Ray and Moira in Salou

Every now and again Chris and I find ourselves talking about living in another country. This morning the conversation was prompted by one of those TV programmes where you watch Ray and Moira from Runcorn being shown round five flats in the Costa Brava to decide which one they want to make their holiday home and eventually retire to.

More often than not the Ray and Moira in question have a budget which doesn't match their dream and we watch them traipse around, after the ever suffering presenter, complaining that they want a finca that overlooks the sea, has its own pool and roof terrace, four bedrooms (for the grandkids - there are always grandkids to consider) and is both modern and traditional at the same time, with no work needed. For this list of features and benefits they have the grand sum of fifty eight thousand pounds, but for the perfect place they can stretch to sixty.

If we ever do it I'd like to have a place here and one abroad. My preference would be a flat in Barcelona, down in the Barceloneta area, with the beach on my doorstep, the park and zoo round the corner, and the Gothic Quarter a stone's throw from our front door. I want somewhere we can get to easily once we land, without the need for a car, and there's a train straight from the airport to Estació de França.

We last went to Barcelona at the end of September. Charles and Paul were getting married and having their celebrations in Sitges, where they'd met, so Chris and I decided to make a week of it. We started with a couple of nights in Barcelona before getting the train down the coast. We'd toyed with going to Tarragona for the next two nights before heading to Sitges for the wedding, as we'd spent a lovely drunken afternoon there a few years earlier. 

The first time we went the Junior Chamber of Commerce was having an international conference in the town and we found ourselves chugging beer with a handful of future business tycoons. There was a stall selling bottles of beer and olives for pennies and we'd gorged ourselves on both while watching a wedding party leave the church in the square. 

That had been one of those days where my vegetarianism had been tested, not because I wanted to test it but because the bloody olives had anchovies stuffed in the middle of them and the Spanish tend not to count fish as part of the animal kingdom.

We decided against Tarragona this time, as beautiful and charming as it is, and instead, like the adventurous souls we are, chose to try somewhere we'd not been before. A little further away from Barcelona, past Tarragona, is the seaside town of Salou and we plumped for this as an option for a couple of days between our city break and the wedding parties.

We'd been told by friends they didn't think we'd really like Salou, that it wasn't our kind of place, but we like to find out for ourselves so we went anyway. Besides how bad could it be? we asked ourselves.

As the taxi from the station to the hotel drove through town I thought, this isn't bad. It looks clean and tidy, there's not a tattoo parlour or karaoke bar in sight - more than can be said for Palma Nova where we found ourselves for a major anniversary a few years beforehand - and the people seem alright. We pulled up to the hotel which again seemed alright, it was an adults only hotel and the clientele was predominantly over sixty five but you look on the bright side, at least the stairwells were quiet. 

The room was huge. Chris had booked a superior double which was three times the size of the room we'd just come from in Barcelona. It had it's own sitting room area and a very large roof terrace overlooking the pool, with sun loungers, table and chairs and to add an extra touch of luxury, it was astro-turfed so it felt like we were sitting on a penthouse lawn.

Dinner was an all you can eat buffet, Chris's idea of heaven, but within two minutes of arriving he'd already started a fight with a surly restaurant manager. A fight he knew he could win because he was the customer, so one he pushed as far as he could which included reporting her to reception immediately after dinner.

Salou at night was a different story to the genteel town we'd driven through that afternoon. I've never been to Benidorm but I've heard the stories and imagined that this is what it was like. It became apparent that the tattoo parlours and karaoke bars of Salou had been restricted in the part of town that lay between the station and our hotel, and instead were to be found in these huge pedestrianised party streets.

We find the only thing to do in these situations is to embrace it and fall in line, so we got pissed. Chris went shopping for tack while I wandered the streets looking for things I could share on Facebook. As we walked past a nightclub a Spanish chap came over trying to convince us to go in by offering free shots of something sugary, we declined, saying it was too early and besides, we lied, we were leaving early the next day for a flight so we were heading back. Undeterred he turned to his second line of business - drugs. 

"You wanna buy any cocaine?" he whispered in a gruff Spanish voice.

Admittedly I was surprised because I assumed he was simply a PR person for the club and replied "I'm sorry?"

"You wanna buy any cocaine?" he stage whispered, slower and even louder.

Understanding what was happening, and seeing how far I could push this, I pretended to be a little deaf and unable to hear him I said, "What? I can't hear you. Speak up."

To which he bellowed at the top of his voice, in what I'm convinced was an estuary English accent, "DO YOU WANT TO BUY ANY COCAINE OFF ME MATE?"

"Oh! I see!" I replied politely, "No, thank you very much." I smiled and we trotted off on our way.

As the phrase goes, Salou is what it is. It's a cheap and cheerful holiday resort, You're not going to find swanky restaurants or cool bars, but we enjoyed it for the two nights and a day we were there. That being said, it's highly unlikely we'll ever go back.

Our next stop was Sitges, a town we know and love and have been going to for years, to meet the gang and go to the wedding. We've often talked about buying a flat there too but it's so expensive I'm not sure we could stretch to what we'd want. We would in turn become Ray and Moira on A Place in the Sun. 

So in the meantime, we're left with our lockdown daydreams of holidays and of splitting our time between here and there, wherever there may be.

I started writing this blog again as a way to record life under the shadow of Coronavirus and I've barely mentioned it today so to summarise, on the 8th April 2020: The UK is to remain on lockdown as deaths keep increasing, the Prime Minister is in intensive care - which is mad isn't it?  I'm still working from my dining room table, Chris has no work or income at the moment so spends his days gardening, and our elderly neighbour Mary continues to be a super spreader - she's just headed out to the shops again despite receiving a letter from Number 10, like the rest of us, yesterday.