This morning I attended a local Royal British Legion fund raising coffee morning, held at a charming small restaurant with a huge shady tree on its street side patio, often sheltering scores of chattering starlings when I pass by. It's fifteen minutes walk from the apartment along the beach road, when I go out shopping on foot. 'El Burladero Berria' is its name. I was surprised when the name checked out in the dictionary as 'brothel'. It took me days to realise I'd miss-spelled the word as 'burdelero', when it was first told to me. It even went into my Google Calender incorrectly. 'Burladera' is Spanish for a mocking bird. 'Burladero' is what the enclosure serving as a bull fighter's ringside refuge is called, quite an uncommon noun, which had digital dictionaries struggling. So really, to name a restaurant after a place of respite in a hurly-burly, is quite appropriate, so long as you get the spelling right!
There were three dozen at the gathering, chatting drinking coffee, consuming pastries and chocolate biscuits. The Chairman opened with the Act of Remembrance, and closed with the Kohima Prayer, and we were treated to a raffle and a quiz run by Mick, the standard bearer who serves at Mojácar church. I was quite surprised to learn at the end of it that ours was the winning table. I bought a pin badge, commemorating the centenary of the battle of Paschendaele in which my Great Uncle Will was lost without trace.
It's only recently that war documentaries have revealed the work of tunnelers digging behind enemy lines and laying huge deadly landmines on the Western Front. Will was a young cavalryman, who left the army in 1901, married and became a miner in Bedwas Colliery. He was over forty when the call came to re-enlist. For most of the century it was thought he disappeared on patrol, perhaps drowning in the mud. In his youth he'd been a Colour Sergeant, but in 1916, he was only a Corporal. It seems he was recruited because he was an experienced miner, though the circumstances of his demise are not revealed in his brief military record. It's a story still to be told.
In the afternoon, I drove to Arboleas to make a bereavement visit, co-incidentally to a military family of Ulster origins. Father, and two of three sons served in the Armed Forces, but it was Mother who died suddenly and unexpectedly. The youngest son coming from Northern Ireland hadn't yet arrived, due to difficulties in obtaining a flight in half term week, plus gale force winds currently lashing the west of the U.K. The eldest son came from Vienna where he works, cutting short his holiday in Greece. The middle son working in Saudi Arabia who came the furthest, was first there, thanks to his employers ensuring he left within a few hours of hearing the sad news. For all their geographical dispersion, a close knit family. The couple had known each other since the year I was born, and had been married four months short of sixty years. I left them after an hour together, with a lovely story to tell at tomorrow's funeral of life together well lived.
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