“On my first morning in Valencia, Maria, my hostess, realised that I had had a cold shower because the boiler was not turned on. She took me out on the balcony, where her rabbit was thumping around in its cage, showed me the boiler, and explained how to twiddle its knobs and fire it up with the piezoelectric lighter. Then she went over it all again and, with a smile I would see often that week, asked me if I understood. I said I did, but I wasn’t 100 per cent sure, for the instructions were entirely in Spanish.
I had tried to concentrate, but her words were elbowed out of my head by pictures – pictures of an incinerated rabbit, of people leaping away from a flaming balcony, and of headlines in the local paper saying that a family of three had been left homeless because one of the language students to whom they had given room had burnt down their flat. It would be safer, I decided, to stick to cold showers. Refreshing, too, for it was only May and already the temperature in Valencia was in the late twenties. Read More »