I have something of a habit of exaggerating people's characterics, good and bad, when I'm recounting an experience to either myself or a lucky listener. Funny people become hilarious, quirks become insanity, and quibbles become all-out fights to the death.
But with these people, our most recent hosts under the Workaway slave-labour regime, no exaggeration will be necessary. Really: I checked myself while I was still in their company. Can these people really be behaving in the way I've cast them as behaving in my mind? I asked myself several times, then watched as they fit the forming stereotype perfectly.
The mother, R, had bought a plot of "land", which was in fact exactly the kind of flat square of scratchy, scrubby nothing that you drive past by the millions of square metres when driving around anywhere south of about Valencia. It was featureless and foreboding, as welcoming as, and actually visually quite similar to, a non-descript patch of Martian desert.
And in this non-place, R had concocted a plan to create a beautiful oasis of a campsite, welcoming everyone from TV-lugging old campervaneros to the kids who come to the coast to party in the summer and are banned from the more sedate campsites that dot the coast all year round.
But the landscape is not the sharp, unforgiving entity in this story that will stand in the way of the success of R's project, but rather R's industrial-strength personality itself. She's been living in her campervan in Spain for about 18 months, on the land for around four. She speaks with a too-many-fags contralto and can immediately be found to take no bullshit whatsoever. She rolls her first joint before breakfast and continues, apparently undimmed, to smoke joints whose strength I can attest to to my cost, throughout the day and evening.
She's accompanied in her dry, prickly life by her son, S, a sweet, nerdy boy of 22 with a cultural and social age of about 13 who has (as he proudly told us) nine Batman t-shirts, two of which are identical. He's into Batman. In a big way. In fact, he's such a devotee of the whole "DC universe", that he seems genuinely woeful and weighed down by the sheer quantity of DC-comics-related TV he has to download and watch each week. There's Supergirl, Star Wars: Legends, Mephisto, Cave Boy, Captain Girders and Ultradude, each of whose TV show brings out a new 40 minute episode each week and "let me tell you, he's got a *huge* backlog," sighs S wearily.
This exhausting schedule requires S to spend long periods of time rinsing the local cafes for their paltry slow wifi since there's none in the Sea of Tranquility which is their home, and to stay up till the insane hours of the morning dedicatedly working through his downloaded stash.
But the unending struggle to keep up with a televisual output which is clearly intended to slake many DC-comic thirsts, not one very thirsty person's, is a breeze when compared to the real thankless struggle of S's life: that with his ferocious mother. He works like a slave for her, during all the non-TV-watching hours of his waking day. He makes her coffee, he cooks the meals, and he works the land in various futile ways, a task rendered comical by the mother's lack of willingness to buy proper tools. Thus, S clears large patches of barbed-shrub infested lunar desert armed only with a small garden rake. He shows off the resulting callouses and scratches with great pride, exactly as you'd expect from the 13-year-old he's not.
And in return for this, R yells, chides, chivvies, harangues and denigrates him from the moment he wakes up to the moment he does the washing up after the evening's meal and slinks off to hide in his fantasy world. The extent and uninterruptedness of this bad-tempered tirade is impossible to overstate. Just when you think you must have been out of your mind to believe that a mother-child relationship could be as dysfunctional as the one you've built in your mind, the next round of action begins and your worst impressions are confirmed. Genuinely the only time this torrent of negativity stops is when they're no longer in the same place.
But their not being in the same place is a curiously pressing issue for young S. As soon as his mother is absent for more than a couple of minutes, he starts wondering aloud about her whereabouts, and doesn't let up until she's back. In fact, thinking aloud to no-one in particular is S's favourite mode of communication. M and I found that if we just ignored it and carried on our conversation, S would keep up a perfectly entertained monologue of funny sounds, TV quotes and stating-the-obvious commentary, quite without requiring any kind of prompting, or even any listening, from us.
Despite this oddity, and the Batman obsession (I made the mistake of asking him early on what is so interesting about Batman. He reeled off a long and undissuadable list of backstory and characters, including some lengthy stuff about Poison Ivy who is, like, basically his favourite character except Batman.), S is clearly a very talented young man. He cooks a very good veggie chilli/shepherd's pie/macaroni cheese for many people on absolutely paleolithic cooking equipment, and is a startlingly excellent drummer who joined a proper-sounding band at age 12 and had recorded an album, including a song he wrote himself, by age 15. But here again his development seems obviously arrested: when I told him I thought he was a great drummer he glowed and said "I'm Grade 7." I haven't heard anyone boast about what grade they were on an instrument since the 90s.
M and I agreed that no Workaway volunteer would be able to put up with the insane-making combination of the mother and son, and we made our excuses and left after just four days.
There's so much more to say about this crazy experience but it's late and this thing is getting long. More next time.....
But with these people, our most recent hosts under the Workaway slave-labour regime, no exaggeration will be necessary. Really: I checked myself while I was still in their company. Can these people really be behaving in the way I've cast them as behaving in my mind? I asked myself several times, then watched as they fit the forming stereotype perfectly.
The mother, R, had bought a plot of "land", which was in fact exactly the kind of flat square of scratchy, scrubby nothing that you drive past by the millions of square metres when driving around anywhere south of about Valencia. It was featureless and foreboding, as welcoming as, and actually visually quite similar to, a non-descript patch of Martian desert.
And in this non-place, R had concocted a plan to create a beautiful oasis of a campsite, welcoming everyone from TV-lugging old campervaneros to the kids who come to the coast to party in the summer and are banned from the more sedate campsites that dot the coast all year round.
But the landscape is not the sharp, unforgiving entity in this story that will stand in the way of the success of R's project, but rather R's industrial-strength personality itself. She's been living in her campervan in Spain for about 18 months, on the land for around four. She speaks with a too-many-fags contralto and can immediately be found to take no bullshit whatsoever. She rolls her first joint before breakfast and continues, apparently undimmed, to smoke joints whose strength I can attest to to my cost, throughout the day and evening.
She's accompanied in her dry, prickly life by her son, S, a sweet, nerdy boy of 22 with a cultural and social age of about 13 who has (as he proudly told us) nine Batman t-shirts, two of which are identical. He's into Batman. In a big way. In fact, he's such a devotee of the whole "DC universe", that he seems genuinely woeful and weighed down by the sheer quantity of DC-comics-related TV he has to download and watch each week. There's Supergirl, Star Wars: Legends, Mephisto, Cave Boy, Captain Girders and Ultradude, each of whose TV show brings out a new 40 minute episode each week and "let me tell you, he's got a *huge* backlog," sighs S wearily.
This exhausting schedule requires S to spend long periods of time rinsing the local cafes for their paltry slow wifi since there's none in the Sea of Tranquility which is their home, and to stay up till the insane hours of the morning dedicatedly working through his downloaded stash.
But the unending struggle to keep up with a televisual output which is clearly intended to slake many DC-comic thirsts, not one very thirsty person's, is a breeze when compared to the real thankless struggle of S's life: that with his ferocious mother. He works like a slave for her, during all the non-TV-watching hours of his waking day. He makes her coffee, he cooks the meals, and he works the land in various futile ways, a task rendered comical by the mother's lack of willingness to buy proper tools. Thus, S clears large patches of barbed-shrub infested lunar desert armed only with a small garden rake. He shows off the resulting callouses and scratches with great pride, exactly as you'd expect from the 13-year-old he's not.
And in return for this, R yells, chides, chivvies, harangues and denigrates him from the moment he wakes up to the moment he does the washing up after the evening's meal and slinks off to hide in his fantasy world. The extent and uninterruptedness of this bad-tempered tirade is impossible to overstate. Just when you think you must have been out of your mind to believe that a mother-child relationship could be as dysfunctional as the one you've built in your mind, the next round of action begins and your worst impressions are confirmed. Genuinely the only time this torrent of negativity stops is when they're no longer in the same place.
But their not being in the same place is a curiously pressing issue for young S. As soon as his mother is absent for more than a couple of minutes, he starts wondering aloud about her whereabouts, and doesn't let up until she's back. In fact, thinking aloud to no-one in particular is S's favourite mode of communication. M and I found that if we just ignored it and carried on our conversation, S would keep up a perfectly entertained monologue of funny sounds, TV quotes and stating-the-obvious commentary, quite without requiring any kind of prompting, or even any listening, from us.
Despite this oddity, and the Batman obsession (I made the mistake of asking him early on what is so interesting about Batman. He reeled off a long and undissuadable list of backstory and characters, including some lengthy stuff about Poison Ivy who is, like, basically his favourite character except Batman.), S is clearly a very talented young man. He cooks a very good veggie chilli/shepherd's pie/macaroni cheese for many people on absolutely paleolithic cooking equipment, and is a startlingly excellent drummer who joined a proper-sounding band at age 12 and had recorded an album, including a song he wrote himself, by age 15. But here again his development seems obviously arrested: when I told him I thought he was a great drummer he glowed and said "I'm Grade 7." I haven't heard anyone boast about what grade they were on an instrument since the 90s.
M and I agreed that no Workaway volunteer would be able to put up with the insane-making combination of the mother and son, and we made our excuses and left after just four days.
There's so much more to say about this crazy experience but it's late and this thing is getting long. More next time.....
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