Expatery

Conversations with Juliet, Julia, Susie and Russ, along with last year's wandering with the expats set me musing about a book on the subject of the British diaspora in Iberia … after all, I find myself here in San Enrique for no apparent reason, so perhaps it is best to create a purpose … not as a cage but as a frame …

The Costa del Sol is perhaps the epitome of the the traditional expat colony, so where better to start?

These four informants are well qualified and not typical, since they speak Spanish and socialise with the locals …. integration apparently being uncommon … “home” conceived as Britain, however long they have been here …

The evolving story will of course discover and describe Northern Europeans of many nations, along with other immigrants … the term expat seemingly reserved for a particular type of immigrant. Language is such a tricky customer ... purporting to explain, posing as a neutral medium, yet, upon examination, its very structure dividing up the world into subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, rich and poor ... as if that could help us understand what is going on ... Newtonian languages for a quantum world.

Susie tells the story of her Spanish friend and her family …. impoverished vegetable growers in the fertile flood plain of the Guadiaro back in the 50s before tourism took off … surviving and connected to the land, Nature and each other. .. they became wealthy from selling their land for development … villas, apartments, hotels, golf courses and polo pitches … a frenzy of activity with scant regard to planning or building regulations … corruption endemic as usual wherever easy money arrives … the infrastructure followed, accelerated by the European Union as the industrious North ensnared and colonised the laid back South with loans ...

So, who will define the difference between immigrant, invader, slave, guest ... and expat? Looking closer we can see that power plays a part and perspective varies the name ... a brief while ago in 11th century England uninvited visitors from across the English Channel or La Manche took power, redistributed the land to the Norman expats ... not a narrative playing these days ... 

Expatery implies ties to a country other than the one currently lived in ... not home ...not where the heart is ...curiously, notwithstanding the tendency of travel to broaden the mind, part of expatery is a reluctance to fully embrace the new country ... to hold to an idealised version of home .... one of the great ironies discovered in random research is the North East Spain branch of the English Defence League ...

Back to purpose and where it comes in to the story ... sitting in the warm evening sun, listening to Placido Domingo, editing today's blogging, maybe the shallow coastal strip is not the point at all ... perhaps expatery is not the subject after all ... maybe inland, to the sierras is where the Beautiful New World grows ...away from the mainstream madness, the separation, the fear ...

Purpose, in any case, will turn up along the way ... meanwhile life is led lightly ... as Russ eloquently explained, "sitting by a river, spotting a passing log, hopping on it for the ride ..."