By Ellie Broughton
Weirdly I slept through the night for the first time in days. It helped that it was Monday morning which seemed like a fresh start after a lost weekend spent drifting through stories of doom and gloom in a trance-like state. I felt positive and ready for action (paradoxically given our house-bound state).
Friendship across the divide
It helped that we were starting to get a clearer picture of what we can and can’t do. As a foreigner living in Spain it’s not very easy to get local information. Although my Spanish is reasonable I could barely understand a word that Pedro Sanchez said in his address to the nation on Saturday night - does he mumble or is it just my hearing? Thank goodness for the much decried social media - although it has it’s fair share of horror stories and fake news there are also a good number of people out there trying to make sense of the chaos. I’m in several expat community and cycling groups on facebook and this is where most of my useful and sensible information has come from over the last couple of weeks.
I’m a person that likes to have a plan - one of my favourite activities has always been sitting down with a cup of tea to write a list! When the lockdown was first announced, Robbie and I wrote a list of things we could do to make it bearable such as catching up on cycling and going hiking in the mountains. However as the ban began abruptly on Sunday morning we felt like the rug had been pulled from under our feet - none of these positive things would be possible now. We would actually be prisoners in our own homes. We had to tear up the list and start again.
List of Things to Do v.2: Well if we’re banned from cycling, even to the supermarket, we’ll set up the turbo trainer. If we’re banned from hiking we’ll set up a home gym and dust off the exercise videos. If we’re banned from walking the dog together, we’ll take it in turns. If we can’t see our families, we’ll teach our parents to Skype. And so on and so forth as my father would have said.
Task 1: some guests had interfered with the DVD player in the Pantani bedroom. It wouldn’t work and they’d set the language to Dutch! It was double dutch to me. I’d stripped the beds, taken up the rugs, found all the dumbbells, kettlebells, swiss balls, foam rollers and mats and taken everything up to the new ‘gym’ but the TV was broken! Failure at Step 1! My only exercise was walking upstairs 10 time to set it all up. In my frustration, I tried turning the disc over and sticking it back in the machine - disaster - the TV/DVD went into lockdown…
Task 2: take the dog for a walk, alone obviously. It doesn’t rain much in Spain (in Mallorca anyway) but it chose today to rain like an omen of bad things to come. To get my exercise fix and relieve my frustration I would take the dog for walkies. Espe and I set off under thunderous skies. One of the many mysterious edicts is that we’re not allowed to walk dogs on grass so we decided to walk along a quiet and pretty lane popular with the cyclists who don’t want to beast it up and down Sa Calobra all day long.
There’s a donkey just outside the village of Binibona that we’ve made special friends with and I always bring him a piece of fruit. Donkeys are social creatures who aren’t supposed to live on their own so ‘Burro’ is a particularly mournful Eeyore. He loves to play with our puppy Espe and they chase each other on either side of the fence. It’s distancing - but still very sociable - and seeing them running and jumping next to each other always fills me with joy.
Walking back up to Caimari enjoying the company of sheep, goats, chickens, peacocks, ducks, geese and cats, I saw our occasional gardener and friend Juan wearing his regular uniform of grubby grey trackie bottoms and a 2014 Caimari polo shirt, tummy spilling out from underneath. “Hola”, I called. He turned to me and our friendly neighbourhood builder Pedro popped up next to him- they were both secretly working at an ancient and beautiful finca that Robbie and I admired greatly from the roadside every time we walked past.
“Would you like to come inside and take a look?’, Juan asked me, knowing how I loved having a nose around the many rental properties he manages. The lockdown and all my good intentions for social distancing were swept aside in an instant. “Claro que si!” I replied. Wild donkeys wouldn’t have held me back. I spent a perfect half hour admiring the house, its three separate apartments and stunning gardens while gossiping with friends. Like the exercise routine, social distancing will have to start manana!