Home Making

This was not just the bricks and mortar (or, more accurately, the concrete and rendering), but in the true Spanish way of doing things, we had got ourselves a furniture "package". It seemed like a great idea at the time: the opportunity to have your place ready for occupation from day one and avoid spending your precious holiday in Spain trailing around furniture shops and then waiting days indoors for the delivery - assuming that they could find the place in the street that boasted four developments of houses all bearing the numbers one to ten, courtesy of different developers.

The furniture package was not quite as we remembered when we ordered it: the two single beds that arrived were soon exchanged for the double that we had asked for, and became the source of eight years of squeaky slumber. The bed settee was somewhat more basic than the one we remembered ordering but overall, it would do the trick, even if we did end up with more melamine than real wood.

Furnishing a place is one thing, but what about all the other little essentials needed to create somewhere that is liveable? We must have spent many hours trawling round hypermarkets and ferretarias (that's hardware shops to the uninitiated), working through an almost endless list that included rugs, cushions, clothes hangers, tools, lamps, washing-up bowl, cutlery... Why were we enjoying this so much? Then it hit us - we were almost retracing our steps of twenty-five years before, when as newlyweds we had first set up home together in our crumbling, rented, one-bedroom flat. The excitement was just the same - just the two of us gathering the essentials together, keeping things simple (and cheap!).

And it was just the two of us, since our son aged eighteen was totally indifferent to the whole enterprise - perhaps he thought that we had spent his inheritance. His teenage holiday attractions lay elsewhere in brasher, brighter places with far more on offer in terms of faster food and the female of the species. Give him time, I said - in a few years he'll realise the advantages of a little love nest in the sun, especially at our prices, i.e. zero, with free beer, wine, vodka and other non-perishable consumables from the store cupboard all thrown in. I was of course, for once, proved to be right. But at least for some time to come, the place was just for the two of us.

We rediscovered the joys of washing up together - not too onerous since most of our main meals were eaten out. The delights of hand-washing clothes, however, was an altogether different subject - no pangs of nostalgia here. Following yet another visit to the hypermarket, our bargain-priced washing machine arrived - I had managed to spot the delivery van en route and usher it to the right address.

After hauling the package up the steep steps to our first-floor apartment, I fully expected the two deliverymen to seek a quick signature on the paperwork and be on their way, job done. Surprise, surprise - things are not done this way in Spain: off came the packaging, out came the instructions and the machine was connected up. The deliverers then proceeded to put it rapidly through its paces - fill, wash, rinse, spin - all OK, muchas gracias. For once, a tip well earned and graciously accepted. I liked this particular Spanish custom. We had become a two-washer family - what status!

There were far more prosaic tasks to be carried out, for instance the voyage of discovery that is the Spanish local rates system - many happy hours were spent at the "Suma" office setting up direct debits for electricity (the chaos eased a little once you discovered the "take a ticket" queuing system, just like the deli counter at Sainsburys) - and the mysteries of paying for the local water supply, or all too often, the lack of it.

We had eventually got pretty much all the essentials in place. We looked out from the balcony at the unfinished, sun-baked, weed-infested community gardens, at the explosion of building sites with their towering cranes that had sprung up all around us. It would have been understandable if we still had some lingering doubts about the whole thing. Then we looked at the pool shimmering in the sunshine and the cloudless deep blue sky stretching to the horizon to meet the Mediterranean. No regrets - we had found our home in the sun.