Siesta Secrets, by Bernie Doorly, from Bray, centres on Alozaina, a small village in the foothills of Malaga\u2019s mountain range, where people are slowly coming back to life after Covid restrictions have been lifted, but the threat of drought brings more peril to their lives with the olive harvest endangered.<\/p>\n
The novel explores rural communities, lifelong friendships, generational trauma and the moment in each of our lives when we have to choose between the life we inherited and the life we want.<\/p>\n
When Bernie (61) decided to move to Spain she was one of those people who was determined to live the life she wanted, and it\u2019s impossible not to feel envious when she mentions returning to Spain after a brief visit to her home town, where she launched the new book on the beach as the sun rose on Saturday morning, December 6.<\/p>\n
Dressed in dry robes and with her swimmer colleagues, the sun was a bonus and a blessing that day but the gamble on its appearance paid off. There is nothing speculative about the sunshine Bernie is used to in Spain as she tends to her olive grove, something she decided to do having first moved to Spain with her husband, Carlos, and three children, Alberto, Molly and Katie, when they were aged five, seven and nine. Her children have now grown up and moved on, but the grove provides Bernie and Carlos with what is the idyllic life now.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we moved over there first, we set up a bar and a language school in the village,\u201d Bernie said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s how we got to know everyone. The bar was called Bernie\u2019s Bar. And it was great. There are some 18 different nationalities in the village, but most of them lived there. But both the locals and the foreigners came to it, because my husband\u2019s Spanish and I\u2019m from Ireland. So, we crossed both communities.\u201d<\/p>\n
After running the bar for about six years and with her children returning to Ireland to attend secondary school, her husband established \u2018Alberto\u2019s Gold\u2019 and began importing olive oil and other Spanish food products, selling them in local markets, like Kilruddery and Macreddin. But as with the characters in her novel, Covid dealt the family business a cruel blow, and \u201cthe whole industry just closed and the business just tanked\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cCovid was the thing because, I always remember we just had a huge delivery of chorizo and ham and everything and then it was just announced that all the restaurants and bars were going to be closed. So, we had no place to sell.\u201d<\/p>\n
Undeterred, they focused purely on the olive grove and now enjoy a life that most of us get to dream of. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a lovely job,\u201d Bernie said. \u201cI mean, it is a big dream, but I would advise people to go for it because with the olives, you\u2019re only really working six months a year because the rest of the time, they\u2019re just growing. You don\u2019t really have to do anything. But I speak Spanish. My husband is Spanish. And you have to really be clear as to what it is you want and be careful as to where you\u2019re going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bernie is now half-way through the olive crop for this year, which fortunately has been a bumper crop. And she doesn\u2019t make the work sound too taxing either. In fact it seems more of a social occasion.<\/p>\n
\u201cFriends would come and help us. My daughter came down to help us. My husband\u2019s friends. So that\u2019s how we do it. It\u2019s lovely. I\u2019m highly unionised. So we start at eight o\u2019clock. And the whole village, everybody is picking olives. And then people have their lunch, they have a bit of a siesta or a bit of downtime. They go down to the bar, chat with everyone. So it\u2019s a very communal thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In between the olive picking, and the siestas, Bernie, who studied Spanish history, devoted over a year to finishing her book.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy degree was in history and Spanish history. So that\u2019s why I was very interested in the stories of these people that I knew, the elderly people in the village and what they\u2019d gone through as children. Because what we don\u2019t really realise is that the civil war was awful, but then there were 40 years after it. That was very, very difficult for people as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it is a novel, so the stories of the women are true. And I had to run it by their children to see that they were okay with this. It had to be done sensitively. I\u2019ve written all through my life, but I\u2019ve never really had time to actually do this. And I just thought, no, I\u2019m going to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Siesta Secrets, by Bernie Doorly is available on Amazon and also at Bridge Street Books in Wicklow town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Siesta Secrets, by Bernie Doorly, from Bray, centres on Alozaina, a small village in the foothills of Malaga\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[2000,299,104,74253],"class_list":{"0":"post-631503","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-spain","11":"tag-tom-galvin"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115716823632316735","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}