The year that was 2021 — Two South of Granada

Andrew and I, like many people, saw the arrival of January 2021 as the start of an optimistic new year but, in fact, January 2021 for us was possibly even harder to endure than most of the 10 months that preceded it.

In 2020, there was a feeling that we could do absolutely nothing about the situation. For the most part, everything was taken out of our hands. No-one could travel so we had no choice but to cancel all of our tourism plans and just sit tight. With the new year, there came a hope that the world would gradually reopen and that life would slowly, slowly regain some sense of the normal. That was not to be, and there was a perpetual round of ‘will we-won’t we’ as we clambered aboard a dizzying carousel of the continued unknown.

From our social media channels, it might appear that we have something of a charmed life here in Spain but let us tell you that we have faced challenges like so many other people and, only yesterday, we were discussing the toll that the past year has taken on our mental health. It is only now, at the start of 2022, that we can see immediate fall out amongst friends in the same business as us, and what a disastrous year 2021 was for everyone. Despite our own personal peaks and troughs, of which there have been several, we have done what we can to keep our head above water and look towards the positive. For me, I admit that many, many afternoons have been bad and frequently, after lunch, I would easily find myself sinking into some dark moods that were very hard to avoid. I can assure you that this has nothing to do with the occasional consumption of a lunchtime beer! There were days when, for no apparent reason, both Andrew and I would descend into the most foul moods when the slightest thing would tip us into a rage. Fortunately, we are able to identify when either of us has succumbed and we can leave each other alone for an hour or two and, by the time we have sought out the sun, taken Alfie for a walk or had an evening gin, then we take stock and push the vile mood out of sight.

Anyway, we accept that 2021 was not the best of years, but it did go very quickly for which we are thankful! I would add that it was not all grim, as we did have many highlights and we put together this brief review to pick out those many good times just so that the bad times are never allowed to win.

January

We started off the New Year with a bang, literally. We had a hike and a picnic to discover a Visigoth cemetery near Colomera and got caught up in a New Year’s Day shoot. We found ourselves scuttling through a very muddy olive grove with inches of mud on our boots, trying to avoid shotgun fire overhead. Our picnic was taken on a clifftop with Vultures wheeling overhead.

Snow came to Moclín on 2nd January and stayed with us for the best part of a week. It was a very cold start to the year, but we love a bit of snow and the landscape was a beauty to behold.

There was no prospect of seeing family, which was very hard to accept after so long apart. There is no doubt that the support of friends and neighbours in the village helped considerably; they are family to us, and it made a great difference.

February

The effects of the UK/Brexit Withdrawal Agreement coming into effect at the start of the year hit our pockets at the start of the month. I had bought a painting from one of our creative course tutors and it got held in customs in Madrid for weeks, and the customs charges for getting it sent from the UK to Spain were eye-wateringly painful. The painting was bought in memory of my Mum, who died in April 2020.

February also marked the mysterious disappearance of one of neighbours, Manuel Caba. The sculptor’s house burned to the ground one Saturday night, and villagers spent the following week trawling through the countryside to try and find clues as to Manuel’s whereabouts. A very sad story played out in a grey and damp Andalucian landscape.

It rained a lot in the first half of February and I seem to remember we baked a lot of cakes and biscuits…and then ate them. The sun and the almond blossom made welcome appearances from the middle of the month and we managed to get out and about once again.

Towards the end of the month, and as regions were still closed, we took the opportunity to escape for the occasional day skiing. This, for us, was one of the biggest highlights of the year. Only people from Granada could go to the resort, so it was well-nigh empty. We were able to drive from home, park, get ski equipment and be on the slopes by 10:00 am. There were times when we were the only people on a slope and it was glorious. I expect that this will be the only time, ever, that we will have that opportunity to have ski slopes to ourselves, in the sun, in the fresh air, away from the prevailing woes that surrounded us all, and we count our blessings for that. It was a much needed moment of normality and escape.

Ian having a lesson with the British Ski School

March

March was a month of grey skies, damp firewood, chilly evenings and photos from my son and daughter-in-law of their gorgeous daughter, our granddaughter, all of whom were just too far away, separated by ongoing restrictions. Whenever we felt too low, we got in the car and returned to the ski slopes and, trawling through photos even now, the memories were joyful.

We resumed our Spanish lessons with our fabulous teacher, Maria, hoping to get more and more fluent during our long periods of isolation.

When the blue skies returned, Andrew and I set about creating the Gin Terrace outside the studio. This was a project that we delayed for far too long, but we knew that we had no further excuses. The laying of pebbles in the sand is incredibly therapeutic. It played merry hell on the back and the knees, but hey, who cares about that when you are creating a little work of art. We pottered away listening to podcasts while we worked, and it allowed us to set aside the ever-present black dogs…The end result is something of which we are both proud and it looks lovely when viewed from the Gin Sofa.

April

Easter came and went. Leaves appeared on the trees and wildflowers started to appear. We never forget how fortunate we are to live in such a stunning place. Throughout the last two years, we have never, ever regretted our move here. On the contrary, we are immensely thankful that we do live here and it only takes a hike to the nearest rocky outcrop to look across the endless landscape to realise that we need to keep everything in perspective. The weight drops from our shoulders and we breathe in the clear air.

April was an anniversary month that I’d care not to remember, but we found ways of filling each day. We both found that we have to have projects, either on the go or in the planning stage. We both needed to know that there was something positive on the horizon. We continued to work, and this almost always saw us through each morning. I fell on one of our skiing trips and had a few problems with my knee which rather precluded me from too strenuous a hike, and this did take its toll, as we both love going out together, with Alfie, for new and exciting walks.

We rearranged the studio, as we had decided to market the space for remote workers looking for inspiring locations in which to work for longer periods of time. That little trend in the travel sector didn’t seem to last long, and the company that had originally contacted us with the idea rather faded away. However, it was very good to get the studio into some semblance of order.

May

June

June marked the second round of our Covid vaccinations!

Our first Casa Higueras Bed & Breakfast guests started to arrive in April and that certainly gave us a renewed focus. Travel was still tricky, so we were immensely grateful to everyone who took the decision to start exploring again, and we had some wonderful visitors. Some of our creative courses had to be postponed as some guests decided to defer their places until 2022. For this reason, 2021 was very difficult for small businesses like ours. We have to commit to the costs of the venue, and these still have to be paid whether or not the course goes ahead, especially if we have to postpone at the last minute. We made a loss on courses this year, but that was to be expected. However, where we were able to run courses we did have memorable times and it was well worth persevering. Primarily, our guests who did come in 2021 seemed to be so appreciative that they had the chance to escape, to do something different and to set aside, just for a short time, the ghastliness of the past 18 months. For that reason alone, running the courses was worth every moment.

We painted, we danced and sang, we made some very good new friends and we shared some extraordinarily special moments.

After our first course, Andrew and I escaped to the coast and stayed in one of our favourite places - Agua Amarga in the Cabo de Gata Natural Park. It was a much-needed break by the sea, with a book or two and a change of scenery.

Father’s Day highlighted again how hard it was to be separated from family, and nothing really helped to dissipate the sense of loss and distance.

One more notable moment in June was…Alfie’s first haircut! It took a while to get used to it.

July

Oh, summer! How welcome you were. Life was much freer, and there was joy to be found in the simplest of things. Granada Festival took place and we were able to see Ute Lemper perform beneath a starry sky. We had a our Flamenco course and it seemed as though the entire village turned out to see our end-of-week performance, all united to be surrounded by music and dance and the warm evening air.

Ute Lemper, Alhambra — Ute Lemper performs in the Alhambra

Granada Concierge Flamenco Performance, Moclin — Our Flamenco course performers under the lights of Moclin Castle

August

We completed our purchase of a garage.

Esperanza 9, humble as it may now be, will be transformed (we hope) into a lovely two bedroom-two bathroom self-catering house with its own little Arabic plunge pool. It is not a complicated project and we are delighted by the plans drawn up by our architect; she has understood perfectly our requirement for simplicity and logic.

Esperanza 9, Moclin — Our new…garage. Esperanza 9

Our Watercolour Painting course guests produced such wonderful work in the space of a week that we put on an exhibition in the village. Once again, it seemed that everyone turned out to cast their critical eyes over the beautiful paintings and enjoy a night out. The cultural part of the evening became something of a fiesta, with song and dance and the consumption of much wine, ending in the small hours…We have such delicious and rich memories of that night in Aure’s bar.

September

Never did I think that I would ever utter the words, “we discovered Torremolinos”. However, discover Torremolinos is precisely what we did. In need of another quick break, all our usual haunts were fully booked. Like us, I think that everyone on Spain had decided that enough was enough and that they were going to go away for a few days or weeks to forget about everything.

Torre was one of the few places that had an hotel availability, and it was a transformative visit, in more ways than one.

Talking of transformation, we ended the month with our Abstract Landscape Painting course and it dramatically changed the way I paint.

I am not sure what it was about Jo Hathaway’s course, but there was something special in the way that the group gelled and created memories that will last for a very long time. I dipped in and out of the course, as I was supposed to be helping Andrew in the kitchen, but in those brief moments I was able to shake off constraints and paint with much more freedom. It completely reignited my passion for painting and I have never been so productive. Now, the studio is a veritable factory with both Andrew and I experimenting and creating; just what we always wanted to do together.

October

A month of cooking, painting and sharing more special moments with guests and friends from our courses and in our Bed & Breakfast. It was with some sadness that we felt the passing of summer, as it seemed all too brief and we were not quite ready for autumn and winter.

Painting in the studio and reading our pile of new books were essential parts of our days. Throughout the year, we both needed to have something on which to focus; something to take our mind off not being surrounded by family, and facing the prospect of more months of the same. We planned, chatted, shared ideas for the next project, cooked, designed menus and remained hopeful.

November

Finally, finally we got to return to the UK to see family. The UK was in the middle of a Covid nightmare, or so it seemed to us, as we had been relatively cocooned in the safety of our village. The news was relentlessly bleak, and I don’t think anyone could contemplate another winter like that of 2020/2021.

Seeing nieces and nephews, my children and my new granddaughter all growing up just highlights how much time has been spent apart. I realised that I had missed a huge swathe in the first stages of my granddaughter’s life. I met her for the first time just as she was taking her first steps, so never got to see her as a tiny baby. My children had battled on through the last 18 months on their own, with each other for support, and I felt that we had been shut out of that - a period of time during which we all coped in our own way, without each other, but time we will never get back. Zoom and WhatsApp have provided much-needed links but it is not the same as a hug and just being in close proximity. I do grieve for those lost months and we both realised how much we had missed our family.

We returned to the onset of winter in Spain, as the evenings brought with them a chill. We painted and read, lit the fire and hunkered down. We still had guests up to the middle of December, and this gave us great pleasure, cooking up storms in the kitchen and fine-tuning our list of menus.

December

What a strange month. Nowhere had that tingle of excitement that usually accompanies the run up to Christmas. We had no plans for pre- or post Christmas visits, just the prospect of short days and cold nights. Even in Granada, the atmosphere was muted and neither of us could do much festive planning.

Andrew, as part of my Christmas present, booked us into a hotel in the ski resort for two nights running up to Christmas Eve. The snow had, up to the 22nd December, been pretty poor, but it rained on 22nd and so snow coated the upper slopes. It might not have been the winter wonderland we had hoped for, but at least we saw snow. Father Christmas cut me up on one of my ski runs, which did little to improve my festive spirit, and we did miss having company to share stories.

Our Spanish Family, in the warm and wonderful form of Mari Petra, her two daughters, grandson and Ramón gave us our family Christmas Eve, cosy around a table piled high with food and lively with chat.

Our traditional Christmas Day picnic was called off, which seems representative of the mood of the season. We did attempt our usual hike, with seasonal goodies in rucksack, but the driving rain battered us into submission and we beat a hasty, damp retreat.

Let’s not dwell on the sad moments, and those moments where we miss those people closest to us. We have each other and we have Alfie, and we do keep each other going, thank goodness. 2022 will be better. We have dates in the diary, courses more than half full and guests booked into the Bed & Breakfast. We have the licence to start work on Esperanza 9 and we have lots of painting to do. We have corners to explore, people to see, plans to make and dreams to realise. We’ve got books to read and walks to enjoy, food to create and menus to compile. As long as we have our projects to keep us going, we’ll be fine, and as long as we have our friends and family around us we can all look after each other, share the best things in life and create new, wonderful memories. Happy New Year!