Last year, when olive season came around, I made a quiet but firm decision to stay out of it. Not in a dramatic way. Just in the way you decide not to touch a hot pan again after you’ve touched a hot pan. I had tried to help. I had been given a ladder. I …
It’s easy to forget, sometimes. When it’s just the two of us, walking or talking or sitting somewhere ordinary, it feels level. Balanced. Like we’re both operating on the same footing. Then we step into the village. That’s when it becomes obvious. We hadn’t planned anything special. Just a walk, a coffee, maybe bread on …
I woke up convinced it was going to be a productive day. That’s usually the first mistake. The plan was simple. A few practical jobs around the house, a walk into the village for supplies, maybe finally fixing the thing I’ve been stepping around for weeks. Nothing ambitious. Nothing that should cause trouble. By ten …
We woke up late. Curtains half shut, room already hot. She said the dog barked all night. I said I didn’t hear it, which apparently wasn’t the right answer. I burned the toast. The cheap kind that smells like cardboard when it’s done. She made coffee and the machine coughed like a smoker. We didn’t …
Carmen said it would take an hour. He was still up there after lunch. No kidding. ‘Antonio’ arrived with a ladder, a small radio, and a cigarette that behaved like a prop.“Just a quick look,” he said, and went straight up. From below I heard tapping, scraping, and one noise that sounded like he had …
We ate late and left the plates to soak as is becoming the norm. It’s good.Carmen dried her hands and said, “Fancy a weekend by the coast?”“Yeah,” I said. Easy answer. Haven’t seen the sea for quite a while tbh. Tea on. Laptop open. I started with Valencia. Swapped to Alicante.“Try Jávea,” she said.“Been?” I …
I didn’t want a perfect weekend. I wanted one that didn’t wobble. We got that. Two nights, a small hotel that smelled like clean towels and old stone, a key that needed three tries, and us not pretending to be cooler than we are. I’m home and the house looks the same but feels shifted …
We didn’t rush in the morning. She made coffee in the flat’s tiny kitchen while I tried not to knock anything over. She wore the same jeans as the day before, hair up, no makeup, still somehow better put together than I’d ever be at 9 a.m. I asked if she slept okay. She said …
We got the early train. I’d planned to say something light on the platform, something vaguely charming or at least competent, but all that came out was “This is the right train, right?” and she just smiled and showed me the tickets on her phone. I hadn’t seen her use the app before. She has …
It’s Thursday and I still haven’t packed. I’ve moved a few things near the bag — jeans, the shirt I always wear when I want to seem relaxed but not lazy — but nothing’s gone in. Every time I go to do it, I end up staring at the list I half-wrote on the back …
I stood in the kitchen after she left, staring at the crusts on the plate like they were about to say something profound. Three bits of toast. Hers had butter and honey. Mine were burnt. Again. The silence after a weekend like that hits different. It wasn’t the flat kind of silence—because I don’t live …
I should’ve said no. Or at least asked where, exactly, this cousin lived. But Carmen just handed me the bag like we were mid-conversation, like it was all already agreed. “Take it up to my cousin’s house—just past the fig tree. She’ll be there.” She didn’t even look up from her phone. There were courgettes …
I was added to a WhatsApp group called “Verdura Sábado” and honestly, I thought it was porn at first. Green icon, carrot emoji, 63 members. No hello, no intro. Just a message that said:“8:30am. Bring change. No plastic.” So of course I ignored it. Until I saw Carmen’s name. Buried in there between someone called …
I thought I came to Spain for the adventure—flamenco, bullfights, tapas on every corner. Sun-soaked chaos. Instead, I landed in Pampaneira. A mountain village where Sundays feel like some kind of spiritual ambush. It’s not the village’s fault. This “slow life” isn’t a slogan here. It’s religion. And I was the unbeliever, pacing around my …
I was standing in the middle of the living room, hammer in hand, covered in paint like some kind of tragic Picasso, staring at a wall that didn’t give a flying f**k about me. And I thought—this is it. The moment I embrace my new life in Spain. The moment I knock down a wall …
You’d think there’d be some sort of warning.A text, a name, a passing mention at breakfast like, “Hey, by the way, we’re going to a funeral today.” Nope. Carmen just handed me a black shirt and said, “Don’t wear the sandals.”That was the full prep. I assumed it was a church thing. A mass, maybe. …
The message came via Paco. Which means it wasn’t so much an invitation as a grunt, followed by “mañana” and a vague arm wave toward the hills. Carmen translated. “You’re going to a men’s lunch.” I blinked. “What does that mean?” She shrugged. “Meat. Wine. Shouting. Possibly cards. Possibly guns.” She was joking. I think. …
It started, as most of my questionable decisions do, with Carmen saying something like, “It’ll be good for you.” She meant the olive harvest. Her uncle Paco needed an extra pair of hands. I needed, apparently, to “feel the land.” She said that too. With this sweeping gesture across the valley like she was some …
Rosa ambushed me with it. “You need company, Robert. Not just hikes and cooking disasters.” I tried dodging, but she wasn’t having it. Next thing, I’m sitting in a café in Órgiva, waiting for a blind date. Rosa’s doing. I checked my watch, tugged at my sleeve. This was either going to be a laugh …
I didn’t come to La Alpujarra for the food. Honestly, I was eating like a feral intern in London—microwaved couscous, the odd curry, toast if I remembered I had bread. Food was fuel. Warm stuff to go between spreadsheets and sleep. And yet somehow, that’s not how it works here.Not even close. It started at …
I don’t know how I got here. Not in the lost sense—my house is ten minutes away—but in the bigger, weirder, “what exactly happened to my life?” kind of way. One second you’re living in a flat in Hackney where the neighbours complain about the noise of your kettle, the next you’re in a village …
I only went for bread. That’s how these things start, isn’t it? You tell yourself “just bread” and then an hour later you’re holding a woven basket full of things you don’t remember paying for and talking to a woman who may or may not have just given you a goat cheese marriage proposal. Órgiva …
You can live somewhere your whole life and never feel the ground under you. I don’t mean that in a poetic way—I mean really feel it. Like your weight, your noise, your breath pressing into the dirt. I didn’t get that until I started walking the trails above Pampaneira. Not strolling. Walking. With purpose, or …
Fixing up this old place in Pampaneira wasn’t some romantic idea—I didn’t arrive with a toolbelt and a vision board. I just walked in, saw the cracked beams and sagging doors, and weirdly thought: yep, this is it. It didn’t make sense then, and it still doesn’t, not really. The floors were all over the …
Pampaneira feels like a place time forgot—but in the best possible way. First time I stepped off the bus, I knew. Something clicked. Not just because it’s beautiful—though, God, it is. But because of the quiet. Not the eerie kind. The full kind. A kind of calm that breathes around you. The streets wind like …