Time for life to cut us all some slack

Life really is not cutting us much slack right now, but we are sure that goes for many of us.

For the past twelve months, we have been waiting for the day when either the children can come out here to stay with us, or we can plan a visit back to the UK. For too long, the quarantine restrictions for travellers from Spain into the UK made it all but impossible for us to plan a visit, as we really have nowhere to stay when we get there, and would be relying on hotel or property rental availability, which wouldn’t work in self-isolation circumstances, as far as a family get-together is concerned.

Then, as soon as it was announced that travellers from Spain who had received both doses of the vaccine would no longer need to quarantine, we hit our busiest period of the year here. Owing to this wretched pandemic, we had been forced to move some of our creative courses into the second half of the year, cramming dates into August, September and October, in the hope of being able to recoup some of the losses of the past 18 months. That’s all well and good, but it does mean that we have no free dates until well into October.

11th October marks the first birthday of Georgie, our gorgeous first grandchild, and it gets harder every day not being in a position to go and spend time with the family. We have started to plan a late October visit, and the idea has always been to rent a house where we can all convene and spend some time together, in our own little bubble. Of course, that didn’t take into account the astronomical prices now being charged for any rental accommodation in the UK. These out-of-season prices are extortionate, and add insult to some already very great injuries. Staying in a hotel is never the same, as we can’t get together as a family just to catch up.

Now, poor Georgie and her parents are being put through the mill, as Georgie is having to spend time in hospital having a 24 hour EEG and an MRI scan. The initial trips to the hospital for tests resulted in the entire family catching a vomiting bug, so in turn each of them has been laid low for 24 or 36 hours, on top of everything else. Hospitals really are places to be avoided right now, and this all makes separation much harder to bear.

Timings have conspired against us once again, due to my knee. I have suffered with a dodgy knee ever since I fell, skiing, back in the winter. This summer, the pain was getting worse so I had to go and have the knee looked at, which resulted in two painful injections to provide temporary respite. It appears that the meniscus has been damaged. I now need a ‘procedure’ which is scheduled for early October. It is almost as if everything is shouting “YOU CAN’T GO ANYWHERE”!

Granada Concierge Creative Courses

In the meantime, we have been working to try and keep together our programme of creative courses and fill the house with bed and breakfast guests.

We managed to run a fabulous Weekend Watercolour Painting course, with Jessica Shepherd, with two guests from Switzerland and Portugal respectively. These guests had originally booked back in 2019 for the course we had planned for 2020, so they certainly receive points for tenacity. The weekend could not have been more perfect.

Then, in July, we had a last-minute couple from New York join us for our week of Flamenco: Dance, Music and History. So, four guests from California, Sweden and New York threw themselves into our immersive week of song and dance. Bobby, from New York, spent the week learning Flamenco Guitar while his wife and our other two guests got to grips with the choreography. There can hardly have been a better escape from the trials and tribulations of the past 18 months. Sitting out on the terrace of our private venue, in the still warmth of another glorious evening, surrounded by lovely people, we all felt immensely privileged to have found ourselves in this little bubble, seemingly so far away from everything that world continues to throw in our collective direction.

At the end of the week, we put on a performance for the village and we were thrilled to see an audience of upwards of 70 people gathered in the square beneath Moclin Castle, and with the sparkling lights of Granada spread out in the distance. We realised, all of us, that even on this very small scale, this humble course helps many other people. Our guests bought goods from a friend’s delicatessen in Granada; we visited the Museo de las Cuevas in Granada’s Sacromonte, and popped into one of out favourite bars for a generous tapas lunch. Our local bar, Bodega Doral, had new customers almost every night of the week, including our first evening get-together. For all of us, it has been akin to sitting through a long drought waiting for the first drops of rain, and when those drops did hit the ground it felt very good indeed.

We are still meeting challenges along the way, with last-minute cancellations arising from continued travel uncertainty. You will note above the lack of visitors from the UK, and it is hardly surprising, given the muddy and confusing messages that have simply resulted in most would-be travellers giving up any idea of holidays abroad. Whether by design or sheer incompetence, the knock-on effect of scaremongering, unnecessary quarantines and costly testing requirements has caused immeasurable damage to countless small travel businesses such as ours. We count ourselves lucky that we can, just about, scrape by this year, but there are days when we have felt like scrapping 2021 and starting over again next year. That said, the feedback we receive from guests goes a very long way towards making it worthwhile, and we have always felt that we need to start back on the hospitality bicycle as soon as we possibly can.

Adios AirBnB

We have, today, decided to delist Casa Higueras from Airbnb. Almost from the day we signed up to this website, we have been in two minds about continuing.

This week, we had two guests through Airbnb and we had a fairly unpleasant couple of days. Almost as soon as the couple arrived, they made comments suggesting that they were Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers. Now, far be it from us to dictate what people do or believe, but we have spent 18 months doing everything we can to ensure that guests can come here and feel safe and well looked after. Neither of us wanted to have this couple in the house following their implied views, and we certainly didn’t want to get into a debate about the whys and wherefores. It annoyed me that Airbnb places a lot of responsibility for Covid safety on the property owners, but seemingly very little on the guest. The very late feedback from Airbnb, when we registered our concerns, placed the onus on us again, and said we ought to strengthen our Covid guidelines. What? Do we have to state that we do not welcome anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers? How does one prove that someone refuses to be vaccinated and believe that the pandemic is a hoax? I had hoped that people who travel would have some sense of responsibility and consideration, but evidently not. Perhaps Vaccination Passports are the answer…

This episode was offset by visits from other lovely guests, but now we need a little break before our next course. A day or two at the beach trying not to miss the children too much (impossible) and planning our UK trip. Neither of us wants to rush in, rush out, pay ridiculous sums for no time with the family - there is little point, as we will all end up more miserable than before. Rather wait just a little bit longer and then be together properly.

Knowing our luck……no, I am not going to tempt fate.