Often I will cook things for myself and enough for my daughter, which I would put on a covered plate for later, sometimes she would come home at the same time, hot, bothered, and starving. She would chow down, clean her plate, and leave the table without a word. My missus waits for her to come home asks her what she wants and gets grief - I don’t know - she screams. The missus ends up faffing about and now the sprogs got an attitude - this way doesn't work turning the home into a café complete with menu choices. When I was a youth you ate what your father was having or what you was given and sometimes 'ifits' - if it's there you will eat it.
I hardly speak to the teenager until she engages me first and I never try to talk to her in the mornings. If I really need something from her or to convey important information, I email her or text. I don’t know what it is with teenagers. I can't remember being that moody and none communicative and then, now and again, she would be normal - she actually spoke to me the other day, but instead of grabbing the opportunity I wasted it with an uningratiating response.
Songs and films have a way of making us feel older, even more so when your daughter hears you singing a song and stares at you flabbergasted, "how do you know the words to that song? It only came out at the weekend."
I shrugged my shoulders as if to say - I'm hip get used to it. Avoiding explaining that was a song from the eighties and again in the nineties. My home town here on the Costa Blanca - La Nucia - will play host to a unique concert on the 18th of September at 21.30 pm in the Municipal Pavilion Camilo Cano. A blast from the past - featuring The Waterboys and The Animals - a concert I will definitely be attending.
They say you're as old as you feel and I'm not going there with the old joke about younger partners - too late. As I sip my café con leche on a honeysuckle and pine-scented terrace, it strikes me how tranquil this place is. The panoramic view a sun-splashed jumble of pine trees and red pan-tiled villas racking back down towards the Mediterranean Sea, where there are languorous stretches of white sandy coastline.
Yet, my self-talk is full of moans about my age and the sweltering heat; looking at the road, three sexagenarians jog past and up the hill with bulking back packs. Why do older people's feet always look massive in white training shoes? - anyway - shame on me for not getting out there and enjoying the many things the Costa Blanca has to offer, the best of which are totally free.
The village alone is a beautiful place to explore on foot, especially around the old town with its whitewashed houses, saintly wall shrines and balconies hung with geraniums, and unfortunately, the odd pair of Y fronts. There is always an undercurrent of weird or at least strange to be found.
The last time I went walkabout in the village, I came across a street where a large group of people had blocked the road off at each end to stop traffic. They had set out tables with tablecloths, wheeled out a couple of barbeques and a double fridge stacked with wine and beer. The central table was decorated with flowers, which had a huge five tiered cake perched precariously on it and there were hundreds of fireworks exploding on the floor shrouding the tableau in smoke. One fella, who had whipped off his jacket and shirt, stood there on the pavement in a white vest burning the hairs off a dead pig with a blow torch - ready for the spit. This was a wedding reception - why bother hiring a pretentious hotel banqueting suit when you can block off your own street with a couple of wheelie-bins and police-don’t-cross tape you've purloined from your new brother-in-law the cop.
