2. ALPHONSE

Before Urmas, before the endless lines of application forms, before the map of the Baltic Sea, there was another map, of Spain. We ran our fingers across it and plotted a journey.

We would travel from Catalunya to the Costa del Sol, working on farms as went. The website of WorldWide Opportunities on Organic Farms put us in touch with farmers who needed our help in return for food and accomodation. There would be fresh air, hard work, rustic cottages, sunshine and an open road. Just before we set off the enormity of the visa application process began to unfurl itself before our horrified eyes. We curtailed our travel plans and told two of the farmers we wouldn't be able to join them.

Miserable cows

Still, our prospects were tantalising after a long cold winter in England, Poland and Estonia. We would fly to Girona and work two weeks in rural Catalunya before relaxing for a long weekend in Barcelona and hitching cross-country to the second farm, near Marbella. I fell in love with Girona's peaceful old town and baked stone walls overnight; the next day it was time to meet our new boss.

Alphonse had a huge farm, sixteen cows, four chickens, a wife, a daughter, two dogs and some cats which, undertandably, he couldn't remember the names or number of. Different cats would turn up every day to be fed and he took no interest in whether they belonged to him or not. His only stipulation was that the cats shouldn't be fed too much as it would put them off their business of eating mice.

Feeding the cows, our first job in the morning, had to be equally precise. The food was packed into a big haystack and had to be peeled off with a pitchfork and heaped in a long mound along the front of the fence before it could be shovelled in. The cows gathered on the other side and jostled hungrily for position. If the food was put in bit-by-bit the strongest cows, starting with the big, ominous bull, would scoff it all. So the two of us, Mari and I, would line it up along the forty-foot fence then take an end each and push it in as quickly as we could.

The cows were unspeakably stupid animals and made the whole thing impossible. They would abandon a perfectly good patch of food to run along the fence and barge one of their colleagues aside in order to get at another patch. For the stronger cows and particularly the bull it was a good life, being copiously fed each morning and roaming as they pleased all day. For the weaker ones, though, it was a fraught existence: living in a constant state of nervousness and subjugation, forever being shunted and butted sideways as they struggled for sustenance, and susceptible at any time to being mounted and unceremoniously screwed from behind by their grunting superior. As I fed them I thought often of my previous job in England, working for the bank.

Because of all this, we never seemed to get the quantities right. There was a constant discrepancy between the amount of food Alphonse wanted shovelled into the cows and the amount he expected to see left in the haystack. He would plod towards us in his big wellies and tell us the row of feed needed to be thicker, but the next day he would say that the haystack was diminishing too quickly and needed to last longer. He was a good-natured man, though, and always ended with a grin, telling us in his heavy accent that it was "quite alright" before plodding away again. But as he left he would scratch his thick black beard, clearly suspecting that we were in league with his cows in an attempt to eat him out of house and home. Sometimes, as a special treat, the cows would be fed a different haystack of thicker, greasier feed that Alphonse said was "like marmalade, very tasty", and I harboured my own suspicious thoughts about why the supplies were running out so quickly.

Whatever we fed them, though, and however much or little, the animals produced gargantuan quantities of shit. Perhaps to deter us from overfeeding them we would occasionally be required to shovel this shit into a trailer. The manure would be driven away to fertilise the plants, the plants would feed the animals, the animals would produce more manure, and so it goes. For many this natural cycle is an inspiration but as I shovelled shit in the cowpen, the bull watching me darkly, I felt only its inescapability.

Mind you, one of the cows managed to escape it. Or so we thought. It came sauntering towards us down the path that led to the feeding pen one day and we panicked that we'd left the electric fence open. Thinking quickly, Mari began waving and shouting and hustling the frightened animal back towards the gate while I waited to open it. As the cow trotted back inside, looking highly discombobulated, I snapped the wires back in place before the rest of the cows could get out. We congratulated ourselves on our steersmanship as the theme from "Bonanza" played somewhere in the back of my head. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

Shortly, Alphonse arrived. "Do you know," he asked, scratching his beard, "how is the white cow back inside the fence?" We looked at one another and, before we thought of an answer, we'd already left it too late to tell the truth. We shrugged, hummed and mumbled.

"Hmm." he said. "Is strange. Yesterday I took her outside the fence because she doesn't eat enough. Today she is inside the fence. But I don't know how she gets through." It was impossible, now, to admit to our good intentions, quick thinking, and impeccable cow control. He tramped off again, confused and a little suspicious. I stood hoping he wouldn't go to the market or the local TV station with his incredible jumping cow, or methodically check every inch of his miles of fencing for a non-existent gap. In fact I suspect he knew exactly what had happened and later, as we walked to the village and a white pick-up truck just like Alphonse's came bumping down the road towards us, I half expected to see him leaning out of the window with his magic cow in the back and a shotgun trained right at us. I ducked behind a hedge before I could find out.

The Houdini cow was soon forgotten, though, as Alphonse focused on his true passion of cutting down trees. The underlying purpose of the farm seemed to be to provide a continuous supply of trees for Alphonse to cut down. Most of it was uncultivated woodland and he would drive around it in the pick-up, leaping out to clear a path with a big chainsaw, while Mari and I followed on foot loading the severed trunks and branches into the back. The thicker cuts were saved for firewood in the cottage and the leafier branches were to be tossed into the cowpen as a supplement to the ever-diminishing haystacks. This was a depressing job because we knew that the more branches we threw in there, the more we'd have to climb in and remove the next day once the leaves had been eaten. This was bad news because the cows made a very careful habit of shitting exacty where they ate.

Some goldfish, in a bath

After that, it would be time to prune the olive trees in the big, south-facing, terraced field. The sun was baking hot by this time of day, even in April, and I'd have to stop often to sit gazing out across the purple and green Catalunyan hills. This obviously meant I wasn't working quickly enough because Alphonse eventually recruited a small pony to eat away the undergrowth around the trees instead. It was a preposterous, coiffured animal, about three foot tall, that had been sacked from a children's farm for being "too nervous" and likely to have an episode with one of the youngsters. Once the pony arrived my jobs in the olive field were all subservient to it: stringing up a fence to prevent the beast from escaping, dragging into place a disused bath that would be used to hold its water, and capturing two goldfish who would live in the bath and eat mosquitos so that the pony didn't drink them. In the olive-field hierarchy, then, it seemed the pony was at the top, the goldfish were next, and I was near the bottom, just above or below the mosquitos. I'm not sure which.

Despite this lowly standing, it was a good life. Our afternoons and weekends were free to roam the nearby countryside, relax with a picnic by the stream, visit the local villages or head to Figueres, the nearest town. It was the birthplace of Salvador Dali and houses a museum of his work, full of chattering students and international tourists who zip from one painting or sculpture to the next, take a quick photograph, and don't bother stopping to look at the real thing. On the way there I had my first experience of hitchiking and we picked up two lifts in two attempts, one from a Ukranian who took us all the way into town at a speed much more familiar to Northern Europeans. For the rest of the time we settled into life at the Spanish pace. I eventually got my comeuppance when a yappy village dog moved too quickly for me and bit me sharply on the ankle.

Most of the afternoons, though, we just stayed home and read. Our accomodation was in a little old static caravan at the end of a dirt road away from the house. We were happy there, basic as it was - cold in the mornings, only just big enough to house our bed and a small cooking space, serviced with an outdoor sink and an extremely rugged outdoor toilet: four wooden barriers round a hole in the ground with a bucket of ash to cover our leavings. The hole filled up ominously during our two week stay and unlike the cows, we didn't have anyone to come and shovel it away for us. I'm sorry to say I hadn't the appetite to do it myself. I imagine that caused a good deal of beard-scratching after we left.