When a bunch of Germans get together they either start brewing beer, or form a brass band. When the Welsh gang up they form a choir. It is said the English will form a club. Abroad they will undoubtedly form a tennis club, a bowls club, start a walking party, or pretend to get deeply embedded in local history.
This is all very well, but you can tell the English have arrived anywhere in force when you are stumbling through a dusty town that seems to have gone to sleep in the bright mid morning sun and you turn a corner, and there, across the street, is a charity shop.
You know that somewhere just out of town is a finca with a ramshackle yard. There will be makeshift pens harbouring a rescued donkey or two. There will be twenty-seven cats looking puzzled and wondering where their essential parts have gone. Dogs will look up at you with sad brown eyes.
Wherever the English go they immediately set up an animal sanctuary. There is a certain type of English lady who likes to make sure all animals are properly domesticated. There are rules by which animals should live when in proximity to humans. Animals must at all costs be sanitised, sterilised, and humanised. Some even think they should be baptised, and when they die, properly burialised.
Wild animals are something different. Where I currently live, across the border in Portugal, there is a brisk trade in cats. It goes like this. Martha realises that the end of her garden is getting a bit out of hand. There are no less than three feral cats ranging across the land. Feral cats are NOT ALLOWED! Only domesticated cats are allowed on Martha's land. There is only one thing to do. She gets out the cat basket. It has a portcullis on the front. When a curious cat goes inside to see what it's all about, the portcullis is tripped, and the cat is captured.
You can hear the swearing from a hundred yards. Martha backs up the car, puts basket with swearing cat in the back, and drives several miles to the river, over the bridge, and then, just to make sure, she drives ten miles back up the river on the other side, and then releases a by now hysterical cat.
Martha then puts the basket back on the patch of land at the bottom of her garden ready to catch the next curious cat. Before long peace reigns in the garden as all the feral cats have been safely transported across the water.
What this doesn't take into account is the fact that another Martha, who is in fact called Mary, lives on the other side of the river bank, and when she finds these feral cats roaming around the countryside, attacking her peace-loving domestic cats, and spraying everywhere, she immediately reaches for her cat basket with the portcullis drop. Hubby is commandeered to drive the station wagon ten miles downstream to the bridge, and the cats are duly released a suitable way from the bridge on the other side of the river.
A brisk trade in ferrying feral cats develops, and keeps the cats thoroughly confused, and the local English community busy throughout the long years of retirement.
Gangs of earnest ladies are kept busy doing what some ladies have always seen as their most important role in life, catching stray grumpy male animals and cutting off their sexual parts. There is obviously some cathartic pleasure in this. It makes the males harmless, gets the females a quiet life, and keeps the population down to manageable levels.
To support the lifestyle of the English do-good lady abroad there needs to be some income. The ideal way to get the funds to pay for the vet to chop off a bit here and a bit there, and to pay for the fencing and the food, and the basket with the built-in portcullis, is to have a bring-and-buy sale, and then start a charity shop.
There is one just across the street. In I go. There are shelves of books in English, books in German, and the occasional French novel. There are racks of clothes, and along one wall is a collection of frightful furniture, on top of which are spread some even more frightful nick-knacks.
On the back of the door is a notice about rabbits. According to this notice I am informed that one rabbit can produce a quarter of a million rabbits in just two years. Odd, I always thought you needed two to get things going.
English ladies abroad! The locals must find them exceedingly odd.
English Ladies Abroad