18: Driving Over Lemons

A book by Chris Stewart

Of the 17 authors whose books I have written about so far on this site, it looks like Charles Dickens wins the prize for longest Wikipedia page. Hardly a surprise. He’d be top-seed material in plenty of other author-offs. It’s not even very close, but other notable contenders in the Wikipedi-lympics include Thomas Paine and Mary Shelley, while Greta Thunberg deserves a mention for already boasting a 6,000-word entry despite being born in 2003. Two authors, Charlie Mackesy and Emma John, have no entry at all, while Stuart Turton, Mark Haddon, and Jack Fairweather’s are pretty brief.

Chris Stewart, meanwhile, wins the coveted award for Best Aside in a Wikipedia Entry for this masterpiece: “Stewart was - rather unelegantly - fired from the band [Genesis] in the summer of 1968 due to his poor technique.”

First things first: yes, the author of Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia, a 1999 hit travel memoir about an Englishman who buys an almost uninhabitable peasant farm in southern Spain, was a founding member of the band Genesis. He met Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel at Charterhouse School and was the drummer on Genesis’s first two singles.

But back to that aside. “Rather unelegantly.” A largely immaterial point, but it should definitely be “inelegantly”, right? A cautionary tale there for ever just copying and pasting directly from Wikipedia. More crucially, though, is what an earth happened? What counts as an inelegant firing? And who is this Wikipedia author who could only hint at the circumstances rather than elaborate further? Are they under injunction?

It can’t have been that bad because Stewart acknowledges in an interview printed at the end of my copy of Driving Over Lemons that he “was never a very good drummer [and] the other members of the band very sensibly threw me out when I was just seventeen”. This is the kind of tone you get a lot in the book: endearing, self-effacing, modest. What you don’t get a lot of is inelegance, certainly not in the writing.

Driving Over Lemons is reading as comfort food. It’s wish-fulfilment by proxy. It allows you the opportunity to wallow in the dream of giving it all up to move to a farm near Granada without actually having to do any of the work.

Stewart, though, and his wife Ana, did do the work. El Valero was the farm purchased, somewhat rashly, after negotiations during a meal of “brown wine from a plastic Coca-Cola bottle and a fatty lump of ham”. It was on the wrong side of the river, lacked an access road, was without electricity, and had no running water.

The process of turning El Valero into a going concern must have been, at times, a nightmare, and Stewart does not shy away from some of the more frustrating moments (which start fairly early on, especially when the previous owner refuses to leave). But, as the subtitle would suggest, this is largely a cheering read. There are enough heroes to outweigh the villains (most prominently the quite legendary Domingo), and Stewart’s positivity is infectious. He and Ana were perhaps uniquely equipped to deal with the challenges of El Valero, and one of the great pleasures of Driving Over Lemons is in discovering how they approach and overcome the various hurdles in front of them; from sheep shearing to bridge building, olive picking to chicken feeding.

It is unclear whether the same set of skills are required for being a sheep farmer in Spain and a rockstar. What does seem clear, though, is that the other members of Genesis did everyone a favour when they gave Stewart the boot, no matter how inelegant the process.