Last year, jaded by the toxicity around Brexit and the election, I had simply had enough. Fuck. That. Shit, I told myself.
At the age of 52, divorced and with a 14-year-old daughter who has better things to do with her weekends than to hang out with Sad Dad who drinks too much, I decided to quit London where I was born and have always lived. It was an instantly liberating feeling. The world was my oyster – I toyed with moving to my beloved Cuba – but I alit upon Spain.
So I did some research (spent ten minutes on Google) and learnt that Ruzafa is variously described as either the Soho or the Shoreditch of Valencia. (In fact, it’s neither, and is not an especially helpful comparison.) But it is packed with townhouses split into apartments, and mansion blocks, and if you throw a tennis ball in any direction from one’s balcony, there’s a very high chance that you’ll hit a bar, restaurant or café. My kinda place, I thought.
I did a recce in December, found a flat I loved and returned to the UK to close down my London pad and do the paperwork on the new place. In mid-February, all sorted, I booked a Polish lorry driver to take my furniture over and, two days later, flew out to Valencia, where I had rented a studio for the night until my Polish friend would arrive. I arrived at 10pm, had a late supper and then asked a taxi driver to take me to a bar. He said, “A bar to meet women?” I found it a strange question, but in my mediocre Spanish said, “Well, not specifically, but yeah, that kind of thing.”
He dropped me in a street near Estación del Norte and the Plaza de Toros. As it was a one-way street, he pointed up the way to a bar and told me that was my destination. I thought it a little odd that I had to knock but assumed it was a licensing thing. Someone looked through a peephole and I was admitted.
Reader, I was in a puticlub.
(I shall do a separate columnabout this but in a nutshell, prostitution is not illegal in Spain and there are many puticlubs, which consist of a bar and seating, while upstairs are rooms, often rather sumptuous with Jacuzzis and such, where the girls hire clean sheets and so on…)
This was a very plush bar with generous seating, where a bevy of scantily clad girls looked up with interest and hope – no honey, no money, not because I am staggeringly good-looking, though there is that, of course. So their disappointment was palpable when I said I was only there to have a few drinks.
But they were by and large sweet girls and good-natured so I ended up sitting with them, having a laugh. In a normal bar, a large vodka and tonic is €7 or €8. Here, it’s €12 so not too bad. But you are expected to buy the girl you are chatting to a drink, which costs €30, and the girls told me that they get to keep €20 so it seems reasonable for them. I caused great hilarity because when I agreed to buy one very persuasive girl a drink –I tried to pretend it was for me. The madam treated my attempted subterfuge with appropriate contempt. I got on very well with two girls, a beautiful Cuban girl from Santiago de Cuba in the east of the island, near Guantánamo that I have visited, the most African of Cuban cities and a hotspot for the voodoo religion Santería, and in particular with a vivacious Colombian from Bogota with a great chuckle named Isabella (the girl, not the chuckle), and when I left some time later, we exchanged numbers.
It was to prove a very wise decision on my part…