A rare and mercifully brief half an hour of channel-hopping took me to C5+, a kind of extra Channel 5 with shows an hour behind the real thing. I found myself watching part of an episode of ‘Bargain-Loving Brits in the sun’ featuring a ‘sun-chasing’ bloke who runs ‘the longest established fish and chip shop on the Costa del Sol’. Six days a week of standing in a chip shop doesn’t sound like my idea of fun but this wasn’t enough for the owner who spend the seventh day at a local market selling what the show described as ‘bric-a-brac’, or as it appeared to me a combination of tat and downright junk. Still, it takes all sorts, doesn’t it? But next we met a woman who had an even more unusual profession: she collected and sold donkey shit.
I wonder how many of us have thought, ‘Do you know what? I’d love to move to Spain for a life of wandering around after donkey and waiting them to take a dump. And then, once they’ve done their business, collecting the shit and selling it for compost.’ But the business owner seemed happy enough. We saw her swapping her donkey shit for some vegetables which had been grown with the assistance of a previous donkey shit delivery.
As someone who isn’t particularly good with bad smells – I almost threw up on Tuesday when I walked past a woman whose dog was – and I am sorry if you are eating at this point – shitting on a grass area, whereafter she put said shit into a shit bag. The smell was awful. How did she do it? Yet there are people emigrating to Spain to do something similar with donkey shit. Good luck to them.
I suppose that’s what happens when you emigrate to somewhere hot like Spain before your pension has kicked in. You have to earn a crust one way or another so cooking fish and chips or collecting donkey shit will at least pay the bills. And you know what? I really admire people who do this. How many of us actually follow our dreams to live abroad? For younger folk it appears to be hard work, sometimes back-breaking, but I imagine they’re happy to have gone through with it.
Many years ago, I admit I did consider, very briefly, the prospect of selling up and making a new start abroad, somewhere warmer than the UK, because it is a simple fact (possibly) that as we get older and retire we moan about the weather much more than we used to, on the likely grounds that we notice what we call crap weather far more. When we were working for a living, it hardly matters what the weather’s like, unless you work outdoors, that is.
The joy of living in constant sunshine does appeal, but little else does, at least not to me. For all Britain’s many faults, it still has my family in it. It has most of my friends and acquaintances. It has pubs, Sainsburys, pasties, a staggering variety of restaurants, Waterstones, HMV, Ribblehead Viaduct, the village cricket club, Averys, decent plumbing and an ability to drink tap water and a million other home comforts I could frankly not manage without. But it takes all sorts, doesn’t it?
I am no snob about Anglified places abroad. I have walked along miles of unspoilt English pubs in the Canary Islands and to my deep shame I have even used McDonalds in Corfu Town, which has now closed down. There goes my sausage and egg McMuffin if I ever visit the island again! It doesn’t bother me a jot. Indeed, later this year we are visiting Lanzarote where one main priority will be to visit the authentic Canarian bar … er … Popeye’s, which has a big screen to show the English football. If you ever catching me ridiculing the Sunday Roast/bingo/Karaoke brigade in a popular Greek resort, just remind me that I have been there and done that and could never guarantee that one day I might do it all again.
Clearly the chip shop owner and tat salesman was enjoying his life on the Costas and the woman was happy shovelling donkey shit, so everyone is happy. As I step out into the endless British rain soon, I might have a passing desire to join them.
