But where to start when trying to distil all this knowledge into book form? They decided to start at the beginning: the letter A. The result of their work, In The Garlic (Santana Books, 2006), is a forthright, warts-and-all A to Z of living in Spain. At times funny, and at times just plain informative, it covers topics ranging from the Galician language, to which street slang terms are seriously offensive and which are just colourful, to clear descriptions of official terms like declaración de la renta, touching on those hard-to-pinpoint linguistic sticky areas like the difference between bolso and bolsa in-between.
“It’s not really a guide—I like to think of it as a mosaic,” says Collins, who lives in Barcelona. “We decided to choose all sorts of words and institutions that make Spain Spain; we wanted to do something that wasn’t a dull ‘house in the sun’ magazine. We wanted to be accurate but not authoritative, and we wanted to counteract Spain being predominantly identified with Andalucía and the Costa del Sol—we really wanted to get a sense of the diversity of Spain. The comunidades are like different countries, and that’s what we tried to put across.”
The hardest part for both writers was providing accurate, clear information on administrative processes. “I was insistent that we include all the administrative divisions, because I’ve seen so many websites and magazine articles where they get it all wrong. And it’s not easy. We’ve both been through all this again and again, and we still get it wrong, because the laws change all the time. But people seem to like the book because it rings true—we’ve both been here a long time and still screw things up.” O'Shea underlines how complicated the research was: “Getting the facts right was the hardest bit, because you couldn’t always rely on the information; sometimes it was almost impossible to get to the nuts and bolts of what they’re saying.”
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