Book review: Last Days of the Bus Club, by Chris Stewart

Gerald Durrell has a lot to answer for. More than any other single book, My Family and Other Animals draped a romantic, sentimental patina over English family rituals, dutifully and lovingly carried on in an exotic location. That foreign field was preferably one, as Durrell claimed, whose days were reliably as "glossy and colourful as a child's transfer" and where the charms of foreignness settled "as gently and clingingly as pollen".

Admittedly, the only inhabited farm on the east side of a river in the Alpujarras, up in the mountains of Granada in Spain, might not rank with an animal sanctuary in Corfu, but that is not for want of trying on the part of Chris Stewart.  He has now milked his Granada farm (he does run sheep for milk) four times, starting with Driving Over Lemons and concluding, for the time being, with this new account of daily life on the farm. What he has on offer at his farm has not altered throughout those books; that is "a muddle of more or less rectangular stone boxes emerging from a rocky hillside, half-hidden by a riot of jacaranda, morning glory, wisteria and jasmine".

A rather cutesy-pie chook, sheep, dog and cow adorn the inside front cover. Stewart's daughter leaves home to study, a flood trundles by, oranges and lemons are harvested, organic certification is awarded, while life bumbles and burbles on. In its most schmaltzy passages, the book resembles a somewhat self-satisfied, self-absorbed occasional letter from a sort-of-friend. Those segments of the book might read better separately, in a less cloying format such as a monthly column.

That cavilling aside, Stewart can make a fair bit out of not much at all. He confides in the reader about his "horribly inflamed dick", wonders whether locals truly believe that headless rabbits qualify as cats, pours pomegranate syrup and chillies over roast lamb, judges a tuna cooking competition (assisted by one lubricant, sherry) and constructs a chicken run, "adopting a nice compromise between art and fortification". Even a 4B pencil and a newly-laid egg serve as unlikely props for Stewart's prose.

Having single-handedly colonised the Cornwall town of Padstow, Rick Stein turns up in the Alpujarras to sample Stewart's cuisine. His host makes use of a boar carcass, one the reader has previously been privileged to inspect, "slimy with blood and wobbling with fat".  The poor seafood chef first has to deal with a dish of fried lambs' balls masquerading as an entrée.

Apart from a visit by Stein, sporadic yarns with neighbours and a field trip with a mate (to that tuna contest), Stewart happily throws the focus of the story back on himself alone. His wife's bit part is most memorable when entirely vicarious, in the episode when members of a local book club ask Stewart how, on the basis of his works, his wife could ever put up with him. The truth of the matter may be that, allowing for the odd eccentricity and extravagance, Stewart might be quite good fun to put up with.  He lacks pomposity, he does not bang on at length about local genealogy or geology, he seems genuinely fond of his family, he diligently attempts to protect his chooks from the foxes and his paddocks from the boar.

Compared with Peter Mayle, ensconced in his eyrie in the Luberon in France, Stewart may be on a better wicket. The wine there might be more sour, the sausages more gruesomely gristly, but there would be fewer tourists (surely a blessing), fewer frills and less fuss (perhaps a tad less bureaucracy). There may not, though, be a fifth book to dig out of the Stewart paddocks.