Days 12 to 8 (19-23 June 2025)
ITINERARY:
Thursday
19 June: hosting the second anniversary edition of Club Hemingway at Radio City
Friday 20
June: hosting the last World Tour of Valencia at Batumi, Mestalla
Monday 23
June 17:00: return our leased car to the depot, check in to the hotel near
Valencia airport
Tuesday
24 June 10:50: flight to Nantes, hire car, drive to a holiday park near St
Nazaire for 6 days
Monday 30
June 19:10: flight to Dublin, arrival time, 19:50
Tuesday 1
July morning: drive to Leitrim, start all over again
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| Valencia from above |
When people
say they would like to bid a proper farewell to the place they have spent a
long time in, things don’t always go according to plan in the strictest sense.
There is a lot of cleaning up, strategic packing, agonisingly throwing away
things that are still useful, etc. And then, of course, there’s the food. Boy,
is that a hard job. With all the stress and the impending deadlines, people don’t
always have the possibility to let go in the old-fashioned sense to their current
lives before the dramatic change to the next one.
I was
determined not to let that happen to me – I wanted a real doozie of a send-off
and no regrets. This is the direct result of what happened to us in the spring
of 2023, when we had precisely seven weeks to empty our entire house and move
to another country. I lost a lot of precious happy times with the children because
we were always so busy. They (rightly) came to demand attention from us on
several occasions per day, a juxtaposition that our panicking minds found hard
to match up. We gave them a decent holiday in the Ardèche and Peñíscola, but
only at the end of August. This time was going to be different. Really.
And it was.
In the twenty-two
months we had spent in Valencia, I had worked hard to establish myself and have
as much opportunity as possible for us all to thrive. The co-working place where
I came to do my writing between dropping the kids off and picking them up was a
hive of activity, and Cristina the founder and owner encouraged us to
socialise. I founded the World Tour of Valencia, a monthly gastronomic event
where we would go to a restaurant with the cuisine of a different country, to give
us all a break from the relentless paella, patatas bravas, albóndigas, and tortillas
españolas.
In truth, it
was a resounding success, as it was usually on a Wednesday or Thursday night,
and we never went to a restaurant in the same region of the world two times in
a row. Valencia’s choice of international cuisine is a new thing: the problem
is the local culture is very dominant, so it makes it hard for any interlopers
to get established. Even some of the top Japanese restaurants seem to apologise
for their mere existence in Valencia.
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| World Tour of Valencia, May 2025 - Eritrea |
But we went
to Korea, Afghanistan, Colombia, Lebanon, Eritrea, Persia, Morocco, Poland, and
several others. The first World Tour destination in January 2024 was Batumi, a
Georgian restaurant in the shadow of the world-famous Mestalla Stadium. It was
so utterly impressive that in December of that year we voted to return to it.
And it was
the place we finished the World Tour on 20 June. More about that in a moment.
The reason I began with this is because at the second World Tour event in
February 2024, one of our colleagues said he was going to be late, as he was
performing a literature piece at an open mic event called Club Hemingway. It takes
the format a little like karaoke, in that you put your name in a pot and you
come to the stage to perform your piece when your name is pulled out.
It was
learning of this monthly event that set me on the path to joining it and
eventually having the honour to host it three times. The World Tour and Club
Hemingway were the two elements that defined my time in Valencia. My final Club
Hemingway was on Thursday 19 June, and my final World Tour the day after,
unusually on a Friday, but it enabled me to be at both. At the end of the final
week of our stay in Valencia. I would have regretted it had I missed out on
these. There is a lot of crossover between the two events – many people
interested in literature also seem to have a penchant for gastronomy, it seems –
so it was often better never to schedule them for the same night. I did once
and I had to leave earlier from Club Hemingway to go to a Polish restaurant a three-minute
walk away.
At Club
Hemingway, you are invited to write your own literature and present it in your
slot for three to five minutes. At the risk of sounding conceited, I would dare
to say that I had built up a formidable reputation for comedy poetry, and over
the course of the year-and-a-half I had attended, also managed to become one of
the performers that some came to see.
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| A typical Club Hemingway evening |
Over the weeks
and months, Cate Baum, the bestselling author and founder of Hemingway, had
become a firm friend of mine, and she entrusted the hosting of the event to me
while she was away for two months at the end of 2024. I was thrilled and
honoured to have been given such a prominent role as the first other host. On
top of this, Cate and I had spent the first half of 2025 helping each other out
of various tricky situations and had become particularly close friends to the
extent that we were texting each other at preposterous times of the day and night.
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| Some bloke with a sheet |
And so she
invited me to host Hemingway on the occasion of my last appearance as a
resident of Spain. On Thursday 19 June 2025, I took to the stage at Radio City
in the centre of Valencia to address the gathered audience and performers. Cate
had made two incredible cakes for the interval, one of which had an Irish-themed
green pistachio ganache and an outrageous crunchy bite to it; the other was a
naughty chocolate-coated chocolate cake with extra chocolate and a side of
chocolate that would have graced the menu of Café Louvre, Franz Kafka’s art deco
go-to hostelry in Prague.
I would go
so far as to affirm that the evening itself was one of the top five highlights
of my life. I will never forget the pin-dropping silence when I began reciting
my poem, the spontaneous laughter throughout, and the raucous reaction of the
audience at the end, whooping like Canadians at the Stanley Cup final. I felt
like a prince, and I will also never forget the love and appreciation that many
regular Hemingway attendees kindly afforded me while I was there.
I love remarkably
non-catchy titles to my poems, and I chose to repeat one of my previous
offerings. The choices were either The Administrative Processes of Spain and
Luxembourg, or The Ballad Of The Offensive National Stereotype, and the
former was chosen. It rang a few bells the first time, but that night it set
the place alight. Club Hemingway provides me with the motivation to write, and I
never repeat my works, but this was an exception. I still had an ace up my
sleeve for the end: to close out the evening a little later, I had written a
short, meaningful yet amusing poem about the event which rounded off one of the
most remarkable evenings that Club Hemingway has ever conjured up. I believe the
event had come of age in 2025, and that was confirmed by the engagement of the
participants and audience.
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| The second anniversary edition, 19 June 2025 |
After the event,
I joined Cate and some others at Sueño Andaluz, a terrific tapas bar in a square
round the corner. They serve some of the best tasting food in Valencia,
including a plate of thinly-sliced pork in herbs. We were on a high and it
showed – I felt like a threshold had been crossed in my writing career. My book
is to be published soon, so I hope there will be more nights like this to come.
Then came
the cold shower.
The following
day, I had to get up early to take a huge amount of our belongings to our
rented storage facility in a marathon run, visit various places to close down
operations, and somehow be at the Georgian restaurant at 20:30 with a smile on
my face. In plus-thirty temperatures.
Normally,
none of the family join me for the World Tour, but this was a different sort of
evening, and I felt they needed an outing to say goodbye to some of the people
they had met at other events over the duration of our stay. This included a
Finnish lady called Una who back in her youth had been photographed countless
times – she had also been a regular at our literary nights, and had introduced
us to a plethora of interesting people. Joining her was a sprightly lady from
Northern England called Jane, and a man called Marco, who was quite a strong debater.
There was
also Henry, a young Australian man, a deep thinker with a peripatetic conversational
thread; Adrien, a French remote worker who loves his food and had built up a
rapport with Dainoris. Cate of course made it too, and as always kept Livia and
Milda amused.
Georgian
food, if you are not familiar with it, is in my opinion one of the best in the
world. When I see these silly figures that some desktop statistician has
collated concerning “best [insert very subjective thing here] in the world”, it
amazes me what nonsense appears. When it comes to food, if by “best”, they mean
“most popular” or rather “most recognisable”, then yes, Italian, Chinese,
Japanese, American and Mexican might make it pretty high, but this is because
the people who get asked this type of question usually stick to fairly mainstream
fare, and for the most part have probably not tried Georgian food. Or Lebanese,
Polish, Vietnamese or Peruvian for that matter. Because let’s face it, very
often it’s a question of marketing and the chosen professional activities of
the respective diasporas.
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| Khachapuri Adjaruli, the second best thing I've ever put in my mouth |
Una, Jane
and Marco had never eaten Georgian food but they certainly polished off
everything put in front of them. The food kept coming – on the World Tour, we usually
get a selection of dishes and share them amongst us. Georgian food is perfect
for this. Along with the food, the conversation was also quite profound and not
lacking in energy at all. It was a most sublime evening; our last Friday in
Valencia.
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| A blurred photo caused by laughter |
We said a tearful
and cheerful goodbye to everyone as I put The Irish Rover by the Dubliners and
the Pogues on my phone and we danced down the street to our respective means of
transport home. We took the car, and before the end of the street, two of the
children were already sound asleep.
The weekend
was hard but fruitful. Bonny Bee managed to empty the rooms one by one and I
filled up the car with their contents to take to the storage facility. I made
several trips from the fifth-floor apartment to the car and back, and once at
the storage facility, I had to find places for everything. We also made sure we
took the children to the beach for a few hours during their last weekend, and
Sunday we ate at Catamarán, the restaurant across the road from our apartment
building which we had frequented on many occasions. All these valedictory gestures
would help us, and in particular me, to accept the fact we were moving on.
On the
Monday afternoon at 5, I had to return our car to the rental place. After
Shirley the Toyota Prius Plus, our first family car that we drove from Germany died
a smoky death in May 2024, we had been leasing a Kia Niro. A far inferior
model, it was also quite cramped and I often had trouble with the simple things
like packing all the luggage we needed for our Great Iberian Road Trip last
summer. We couldn’t buy too many souvenirs simply because the thing was so tightly
packed, when I opened the boot a torrent of crap would fall out.
Before then,
a lot of events needed to fall into place:
I had to
finish taking the last stuff to the storage facility; I needed to send a parcel
with the main essentials to our new home in Ireland so that it would be there
when we arrived; because of the dinky size of the car, I had to drive most of
our luggage to the hotel we were going to stay in for our last night next to
the airport; and I had to do all this before 3pm. Because that was when
Mercedes, the agent for the apartment, was coming to collect the keys and give
the place the usual look-over. We would then officially be nomads.
Entering a
DPD parcel shop to send my first package, I was made aware that there was an
error in the code. Apparently, the shop was only for pickups, not for sending.
First totally stupid error of mine, and one I shall not forget in a hurry. Still,
the guy said to fill it all out and he would deal with it, which was extremely
nice of him. On Thursday 26 June, I got the confirmation that the package was picked
up. I’ll send him a little gift from Ireland.
Then I screeched
back to the apartment and loaded as much stuff into the car as I could so that
we had less to carry by hand once we dropped the car at the depot. When I
returned, I saw with horror and bemusement the quantity of luggage we were
going to be taking on a Ryanair flight and I recoiled in panic and distress at
the very thought of trying to get this all to France then into one single hire
car in Nantes Airport. In the end, it looked like a professional football team
had press-ganged a bedraggled bunch of kids and their parents to cart their
luggage for them.
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| The view from the hotel with some of the roadworks |
I took it
all to the hotel, and found yet another obstacle had been thrust in my way –
the storms of last autumn in Valencia had taken their toll and the road outside
the hotel had been badly affected. The only way to get to the hotel was to park
in the petrol station below and walk up a path. Later on, the plan was to check
the path to the airport so we could get all our bags there. This was hilarious:
walk almost the entire perimeter of the hotel and the petrol station between
parked cars and stones from the new works, go up a hill about 100 metres long and
over a bridge then down into the airport taxi pickup at arrivals, and take the
lift to the departures. Forget that, we’d be taking a taxi, even if it was just
a matter of a few hundred metres.
I asked the
receptionist of the hotel for a trolley or something to be able to manage all
the stuff. I was very lucky he actually had one. I needed four trips to get all
the bags upstairs, so my burning question was: how in the name of all that is
reasonable were we going to get this huge pile of stuff to Nantes, let alone
Leitrim?
Hurtling
back to our apartment, I was not surprised to find Mercedes chatting to Bonny
Bee and looking pensively at the diverse set of crap still to remove from the
apartment. I had an hour until we needed to leave for the car depot, so I
decided to deal with the last remnants of gear for the container while they
took the final rubbish to the bins across the forecourt outside.
Then it was
time for the big check-up.
After
another 10 months in there, it seemed we had managed to keep things in a fairly
proper state, despite the shelf falling off the wall, the main double glass door
shutter belt breaking, a ship’s steering wheel dropping off its hook, and the remains
of infantile behaviour on the walls and sofas. We paid a cleaning firm a
generous fee and that was that.
We were also
greeted by our kind-hearted neighbour, Andrés, a sprightly late-septuagenarian who
still put on his Lycra gear and cycled to his field where he grew all sorts of
vegetables. His warm words of farewell gave me a lump in my throat and I failed
to stop the tears. He would also call a day later to check we had arrived in
France. The man is an example to us all.
The clock
was not just ticking towards 5pm, it was whirring and the hands were moving
like a rev counter in an Italian muscle car. In fact, I calculated that even if
Mercedes were to leave at that precise moment, we would be 5 minutes late at
the depot. The place closed at half-past five, so we all had to get a shift on.
The cosy valedictory chat with Mercedes finished at about four thirty-nine, so I
strapped everyone in unceremoniously and made a beeline for the car lease place.
Two floors
underground inside a hotel car park, and at least 5 kilometres from the hotel, I
knew I would feel better once we got there. I called to say we’d be late and
the operator said the guy would wait for us, which was nice. I may have committed
a few traffic infractions on the way, but at least we got there.
A kind man, quite
young, he coincidentally lived in the same town as us, 20 kilometres away. He did
his job thoroughly and said everything was in order. I guess we’ll receive a
bill if there is anything still to pay. We took everything out of the car, and
surveyed the mess. There were a lot of loose items, a rectangular fold-up shopping
basket with some shoes, a few sports bags and some other sundry junk that could
have been jettisoned somewhere. Oh, and a huge child car seat.
I thought it
was prudent to take a good mix of clothes to fill up our allotted suitcases,
but Bonny Bee had other plans – I’m sure she would have taken the mattress if the
thought had occurred to her. In the end, I had to pay a small fortune for extra
luggage, and I was none too pleased about having to lug all this stuff on two
planes. In fact, if truth be known, I was incensed and outraged by this. We
could have done with the money for other more practical things, but I was so
tired, I just let it slide.
We went
upstairs into the lobby of the smart hotel above and made our way to the bar
area. We were all parched after such a day. The steaming pile of garbage we
were bringing with us sat by the beautifully designed mezzanine like a
festering mound of abandoned trash in a palace courtyard. Not that either of us
cared that much.
Outside the
hotel sat two taxis that I was eager to get to before anyone else. After our
drinks we hired both of them to transport us and what was to become the world’s
most well-travelled heap of litter to our hotel at the airport. Upon arrival, I
went and borrowed the trolley to cart it all up to our rooms. We were being
given a discount on the rooms because, on the hottest day of the year so far, with
temperatures well into the thirties, the air conditioning wasn’t working. Happy
times.
It was
approaching half-past seven and it was still ragingly hot, but we were all
famished. I had eaten nothing since my bowl of muesli that morning. Manises,
the suburb of Valencia which houses the airport, is a lively working-class area
with a great deal of places to eat and the central market square seemed to be
the place to go. I found a bar-restaurant on the corner of the square that had the
type of menu that would suit us all: the children had nuggets and chips, Bonny
Bee had chicken in an interesting sauce, and I had half a grilled cow.
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| Our last evening in Spain was spent in Manises |
Having
managed to lose 5 kilograms in a couple of weeks, I have taken to trying to
avoid carbs and starchy food in the evenings, so I had a mere salad and a
handful of chips. I deserved a treat. We all had dessert: chocolate moelleux
for Livia and me, and Contessa ice creams for the others, plus coffees for the
adults, then we made our way back to the hotel. It was at this point that we
were looking for a couple of extra travel bags to make sure the stack of garbage
made it out of the country. All the Chinese shops were closed, so I thought it
would be a safe bet to go to the airport shop – it was bound to have one.
I left the
others at the hotel entrance and strode off towards the airport. It was then
that I spotted Lidl was still open. Bounding across the road and into the door,
I had ten minutes until closing time. And on one of their numerous renowned
jumble tables sat a pair of large freezer bags that we could fill with clothes
and shove a few other items into the vacuums they created. I also bought five
breakfast pastries; these would turn out to be the only food we would consume
until we were airborne.
After my
educative walk to the airport, where I noped out of dragging all the gear to
the airport on foot, I spent the rest of the evening trying to fit everything
into existing bags. In the end, I resorted to stuffing a load of jumble into
one of those IKEA laundry bags and tying it up. Completely spent and at the end
of my tether, I asked at reception to order two taxis for eight-fifteen and I
set the alarm for an hour earlier.
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The treacherous airport path
|
The next
morning, we just woke up, got ready, stuffed the breakfast pastries inside us,
and made our way downstairs. I borrowed the trolley once more and brought
everything to the lobby. The taxis arrived and the drivers looked on with utter
stupefaction at the colossal assortment of luggage we had. Squeezing it all
into the two cars, a Prius Plus and a Dacia Sandero, we set off for the airport.
One of the
abiding memories I will have of Spain is the scandalous amount of asphalt and
concrete there is everywhere; much of it I am sure the result of backhanders.
Sometimes, what could have been a straightforward motorway junction has been
transformed into a cement spaghetti layout with tentacles in all directions,
signposts, surprise turnings to nowhere, and often a superfluous relief road.
It’s evident that someone somewhere was creaming off EU funds to make these
vast intersections, so it was not a shock to discover that the taxi ride would
take longer than my walk to the same spot the night before.
Due to the
traffic situation, they parked at the arrivals section on the lower floor,
which was no help to us, and scuttled off with our money, leaving us with three
large suitcases, seven hold bags and five carry-on pieces. There was not a
trolley in sight – naturally, as we were on the arrivals floor... the trolleys
are sent back to the baggage carrousels in the arrivals terminal. I entered the
building and went to seek three of these hand-operated devices.
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| Queuing at Ryanair's baggage check-in was not a lot of fun |
I quickly
noticed the sea of humanity in the Ryanair queues and felt a pang of foreboding,
but I was more concerned to know if I had paid the right amount for the extra
bags. If not, we would be hit with a huge supplementary bill. The queues were
moving fairly rapidly, although I was focusing on trying to shift everything
along and round the snaking channels to the front. Dainoris was pushing a
trolley and was doing rather well, I have to say, although he needed a helping
hand from the woman behind to get round the bends.
Reaching the
front, the administrator weighed our bags and counted the tickets several times,
which was the right thing to do, as every time there was a different result. One
of our bags, the IKEA one, had to go through a special procedure that required
me to follow another administrator to a holding zone at the end of the baggage
area and load it into a lift to take to the plane. No idea why, but there we
go.
By the way,
that child seat I took out of the taxi the day before and whoops! I left
it on the pavement outside the hotel. Silly, silly me… how thoughtless was I to
have done such a thing?! *cough*
We watched our
luggage make its way along the travellator, and I took in a deep, contemplative
breath of fresh air as I brought the family along to the security barriers. I
opened my phone to the PDF, sent Bonny Bee in first, followed by the children,
and I, along with the rest of the carry-on bags, went last. Nothing of great
note, except that our stuff filled up the entire conveyor belt. When we reached
the departure terminal, boarding was already taking place.
The
extraordinarily officious but remarkably efficient boarding staff informed us
we had two bags too many. Their advice was to stuff the smaller ones inside the
larger ones and take no notice. It consisted of Bonny Bee’s handbag and my satchel
with all the documentation and money. For the rest of my days, I will never
understand why we couldn’t just carry them on – we had got that far without any
issues.
And all that
stress, anxiety, tension and worry that we went through was the reason I made
sure we had a good sendoff and said proper farewells beforehand. That was the
therapeutic catalyst that would allow us to leave with as few regrets as
possible. And then, at just before 11 o’clock in the morning, the plane taxied a
short distance down the runway and sped into lift-off, taking us away from our
two-year exile in Spain and northwards towards Nantes for six days, before we reached
our new home in Ireland.
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| Livia, excited before take-off, as we all were |
