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| The "Mighty Montgo", seen from my house everyday |
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I’m Back – But I Never Really Went Away
Back again… and still trying to work it all out.
It’s been a while. Ten years, give or take, since I last sat down and wrote anything on here about life on the Costa Blanca. Some of my earlier thoughts on life out here are still over on my original blog… here, check it out. Back then it was all new—sunshine, strange bureaucracy, learning how to ask for the right cut of meat in Spanish, and working out why everything shuts just when you need it most.
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| Party time again in JP |
Or at least as normal as life ever gets when you’re living in a Spanish village, working nights as a DJ, running quizzes, and occasionally wondering how you ended up here in the first place.
The truth is, I’ve been writing again—but not on here.
I’ve been working on a book. Not a list of “this happened, then that happened,” but something a bit more honest. A look back at a life that started in the infantry, drifted into signals, and ended up with me providing communications in places where, quite often, there wasn’t any.
It’s funny what comes back to you when you start writing things down properly.
Little moments. Big moments.
The sort of things you don’t think about for years—then suddenly they’re as clear as the day they happened.
Like the time we were out in Kenya, trying to keep a battalion connected across miles of nothing, while being told not to wander too far because of lions and other “selected wildlife.”
Or Northern Ireland, where if the radios didn’t work, things could go wrong very quickly.
Strange really… how that part of life—where communication meant everything—has somehow led me here, standing in a bar in Jávea, trying to get a microphone working for a karaoke singer who insists they “can’t hear themselves.”
Different pressures. Same principles.
Get the comms right… and everything else tends to follow.
So I thought I’d start this again.
Not as anything serious. Not as anything polished.
Just a place to write.
Some of it will be about life here—village quirks, expat habits, the odd cultural misunderstanding. Some of it might drift back to earlier days, because it turns out
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| Wine tasting village style |
And if nothing else, it keeps the mind active.
Which, at my age, is no bad thing.
Anyway… we’ll see how it goes.
Good to be back.
How I Ended Up Here
The short version is: I didn’t plan any of it.
The longer version starts in Morecambe.
We had the York Hotel for ten years. Hard work doesn’t quite cover it. It was everything—long days, longer nights, and dealing with some of the best and worst of people, often in the same evening. If you’ve ever run a pub, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
It could be brilliant. It could also test you to your limits.
After that, we did something completely different.
We packed up and went travelling around Southeast Asia—proper backpacking, not the brochure version. I even wrote about it at the time on a blog called Backpacking on a Pension.
That trip probably did more than anything else to change our direction.
Spain came next—but not in the way you might expect.
My first proper job here wasn’t behind a bar or a DJ booth. It was teaching English at an international school on Saturday mornings. That was the first time things started to feel official—being on the system, paying tax, part of everyday life here rather than just passing through.
From there, it led to invigilating exams, and eventually doing supply and cover teaching with older students.
Not exactly the grand plan… but then again, there never really was one.
Somewhere along the line, the DJ work came back into it.
Music had always been there, but now it became part of life again—bars, parties, quiz nights, karaoke… and all the characters that come with them.
And that’s really how I ended up here.
In a small village called Jesús Pobre.
Population just over a thousand.
Four bars. One restaurant.
You’d think that was too many.
It isn’t.
And over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about all of it.
The bars. The people. The music.
And what it’s like living in a place where, more often than not, life revolves around whichever bar you happen to be standing in.
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| DJ/MC for the village Christmas Fiesta |
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