The Problogue

Well, birthdays come and birthdays go but it's not every birthday that you receive your own blog as a present! That's what happened today, however; I got up, checked the email and found one from my Phil, in lieu of a birthday card (the poor thing has been hibernating because of the rain which has poured down on Vigo in the last week and has barely set foot outside the building!) and with a web address for my own blog - hip, hip, hooray!

Before we came out here on our Vigo adventure, I promised various friends and (soon-to-be-ex)colleagues that I would be setting up a blog. Some even said that they looked forward to reading it. How very kind! In the event, however, in between all the things we needed to do on arriving here (of which more later), setting up a blog sort of slipped through the spaces.

And now, here I am, another year older but with my very own blog and all the potential of the empty space to fill! What a responsibility! Can I do it? Will I manage to amuse, inform, entertain? Will anyone read it? Or will I just bore the pants off the first ever reader and never ever again have a single follower?

So, here goes, by way of a start: The "problogue".....

About 15 to 18 months ago, on holiday Galicia, northwest Spain, we spent a hot day in Vigo and Phil came up with THE IDEA, the idea which went on to dominate the next twelve months. So, what was THE IDEA? Upsticks and spend a year in Vigo, with a view to moving there permanently if the climate and the people proved friendly: that was THE IDEA.

And so it began, the start of the great adventure. I went back to college in September 2007 and quietly told a few friends what I intended to do. When my head of department started to demand a five-year plan, I let him know that mine was to get to the end of the year and disappear. A number of friends and colleagues did not believe that I would, or indeed could, do it. Comments about my commitment to my students, the energy I put into the job, the satisfaction I clearly got from the job, all these flew around as arguments why September 2008 would still find me at Pendleton College working as Curriculum Leader for Modern Languages. They were wrong because here I am now, not quite living la vida loca, but still, in Vigo.

All the same, the idea (not yet THE IDEA) of disappearing into the wide blue yonder had been there for a long time. So why Vigo? When first we mooted the idea, long years ago, of living in Spain, we imagined a place with a pool, somewhere near a quiet beach or something similar. As time went by, however, we felt the need for something more: bookshops, nice but in expensive restaurants, cinemas, theatres, PEOPLE. A holiday in Almeria convinced us that we did NOT want a place with lots of English expats. Italy called and we learned Italian with that possible destination in mind.

Learning Italian was, as we heard a young American in a film say, "a whole 'nother adventure". It really was the best fun we'd had in a long time, going off to language schools in Sicily and Tuscany, learning the language and exploring a beautiful country. It was also a wonderful and salutary experience for me to sit on the other side of the desk in a language classroom, giving me a new perspective on language learning now.

However, Italy was not to be our long-term destination. We might talk about the cost of living, our dislike of privatised beaches in Italy, our greater knowledge of Spanish society and the fact that we have friends in Spain: all true, none of them deciding factors. No, it was the mosquitos that did for Italy in the end! The worst were the "zanzare tigre", tiger mosquitos from Africa which attack anyone and everyone and gave Phil a major allergic reaction leading to emergency first-aid and antibiotics. So Italy is strictly for visits outside the mosquito season.

There we were then with the grey winters and only slightly less grey summers of Saddleworth and two sets of itchy feet. We had visited the north of Spain for long summer holidays several times. Through a college project I had made friends in La Coruna and liked the city but La Coruna suffers from BAAAAAD winter storms. Santiago de Compostela and Pontevedra are both perhaps more picturesque than Vigo but, from our first visit, we felt Vigo was a place where we could live.

And that, more or less, is how THE IDEA became a reality. So far so good. More details of the great adventure another time.