Giles Brown
I HAVE always been keen on maintaining my Christmas traditions. Once again, I spent most of the Christmas and New Year period at the radio station, presenting ‘Best of Shows’, drinking far too much coffee and making clandestine raids on the festive chocolate selection in reception.
You can always tell when the Christmas holidays are ending as only the hard toffees are left. I also discovered that popping a large toffee into my mouth just before going on air was not a clever thing to do.
Unable to speak, I spent most of my intro music, when I would normally be smoothly telling the audience about my guests, trying to dislodge the offending confectionery that had securely welded itself to the roof of my mouth.
The Christmas Morning show, however, is always my favourite to host. The listeners are normally on their second Bucks Fizz of the day, and the festive calls and messages make a refreshing change to the normal unrestrained, free fire zone that is my current affairs call-in programme.
The week before Christmas also saw me trying to sort out some of my paperwork. This entailed several trips into the pueblo, where I should not have been surprised to discover that everything official shuts at 2pm and the Policia Local do not work on a Wednesday.
The Town Hall also admitted that they have intermittent internet coverage, but they would call me to pick up my paperwork when it was back on.
To round the year off, I finally managed to get a jab. For a multitude of reasons too Kafkaesque to list, I have spent the past four months trying to prove to various departments that I exist. Having finally convinced the pueblo health centre that I was not a hologram, I headed to Marbella. Taking a seat, I waited for my name to be announced.
‘He les Norman’ boomed over the system and I congratulated myself on having both an unpronounceable first name and an old-fashioned middle one, which the authorities assume to be my surname.
Instructed to wait for 15 minutes after my vaccination in case of any side effects, I sat quietly and wondered what they might be. Perhaps I would start bleating loudly, purchase Microsoft products or be initiated into the Illuminati.
Nobody had mentioned hallucinations, however, and when Spiderman walked into the room, I wondered if several decades of enjoying the Marbella lifestyle had finally caught up with me. Had the vaccine finally pushed my frazzled powers of perception over the edge?
It was not until one of the Three Kings also strolled past, deep in conversation with another comic book superhero, that I realised that they were there to lighten the mood for the children in the centre. Thankful that I had not completely lost my marbles, I headed out into the night.
READ MORE:
- Inside Giles Brown’s off-grid home in the Spanish hills with no electricity, heating or internet
- ‘Making do with tech as old as me’ – Giles takes a tip from the Wombles for his off-grid…
- ‘L’etat c’est moi’: Giles Brown looks back at the glory days of King Juan Carlos
