Last Days of the Bus Club by Stewart Chris

Author:Stewart, Chris [Chris Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908745446
Publisher: Sort Of
Published: 2014-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

The whole broad bean business had particular relevance that year, as Manolo, for some reason known only to himself, had sown about half an acre of habas, and we had had the most successful crop I had ever seen. Habas do well here, and it’s the staple diet during the earlier part of the year. But even in this bumper year, when we could have picked every bean in its tiny delectable state, we found ourselves double-podding, for Ana insisted we pick the horrible old coarse ones first – so as not to waste them. What this means, of course, is that by the time you have got through the big horrible ones, the thin tender sweet ones have all in their turn become fat and horrible. It’s the same with the raspberries, later on. Ana insists we eat the over-ripe fruit before we’re allowed to get at the nice juicy fresh ones. By the time we get round to picking them they are rotten, too, so we only get to eat rotten raspberries … just like the ’orrible ’abbers. It’s a deeply flawed system.

But to return to the task in hand. Before the second shucking of the habas, you have to get the beans out of their big pod. Ths is not unpleasant work and you can get through it tolerably quickly. But Ana considers it one of those jobs that must be combined with other activity, and, outside of our hour with Manolo, the best activity to combine it with is listening to audiobooks. Again I’m a little ambivalent about this as I have a sneaking, fastidious sort of a suspicion that I am detracting from the meaningfulness of both activities by combining them. However, that spring we had sackloads of habas to shuck, and so we both settled down with a bowl between our knees and headphones on our heads. You may perhaps wonder why we could not listen to the book together, as would seem to be logical. This was because, although we were listening to the same book (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers … and I defy you to come up with a finer novel), we were at different stages of it, on account of my having snaffled a couple of tapes to take on a car journey to Granada. I was therefore way ahead of Ana and as I didn’t want to hear the earlier bits all over again, and she didn’t want to skip any of the intevening parts, we had to resort to separate audio equipment.

So imagine us, if you will, of an evening, me sitting on the pouff, the Wife on the sofa, both engrossed in the story being read separately to us. Between us the bucket of unshucked habas was diminishing slowly, while the piles of podded beans in the bowls between our respective knees grew at an equal rate. Our faces were rapt in earnest concentration, except for every now and then when one or

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