Part 6: Izco - Monreal (10 kilometres)

This weekend I’m going to enjoy some hospitality courtesy of my friend Mikel and his wife Leyre in Zizur, on the outskirts of Pamplona, so I decided to take things easy and do a route of 24 kilometres over two days, get my strength back, enjoy the culinary delights of Navarre and spend time with friends that I haven’t seen for a while. While Mikel left Izco to go for a cycle, I walked for a couple of hours until reaching Monreal, occasionally passing the odd day-tripper out walking their dog or runners likely out training for the half marathon which passes by here tomorrow. It was a little cold but sunny all the same and the temperature increased as the day went on. A blissful walk through the Mountains of Navarre.

Mikel and I became great friends while we worked in London. He is an unaffectedly generous Navarran who is always in a good mood; one of those positive people who make it a pleasure to be around.  Exactly 10 years ago, I decided to make a drastic change in my life and I went to live in London. I was finishing a work placement in an international logistics company in Zaragoza and it looked like they were going to keep me on and that I was on a one-way road to happiness, or what many people thought happiness was for me. "Get a permanent job; then you’ll be able to buy a car; you’ll meet a girl, you’ll get married; you’ll buy a house (at that time there were actually houses that sold and banks that seemed to give away money to buy them), have children and live happily ever after”. Who from my generation hasn’t heard the same old story over and over?

However, I had other plans for myself. In my last year of school, I had a philosophy teacher who had a certain speech disorder which I always seemed to provoke in class, probably the reason why I spent more time out in the corridor than actually listening to what he said. I was a bit of a dickhead in school, not something that I’m particularly proud of but that’s just the way it was. I remember that on the last day of term the same teacher gave out a little sheet with a series of phrases and told us, while looking at me for some reason, that he didn’t care if we hadn’t learnt anything all year but that he would be happy if we took at least a few minutes of our time to read what he had written, something he wanted us to take with us in life. As that teacher well prophesised, I don’t remember anything he taught me throughout that philosophy course, however, there was one phrase on that piece of paper that stuck in my head and which I often repeat to myself: “if you don’t make your own decisions, others will make them for you”…

That was how a decade ago, with no house or job, only a one-way plane ticket and 400 euros in my pocket – what I earned during my 6 month work placement – I made the decision to head off to London and take my life into my own hands, with no excuses, hoping for the best but being prepared to accept responsibility for my own failures. That’s the thing about making decisions freely and responsibly, you reject something so easy and convenient such as being able to blame others or circumstances for your own misfortune. I slept on mattresses on the floor for the first few weeks thanks to the hospitality of my good friends from Zaragoza, Tomás and Emilio. I would leave the house at 8 in the morning to go and hand out my CV all over London and not come back until 9 at night. They were difficult times; the United States was about to declare war on Saddam Hussein and the economy was at a bit of a standstill as the whole world thought invading Iraq would never be as plain sailing for Bush as it was for his father, and that it would be a long and drawn-out battle with implications for the world economy. So the only thing I got during my search for work was rejections, while money was quickly disappearing. 400 euros doesn’t get you very much in London. All the same, I was the happiest person in the world. I had decided to be there and to keep fighting.

One day, while walking through the City, I saw a branch of BBVA. In my ignorance as a small-town boy, I didn’t have the slightest idea that there were Spanish banks with branches in London. I thought about going in and leaving my CV but then I thought why bother, I didn’t have any banking experience and they weren’t going to take me on anyway. Looking for work and constantly getting turned down really affects your self-esteem and you even surprise yourself by putting obstacles in your own way because you begin to tolerate the humiliation of being turned down, or of not even being considered at all, less and less. I couldn’t even have walked 50 yards when I said to myself: “what the hell, you speak Spanish and this is a Spanish bank in the United Kingdom, and besides, it’ll be a definite no anyway”.

A few days later I went to the BBVA offices in Cannon Street for a job interview. It remains a mystery how Jeff, the head of security who was the spitting image of the butler from “The Prince of Bel Air”, let me go in. He wasn’t Spanish; otherwise he probably would have asked me if I was the Micolor clown and if I was coming to open an account. I hadn’t brought my suit from Zaragoza and I didn’t have any money to buy one so I improvised: Toni’s blue shirt and tie went together quite well but not with the black trousers I had bought myself in Belfast to work as a waiter, and they looked even worse with the brown checked jacket that a Londoner who used to live in Emilio’s house had left me. Let’s not even talk about the size 43 (UK size 9) shoes that Tomás lent me because my feet are still hurting at the thought of my raw red heels, which normally fit nicely into a 46 (UK size 11).

I attended a few interviews but BBVA didn’t phone me and my money ran out. I needed a job to earn at least a few quid per day to eat and pay for transport. My decision to move to London meant that I couldn’t ask my parents to give me money for this adventure so I just had to manage somehow. Near where Emilio lived there was an internet café run by an Eritrean who was married to a Spanish girl. I used to go there every day to check my email and so we became friends. He was a very clever guy. He had arrived in London with nothing to his name a few years back and in no time at all he had set up several businesses which seemed to be going quite well. When my situation began to get a little desperate, I went to visit him and told him that I needed some work, even if just by the hour, and asked if he could help. He told me that he had recently opened a new internet café on the same street and that he had rented out the basement to some Russians. He didn’t really know what they did for a living, only that they needed people.

Going from an interview with BBVA in the City to another in the basement of Finsbury Park with two thuggish-looking Russian guys with no neck wasn’t exactly what I could call a step forward, but then I’ve always been told that sometimes in life it’s necessary to take a step backwards to gain momentum. I was a bit concerned that gaining momentum in the Russians’ hands was going to leave me behind the heavy iron bars of a police cell but I wasn’t exactly in a position to be picky, so I told them that they could count on me to clean up houses, which was supposedly what I had to do. I left the basement through a trap door and walked out of the internet café happy because at least, the next day, after a long hard day’s work, I would have 40 quid in my pocket to keep me going. I hadn’t even walked 100 yards when I got a call from BBVA telling me that I’d been selected and that, if I wanted, the job in the Foreign Trade department was mine. And that was how, without any hyphenated surnames, friends in high places or fancy master’s degrees, I began a successful career in International Banking which has lasted 10 years so far. And if I did it, all the young Spaniards who have to get out now due to their circumstances and the incompetency of our leaders, can do it too; so I hope that they don’t lose heart or let anyone get them down. Chin up Luiso, Spiry and all you others!

I was thinking about all of this as I arrived in Monreal and met up with Mikel and his ever there smile again. After getting my stamp in the Parish House to prove that I’m making headway on my pilgrimage to Santiago, we set off for Pamplona where Leyre and her crew were waiting for us to get stuck into a sumptuous meal in an arrocería (restaurant specialising in rice dishes) near the bullring.