I’m writing this while sipping on a Marzipan brandy, a slightly peculiar cordial that comes in a tall and skinny bottle from the local Aldi supermarket.
It makes me think of the old days, when one’s Christmas preference was a bottle of El Gaitero, a sweet cider which is sold in a champagne bottle – because the *pop* as the cork is released is an important part of the seasonal celebration.
Also, it was cheap – indeed, it still is.
Good too, even when you’re drinking alone.
Long before they built an Aldi on the other side of the hill from where I’m living, my parents would have to take the cuatro latas (as the Renault 4 was known) along the coast to our market town – Vera – which in the early seventies had opened the area’s first supermarket: Emilio’s – which I am glad to see is still going, fifty-three years later. You could wander around and push stuff into your basket: ‘impulse shopping’ had arrived (‘What on earth is this?’, my mother might ask as she eyed something new).
Locally, we had a few groceries. The best known was in the village square: Juana’s place. She ran the shop – you would point at the shelves and say in your best Spanish ‘uno por favor’, continuing until you (and Juana) were content. Later, and Juana would catch on fast to her new market, she nailed a sign outside the store which read ‘Foodings’. 
There was a fellow known as Tea-cosy Roger who lived in the back of the village, and one could drop by to ask him to pick up this or that in Almería (an hour and a half away) where he would go on the bus once a week. He always wore a colourful woolly hat, obviously knitted by his adoring mum. His front room had a single tin of mock-turtle soup on a shelf to underline his commercial spirit.
Later, a local eccentric called Ian would offer an even more interesting service – driving up now and then to a suburb of Benidorm in his BMW and trailer to pick up British sausages and other goodies, to be mobbed on his triumphant return.
Supplies also arrived by air, as friends flying out from the UK remembered to bring bacon and teabags in their luggage.
A shop in the local port of Garrucha would regularly be talked into ordering strange products by a salesman than only a foreigner could possibly like. Diego would mournfully say as I enthusiastically picked up his final carton of johannisbeersaft, ‘Well, thank God that’s gone, I’m never buying that again’. Next week, he’d have a special on Irish butter biscuits.
For proper meat, my parents would drive down to the nearest decent butcher, a German in Torremolinos. This would take several days for one reason and another.
And thus, we survived. The local milk came in a tall returnable bottle fitted with a metal bottle top (like a beer). It was slightly blue in colour thanks to the added formaldehyde. On the bright side, it never 'went off'. Butter came in a tin from Belgium. Pork, goat, chicken and eggs were easy to find in the local markets. When the fridges began to appear in the shops, we found Spain’s excellent yoghurts and ice-creams – although the milk would take a little longer to arrive, waiting for the twin inventions of UHT and Swedish tetra-brik packaging.
Simple times. One paid in pesetas and got one’s change either in small coins or sweets.
But these days, as our area shyly joins the 21st Century, we can now lay claim to several small supermarkets and four large ones, including the recently opened Aldi.
They are all playing Christmas music in their stores right now, which sort of explains how I ended up with a bottle of Marzipan brandy.