The Rocky Road To Ireland, Part One: Leaving Valencia

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Livia, excited before take-off, as we all were

What We Did Next: Our Time In Valencia Has Come To An End

    SOLD! More photos at the end.

After twenty months here in Spain, we have made the decision to move to a farmhouse in rural Ireland. When we departed from Germany/Luxembourg, it was done in haste and we had barely any time to accept what had befallen us.

Late last year, we found a buyer for our house in Saarburg, and decided to use the money to invest in a property here in the Valencian Community. But following the ravaging storms of November and a litany of unfortunate events, it became evident that this was not the place for us. This was confirmed by Livia’s struggles to adapt to the classes; the main reason for our need to move in the first place.

So we decided to review the list of countries that we had drawn up that we would both be willing to move to (my list was longer than Bonny Bee’s!), and of course there was only one that we shared: Ireland.

In early December, I made some appointments to view houses in parts of the country that seemed attractive, and we took a trip by plane to Dublin a week before Christmas. We figured that if we liked the place in midwinter, we would certainly like it in summer.

It was an enchantment: so much so, that even five months later, the children keep asking when we’re going to Ireland. We drove across to the west coast and back again looking at various properties. One of them was a lovely little house nestled in a valley surrounded by lush, green forest in a village called Cloone. The neighbour, a farmer called Frank, came by and explained about the history of the place. It was a grey Sunday afternoon with scattered rainclouds, but that didn’t deter us.

Frank almost convinced me to buy the place, especially as it was so cheap. The agent had said that everyone who had come to see the property had taken one look at it and driven on, which I thought was harsh, but we kind of liked it. So I said goodbye to Farmer Frank and more or less told him that we would see him in a few months.

That would turn out to be a lie.

I checked on my phone for somewhere to go and eat lunch and one of the places was a lovely pub in Dromod, a small town about 15 minutes’ drive away. When we walked in, the atmosphere was very Christmassy and the menu short but very appealing. The lady of the house came over to us and asked us what we wanted to eat. She also asked what brought us to Dromod. I told her we were looking for a house to buy.

“Oh really?” she replied, “My husband’s a property auctioneer and he’s just over there. Let me get him; just a moment.” Bonny Bee and I both had a feeling that we were supposed to be here, in this place, at this moment, and about two minutes later, a jolly man who had obviously had a long, happy and peaceful life surrounded by his friends and family, came over and introduced himself.

“Hello there, Adrian speaking,” he said, with a smile that contained a hundred kindnesses and an eye twinkling in a manner that I have never seen before, “I hear you’re looking for a house in the area. If you tell me your criteria, I’ll see what I can do.”

So I told him we were looking for a house to buy within our budget that wasn’t too badly neglected. We were hoping to buy a house in cash with the proceeds of our previous one, and we were willing to make concessions regarding the state, as long as there was the potential. He shot me a penetrating glance that radiated reassurance, and promised to return in a few minutes.

When he came back, he handed me a brochure of a house not far from Cloone and just a handful of kilometres from a well-equipped town called Ballinamore.

“Four bedrooms, an acre of land, top of a hill surrounded by forests, lakes and grazing pastures.”

I looked at it and realised I had actually made enquiries about this very place. So I asked him: “Did you get a call from someone in Valencia a few weeks ago?”

“Yes, yes I did. We spoke about the big storm you were having,” he replied.

And it was at that moment I knew we had to go and take a look at that place. I told him we had seen a house in Cloone that would be our preferred choice, but we were happy to take a look.

“Stay there, I’ll call the owner now. There are still a couple of hours of daylight left.” We had a huge drive ahead of us to a place called Bohola in Mayo, but we felt we had to do this. “Yes, he’s there, you can go over any time after you’ve finished your lunch. We’re having a charity event this evening, so I have to go and get prepared now, but let me know in the morning what you thought.”

We thanked him. I asked his wife what the charity event was – it was to raise money for a local care home. I slipped a twenty in the bucket and we left to take a look at this place.

It was down a narrow lane past some rather grand houses and through a forested area. When we came out the other side, it was like we had passed through some Tolkien-esque portal and found ourselves on the top of the world, closer to the heavens and a mere raised hand to reach the clouds.

The current owner, Emmet, a man from the East of England, was there to greet us. A softly-spoken fellow with a German wife called Bettina, he shook our hands and invited us in. They lived in the caravan parked out the back while they were renovating the interior, not because it was uninhabitable, but because under Irish law, if you don’t occupy the house, you can apply for up to 70,000 euro of subsidies.

They were selling up after only two years not because they wanted to, but because Bettina’s health was deteriorating and they needed to live nearer to a specialised clinic that could help her. It was truly out of the way, but it had a charm that drew us in. Emmet showed us around and told us a lot about what was wrong as well as the good stuff, which was refreshingly honest.

I took a few photos to remember it and discuss it with Bonny Bee later on in Bohola when the kids were asleep. I told Emmet we had seen a house in Cloone that we were going to pursue, but if that doesn’t work out, we would be in touch. He thanked me for my honesty. I also called Adrian and told him – he thanked me too, and we left for the west and that was that.

Or was it?

That night, after a dram of the finest whiskey I had ever drunk in a splendid ancient inn, I had an epiphany. That house near Ballinamore just wouldn’t leave my mind. It was more expensive than the one in Cloone next to Farmer Frank, but it just seemed to have slightly more potential. There was no kitchen, no bathroom, and the windows were very drafty, but all the things we could do with it were so tantalising.

So we drove over a hundred kilometres back to Ballinamore to take another look. We just hoped Emmet was at home when we arrived because we didn’t have his number. The skies were clearer and the wind was more clement, and the whole wacky operation seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

He was pretty surprised to see us, to say the least. We got out and told him that we were unable to stop thinking about the place. He was definitely excited about that. Bettina was there and she had a broad smile on her face despite the obvious pain.

We asked more in-depth questions and went through everything from the electrics to the water supply, from the septic tank to the rafters below the roof. We understood the house needed some TLC, but we were prepared to give it what it required. Outside, Emmet told us, there are hares, deer, pine martens, hedgehogs, brown squirrels and sheep. There is so much space on the land that we can more or less do with it anything we want.

After a good hour and a half, possibly two hours with a great deal of wandering round getting a feel for the place, and having consulted the children who gave it a massive thumbs-up, we resolved to buy the place. Emmet and Bettina were delirious. In my mind's eye, I pictured the pond, the tree house, the huge boulder, the grove, the herb garden, the roses, the lupins, hollyhocks and syringa that I'm going to pepper the place with.

Then they told us a story: a few months earlier, they had the house virtually sold to an American lady from New York. One of those with spurious Irish ancestry, you get the gist. She had paid the deposit and was about to leave, when she realised she didn’t have a driving licence and the nearest bus stop was two kilometres away. So she pulled out, and that turned their lives sour. They were feeling despondent. Well they could now look forward to providing Bettina with the help she needed and move to a more convenient location.

I called Adrian.

“Hi, guess where I am right now…”

“Oh I don’t know, Bohola, wasn’t it?” he replied.

“Nope, I’m standing next to Emmet and we have decided to buy the house in Ballinamore.”

You could visualise the level of relief on the phone as I told him that. He was also pretty surprised. We went back to the inn for lunch again and the children got ice cream on the house. There was a celebratory air after the gala evening the night before and the confirmation of the sale of the house. Adrian took all my details and resolved to get cracking on the sale.

He took me by the hand and announced in a merry yet meaningful manner: “Raymond, congratulations on buying a picture-perfect parcel of land in the green and lovely county of Leitrim. Welcome to the community!”

We were home.

Driving back to Dublin, things just felt right: we had planned to move on our own terms this time. This was going to be the point where we could put our lives back on track.

The next thing was to seek a school with amenities for Livia. Just four kilometres away, there’s a school so I called and spoke firstly to the deputy head and then the head. The head told me that the school had several members of staff and a dedicated class for children with Special Educational Needs. The application was so straightforward: a two-page questionnaire and a few other details, then finished. This is in blatant contrast to the administrative psycho-drama I had getting the kids in our preferred school here in Valencia.

So now, the next thing is getting us there…

At some point near the end of June, we will leave our apartment of 20 months and head to France for a week to decompress. After that, we will arrive in Dublin to begin the next chapter.

 

Why we decided to abandon private education

It was just a year and a half ago that we were compelled to leave Germany and Luxembourg because of Livia’s education. The idea was that we needed to make sure she received a solid education in English, as she refused to speak French or German. With the UK off-limits, it came as a no-brainer to us when we discovered the province of Valencia in Spain had three times as many international schools with English as the working language compared to Luxembourg and our region of Germany combined.

We always saw our time in Valencia as an experiment where we would take stock of the situation on a regular basis. The first year passed quite quickly, but Livia was once again rejected from the private school she had been welcomed into only nine months earlier. Fortunately, they had the decency to tell us in early January of their decision not to renew our contract with them, which gave us time to look around for a better match.

Livia had been accompanied in class by a professional from a psychology centre most mornings for several months, paid for on top of the fees for three children. Despite this, the complaints about her behaviour started rolling in a couple of months later. We knew about her inability to stay focused and her propensity to misunderstand people’s intentions, but the idea was that the professional assistant in the class would help her settle and focus. It was working. So it came as a shock when the head of the school and her teacher called us into the office for what one might call The Little Chat.

The initial line was “it isn’t working”, then it dialled up to “she needs to be in a school with a far smaller group”, and finally it reached “we will help you relocate her as soon as possible” (but they won’t). You know how these “escalation” conversations go – a similar trick is applied to employees being told they’re about to be made redundant, or to unsuspecting partners in one-sided relationships. If you want to get rid of unwanted baggage without upsetting them, you need to start small and gradually build up to the main point. They were insistent that she needed to go to another school with smaller groups as soon as we could find another place for her.

And so the manager promised to make some calls, but in fact the burden really fell on us. We looked around for other schools as after this, we were pretty upset that they hadn’t really given Livia the choice to stay until the end of the school year. There was the Waldorf School in El Puig near our apartment, but they didn’t get back to us after our visit. So we thought about putting all three children in the semi-private (concertado) school near our office in the Cabanyal area of the city. I called for an appointment and a very kind lady invited us for a visit. We just hoped all three children would like the place. The day came quite quickly and we went all five to see the school.

Livia in all honesty hated it. But we felt this was nerves about having to make yet another change rather than an actual dislike. Dainoris walked round with us and found it a pleasant experience. As for Milda, we lost her on the way round, but we later found her sitting in another classroom taking questions from an audience gathered round her. She had only recently turned four at the time, and here she was, holding court amongst about ten other children and their teacher. She was going to fit in fine.

So in the first few weeks of 2024 I made the appropriate moves to try to enrol them all in that school and withdraw them from the private school at the behest of the latter school’s manager and Livia’s teacher. This is when the hilarity began… I first had to request the papers from Valencia city council. Arriving there, the employee at reception said my journey was unnecessary. All I needed to do was to download the city’s app and go to the education section. Oh, that sounded much easier, didn’t it? Nope. It took longer than it would have done to just queue up at the council and speak to a human being. It required you to set up a digital signature with a disproportionate set of hurdles to clear, and then upload a list of documents longer than those required to get a mortgage. And this was just to establish your profile.

To actually effectuate the enrolment, I had to undertake such a daunting and prohibitive procedure that I can honestly say was the most futile waste of my time I have ever been forced to experience. And I have taken a speeding awareness course. In German. Which took place on four consecutive Saturday mornings. And it cost me hundreds of euro.

In Luxembourg, for example, you sign in once and you gain access to everything from social security to housing, from health to education facilities, from unemployment benefit to reporting defective street lighting, noise pollution or stray cats. In Germany, we showed up to the council buildings, took a ticket and someone did everything necessary to be able to live and work there in about ten minutes. Here, though, I was confronted with a barrage of dubious and intrusive questions, many of which had nothing to do with education, all just to prove we were who we said we were and that we wanted what we said we wanted.

Meet the low-trust society head-on.

It was the most Kafkaesque, Byzantine, tortuous, and flawed procedure ever dreamed up by the depraved mind of a civil servant this side of the grave of George Orwell. Even the French couldn’t muster up such a pile of utter blethering gobbledegook if they forced all their hundreds of thousands of employees to eat a tinful of shrooms and tasked them with inventing a new procedure for the registering and licensing of electric scooters for dung beetles.

And at the end of the online application process, having spent a good hour answering the plethora of questions and uploading everything necessary to satisfy the city education ministry’s great and good, which I had to do three times for each child, I pressed “SEND”. And the longest error message ever written appeared on the screen, which in the type of stuffy, haughty and circuitous language that had been banned in most northern countries in the eighties, explained I had missed one pathetic little piece of information a few pages earlier, and I had to do the whole thing again. No recourse to correct the mistake, no red highlight of the erroneous data, just the obligation to go through the entire demoralising process once more, making sure I didn’t forget how I did it last time. Instead, though, I went for an angry walk on the beach where I kicked a lot of sand and shouted incoherent profanities at the sea. My mental health had already started to come apart at the seams due to the previous traumas, but this set off a load of alarm bells that screamed to everyone around me “he’s clearly potty, keep your distance!”

So Bonny Bee took it off my hands and did it all a few days later, having learned from my mistakes. It went through. Apparently. Not that we’d know, apart from the little message on the screen saying the process was complete.

Several days later, we received a very short, terse message from the city council, all in capital letters, that essentially said that nobody was going to allow Livia to change schools in the middle of the academic year. All that effort for nothing. I was getting really tired of doing the bidding of people who clearly had no sense of proportion when it came to handling citizens’ needs. But then I realised that actually, they had a point. Why should Livia have to change schools half way through the school year? It made no sense.

So I told the head of Livia’s school what the city council had said – it would mean they would have to keep her there for the remainder of the year, which would be the most ethical outcome. For despite all the moaning and carping from her educators, Livia had made a lot of progress.

The head and Livia’s teacher were disappointed, but they had never done this before, so they had learned something – that it took a furious faceless bureaucrat sitting in an office to act as a moral compass in all this. Imagine that.

The thing which had disappointed me most was that I was under the illusion Livia’s teacher had been showing a lot of eagerness in her efforts to help her, as she had initially said it would be her special mission. But the reality in the end was, like the staff at her last school in Luxembourg, she just wanted the quiet life. She didn’t want the hassle of an eccentric and confused little girl disturbing the class.

This was confirmed when, a week or two later, she complained about Livia’s behaviour again as Livia had been giving one boy a particularly hard time. To give her and the others in the class I suggested they swap Dainoris and Livia around, as they were in the same year but in different classes. The teacher did her very best to look shocked before making the most self-condemning statement of the year: “we could never do that to a child – if we moved her to another place, she would think she was being punished!”

Well, Ms Poppins, if this is how you felt about moving classes, then I wonder what you thought forcing her to change schools was going to do to her… if you read this, I would love an answer. I’ll print your reply anonymously, of course – I wouldn’t want you to start getting quality control inspectors, or worse, hate mail.

Despite all the condescending, Teachers-Know-Best sermons and the We-Only-Have-Her-Best-Interests-At-Heart homilies, we don’t hold any grudges. We just want to know whether the founder and owner was worried about her beloved school’s position on the education league tables, rather than being the outstanding pillar of education that all the advertising material alluded to. That included a whole spiel on their website about a special needs department, which was obviously another fallacy, as the only allusion to special needs was a visit once a week from an external child psychologist who would do the rounds and have a few chats with sad-looking munchkins.

I mean, I don’t mind the fact that a huge private school with exorbitant fees doesn’t have the facilities to cope with one solitary difficult child, and I’m glad in the end the head teacher admitted it, but I truly felt that everyone in there gave up far too early. Along with Livia’s classroom assistant we were paying extra for, we felt we were making progress. Livia came home happy four days out of five and had been making a huge amount of progress. But her teachers didn’t even wait for a diagnosis before pulling out.

This was the second year in a row that a private school had given up on Livia, riding a coach and horses through their own shiny charters that proudly show off their Duty of Care To Every Child. What’s the point in promising to do your best if in the end you hide behind your school’s deficient infrastructure (despite those huge fees) in order to justify running up the white flag of capitulation? I can only imagine how badly they must have felt in having realised they had failed a child. Again.

All this has led me to conclude one major thing: the private schools in every place we have been to all have one thing in common – they really aren’t as competent or as qualified as the public sector to take care of your child. If they can’t cope with one child with a restless spirit, causing havoc with their mythical multitasking skills, then you may as well save your money.

Now you may get the idea that I’m bitter about this. No, not really.

However, I feel it’s my duty to warn everyone thinking that sending their child to a private school is going to give them a massive head start in life.

But for some, nothing could be further from the truth. Their facilities may be cleaner, their gadgets more modern, their playing fields bigger, but that’s just cosmetic. What matters is the people running it: from the head of the facility to the caretaker, a school is there to give every child the means to cope with the essentials of life, and to send them home feeling happy and fulfilled.

I was sent to a private school, and I really don’t recommend it. There are several reasons why you should not send your child to a private school, in my opinion. And this is only based on my opinion, not a broad assumption. I am sure there are many fine institutions out there. I myself went to one outstanding preparatory school which sadly closed down in the 1990s. The other private school I went to had the same toothless leadership as those at Livia’s schools. This is because ultimate accountability is not to parents, but to the board of governors, aka the shareholders, many of whom have absolutely no interest in the wellbeing of the pupils or the desire to invest in better facilities if it means losing out in the short term.

But this is not the only reason I would warn parents off private schools. Let me take you through them one by one:

The first reason is what it does to the child’s psyche. Because of all the money being spent on me, I felt under the greatest pressure to perform. But every test that came up, I flopped, because I could not handle the pressure. I would have much preferred to have been a slightly higher than average pupil in a state school than a less-than-mediocre performer in a paying school.

The second reason is that private schools are under no obligation to hire teachers competent in their field. In fact, in a few of the private schools whose interiors I have seen, the teachers have been completely out of their depth. Qualifications are becoming an issue now, especially when it comes to education authority inspections, but a lot of them are failed state school educators.

And the third reason is that no matter how much money you plough into the school, it still doesn’t have the same amount of access to important resources as state schools do.

In the end, we managed to fill in the application for the three to go to the semi-private school near our office this year, and so far they seem to be coping well, but they need some assistance. In fact, although Livia is still visiting therapists and is still quite a handful, she is far more settled than her previous two schools. Furthermore, she comes home and surprises us with the number of Spanish words she can speak. Considering the principal reason for our move was her refusal to speak anything except English, the dial has most definitely moved on this front.

But this is not all we have decided to abandon. I will elaborate in another article coming very shortly.

Living In A Disaster Zone - A Week In Valencia

Volunteers en masse heading from the city centre to Paiporta on foot
(courtesy of Sandra Mayoral)

The past week has been one of the most programmatic periods of our lives. It started last Tuesday, when we saw on the weather apps and in social media news postings that our region was bracing itself for a pummelling. We were just unaware of the extent of the thrashing we were all going to get. At a quarter of an hour before 5pm on Tuesday 29 October, we left our office in El Cabanyal, a suburb on the western side of the city bordering the sea, and walked the 350 metres to the school which the children attend.

We picked them up as usual, but instead of heading to the café to decompress and catch up on news, we hurried to the car, parked a way away beyond our office. The children usually complain and protest if we miss out on this, but even they had understood that there was something amiss in the ether. It was airless, despite the strong wind, obviously because of the rise in humidity. I was sweating, although it was comparatively cool. They were all very compliant and sat in the car without so much as a sigh. We took the usual route northwards out of the city and along the coast to La Pobla de Farnals, the settlement next to ours, so that I could buy some provisions for a day or two.

That was a good decision, as will shortly become evident.

As we drove, outside the car it was ferocious – blasts of wind virtually lifted the car off the road. There was debris already floating about and being thrust into the air by the gusts. Waves on the sea had been building for a few days. I had noticed the choppy waters, but on the way home they were viciously battering the rocks, sending chutes of water ten or fifteen metres into the air. All of us were taken aback by the situation outside the car. So when we arrived in the relative calm of the supermarket car park, I temporarily forgot about the impending nastiness. Driving back, I would usually leave the car in the gated open-air car park below our building, but I decided to put it in the underground facility. It seemed like a lot of others had the same idea.

Our apartment in El Puig de Santa María lies right on the seafront, and we were about to have a front-row seat for the evening’s weather show. This would be the day that the climate emergency announced its presence in our here-and-now, and its intention to stick around until we as a human race do something about it. The sickening propaganda and misinformation surrounding meteorological extremification has made it easier for fossil fuel multinationals to feed conspiracy theorists and their acolytes with false data. It is amazing how easy it has been to find gullible souls keen to denounce cleaner fuels. Well it is becoming harder and harder for these useful idiots to keep on disseminating their deceptive and damaging nonsense.

The view from a window further back from the front in our apartment

Our fifth-floor apartment facing the sea was being severely battered by the wind. Sand was swirling, smearing the windows along with the intermittently heavy rain. Huge puddles were appearing on the camper van zone next to our building, and the palm trees were forming semi-parabolas virtually leaning into each other. The glass in the frame of our sliding terrace door was flapping inwards with the eruptions of wind, so I put the shutters down on all the windows to mitigate any damage from a really powerful gust, and hoped for the best. The shutters were also under severe strain, but better they take the initial hit rather than the glass.

The whistling through the cracks in the antiquated windows here was compounded by the ear-piercing bagpipe noises being generated by the thin gaps above the terrace door in Milda’s bedroom, where a roller blind usually sits. I patched it up with sticky tape and hoped it remained intact at least until the morning. With the children in bed, we started asking the school for instructions. I had already decided they wouldn’t be going in on Wednesday, but I was banking on the school making that official. Late in the evening, we received confirmation of this. As Friday was a national holiday anyway, we would be told a day later that all schools, colleges and universities in the area would be closed for the entire week.

We stayed up until late hoping that the turmoil outside would die down, but it took a long time to abate. The sea was a fulminating expanse of volatility, higher than I had ever seen it. There is usually very little tide in the Mediterranean, but that night, the sea even came up to the First Aid hut just below the promenade. In the morning, several of the palettes that make up the floor outside the hut would be displaced. I wasn’t worried about putting the car in the underground parking area, but it did play on my mind a couple of times.

We managed to get to sleep and hoped the situation would be calmer in the morning. It was, but there was evidence of the night’s wrathful proceedings everywhere. Tree branches strewn far and wide, plastic bags dancing in the road, silt amassed in places, huge muddy puddles in the ubiquitous dips, mopeds and bikes overturned, awnings ripped, fences splintered and torn from their moorings, discoloured water in the sea, pieces of furniture in random places, cars covered in leaves, sand and bark, or dented from raining debris. Our own windows were covered in sand and wet dirt, thrust from below.

I took a walk around the block and down to the beach. The sea was still in a state of agitation, but a great deal less than the day before. I resolved to stay at home for as long as necessary – subsequent government warnings tended to agree with this. However, as it looked like we would be there for the long haul, I decided to do a bigger shop. Returning to the supermarket, it was clear a lot of other people had the same idea. In the end, I left with a full trolley and an unrelenting desire to rest. Luckily for us, the children weren’t in the mood to get active either.

Wednesday passed fairly uneventfully. We took the children to the playground in El Puig main town just to have a run about and lose some of the pent-up energy from being sequestered at home. It also gave Bonny Bee and me some time to talk about our future. A few recent setbacks had persuaded us that maybe we weren’t in the right place, and the activities of the last 48 hours had kind of confirmed that.

Over the coming couple of days, the news filtered through about the extent of the storm. It was worse than anything that even the most depraved mind could imagine. And the area it had affected had been completely devastated. But worse than that, many of the authorities had not reached a lot of the places most seriously affected. It was becoming clearer and clearer that there was a serious dereliction of responsibility. The French emergency squads had reached some suburbs before even a local uniform had passed.

And what is even more of an indictment on the Spanish and Valencian authorities is the fact that the French squads had at first been told they weren’t needed. The army was deployed a full three days later. The vast majority of the help has come from the initiative of the citizens. Spanish TV talk shows are full of angry and distressed citizens eviscerating the national and regional governments for dragging their heels for so long, and for not taking precautionary measures beforehand.

Courtesy of Rosa Hoynck van Papendrecht

In all of this, there is a personal factor. Everyone who lives in Valencia knows someone from the affected areas. We all have friends or colleagues living in the western suburbs. One of mine hadn’t responded to my calls and messages for two days, but he resurfaced on Sunday morning, telling us he was exhausted and overwhelmed.

Although we were told by the authorities to remain where we were to keep the roads clear, there was a certain feeling of restlessness building in me. When the invasion of Ukraine happened, I kicked into action the same night, and I didn’t stop for months. But this time, being here, having the energy drained from me, I had retreated into my own shell and was finding it hard to leave it. The setbacks that we had experienced had made me a pastiche of my usual self. I had withdrawn from society because I felt society wanted that. But I didn’t want to pass this one with the regret of not taking any action.

So on Friday evening, I put out a message on the WhatsApp group for our coworking organisation to ask if anyone wanted to chip in with me and I would go out and fill up my car with practical items. Within a couple of hours I had nearly 300 euro in my account. In the morning, I emptied the car of any junk (and there was a LOT), and decided to head to a hypermarket in Sagunto, the next town north, relatively far from the disaster zone. The shop, however, was heaving. Parking spaces were at a premium, trolleys were virtually all gone, and every square metre of the shop was filled with shoppers and their acquisitions.

I had to firstly get a coin to stick in a trolley, and that meant I needed to go to the customer service helpdesk. It was swamped with people, but I took a number in case I got lucky. I went off somewhere else to find a coin. No luck. So when I got back to the helpdesk my number was called. But some other guy with a lower ticket number piped up. After hearing him inquiring about getting money back for some rather trivial gadget, I got a bit fed up with the self-absorbed people around me. So I said “all I need is a token or a coin to get a trolley.” She kindly gave me 50 cents and I said “thank you, that is all.” The old geezer looked fairly sheepishly at me and I gave him my best death stare. Sometimes my passive aggressive personality does come in handy.

The Ukraine tragedy had given me insight into what things are needed and what things people donate too much or too little of. Going round the shop, I pinpointed things that people always ignore in favour of the more obvious stuff: babies’ nappies, moisture tissues, large and medium rubbish bags, but also a few more obvious ones, such as disinfectant, cleaning products, cooking oil, broth, UHT milk and water. I chose to spread the number of products so as not to cause the shop to run out. This had happened everywhere during Covid and in parts after the Ukraine invasion.

Carrefour in Sagunto, halfway round

I went to join the queue to pay, and was confronted with a line of people that went around the entire exterior of the hypermarket, almost back to the checkout desk on the other side. It was immense. I thought it would be a little calmer in Sagunto, but this whole experience was proving that it was affecting the wider region as a whole. A couple of charlatans tried to push in front of the people behind me, claiming it was the end of the line, but a few pointers made them realise nobody was open to suffering fools gladly and they scuttled off elsewhere. Nearer the front, actually, but I’m sure they got the same message there too…

After a fairly quick wait, I reached the checkout. The lady behind me was patient enough to let me pack everything up properly. She was obviously aware I didn’t need a whole box of wet wipes, and enough cooking oil to drown in a bath with, just for myself. I packed up the car, returned the 50 cents to the kind woman at the helpdesk, and drove to Valencia.

There are various locations around the city taking in donations, and the first one I went to, the neighbourhood association of Benimaclet, was totally overwhelmed to the point that the volunteer outside told me to come back the day after. Outside, there were bottles of water stacked high. Inside, the place looked like a packing centre for a supermarket rather than a neighbourhood drop-in centre. They were very busy and doing their utmost to keep control of the situation.

I resolved to drive to the neighbourhood association in Algirós, close to our coworking centre. As soon as I opened the boot of the car, four volunteers came over and emptied it. They were really efficient and resourceful. They also appreciated the items I had got, and I felt justified in my purchases. One wanted to take the reflective vests that belonged in the car – I had to tell her they were ours and a legal requirement, which brought out a little smile. I drove off feeling contented that I had played my part and given other members of our coworking community the chance to play theirs.

My travels on Saturday 2 November

I called Bonny Bee, as it was half past one and lunch was pressing. We resolved to go to La Pobla de Farnals to the Italian restaurant there for pizza. The children could also go on the dodgems, the trampoline and the carrousel and give us a break. It was a good afternoon to decompress and take stock of the situation. As an aside, the music played at the rides was classical, not the usual pop-disco trash.

However, all was not well elsewhere.

Two weeks ago, we had gone to the neighbourhood of Aldaia near Alaquàs to look at a house to buy, and the week before that, we had been near Chiva looking at another one. Both neighbourhoods had been catastrophically affected by the floods. We might have ended up buying the latter, as it was a lovely house – a hundred trees in the grounds, including an olive grove, oranges, lemons and jacarandas. The other place was much nearer the city centre, but it was in an area that I didn’t like. I felt something was amiss there. Maybe I had a premonitory feeling about what was coming, I don’t know.

I have been wondering what state the places are in now though. If it were not for the geologically slow process of selling our house back in Germany, we may have ended up in western Valencia. We had even been to Torrent, Catarroja, La Torre and Calicanto to check on places to live: these four areas have all been severely cut off from the rest of the region. Roads are blocked, bridges gone, streets covered in debris that has accumulated in bottlenecks.

There have been other signs:

At about the same time as our visit to Aldaia, I spoke to a police officer about a piece of broken matchstick in our lock that had prevented us from opening our apartment door, and he had said it wasn’t a break-in but someone in our building who doesn’t like us. We have faced a few nasty run-ins with people who have made our time here less than ideal.

The blue dot top right is where we live, and the school and office are just below La Malvarrosa

Also, we had gone to buy a car, as the lease for our present one was due to expire on 6 November. But the agent responsible for the sale had made some rather basic errors in our request, and it had become difficult, no impossible, to buy one. Fortunately, the present car hire organisation had allowed us to carry on with the car we have.

All of these things had in a way been telling us, or even screaming at us, that we should reconsider our choice of place to settle. 

Late on Saturday, I went out to buy more provisions in a variety of shops. There was very little left, but I managed to scoop up what was necessary.

Nearly no fruit left in Mercadona, El Puig

Same story with the milk and dairy products

Salads and vegetables also all out of stock

Water - just some sparkling left, no still

On Sunday 3 November, the king and head of government came from Madrid to visit some of the ravaged areas. They were immediately set upon by angry mobs. There is a lot of resentment out there, and it’s mainly aimed at those at the top. People telling the heads of state and government they were four days too late, calling them murderers, and pelting them with some of the mud and silt that was still lying around in abundance.

We have to see how it’s reached this point. And it’s simple, really: the national government is led by Pedro Sánchez of the PSOE, a socialist party, and the regional government is led by Carlos Mazón of the Partido Popular, a right-of-centre party. One does not want the other to take the glory for any successes or decisive gestures of salvation. Instead, there was a huge political staring match with the loser being the one who blinked first. The toxic masculinity that has become a staple of Spanish politics really flowed over. Sánchez played the waiting game in the hope his rival would collapse, and Mazón confirmed the situation by believing that asking for outside help was a sign of political weakness from the Valencian government.

Courtesy of Memorias de Pez, YouTube. Full video HERE (in Spanish with subtitles)

We also have to look at who has responsibility for what. The Valencian government has control over law and order and keeping the peace as the Guardia Civil and the National Police come under its command. The Protección Civil is also under its control and coordinates the response, plans evacuations, and takes over places to use as refuges. The fire service is under the responsibility of both the Valencian government and local councils. Then there is the Policía Local, that controls the traffic and coordinates the evacuations. They are under the local council control only. Then there is the UME, or the Military Emergencies Unit, as well as the armed forces which are controlled solely by the government in Madrid. The Valencian government has to put out a request for their involvement. That obviously hadn’t happened because of the loss of face. A frightening realisation.

All of these points, all of these setbacks, all of these astonishing pieces of news, seemed to be conspiring to tell us something much more important: if this were to happen again we would be in the hands of politicians with very fragile egos.

A still from the Memorias de Pez video

I have known about the Land Of Nasty Surprises for most of my life. I warned Bonny Bee when she chose this place to come and live. It is not as shiny as it looks, as I had found out way back in the 1980s and 1990s. Things have hardly changed. The sun may shine most of the year; the food may be good even if it is full of pretty repetitive ingredients; the social life may go on round the clock and the bars and restaurants may be appealing. But under that superficial veneer there is not much substance.

I remember the response to Ukrainians fleeing the country into Poland in 2022. Before the night was over, there were preparations in place and a huge relief effort. Poland became the world's largest refugee camp without even erecting a single tent. I also remember the flooding in Germany and Luxembourg a few summers ago. The rescue operation was almost immediate and the governments had called for international help by the end of the first day. But here in Spain, political one-upmanship, point scoring and demonstrations of strength are more important than actually taking practical measures. 

It was this point that made us both resolved to leave Valencia for good, at some point in early 2025, all being well. We have a strong belief that there are never coincidences. And with that in mind, we will choose wisely.