Some new friends to meet

We have so many interesting characters here in the Mojacar area.

Allow me if you will to introduce you to some of my friends that you will often see in the market place, restaurants or café/bars and then, you can “say hello from both of us”.

You really need to meet a few more of them. Many of my friends helped pave the way for you getting settled and established in this distant kingdom from back home, wherever that might have been.

One particularly interesting personage is Jean Millar a resident of Almeria province since 1965. She and her husband Jock started life in the coastal village of San Jose. Then there was no asphalted road, water or electricity, just the bay and the boats. In fact, they were the first foreigners to buy a home in San Jose, a popular place since swallowed up by the foreign invasion later in the 70’s and 80’s.

Jock once tried his hand at running contraband way back then. A most delicate item, unobtainable in Franco’s Catholic Spain: condoms.

Jean tells a story with great relish commenting that years later while strolling down the paseo in Almeria the then arresting Guardia Civil recognized Jock rushed over to embrace him and gleefully exclaimed: “remember the night I almost killed you in San Jose?” They became best of friends.

Initially their Spanish castle consisted of just two built rooms and a cave section. Their neighbours had even less, just a cave. A situation almost impossible to envision today. Jock was an artist, and a good one. He once did a series of paintings concerning Cortijo Grande in Turre when the course just started, and my brother wanted to buy every painting. That is where I met them officially some 20 years ago.

But, I had heard much about them in the proceeding years following their move from San Jose to Castro de los Filabres, a Scotsman and his wife living high in the hills above Tabernas.

Harsh conditions and a very difficult life style to survive. Always refined and in control of their presence they served up an excellent example of how to be a “foreigner” when foreigners were as common as aliens. They lived a meagre existence with little work to be garnered during those years. Jock painted, murals, publicity boards whatever to earn his crust while Jean worked teaching English to the village children or elders.

Jean, what’s so different today than in those by-gone times? “Everybody was more helpful then. They went out of their way to assist you in any endeavor, building a wall or baking a pie. Today they seem more greed oriented”.

Jean rents an apartment on Mojacar’s beach front near Bar Essential. She is often in Total Entertainment using the internet or at Tomas’s Lo que Faltaba having a cup of coffee. Please say Hello from both of us.