ve Elly tendra unos 15 años y no serviran para ella!

Bueno, a ver si la próxima vez que escribo en castellano lo tengo mejor! Seguís escribiendome, me hace mucha ilusión ver vuestros nombres en mi 'in box' y leer las cosas que me contáis. Os echo mucho de menos :-) Muchos besos y abrazos para todos, hasta la próxima!!

Two mugs in a fleamarket

Sometimes a week flashes by because it was totally uneventful, leaving nothing to show for itself. Other weeks somehow manage to fulfill an entire month's quota of notable events and still be over with in two shakes of a toddler's head. He's been great, the little one; most of the scabs have gone and he's eating like there's no tomorrow, which is just as well cos (of course) Elly then erupted, right on cue to coincide with the first day of the school holidays, with a really quite nasty dose of the same. She's on the mend at last but had it much worse than Oscar, who was pretty much oblivious to the whole bout, and now that her few days of involuntary fasting are over the two of them have ended the week in a piranha-like feeding frenzy. Nothing is safe, especially chocolate anything vaguely resembling dried fruit.

Mercifully, it was a week devoid of pork, apart from the ham which came on our delivery takeaway pizza. Up until yesterday, we'd had no luck finding anywhere decent that also does mopeds, thanks mainly (it seems) to the fact that we live near the hospital. Why, I don't know. We (even) tried Dominos in sheer desperation a while ago; they're based about three miles away in Team Valley and said yes, they would deliver to Chester-le-Street but "not to the end near the hospital"... anyway... this other place we'd been avoiding – again, why, I don't honestly know – turned out a passable quattro stagioni with bonus fifth topping (ffs) and got it here without nary a mention of hospitals, doctors, A&E, none of that. Their garlic bread was a bit cheesy, but we were famished. It was just the job & disappeared faster than a fly-by week in April.

No, instead of a lucky bag of pig we opted for a large piece of cow, all minced up and ready for the pot. We've made Heston's Chili Con Carne before, and it's absolutely brilliant so long as you completely ignore calls for brined short ribs, Devil's Penis chilis, dry ice (?!) and so on, use only ONE star anise, forget the confit – in fact ignore everything except the con carne part – and don't forget to add a square of 70% chocolate instead of the finishing butter. Wonderful, but I'm sure it never used to make so much! It was served up twice a day for three days, and we were ladling it on, but short of having it for breakfast we were just incapable of finishing it.

It must have been the all-beef diet that got me out cycling on Thursday evening. Once me mate Ian had the old bike in for a service it was literally as good as new, so I agreed to go out with the Shop Club for one of their mad twilight excursions into the Land of Mud. The ride takes in part of the C2C route, which I'm all-of-a-sudden mad keen to do in its entirety, despite remembering the hard way that we're in England now: it barely scraped a single degree in the wind, while a light sprinkling of rain came and went and a potent mud-and-straw mixture seized up my brakes... the ride was great fun nonetheless, I managed to keep up really well and tomorrow I might even try & attempt to walk upright again.

The weather's actually not the big deal we thought it would be, even though it looks like it's going to be unsettled (I believe the euphemism is) for the second week of the holidays, which doesn't bode well for the exuberant excesses of our newly carbed-up offspring. As Nik pointed out following an early-morning pop-to-the-shops the other day (and apologies to those without English telly) it's not just cold, it's Marks & Spencer cold. The frankly pointless weather chart is an entire messy drawer of assorted icons and wind symbols, which to the trained eye is clear Met Office code for "Gawd knows, look out the f@#king window like everyone else". We'll be doing just that, by the looks of it, for the next five days.

oh, and I'm offering a prize to the first person who can explain the meaning of this post's cryptic title, as I've completely forgotton what it is.

spring into winter

This weekend saw us doing some different things to usual. We didn't go to the library on Saturday morning, we went instead to Tynemouth. It was very cold, the forecast threatened snow and even though we didn't have the raincover for the buggy ('cos we'd left it at my mam's) we decided to go and meet Rog and have a bod about. We met (late) and walked around the priory, almost but not quite being blown off the precipice. Elly loved the old "castle" and went on at length about princesses having lived there. Poor Oscar, still recovering from his chicken pox but all scabbed over, was asleep when we arrived and we woke him up getting him out of the car. He just sat in his pushchair looking a little shell-shocked and trying not to admit it was as cold as it was... We went to the wonderful (thankfully indoor) flea market at the metro station and had a great time wandering around and looking at all the interesting things people sell. It looked like our house did when we were moving, needed to shift some stuff and held a not-in-a-garage-garage sale; actually, most of the stalls were full of what looked like stuff from my parent's house, which is another job to be getting on with. Sorting it and boxing it up and getting it all to car boot sales is going to take up the next 4 months, at least!

Anyway, after some fish and chips in a wind-blown bus "shelter" (we found the restaurant was full and we couldn't wait and when we made the decision it was sunny and not so windy... which changed quickly) we felt the wind drop a couple more degrees in temp, blow a bit harder and start to bring some sleet with it off the sea. We unceremoniously made a run for it, Oscar by this time blue and screaming with the cold. Poor lamb, he isn't used to it.

We called in to see Sid who is in the Freeman, and managed to cause havoc for an hour or so. Amazing that we didn't get thrown off the ward, after Oscar started climbing all over Mik's head and squealing like a very loud thing.

My mum has dropped her Saturday night at work, so naturally we had to take advantage... The kids have a great time there, and I think mum enjoys it too, I think it keeps her young ;-) We went to see Daniel Day Lewis do one of his out-of-this-world intense characters in There Will Be Blood at the Gala cinema in Durham. Great. The only thing was, the weather hadn't improved by the time we came out and I kept wanting to stop all of the strapping Durham lasses & tell them to Put A Coat On as they were walking around in lovely but totally inappropriate summer type dresses. They must be like our friend Rohan who rarely gets colds or illnesses of any kind because he goes to the beach and swims all year round. Hard as nails.

Sunday morning found us not waking up 'til 9.30!! Bliss. Guilt-laden bliss, as I'd missed an exercise class, but bliss all the same. The Sunday paper, tea and hot crossed buns, Peace and Quiet. Oddly enough though, about an hour after getting up all I wanted to do was see the kids. We went out for lunch with mum, and the kids were good, a bit tired but Elly played waitresses and Oscar bodded about flirting as he does. And the snow snowed and it looked pretty. It did lie for a bit, but by the time we got out to build a snowman it was starting to melt and was too wet really. We did (a very little) one all the same, complete with carrot and coals.

Oh and by the way, I'm not jealous (much) of the wonderful weather everyone is having in Spain. Messages of it being sunny and hot and of time spent on the beach don't get to me, oh no. But how I wish we were there right now! Even Elly said she didn't like this weather after our freezing morning in Tynemouth... it's Spring Break from school now for 2 weeks. I'm too scared to look at the weather forecast. I just hope we don't have to spend every day either in the swimming pool, in the soft-play area or moping about the house 'cos it's too minging to go out. My 'ready to go out' bag consists of snacks, a change of clothes for the kids, 3 x pairs of wellies, the raincover is permanently in the car and I have 2 mobiles charged at all times. Ready for anything? You betcha!

A week of porky pies

It's about time I came clean about that last post. It wasn't a complete fabrication, in fact most of it was either true or a wild exaggeration of What Really Happened... I thought the bit about paying for state schooling was a bit of a giveaway, to be honest, that and the part about being deported (which actually might have been quite nice, given our current weather) should have rung some alarm bells, but I did get a surprisingly high count on the old spoof-o-meter :o) – a few cross words were sent about it being a bit too believable (which is first cousin to gullible, of course) but perhaps not as believable as the BBC's flying penguins: a true classic that apparently fooled millions of other "believers" country-wide...

(oh, and just in case you think today's photo represents some kind of insult-to-injury, I was prompted to post it in honour of the nice people who have finally got the powers-that-be to stop obese kids from riding the donkeys on Blackpool Beach. No really, I thought it was a late April's Fool too, but it's for real, they have Donkey's Rights like a six-day week, designated lunch hour, all that stuff. Don't take my tarnished word for it, see for yourself.)

I can't remember it being a stand-out English thing, but we seem to be in the grips of a pork-eating vice at the moment, and I'm not sure where it will all end. I'm referring to us NEMOs, not those obese kids (although them as well, probably). What started out as a vague interest in British sausages has rapidly descended into the hog frenzy that was last week. It's not me, I hasten to add, but our Niki who seems to be the ringleader here: ok, I might be incapable of walking past the butcher's window without popping in for some of their fabulous Ayrshire bacon, but at least I combine it with a lamb roast or some nice cooked sliced ham beef or whatever – Nik turned up home on Tuesday with two large pork chops, a pound of the Ayrshire, some sausage (pork) and er, some more sausage (pork, chorizo style) all bundled together in this big white carrier bag. We had to bail some broccoli out into the wardrobe fridge just to fit it in. I mean it was all great, don't get me wrong, that's a top butcher and no mistake and it's all been gobbled up, I'm just concerned about where to go from here. What piggy products will she come home with next, I wonder? Trotters? Unspeakable parts? Watch this blog...

Food was always likely to be a recurrent theme here, and I'm inclined to make our particular/peculiar habits in this respect a regular feature. One interesting trend is eating out, something we basically don't do any more, except for hastily-grabbed fish & chips and Sunday lunch, which we seem to do relatively often. I'm kicking myself for not getting some pics of our last few outings – who knows, it might even have spawned a parallel blog one day, as we're totally fickle and make a point of always trying somewhere new. It's invariably a pub, as under-a-tenner-a-head is impossible anywhere else. Today's was pretty good; Anne's treat (tastes better straight away ;o)) as she had won the Grand National sweepstake at work. Wishing I'd listened to her as closely on the subject of horses, the Court Inn was her recommendation for lunch, right next to the Durham County Court (duh) in a surprisingly nice part of the city.

The lighting and decor was good for once, although maybe a bit too intimate to sucessfully retrieve Oscar's peas and bits of Yorkshire pud; service was really good, quick and friendly; the food a bit under-seasoned (how anyone can cook and mash a turnip without so much as showing it the salt shaker is beyond me) and the brisket a little overdone, but it all arrived piping hot and the ale was first-rate: Wylam Gold Tankard, definitely one to watch out for. I'd give the gravy 4 out of 10, which isn't bad considering all gravy these days is measured against Anita's amazing Martha Stewart-inspired recipe. I do think these places could earn a few bob more if they offered a decent postre or at least get a coffee machine in; we ended up going back to Anne's for Christmas pud and custard (her larder is legend and is in the process of weeding out, so you never know quite what you'll get) and a nice cuppa instant. The snow (!) on the way back was lovely and atmospheric, and it was altogether a very nice afternoon. A nice break from the pork, more than anything.

A finch's plot

We always knew it would be hard, living here, although I never dreamed it would become untenable. We came with every intention of putting a brave face on things, knuckling down to work and pressing on with the Aussie visa application, and now it looks like we're being forced to move back to Spain. The news last Friday that we were ineligible for Child and Working Tax Credits came as a bit of a blow, but the implications of that have only just worked through into reality: the simple fact is, we lived in Spain for so many years that we no longer have automatic residency in the UK.

The reasoning behind the Benefits Agency's decision is based largely on the fact that we have no National Insurance contributions to our names since the last millennium; this, combined with our express intention to move away again as soon as possible, means we basically fail the UK government Habitual Residence Test. Unless we pay £28,453.75 in back-dated NI contributions and agree to remain entirely self-sufficient for the duration of our stay, we're basically obliged to leave as soon as possible, which for us means a return to Barcelona.

This is all new to us. While we've been away, a series of legislative moves have progressively tightened the rules on migrant EU workers, including those UK nationals returning after long periods working abroad. Despite a landmark ruling against the new residency laws in 2004, the UK government are successfully refusing any and all benefits to migrants, even to returning UK passport holders. This means "benefits" in the broadest sense of the word, so we are expected to pay for everything – doctors, hospital treatment, refuse collection, child immunisation, state school fees, everything – which would normally be free, or at least will be free when we move back to Spain.

I wouldn't care, but the Child Benefit claim that sparked all this off is for a pittance, compared to the tens of thousands we'd need to pay in back-dated tax. It's a pittance compared to the cost of a week's supply of nappies and Fruit Wheats, come to that. We always expected moving to Australia to be difficult, not to mention expensive, but the fact that it will be less traumatic once we're back in Spain is reason enough to cut our losses sooner rather than later. Suffice to say, when the letter from the immigration authorities arrives, as it surely will, we'll be long gone. And when the migrant finches are absent from your bird feeders this summer, bear in mind it's probably nothing to do with climate change; more an avian statement that you can take your peanuts and the flimsy cage you keep them in and stick them where the sun don't shine.

(addendum: just in case it's not already obvious, the title of this post should be mixed up and taken as you read it...)