Are you awake?
Yep. Can’t sleep.
Me neither.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Probably...
                                     My God! What have we done?

Light on. It’s mid-October in a tiny village in the Andalucía mountains. The house is cold and damp. Someone has disturbed the dogs penned in on the outskirts and all hell has let loose!

The evening before we had just agreed to buy and had put down a deposit on an apartment in the nearby town of Ronda.

We viewed the place in the afternoon at the end of a long hot morning viewing totally inappropriate places with our Spanish estate agent.

Had we panicked? At the time we didn’t think so, as we’d been looking for over a year, but in the cold, damp, dark, sleepless early-hours of an autumn morning in Andalucía, we had begun to question the wisdom of blowing most of our recently matured endowment on a jerry-built place in a comunidad de propietarios (community of owners), all of whom are Spanish.

What had we done?

© Paul Whitelock