No Sun Without Shade

On arriving in Marbella in January 2000, I was overwhelmed by the clean air; so different from the fumes of Granada. The streets were cleaner too; wide avenues planted with endless greenery – I even heard birdsong, which in the centre of Granada was something of a rarity.

Another contrast was the feeling of security definitely lacking in the city of García Lorca. I felt safe walking the streets at any time of the day or night, there were no drunks sitting in the parks, no addicts or gypsies weaving their way in and out of the restaurant tables to try to bully you into giving them your loose change.

At the time, the only beggar in the entire town was a local character called Juan who shuffled around bombarding everyone repeatedly with, ‘Dame cien pesetas pa’ comer. Dame cien pesetas pa’ comer.’ It actually transpired that quite a fortune had been amassed with all the ‘cien pesetas’ he had managed to accumulate over the years, but as he was mentally not quite all there, the endless possibilities available to a man with a pocketful of cash in Marbella were never appreciated, and so he carried on collecting them; to what end, nobody really knew.

One of the motives for such tranquillity was the election of a certain Jesús Gil y Gil – business man and owner of the football team Atlético de Madrid – as mayor in 1991 by a large majority of constituents fed up with the ever-increasing crime rates and the declining reputation of the region.

Gil was the leader of his very own political party, the Grupo Independiente Liberal, G.I.L (accurately representing his notions of self-importance) which was eventually disbanded in 2007, three years after his death in 2004 from a brain haemorrhage.

Gil was either loved or hated and didn’t care a jot either way.

His inflammatory public declarations were rife with insults and profanities towards those who had displeased him (despite the superficial similarities, Gil was far more intelligent and far more wily than the current repulsive incumbent of the White House) but, for a while at least, he transformed Marbella into a very pleasant place to live.

The means he used to this end were not always very subtle, nor were they altogether above-board – prostitutes, drug users and delinquents were summarily expelled from the town, often following beatings from the local police. Immigrants on exceptionally low incomes were deported, and the sin techos (homeless people, literally ‘without roofs’) were given hand-outs from town hall coffers in exchange for removing themselves from the area.

Gil’s brutal measures rendered the area a more desirable place to live than it had been for some time, and thus saw him re-elected time and time again. His most fervent supporters being middle class old-timers (quite often the pro-franquistas) and the financially privileged, who were delighted to be once again residing in a ‘desirable’ part of the world.

Aside from ridding Marbella of ‘undesirables’, Gil was also known for his intensely speculative development of the area. Much of his wealth had been accumulated from the construction business, where he held a reputation for being a little less than transparent in his dealings – he was imprisoned in 1967 following the death of 58 people after one of his sub-standard buildings collapsed in Segovia.

Although he was eventually released from prison, rumour has it that it was only after he paid a considerable some of money to Franco himself.

Once in power, Gil viewed Marbella as his own personal construction project; giving the green light to projects which clearly did not correspond to urban planning, and permitting people in his employ to accept bribes in exchange for signing off new urbanisations.

The fallout from this type of corruption can be observed no more clearly than in the shape of British ex-pats who sunk their savings into property, only to discover that it had in fact been constructed illegally – something that strongly highlights the necessity of understanding laws and local government regulations, as well as having a reasonable grasp of the language of the country in which you intend to purchase a property…

Local estate agents could not be relied upon to paint an accurate picture: their only interest lay in collecting the commission resulting from the sale, at which point their participation ended.

Many of the British estate agents on the Costa had made no attempts to master the Spanish language themselves, so in the unlikely event that they had been more inclined to honesty, they were often woefully unaware of the machinations at local government level (both ignorant about the country they were living in, and arrogant in their belief that British money could purchase whatever it wished to).

Gil was finally forced from office in 2002 and briefly jailed after being found guilty of siphoning off town hall money to fund Atlético de Madrid.

His successor, Julián Muñoz, was jailed for town planning corruption in 2006.

Muñoz’s successor, Marisol Yagüe (this time from the PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero de España) followed him there later the same year.

While they were both in jail, the city council was run by an ex-football player, Tomás Reñones.

Can you guess where he ended up?

Due to the uncomfortable belt-tightening resulting from the exchange of full-time for part-time employment, I very quickly realised it was going to be necessary to ratchet life up a gear and find myself a second job.

And to my amazement, the Fates laid aside their usual deafness when faced with my most heartfelt desires, and presented me with a language school less than a minute’s walk from my apartment building that was in immediate need of a part-time, afternoons-only English teacher

So with the as yet untried and untested TESOL certificate clutched in my sweaty-with-nerves hand, I trotted along to try my luck.

After chit-chat lasting only a little over ten minutes, the delightful Swedish lady running the school declared herself pleased to offer me the position (I may well have been the only applicant; my fellow English-speakers having their hands full flogging grotty apartments to retired Brits in search of a new life in the sun) and I was invited to start the very next week.

The one small detail I had neglected to impart during my interview being my negligible experience of children. In fact I would probably go so far as to say that I avoided them wherever possible.

I was an only child, bought up in the glorious isolation of a farming hamlet – populated primarily with crusty agricultural types in their 50s and 60s – by distinctly un-child oriented parents, and with only one solitary playmate, raised in a similarly adult-dominated environment just down the bumpy country track.

The first of my traumatic childhood memories was being thrust into the company of other children at preschool. Despite apparently being one myself, I found the rambunctiousness of their playing, the pushing and shoving and arguing, the sheer confidence with which they energetically tore through the day, utterly overwhelming.

As I hit my teenage years I began the trial by fire via babysitting – something that brought its own set of problems: getting the little shysters to obey you, to go to bed and stay in bed, to stop thumping each other, to drink their milk to TURN-THE-BLUDDY-LIGHT-OUT-NOWWWW!

Mopping up after them when they were ill – peeling vomity, pooey pyjamas from shivery and sobbing mites while knowing that what is merely a 24 hour tummy bug for them, will have you flat on your back and near death for a fortnight.

So it was with not a little trepidation that I started my third career in eighteen months; this time as nervous English teacher to a classroom of 6 – 9 year olds. An exercise in taking a deep breath at the beginning of each lesson and desperately trying not to notice little eyes peering at me as if their owners knew something I didn’t have a hope of figuring out, and were simply biding their time before using said knowledge against me as soon as I dropped my guard.

This trundled on for a number of months. Every morning I donned my ‘Assistant to Independent Financial Advisor’ hat, with my ‘Terrified Teacher of Small Scary Humans’ hat making an appearance as soon as school was out in the afternoons.

Despite my very best intentions, within a few months I was veritably scaling the office walls with boredom at my morning job; while the shaking-with-highly-inconvenient-but-almost-incapacitating-anxiety-before-every-single-class at my afternoon job showed no signs of abating despite the passage of time and the garnering of experience.

A solution to my employment woes had to be found, and it came in the surprising form of an old school friend, Ruth – staying with me before setting off on another of her madcap solo travels, this time through Morocco.

Why don’t you just teach English from home? She said.

You could employ the teaching methods you feel most comfortable with, choose your class sizes, choose your students, choose your timetable. You would be your own boss and be able to avoid the problems associated with working for other people (or having to be civil to tedious colleagues).

Because although my previous employment experiences had not been terribly successful, I was very much aware that the common denominator could only have been me, and therefore cutting employers out of the equation and actually designing my own job might well be the answer.

I thought about it carefully, then I thought about it some more; and even after all the thinking – which was usually guaranteed to put me off anything – it still seemed like a really good idea.

So I handed in my notice at the morning job, handed in my notice at the afternoon job and launched myself, cackling demoniacally from the headiness of yet another life-altering decision, into the complete unknown…