Another cigarette exits my packet. Then my lighter disappears. I am in Juande cafeteria in the Glorieta Square in Santa Pola. Juan, the owner and ‘when I feel like it’ waiter wanders off with a puff of smoke to chat with another customer at another table in this typically Spanish hostelry – and with my lighter.

Dave Bull

I’m here because it’s my escape. My bolthole. A place to sit and write with a large coffee amongst good people – and where else can you sit all day and have a couple of coffees to interrupt the chat without getting a piercing look from the owner. Ok it will cost me a few ciggies during the day too (and probably a lighter) but it’s a small price to pay when you’re enveloped by what is best in Spain - the traditional and the cultural. Outside of the front door, the recently extended Glorieta Square leads to the impressive five hundred year old castle – and Juan’s twin brother stands idly chatting with another local – with my lighter...

The noise inside is incredible as mostly housewives joust for their particular piece of knowledge to be heard before and above all others. The rest of us raise our voices to be heard over the din, therefore increasing the overall volume that bit more. You’d think it’d be impossible to get any work done at all but for some reason I can get more done in a couple of hours (read six…) in there than I can all day at home.

Juan and his wife Loles have run the café for the past twenty-five years having converted it from a general store in 1983. Juan’s parents had opened the General Store in 1930 and ran it for the next 53 years, supplying the town with everything from light bulbs to Goldfish, in fact the front of the building appeared in the major Spanish feature film ‘The man with the white umbrella’ in 1959.

Nowadays, Juan and Loles enjoy the Brits as customers too, and says Loles; the British always have two cups of coffee with their breakfast which is very rare with the Spanish and of course they drink a lot more beer than the locals but they are always polite and friendly and we always ask them to practice their Spanish with us.

Next time you are in Santa Pola – call in (offer Juan a ciggie and you will be a friend for life) and taste a bit of Spanish life and culture over a wonderfully, steaming, enormous Café con Leche – ladies, they do not come bigger than Juan’s …

As I sit and write in a local café today, inevitably the TV is on – loud, and as is popular is Spain there are about 150 adverts during the commercial break. My point is – and I’m getting there ladies – is that one particular ad offers (I have no idea what they are called in English) pants for the ‘larger’ lady that basically pull everything inwards (if it’s all squashed up how do you have a drink?) and once concealed under the outer clothes, gives the appearance of a much slimmer figure. What I want to know is this: if they work, and you are out on the pull one night (I’m not suggesting that all wearers behave this way…) isn’t it a bit of a shock for the lucky fella? I mean at the end of the night you slip back to his place for a coffee, get comfy, get intimate, and when he wakes up in the morning you look like you’ve eaten the pillows, and the dog…?

While I was in the bar I started watching the dreaded TV when on came the Spanish weather forecast. I was now sat with a Spanish friend (José, surprise, surprise…) when he launched into a (very) foul-mouthed tirade about Spanish weather forecasters and how they always get it wrong. He has a point. The Spanish weather forecasts are not the best in the world and with the guy (or girl) standing in front of half of Spain, blocking it off to half the population, they don’t really help themselves. ‘Look at it!’ he shouted above the TV, the stereo, the clientele, and the other telly, ‘they always say that every day is gonna be da bloody same! In England they tell you it is gonna rain at bloody half-past two, and it does!’ I didn’t have the heart to remind him that this is Spain and it usually is the same weather, most of the time.

As it turned out, it is (apparently) Zapatero’s and Franco’s combined fault that the weather was wrong and the weatherman was ‘son of a bitch’. Whether it turns out to be right or wrong, you just feel better after a Spanish forecast than you do a British one. Theirs leaves you looking forward to a barbecue or the beach at the weekend. Ours will tell us how long we can spend outside before we catch some form of skin disease or whether hay fever sufferers should even bother getting up…

Writer on life in Spain and the humorous side of life...although it has been known for me to get serious at times...I am usually asleep by then...

Website: www.loadofbull.es