Cappuccino please, with extra cream.

Oh god, did I really say that?! I'm getting worryingly used to luxury before AI destroys my fun!

I had suggested camping in a posh tent to save a bit of cash.

Honestly, I did.

To which my husband exclaimed, ‘I can’t record in a tent!’

True, he had a point. Being a voiceover artist he can only trust hotel suites, for ‘sound insulation reasons’. It’s got to be one of the best excuses in the world for having to stay in luxurious hotels.

This is now the longest holiday I have ever had. I can’t say we’re travelling. That’s for adventurous, young backpackers with open, return tickets. Isn’t it? But as my husband loves his job, and his customers seem to love him, it’s as close to ‘travelling’ as we’ll probably get.

That said, AI voices are on our trail. Catching up with us. A car chase. I can’t help wonder how long we’ve got before we have to downgrade to three stars, or hostels.

This morning a German client, another lovely faithful, who can’t wait until Monday when we get back, (and recordings are stacking up) has insisted on recording live today. Now that’s risky. No matter how good we are at sound engineering, all we need is for the gardeners to start trimming the hedges with a strimmer and we’re toast.

So we breakfasted early before light, with fingers crossed. A bit tricky, but we did our best. Then I grabbed my camera and photographed the waves at dawn.

Now it’s 9.20am and I remain evicted. I thought I’d write in the bar, but it isn’t open yet. So I’m sat on the sofa outside listening to jazz again. Everywhere I go they play jazz. In the lifts, cafes. Lunch of salad of marinated onions in a beetroot dressing with prawns yesterday, in a narrow, wall to wall tiled bar, was accompanied by jazz. The 2023 commercial language for rest, is jazz. It’s official.

As I sit here by the pool this breezy morning, the staff are putting up the parasols. I’m the only client in sight. Suddenly the two aproned women either side of the water start to chat in their musical voices, smiling as they go. It’s a friendly vibe in the south. They raise their voices to be heard across the width of the pool. Oh god. That’s all we need. Will the microphone pick up their chatter? His mic is near the window.

‘Relax’. I tell myself. ‘There is nothing I can do’.

The bar opens and I move inside to stop me worrying about his recording.

We must have travelled over 6000km. Two one-way flights and seven train journeys; from Hamburg to Hannover to Malaga, Granada and finally Cadiz and the city with the most international vibe was Granada. I heard American, French, Chinese and Italian spoken and that was at breakfast. God, what a marvellous place. Part of my soul nestled in there and stayed behind. I will have to go back sometime to pick it up.

Our guide was half Japanese, half English, born in Granada and married to a Japanese. His English was brilliant with only a few giveaways of an accent, but then I love tuning in to accents. A spin off of working with languages for decades. Eight hundred years of history came totally alive by his imagining the dramatic conversations between sultans and their first and second wives. He got us to consider how jealousy between wives would affect the course of Granadan history, not to mention the architecture of the Alhambra, conspiring to see their own sons as rulers.

Of course. I suppose, without jealousy, world history, Granadan history included, would be totally different.

The one language surrounding us throughout the whole trip, from Germany to southern Spain has been German. I’m even starting to pick up a few new verbs. Listening, that is. ‘Ich Spreche Kein Deutsch!’ as they say. German people bask in the sun like lizards here for hours. I did my fair share of that in Turkey when I was younger. I remember that sense of excitement seeing a blue sky every morning. I can’t do that anymore; I’ve lived in this hot country so long now the need to feel the the sun on my skin has gone.

The waitress comes over to my table. ‘Buenos dias’. (Spoken ‘Bwenah dee-ah!’). They clip the tails of words; smiling is much more important here than bothering with consonants.

‘What would you like??’ Oh, well. Now, there’s a question, I think, nothing really. I’ve just had a huge breakfast. I’m only here because I’ve got nowhere else to go, I’m just a four star, hotel refugee.

‘Oh please!’ I realise I’m probably frowning.

I could order water or tea but I hear myself ordering a coffee, like the ones I’ve seen delivered on trays? ’Si! That’s it, with the cream on top?’

Oh god, how will I ever cope with hostels!?

‘Ah!’ She says. ‘You mean a cappuccino?!’

‘Ok. Yes. Is that what it is? Yes please!’ Smiling now. ‘But you better make it decaffeinated because I’ve had three coffees and it’s only 9.30!’

She smiles, of course.

I heard clips on the radio this morning of politicians in Spain’s congress using all five official languages, for the first time in modern history. It made me happy, even relieved, to hear Galician, Basque, Aranese* and Catalan spoken by the thinkers and speakers of the state, along with Castilian (Spanish, as the English call it).

Amazingly Aranese is only spoken by 2800 native speakers. Only? Mmmm. You have to be careful don’t you, with words? ‘Only’ would imply, not enough to justify its use in government? What I mean is, how amazing that 2800 people keep an ancient language alive.

Diversity makes for a richer life. If all five languages are spoken in congress, then the extreme right party can’t so easily pick on just one, like Catalan, as being the thorn in the side of Spanish politics, can they? Don’t things become less black and white for them? And hence more tricky to manipulate the view in the press?

I like to think that way anyway.

Fingers crossed. Again.

It's weird being the only English in a large hotel and I’m still the only one in the café, apart from the caretaker standing on top of a ladder fixing a lightbulb. Suddenly I hear the dreaded garden strimmers.

Oh no. Nightmare.

The topping of my cappuccino topping sinks in a panic too. It’s given up on me, slipping down the side of the glass.

I check my phone. No messages. Either the recording is miraculously going well, or all hell has let loose, and he has no time to write to me.

The terrace outside gets busy as the smokers reflect on the day ahead.

I was reading that nearly thirty per cent of the senators in the United States address their constituents in Spanish, even when only about five per cent of senators are Hispanic. Having more than one official language in a country seems to be more the norm than the exception. That’s how important the second official language in the United States has become.

I read on.

And what about, in the United Nations? Spanish is one of, how many official languages of the UN? I forget this kind of stuff. It’s one of six. There is Chinese, French, Arabic, English, Spanish and what’s the sixth? Is it Portuguese? What about the whole of Brazil? Italian? After all, it’s the 8th strongest economy in the world. It’s not Italian or Portuguese. German surely, must be one of the UN’s six? The fourth economy and ninety million people speak it. No. German is not an official language in the UN either.

Is it Hindi? One of the oldest and apparently spoken by 366 million? No, it’s Russian. The most frequently spoken of Slavic languages. It’s Russian because it’s one of the most widely spoken languages, or at least it was, when the language rules were made, with now 258 million speakers.

There, so numbers matter. I guess if they added German, then you would add Portuguese, and of course Hindi would be seventh before them for that matter. The lesson being, we put a line somewhere, just to be practical. There’s much to be said for aiming somewhere in the middle and oh, maybe things need to be revised from time to time as populations grow.

Ah! The bar has just switched to pop music. Admittedly I was getting a little jazzed out. And they play Sade. A popular Mediterranean bar choice this summer. Hasn’t she done well since her hit of ‘Your love is King’, in 1984? Six albums, sixty million in sales and over twenty times platinum. Now that’s positively sparkly.

I can’t blame the bar owners who are just doing their best to keep mainstream happy. How else can they pay wages, the rates, electricity costs, gas bills, licences, social security and taxes? As the famous saying goes, by the English monk John Lydgate, born over seven hundred years ago, ‘You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time’. I thought it was Abraham Lincoln who said that but maybe he was just inspired like I am, by Mr Lydgate who wrote no less than a hundred and forty thousand lines of poetry.

forgotten toppings

Love to hear your comments on this. I hope you enjoyed reading. Share it if you think it is worth it.

I got a bit of background information from Vicente G Olaya from El Pais for this.

Happy weekend. Lots of love.

*Actually I think Aranese is yet to be used in congress, but I read (somewhere, and can I find it when I need it?! Of course not) it will be used for the first time in the next few weeks.