The other weekend, I had one of those lovely Sundays that you always hope for during a shitty Wednesday. I woke up with a solid but not unbearable hangover from the excellent night before. Food and tea made me human, and I walked slowly into town to meet my teacher buddies at the post office, and from there towards the stadium that plays host to Recreativo de Huelva, the oldest football club in Spain, currently fighting hard to stay in the top division of La Liga.
The road to the stadium is utterly wonderful. Being busy, and lazy, I hadn't actually gone and seen the water of the estuary that Huelva stands on until that moment. It's a striking sight, industrial and beautiful, with a huge disused wooden pier stretching in a gentle arc into the middle of the river. When it crosses the road, you can look back under its straight path back into the centre, at the engineered symmetry. I remember saying at least twice how relaxed I felt.
We got tickets for the match: Valencia, my adopted Spanish team and league leaders, were visiting. We grabbed one-euro cans of beer and made sportsman's bets on half-time and full-time scores, and everyone else gave the locals little credit: 2-0 or 4-0 to Valencia, sort of thing. I stuck my neck out and said Recre would get a point, 0-0 at half-time and 1-1 by the end. Then we headed to the day's other destination, the Fiesta de Gastronomico, just under the shadow of the East stand.
We'd been to a Fiesta de Tapas a couple of weeks before. It's a funny thing to have a festival dedicated to tapas, considering there's no unifying principle behind tapa dishes other than that they're food on a small plate. Nevertheless, it had been pretty excellent, with cheap beer and a family atmosphere. The Gastronomico was much the same, except a bit up-market, in that you could buy jars and bottles and wheels of things. We spent €5 on good cheese, and washed it down with beer (cheap as ever - some things don't change). We had free samples of wine, poured in a showboating, over-the-shoulder way by a sort of alcohol matador, from a strange cup-on-rod mechanism: Chris had the stones to ask for a go at the pouring method, and commendably managed not to cover himself in wine while trying it.
Fed and watered, we went and saw the football, from high in an open stand on the South side with a fine view of the pitch. I had the same buzz waiting for the game to start that I get in Hillsborough watching Wednesday, but also none of the excited, paranoid claustrophobia: it was all much more relaxed. We were basking in the sun, with the peaks of the city visible over the opposite stand. There were Valencia fans behind us, but no trouble. A row of people wore silly paper hats and got us to take their picture. A man smoked good-smelling hash in front of us and munched on seeds. The first half kicked off, and Valencia C.F. didn't look all that: Recre were proper sticking it to them.
Obviously I couldn't understand all the chants that rolled around the stadium (mainly from the North Stand: it's always the North Stand), but I could dig the clapping. If there's one thing the Spanish can do, it's clap a good rhythm (clap near a Spanish baby in the womb and its little hands move on the ultrasound, sort of thing). Once in a while, this CLAP-clap-clap-CLAP-clap-clap would spread round the stadium, a thousand-strong waltz, musical, smarter than the blunt oys and aahs of English chants, which by the way I'm not slagging off; I think Recre could do with a bit of Over Land And Sea (and Barca!).
Half-time rolled around, and it had been a scrap with no goals, as I'd predicted. The interval had no daft games, no sponsored kids trying to score from halfway, just a break from the football. And then we were off again, and suddenly, wonderfully, we were one up. The set-up made me crazy, the Recre forwards passing sideways in the box while I crowed "FUCKING HIT IT", not caring about sounding conspicuously English. It went in, though, and all was right with the world, and once the celebrations died down, that peculiarly deep tension-of-being-ahead-when-you're-not-supposed-to (I bet the Germans have a word for it) set in. It lasted all of fifteen minutes. Valencia bundled in a scrappy shit goal, finished by David Villa: you could complain about the quality, but at this point he already had 10 goals from 9 games, and it takes a pretty immovable object to deal with that sort of unstoppable force.
That, in the end, was it. A good result for Recre, and a deserved ovation for the players. My prediction of 0-0, 1-1 was bang on, and I think I'm gonna start playing the
Quiniela - Spanish pools. I've got a feel for it. All fuzzy from lunchtime beers, I walked the half-hour home slowly, and didn't do any lesson planning. A good thing too, I reckon: the next week was insane, with an 8am cover and my stress-filled observation lesson, but I got through it. It seems better, so far, to push crazily through the week, one lesson after the next, always on short-term alert, and then have two days of genuine cooling-down. We'll see if this works, or if I blow a gasket by late November.
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