Gibraltar

Just got back from a week in Southern Spain with my family, in the beautiful hillside town of Gaucin. Several days of lying under the shade of the house lemon tree, sipping drinks, reading, occasionally raising our eyes to watch our girls bomb into the swimming pool. The most energetic we got was a trip to the bakery on the corner for the daily bread rolls, or up the hill to the supermarket for more supplies of melon and ham. Then out in the evening for vino and tapas when, inevitably, we ordered more food than was needed (in our very bad Spanish), and ate it all anyway at an hour when we would normally be asleep. We made two trips: one to the dramatic ravine town of Ronda, which we’ve visited before, and one to Gibraltar, which was utterly bizarre. We queued for an hour in a line of cars, in thirty-five degree heat to cross the border through passport control and found ourselves in a pocket of the UK on the very tip of Spain. Union jacks everywhere, tea towels printed with Kate and William, pubs selling real ale, bobbies on the beat, sales signs in British pounds. A group of Gibraltarians that sat down next to us at a pavement café were rattling away in Spanish and English, changing language sometimes halfway through a sentence. It was kind of surreal. Up on the rock, a cable-car ride away, Barbary apes roamed freely, and down below was a British town, disjointed, refracted, transplanted fourteen miles off the coast of Africa. You couldn’t make it up. Flann O’Brien would have had a field day.