Road to Recovery

  Chapter 14

  How on earth did we all fit into the aircraft that was taking me home? Simple - I just hired a larger aircraft. I hadn’t expected to come home with any of my new finds, people usually have to give some form of notice, but somehow things all seemed to be falling into place for me, and I even had Marcel along for the ride - ‘what about your notice?’ I asked him when we were safely airborne.

  ‘I told my boss what I thought of him, and poked him in the chest’ he sheepishly mumbled. That didn’t seem too heinous a crime I thought; until he went on to explain that he had been holding a razor sharp meat cleaver in his hand at the time. Security had then escorted him off the premises so he presumed that his employment was terminated.

  Remind me to hide the meat cleavers.

  With more and more people residing in or about El Campo it was time for me to go shopping (which I always enjoyed); so the next day, at the crack of ten o’clock, Paul, Charlie, Marcus and I had a race against time. The first Inmobiliario (Estate Agent) was taken by surprise, and we bought up half a dozen villas at below the asking price. The next one tried to almost double his prices; telephones obviously work very well in this part of Spain, so we left him standing in his doorway muttering foul Spanish incantations at our backs. The third one only put his prices up by about ten percent; I could live with that, so we purchased another three brand new town houses, plus the villa that I was already renting for Paul and Eddy, but my prize buy of the day was a skeleton. It was an arrangement of concrete pillars on a concrete base, with a partially completed roof on top of it. The builder had found that he could not sell any of the apartments that he was constructing, so after completing the framework he just stopped work, cutting his losses, and putting the whole project on hold. With Paul and Maria’s help we negotiated a price for the whole site, six floors (maybe two, three or even four apartments per floor, depending on their sizes), an underground car park and a reasonable amount of land surrounding it, more than enough for a large swimming pool. Paul almost had a seizure at the thought of more work but I pacified him, my home was his number one priority, everything else could wait, either that or we hire a Spanish architect, problem sorted. Marcus will have to visit an optician though; yet again he never saw it coming. Good bye assistant P.A, hello Property Manager (designate). I really was getting into the swing of things, and by late afternoon we had a Spanish builder on board, the same one that had actually constructed the skeleton in the first place, but this time he was working for me. A local architect was then recruited to manage the whole project, under the direction of Paul of course (and with regular visits from Eddie), and a furniture store was found that could totally outfit all the properties, down to the last bottle opener, when they were finally completed. I even wanted the second hand properties refurnished, nothing second hand for my staff, although Vicente was not a happy bunny; if I had spoken to him first he could have saved me at least ten percent, ahhh well!, it’s only money.

  Whilst we were wandering around the Pueblo, buying up properties left, right and centre, I slowly got more and more agitated at the sight of all the graffiti that seemed to be appearing on every available flat surface. One thing that had always annoyed me was graffiti, even in its more artistic form, so after I had spoken to Vicente about purchasing the new properties I raised this issue with him, more as a general gripe than anything serious, oops I should really watch what I say. One of Vicente’s new associates had only that morning been sounding off on the same subject, could this new eager beaver do some research into the subject for me? Certainly I said, and then I promptly forgot all about it.

  Roll on my holidays, or should I say vacation as I was going over to that side of the pond again, it was three days away, and I was visibly chomping at the bit. According to my favourite hospital consultant I was making spectacular’ progress, but I was still not 100% - a holiday was just what the doctor ordered, and even without his advice I definitely needed some serious R & R as it seemed to me that every new day was turning out to be one long meeting; decisions, decisions and yet more decisions. What with Paul, with his day to day questions about the ‘Main House’ as it was now being called; ‘when I had said gold taps in the master suite, did I mean real gold or just gold plated?’ David, with his problems, ‘what type of wireless motion sensor network had I decided on, to go around El Campo, temperature, sound, vibration or pressure?’ Of course that was one of the easy ones, as I knew the answer right off the top of my head, ‘ALL of them’, or perhaps just as I was settling down to five minutes with Bonnie and Clyde, Maria wanted to finalise the job descriptions of the next batch of recruits. After the holiday I would seriously have to structure my days, a time and a place for everything.

  Unfortunately the one area that was really giving me a king sized headache was Phase III. El Campo airfield was situated on a plateau, just high enough up so that it wasn’t overlooked by the surrounding area, and its boundary, to a good percentage of the southern edge of the airfield was water, or to be more precise the Mediterranean, and most of this was a rocky cliff, most, but not all. It was as if a giant excavator had taken a huge bite out of the eastern corner of the plateau leaving a huge natural cove, and this cove was shared with the village of San Miguel del Mar, so a dividing jetty had been constructed in line with the edge of the plateau, thus effectively separating the military base from the village. A substantial sea-wall had then been constructed almost entirely encasing the entire cove, but leaving two entrances, one either side of the jetty, created two harbours, one civilian and one military. There had been ample room in the military harbour for the Navy to operate a variety of vessels from within it. It was well situated in a pleasant part of the Country, well protected from the elements and so it usually had three or four Patrol Craft of varying sizes in residence, with the occasional visit from a passing Frigate or Destroyer, but unfortunately, as a cost cutting measure, the Spanish Armada (Navy) reluctantly abandoned its favourite mini base in the sun, leaving the Air Force with a fair to middling harbour for their air/sea rescue launch, and a few recreational dinghies. When the Air force finally departed, the harbour mouth was sealed off with chains and underwater obstacles, and the whole complex left to rot, until a local company (well they are only based about fifty kilometres away), that specialised in the design and construction of Marinas worldwide finally won the highly contested contract for Phase III. They had already started to clear the site, and had drawn up the preliminary drawings, but what they needed now were more detailed plans, and that needed serious input from me. Paul was a great help, but he wasn’t a sailor, and he also had his own projects to oversee. Consultants were a godsend, but they really didn’t have a clue what I wanted. The reason for that was simple - I didn’t have a clue what I wanted myself. Perhaps I was getting a little ahead of myself. What I really needed was someone to tell me what I needed, perhaps a clairvoyant!

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