Mezcla

The Aliens Have Landed

Ever since we'd moved into our new house we'd had a problem with lighting. The MacBride residence, you see, tends towards the minimalist, and all the lights we looked at in Spanish lighting shops were just too ornate. Up to now, we'd made do with a few table lamps scattered about the place. But the completion of the downstairs apartment prompted us into action.

The Boss, who by now seemed to fancy herself as an interior designer, consulted her stack of magazines again to see what the glitterati considered fashionable.

'All those lights dangling on wires from the ceiling are ugly,' she declared. 'Everyone has recessed spotlights now. They're much neater and you can swivel them to point at your focal points.'

'Have we got any focal points?' I inquired.

'We can buy some artwork, paintings, sculptures, that sort of thing.'

'I'm going to have to ask for a raise,' I told her.

So, the management decided that recessed halogen "eyeballs" would be installed and that I, with my vast electrical knowledge and expert DIY abilities, would install them. Fortunately, someone had bought me the "Bumper Book of How to Do-It-Yourself" as a Christmas present so I hastily swotted up on "how to make holes in a ceiling" and "how to wire a light fitting". It appeared that the first step was to accurately mark the positions for the lights, and that proved no easy task.

I spent more time measuring, marking, rubbing out and marking again on our ceilings than it took Michelangelo to do his stuff in the Sistine Chapel. I now know from experience that he must have had one hell of a crick in his neck. Eventually, I got it right and started making dozens of neat round holes until our ceilings resembled a giant gorgonzola cheese.

The builders had left mains wires for lights in the center of each room so I then had to run electrical cables from these to my holes. If anyone knows an easy way to do this, please let me know, because I spent days trying to feed the wires through to all these holes. I seriously contemplated buying a gerbil, harnessing it to the wires in the ceiling, and tempting it to each aperture in turn with a tasty morsel.

After many unsuccessful attempts, I finally came up with a method involving several feet of fence wire bent into an elaborate shape. The patent is pending.

A couple of nervous breakdowns and several tantrums later, I eventually succeeded and managed to get all the damn things wired up and fitted. We now have about sixty of these eyeballs, plus the original assorted table lamps, etc, which add up, I reckon, to about three thousand watts of illumination ... or roughly the same as a small town. If we switch on all these lights for more than ten minutes we get sunstroke. I've taken to wearing a sombrero and dark glasses inside the house and applying sun cream after dark.

Each of these eyeballs also has its own transformer and when they're turned on each transformer emits a low-frequency hum. When they're all going you can feel the house throbbing with power from halfway up the street. The first time we switched them on, all the neighbours rushed into the street in panic, thinking an alien spacecraft had landed. I had to go out the next morning and buy half-a-dozen dimmer switches so we could tone things down a bit.

So if any of you happen to be on the Costa Blanca and notice a strange glow in the sky after sunset, don't go thinking it's a plane crash or a forest fire rampaging out of control. It's only me putting the lights on before locking up for the night.

***

All this work was taking place towards the end of our first summer in Spain and, take it from me, any sort of exertion during a Spanish summer is not recommended. Luckily, our pool was now finished so, whenever I got overheated, I was able to go and throw myself in to cool off. Of course, I was then introduced to the joys of pool maintenance which can become an obsessive and addictive pastime. I got to a point where I couldn't bear to see a blemish, spot or stray leaf defile the sparkling blue tiles of our pool. I would inspect it incessantly, to make sure I had a perfectly clean bottom ...