By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey and Jack Steel)
I’ve mentioned before that I live in the mountains, in the
tiny principality of Andorra, which is a many ways a slightly strange country.
This observation was brought home to me fairly forcibly the last time I took
the dog out for a walk last week, before we headed north through France to
England, where another cruise beckoned.
In a
country where Alsatians and Huskies abound, we’ve kind of taken another route,
and our hound of choice is a Yorkshire terrier. Not the most macho of dogs, but
pound for pound every bit as tough as any other breed. That, at least, is my
story, and I’m sticking to it. The roads on our development only link the
houses, and on both sides of the fairly small urbanisation they deteriorate
into rough stone tracks that wind and meander their way through the high pine
forest. And on these tracks, it’s not unusual to encounter other animals, both
wild and domesticated, ranging from the occasional snake up to wild boar, and
occasionally cows and goats. Usually, the presence of domesticated animals is
signalled by the ringing of bells. Not by some attendant or herdsman, but
simply bells which are secured around the necks of some of the animals.
The
terrier – whose name, not that it matters, is Ted – takes a somewhat jaundiced
view of anyone and anything she sees on what she clearly believes to be ‘her’
land, and looks upon cyclists and joggers with particular disfavour. But she’s
not usually too bad with goats and so, when I heard the melodic tinkling of
bells around the corner on the track in front of me, I decided to press on, to pass
through the herd and continue along the route I had planned.
When I
got around the corner, the terrier and I were confronted by about a dozen goats
ranging from quite young kids up to full-grown adults, all of whom were busily
eating just about everything in sight in the manner of goats everywhere. The
animals were what I had expected, but the goatherd certainly wasn’t.
We
exchanged friendly greetings in the way that one does in Andorra, and the
terrier and I weaved our way around the animals and continued on. At the
corner, I paused and looked back. The expression ‘goatherd’ conjures up an
image of a scruffy and unwashed individual, probably leaning on a staff, and
raises unspoken questions about where he sleeps and how and where, exactly, he
attends to certain other bodily functions.
But this
goatherd was wearing a pair of stout brown shoes, neatly pressed tan slacks and
what looked suspiciously like a Pierre Cardin shirt. On his wrist was a solid
gold Rolex Oyster watch and he was smoking a large cigar. Not what you might
call typical.
And it
wasn’t as if he was just standing in for the regular goatherd: I’ve seen him
before and to the best of my knowledge these are his animals.
That’s
one of the oddities about Andorra. If you go back a mere half century or
thereabouts, the population had essentially a subsistence economy, farming
cattle, goats and tobacco, and living in stone houses where the lower floor
functioned as a barn in the winter. And then a number of foreigners,
principally English but some other nationalities as well, discovered that the
Andorran government, such as it was, had no idea what the words ‘income tax’
actually meant, and promptly began buying up whatever land they could lay their
hands on.
As a
result, Andorran families suddenly found a huge demand for building land from
foreign investors, and land itself became so valuable that it was sold, not by
the acre or even by the square metre, but by the pam, or the palm of the hand. Twenty-five pams make up one square metre, as a matter of interest. There was a
sudden and pronounced influx of wealth, and farmers who until then had barely
been able to scratch a living from the land suddenly found that they were able
to buy new houses and drive Mercedes and BMWs and generally live the life of
Riley. But the only profession that they knew was farming, and so despite their
swelling bank accounts, they continued to grow tobacco and herd cattle and
goats just as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them.
Hence our
local goatherd. And personally, I think it’s rather sweet.
And there
was one other interesting fact that I’ve just remembered, from the very early
days when we first had a property in the country. I can recall seeing the local
postman walking, and sometimes jogging, down the road followed – for reasons
which I was never able to ascertain – by his wife driving a car. A little
eccentric, perhaps, but there you go.
But that wasn’t the interesting fact. I learned later
that this man, this postman, with responsibility for one of the most populous
valleys in the country, could neither read nor write. Both, one might
reasonably think, would be fairly important skills to possess if your job
involved delivering mail. Apparently, he had obtained the job through his
family connections – in Andorra it’s often who you know which is most important
– and his technique for delivering letters was simply to compare the writing on
the envelope with the writing on the outside of the building, and if they more
or less matched, he would then stick the letter in the communal mailbox and
walk away.
And I
suppose the really odd thing is that the letters were usually delivered to the
correct building.
You can contact me at:
www.James-Becker.com
