Full of the joys of Spain

You know those people who wake up every morning uttering inane expressions like 'oh what a beautiful day', when all you see are grey skies and pouring rain? I used to have a friend like that and had prozac been invented at the time, we would have presumed her to be on a very high dosage - after all, there is probably only a few days a year that this saying truly applies.

However, living in Spain and saying the same thing actually means something. Despite being here five years now, I still admire the blue skies, green mountains and sparkling Med, every day thanking my higher conscience for making the decision to move. Friends are always saying 'don't you miss....', but no, I don't. I miss my friends and that's it - nothing else. Why would I? I have a 15 minute drive to work in the morning along the coast road in sunshine and with the sea beside me - as opposed to a 40 minute train journey in the rush hour to Charing X or a long traffic jam on the A2. Although I actually work harder than I did at home, there is plenty of time to enjoy life and if the work doesn't get done, I adhere easily to the typical 'Manana Manana' syndrome - there's always tomorrow. I know only one person who is stressed, whereas in the UK everybody I knew was stressed over something.

I have my problems - who doesn't, but its either the kids or the bank balance that worry me, not if I'm wearing designer clothes, if my make is perfect, whether I can afford a holiday, whether I'm late for work, where I'm going to find time to go shopping, if I'm going to be the victim of a teenage gang attack as one of my friends has been recently, etc. etc.

All in all, a fantastic climate really does make a difference to your whole life - and yes, I wake up every morning thinking 'oh what a beautiful day'.

Spain's little nasties

Sometimes I miss the good old English creepy crawlies, having had some nasty confrontations with the Spanish varieties. I’m sure there are worse parts of the world in which to live, but I for one wouldn’t choose them.

Amongst the worst are the caterpillars, centipedes and spiders, whilst for pets it’s the sand flies, processional caterpillars and ticks.

My bedroom ceiling resembles a graveyard consisting of spiders, centipedes and mossies and we have now learnt, after several nasty experiences, to carefully examine every corner of our bedrooms at night before going to sleep.

Mosquitoes, despite nets on all the windows, still manage to sneak in and haunt the bedrooms at night. Just when you are dropping off to sleep you hear that awful buzzing noise around you, yet they completely disappear once you turn the lights on, only to return when the lights go off and you settle back down. Although not painful, the itching can keep you awake for hours.

Some mornings you find an array of bites which are quite obviously from different insects, some bites have two puncture wounds together which I think are from centipedes, others are swellings with one puncture, probably from spiders. Both of these are painful, as opposed to the itching of a mosquito bite.

Centipedes are not small as in the UK, and can be anything from an inch – 6”. This may not sound too large, but if you wake up and find one that size on your leg as my daughter did when she spent the night in the ‘campo’, you really would get a shock – and probably a nasty bite. Centipede bites are quite painful, a friend of mine had to have her swollen foot lanced in hospital due to the spreading venom causing so much pain. They are extremely quick – I suppose that’s expected from something with that many legs, but believe me if you’d been bitten by one, you would make real sure that you did not go to sleep in a room with one still running around.

The pine, or processional caterpillars live in cocoons in pine trees and drop down ‘en masse’, marching nose to tail in search of food. There may be hundreds at a time and their hairs are dangerous both to humans and animals. The only way to stop the procession is to burn them, as the hairs can still have an effect when the caterpillar is dead. An animal that inhales the hair, will suffer severe respiratory problems which are fatal if the antidote is not injected in time. Death is relatively quick, within about 12 hours – as we found out last year with one of our cats. Luckily, they are not around all year, mainly between the end of Jan – end March.

Ticks can cause irreversible damage to animals by disease transmission. Attempting to pull them from your pet can leave the head buried under the skin which can result in a nasty infection. Burning the body of the tick once it is blood filled (often you won’t notice them until they are full) works, but obviously this depends on whether your pet will stand for this. Luckily for us, our dog used to keep still and allow us to burn them.

The Sand fly lives in overgrown gardens and woody areas and is at its most dangerous to animals in the early hours of morning during the summer season. Disease from the Sand fly can lie dominant in dogs for years, and can be transmitted from dog to dog. The best preventative measure is to buy a special collar, especially if your dog lives outside. Sand flies rarely come indoors, and fly close to ground level.

There are apparently 13 varieties of snakes in Spain, of which only the vipers are dangerous. It is very rare to see them unless you walk in the mountains, but occasionally you will see some quite long ones slithering down a quiet road.

I have had two recent ‘episodes’ concerning rats which I haven’t encountered in the previous 4 years, although apparently rat colonies are quite prevalent in the villages. Sitting at a small Spanish bar in the port area of Calpe having a drink with a friend after a long day at the beach, we were deep in conversation when I felt movement on my shoulder. Thinking it was my salt encrusted hair blowing in the wind, I didn’t take a lot of notice until my friend leapt from her chair at the same time as a face appeared at the side of mine. The table behind us also jumped up, as did I as the rat jumped from my shoulder to the ground. When the bar owner came out to see why half his customers were standing in the street, we explained about ‘el rato’, and he laughed and said that they were living in the storeroom at the back of the next door building. A rather peculiar attitude from a guy that also sells food.

Last Monday, having been out all day, we returned home to find a big hole in the mosquito net at the kitchen window. Positive it hadn’t been there before, but convinced by the children that it had, we went to bed not giving it a second thought. Tuesday, I covered it up by using superglue and a piece of material to make sure that nothing that stings or bites flew in. Wednesday evening my daughter and I walked into the kitchen as a large rat fled from the new hole he was biting in the net. We now have to keep the kitchen window closed despite the still high temperatures whilst I decide whether I am capable of trying to poison him. Having kept pet rats in England, I’m not sure that I can.