10 February 2012
So, off we went from the airport and headed towards the place we were staying - a friends house (Charlene, Robyn’s mum) in Campo Verde or something like that. She, in turn, didn’t own the house and it belonged to another friend. Charleen was living there whilst organizing something more permanent.
We stopped at a Supermarket to get some booze and tit bits and Alena got her first taste of Spanish hospitality. A checkout girl watched her load all her stuff onto the conveyor belt and then, unsmilingly and in that lazy Spanish droll, said “Checkout closed”. Poor Alena was fit to explode!.
Anyhow, made our way to the house and received a warm greeting, if not a warm house. Temperatures were at a record low and, as luck would have it, the heating was broken; when you’re in a fully tiled Spanish Villa that makes it damn cold!. I stepped in as the official Alpha male (as discovered with the car hire twit) of the party and attempted to remedy the problem but, much to my embarrassment, I was unsuccessful.
We had a bite to eat and settled down for a good evening’s craic until tiredness overcame Robyn and her sister, Chloe, and they went off to bed. We adults decided the best way to keep warm was to get blocked and soon we were wrapped in the warm glow of an alcoholic haze.
Eventually even we realized it was time for bed and Charlene, who up to that point hadn’t seemed too bad, stood up to start tidying. She soon discovered that whilst her upper body was a little tipsy, her legs were paralytic and she hit the floor like the proverbial bag of shite. Her mind, however, was still sharp and immediately sent instructions out to her body to break her fall. The message, which was destined for her arms, somehow got diverted to her chin and it fulfilled its instructions taking the brunt of the fall more or less knocking her out!.
It’s at times like this when a disaster sobers you up, and so instantly Alena’s and my first aid training came to the fore, and we started gently kicking Charlene to see if she was alive. A few moans and mumbled “I’m Ok’s “ were enough to convince us she was, in fact, alive but we then had to work out how two drunks could get another, half conscious, drunk up a flight of winding stairs. This was eventually achieved with a lot of pulling and hauling; but it did include a number of fall overs and eventually a full face plant, by the two ladies, at the top step.
With some difficulty we managed to get Charlene into bed and I left Alena to share that bed and went off to sleep on the settee downstairs. The house was in darkness and the night was still and I slowly drifted off to sleep.
Sometime later I was awakened by the sound of a woman with a Spanish accent coming from upstairs;
Woman : “Is everything alright”
Silence
Woman : “Is everything alright”
Alena’s voice “Who’s there?”
Woman : “Security. Is everything alright”
Alena : Sounding very confused “Who is that?”
Now, it turns out that some 15 to 20 minutes earlier Alena had accidentally pushed a panic button near the bed whilst getting undressed. The Spanish security company, being typically on the ball, had waited a full 15 minutes before coming back through an intercom on the wall to ask if all was well. A rather bewildered Alena was now sitting up, in the dark, talking to the aforementioned wall.
Woman./Wall : “You push panic button”
Alena : Now a bit more relaxed with chatting to the wall said defensively, “No”
Woman/Wall : “Yes you push. You have password”
Alena : Sounding a little less confident “No. I am just visiting and staying with a friend”
Woman/Wall : “Does your friend have password”
Now we have a problem, because telling the wall the householder is unconscious in bed was not going to make things look any better, and I could here a silence while Alena was obviously thinking of her next move. The deadlock was broken by Robyn, who came to the rescue and took sober control of the situation.
Robyn : “Hello, all is well it was just an accident”
Woman/Wall : “Ok, but I still need password”
I could hear thumping and grunting noises as they tried to wake Charlene and, on finally doing so, she came out with a list of garbled potential passwords and the wall appeared to be satisfied with one of them. Alena spent the next 10 minutes denying responsibility even though her clothes were piled up beside the big red button. But we had a bit of a giggle about the whole episode and returned to bed.
No sooner had we got to sleep than the phone rang and it was the, rather irritated, owner of the house who had been woken at home by the security company, to be told there was a bunch of idiots in her house who didn’t know the password. She was not a happy bear and it took, a very diplomatic, Robyn to gain forgiveness and smooth things over.
I hate Spanish talking walls!
Tomorrow or maybe the next day………………… THE SPANISH CONCIERGE & THE MORAL DILEMMA
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