It’s easy to blame the dead for your problems. My grandma would always tell me not to fear the deceased. It’s the alive ones you’ve to look out for, she’d say. She was a wise woman indeed. Which is funny, because I’m about to blame her for something.
I have a wicked sweet tooth. Many of you may joke about having a second stomach for dessert, but I have a bottomless pit. And for that, I’m going to blame my dearly departed grandma. She was obsessed with all things sweet, an obsession that she passed down to me from day one. I’d barely been born when my mother caught her shoving lemonade down my throat. Mum was livid.
Thus my problems began.
A few years later, I was at a Christmas party. Father Christmas was handing out selection boxes, which are essentially trays full of chocolate bars. Once I’d gotten my hands on one, I hid under a table, ripped the thing open, and began to scoff the chocolate bars, one right after the other. Some nosey cow then spotted my gluttonous episode and grassed me up to my mum. “He’ll make himself sick!” she exclaimed. “Oh”, laughed my mother. “No, he won’t.”
Mum was right, of course. I am impervious to sweetness. I am untouchable, unfazed. Which is why it’s no surprise that the greatest cultural shock I experienced upon moving to Spain wasn’t the usual stuff that travel influencers quip about. It was the price of sweets.
So here I am, stood in the Carrefour Express below my apartment, contemplating the measly assortment of sweets and wondering whether or not to spend half my wage on a bag of marshmallows that, seen through the transparent plastic window on the packaging, look like absolute shit. Part of me thinks I should just go home and eat sugar out of the bag. It wouldn’t be the first time, but that’s a whole other issue. The problem at hand is that I can’t adjust to this one particular cultural quirk. I can’t bring myself to be as indifferent to sweets as the Spanish seem to be.
When I go back to England these days, I find myself pretty indifferent to the supermarkets there. I’m uninterested in the various flavours of crisps because I don’t like the oil we fry them in. I hate that all the fruit and vegetables come prepackaged in set quantities. The amount of ready meals and pre-made stuff now seems obscene. But my God do I miss the sweet section, even if some of the best sweets on the British high street were sadly taken from us a few years ago.
All of us 90s kids have had an argument with a Wilko’s cashier over whether we had, in fact, managed to squish the mic-n-mix firmly enough into the paper cup for the lid to close properly. It was like Tetris: even the tiniest air pocket could rob you of an extra jelly bean. Any scientist wondering whether a solid can act as a liquid has obviously never seen me and my friends contort a scoop full of jelly worms into a puck the size of our fists.
Spain doesn’t have anything like this, and the selection that they do have leaves a lot to be desired. The sweets here are bland and oily, with hardly any variety when it comes to flavour and texture. The packaging is also particularly lacklustre. Everything comes in a sad-looking plastic bag which feels pretty cheap. A quick glance at the price tag will then reveal that it certainly is not.
I moan about this because I’m a sugar fiend, sure, but also because it’s a phenomenon which I first noticed in sweets and which I’ve come to realise spills over into every kind of product you can think of. I’m not sure what to call this or how to frame it without sounding insulting or insensitive, so I’ll just say it as it is: in a foreign country, my initial impression of a product is always worse than it would be back in England.
I don’t think the products are the problem, though. Spain, it’s not you, it’s me. The issue is that I’ve not lived here for long enough for all this to feel natural. I live surrounded by a visual landscape which sometimes still feels wildly unfamiliar.
This is evidenced by my struggles to find certain things. I remember when I first landed here and needed to buy an extension lead to charge my various doodahs. Before the dawn of decent translation tools, I’d no idea how to say this in Spanish, and nobody understood me when I tried to describe the thing. No fear, I thought, I’ll just go to a shop and look for one. But then it hit me: I hadn’t a clue where to go. In England, I’d wander into big Tesco and that’d be that. Before its untimely demise, I could even have nipped into a Wilko’s, my go-to place for extension leads as well as pic-n-mix. But in Spain, I was at a loss.
Years later, I may be tempted to deride this past lack of knowledge. But then I stop and think about it, and there’s lots of things that I still wouldn’t have a clue where to find. To this day, I’ve no idea where I could go to for a tongue cleaner or some discounted backpacks. There’s still so many shops that I wander past and —apart from what I can glean from the shop window— I have no idea what they offer. I’m constantly coming across names and brands that are still a mystery to me. Which is slightly worrying, as you’d think that someone who builds brands for a living would have more of an idea.
As I write, though, I realise it’s not that I miss any of the brands or products that are on offer in England. I’ve already said my bit about our crap crisps and readymade slop. And, as much as I’m nostalgic for their thick catalogues, dinky pencils, and turquoise order machines with the little number pads, I don’t actually miss having an Argos down the road.
What I miss is the familiarity, the deep knowledge of a retail landscape that can only come from a childhood spent immersed in it. I miss walking down the street and knowing exactly what’s what.
Living abroad is a joy, but it brings many challenges. There’s the language barrier, endless paperwork, and complex cultural differences. These are all much more severe than simply not knowing where to buy some jeans, but I’ve got my head around them. I can file my tax return just fine, but I still don’t know where to find a properly fluffy dressing gown.
In my endless search, I’m left wondering whether I simply don’t know where to look or whether they aren’t sold in Spain at all. I’ve been here for long enough that I should know where to find this stuff by now, but I’m also now too old and set in my ways to actually bother looking for it. If it’s not in the shops that I visit every week, it simply does not exist.
So, Spain, stop wittering on about the housing crisis and start cracking down on the real issues. There’s no sweet popcorn at Mercadona.