Save Me…… from a shortage of mushy peas

It’s funny the things you find you miss when you live in another country. I’ve been living in Spain for a couple of years now and have actually not been back to the UK very much at all in that time. Four times in fact, and each one for a short visit. I’ve spent less than three whole weeks in total in the UK in over two years.

And while I don’t actually miss the UK that much – not at the moment anyway, I have no immediate desire to move back there, at least not yet - I do, of course, miss certain things, like my friends.  I also miss the strangest things about it.

Take the weather for example. Yes, really. Here in Seville, deep in the heart of southern Spain, there’s a lot of sun. A huge amount. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the sun. It’s great. It’s brilliant. Since June it’s rained here just twice. And there’s not even a water shortage. The Spanish got that figured out a few years ago by building a lot of reservoirs so that water is always available, even if it only rains twice in five months.

But here lies the problem. While I love the sun, it’s getting towards the end of October now and I’m getting a little sick of it, quite frankly. I mean, come on. Enough’s enough. When is it going to be get colder again? The sun’s great. But it’s like when you buy a packet of Custard Creams (my favourite biscuit) and eat them all in one go. You love them, but you don’t really want any more for a while. You know what I mean.

As far as the sun goes, I’ve had more than a few packets of it these last few months and I could really do with a nice big jumbo cash-and-carry packet of rain and a big family pack of cold too! And that leads me to what I really miss.

I miss Custard Creams (although my friend Paul very generously took up some of his baggage allowance to bring me a pack when he flew over for a visit in July). I miss sausages. Proper sausages. Not the processed frankfurter-type with non-specific meat you can get here in plentiful quantities, but the real, proper pork bangers that you can whack under the grill (not that we have a grill in our tiny flat, but if I could get proper sausages I’d go out and buy one). I miss mushy peas, the ones you can get in a chip shop. I miss chip shops. And I miss proper chips. You get chips here, but they’re not proper chips, not the thick, crispy, crunchy chips. I miss cabbage and Brussels Sprouts and mashed potato and roast potatoes and roast beef and gravy. God, I miss gravy. Yorkshire pudding, trifle. Curry!! God, how did I forget that?? There are a total of just two Indian restaurants here in Seville. Two! And they’re both quite expensive. If living in Seville was like living in the Sahara, the oasis’ would be filled with Chicken Korma and poppadoms and the palm trees would be made of onion bhajis.

That’s not to say that the food here in Spain is bad. It’s not. It’s great. But sometimes it all gets a bit “samey”.  Tapas are a staple diet here for people visiting the bars and cafes. But almost everything comes out of the frying pan! Except the salads of course, but when you’ve had 500 salads in a single summer, you don’t want salads for a while.

All this listing of food is making me hungry. But I still don’t have the urge to move back to the UK. That’s the dilemma. Apart from arranging food parcels to be sent here every month, which would cost a lot, I can’t think of any other way to satisfy these cravings. Yes, the packet of custard creams my friend Paul brought were brilliant. But they filled a very tiny part of a very big hole in my stomach.

I am back in London next week, but only for a flying visit. I hope, when I’m there, to visit my favourite south Indian café and have a Sunday roast in a pub.

Maybe these short visits will be enough to keep me going for a few months more. I hope so. If not, I just hope someone is planning to open a Happy Shopper here in Seville soon. They’re the only places you can get a full English breakfast in a tin, a packet of Black Jacks and a Curly Wurly! God, I miss Curly Wurly’s.