LOOK WHO’S TALKING

Just when you thought it was safe, Giles Brown makes his new year return to the Olive Press

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back to the last pages of the Olive Press. I’m back.

A combination of pre and post Festive season and New Year commitments and celebrations, plus yet another birthday in mid-January, meant that I had no time to put the proverbial pen to paper – or badly manicured fingers to keyboard. Then there is the ongoing Kafkaesque saga of my struggle with bureaucracy.

I will spare you the labyrinthine and sometimes the wrong side of lucid details. But I will say this.

You know those missing person situations, where highly trained mountain rescue teams spend days scouring remote peaks for stranded climbers?

I have a way of saving on both manpower and time.

Just give the details of who has gone missing to the funcionarios at Hacienda They will be able to find you in seconds. You could be in a hut on a tributary in the depths of the Amazon, the first European to make contact with the indigenous tribes, when you would hear the sound of a canoe approaching, delivering the aforementioned Hacienda letter…

I tried to circumvent the fact that I am now well and truly in my mid-fifties by informing anyone who asked that I was now the same age as the speed limit in the US. (55, in case you didn’t know).

But my age drops to 30 in urban zones, obviously. Leaving Marbella at 2.30am after my celebrations, I ran straight into an alcohol checkpoint. Noticing my accent, the officer immediately whipped out the breathalyser and politely asked me to blow into it.

PUZZLE: The tee-total Englishman in Marbella?

The poor man obviously was not to know that these days coffee is the only thing that I drink, and so waved me on.

Glancing in the rear view mirror, I am sure that I saw him shaking his head and banging the breathalyser as I drove away in disbelief ‘English? In Marbella? At 2am? And under the limit????’