Waking up and plucking an orange from a tree just outside your bedroom window by way of breakfast, a leisurely morning stroll around the olive and almond groves followed by a long, leisurely lunch with a magnificent mountain range as backdrop. An afternoon dabbling away with your watercolours while keeping half an eye on your flock of sheep followed by a plunge into the fresh water of the river that runs through your garden.
Whosever life that is, it's a lot better than waking up to find that your roof has collapsed around you, the river has swollen into a dangerous flood, there's a scorpion crawling up your bare arm, the local dogs have eaten your sheep, your mad neighbour says he'll shoot himself unless you let him sleep with your wife, and the people in the nearest village either ridicule you or shamelessly rip you off at every turn.
When English travel writer cum professional sheep shearer Chris Stewart decided to opt for an Arcadian version of the Good Life by selling up everything and moving lock, stock and Earl Grey teabags to a dilapidated farm on the side of a mountain in a remote region of southern Andalucia in Spain, he was clued in enough not to expect the former type of lifestyle but never imagined it would be the latter form of experience that would dominate his brave new life.
In chronicling the mood swings of a life less ordinary, the game Stewart has produced a delicious slice of rural verite, a book that serves as a more realistic and slightly funkier version of Peter Mayle's rather twee (in comparison) A Year in Provence. While Mayle was a retired executive who whiled away his time in Provence sipping fine wines and raising a patronising eyebrow at the "charming folk wisdom" of the natives, Stewart went to Spain with no money and no cultural hangups and became a working farmer. Stewart's less than ideal idyll began inauspiciously back in 1988 when he sank £25,000 into a beguiling but ruined farmhouse on first view. The fact that the house had no access road, running water or electricity didn't bother him as much as the fact that he hadn't told his wife, Anna, about the purchase until it was a fait accompli. Anna, very much the stalwart of the book, arrived a few weeks later and, surveying the wreckage, merely rolled her sleeves up and got to work on little luxuries like making her own fridge. With only a stumbling amount of Spanish, no knowledge of the area and a house to virtually rebuild, Chris and Anna are at the mercy of their eccentric neighbours, who giggle behind their hands at Los locos Ingleses who have bought a house that locals wouldn't live in for all the olive groves in Andalucia.
A story early on illustrates the robustly humorous nature of the people they have come to live among: as a peace offering, Anna brings her neighbours a box of expensive biscuits from Harrods. They eye them suspiciously and on putting them in their mouths, announce loudly that the biscuits are the most disgusting things they have ever tasted in their life and promptly spit them out on the ground in front of her. Chris and Anna's Spanish inquisition is mitigated slightly by the kindness and help of their illiterate neighbour, Domingo, who gives them master-classes in the flora and fauna of the area, helps rebuild their home and facilitates their gradual acceptance by the local community. With their knowledge of both Spanish and farming increasing over the years, the couple good humouredly muddle their way through. If it's not Anna berating her husband's bourgeois refusal to call their neighbours peasants ("For Christ's sake, Chris, it's how they refer to themselves, stop being so English") or hilarious accounts of their total incompetence as novice shepherds, there's a constant comic undercurrent in the couple's quest to tame their land, their livestock and their own preconceptions of farming life.
Unlike other authors who have trod this same path, Stewart is not pushing any New Age/Eco-Fundamentalist/Hippy-Dippy back to nature agenda. Interestingly, Stewart's rare bursts of anger are reserved for the New Age travellers (who are from Manchester) in the area who lecture him on how his electrical sheep-shearing ways are "killing off all the old traditions" - not knowing that overnight the centuries-old tradition of shearing manually with scissors was gleefully and abruptly halted by the local farmers when Stewart showed them how to do it electrically.
Refreshingly, every mention of, say, lemon groves or bathing at midnight by candlelight in their river, is counterpointed by how difficult it is to tend the groves and how dangerous the river becomes after heavy rainfall. A few years in, Anna becomes pregnant and the arrival of their daughter, Chloe, copperfastens their position within the community. As some measure of the relative hardship they still live in, Stewart recounts how when Chloe started school, they had to construct a primitive form of ski lift to get her over the river each morning so she could meet up with the school bus. As much as one admires this Spanish Family Robinson, it's the supporting cast and bit-players that really propel the narrative. This is not so much a clash of cultures between a hitherto urbanised English couple and a traditional farming community as an opportunity for both sides to explore new ways of thinking and doing.
Incidentally, in their publicity the publishers make much of the fact that Chris Stewart was once the drummer with the dreaded prog-rock (but very successful) band Genesis. In reality, he was only with the band for a matter of months, finishing up when he was 17 because he preferred to complete his education rather than go on tour. He was replaced by Phil Collins, but none of this has any relevance to this book. It's a marvellous read throughout and none too demanding. But there will be a price to pay for the book's anticipated success. In much the same way as Provence was overrun by coach parties following A Year In Provence, this book could prove to be a (largely unwelcome) mass tourist-generator and act as a spur to all those who have ideas of giving it all up to go and tend a small rural holding in an exotic setting. With that in mind, please don't buy this book.
Brian Boyd is a freelance journalist
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Chris Stewart, right, photographed by Richard Kut. Left: on the high pastures of Andalucia, photograph by Steve Day.
