It's raining, it's pouring

Get to Know Spain is a companion book for GCSE exams written by Rosemary Hunt and first published in 1980. In the section on climate it says - In most parts of Spain the climate is extremely harsh.

As I've said in another post we haven't seen much rain over the last two or three months but for the past couple of days the temperatures have dropped (27ºC daytime 15ºC overnight) and the sky has been threatening rain. And today it came. Buckets and buckets of the stuff.

As usual our interior patio started to fill with water and I had to wade out to unblock the drain, our next door neighbour is apparently, as I type, trying to stop the water flowing down our joint track from carving out a mini version of the Grand Cañon, our aljibe, the thing that collects run off water, is overflowing, we keep losing the electric for a few seconds after every lightning flash and we've unplugged all the computers from the mains just in case. The hail was bouncing off the cars and patio furniture whilst the thunder crashed and the lightning crackled. The cat doesn't seem too concerned by the celestial fireworks but he did come to join us - safety in numbers I suppose.

When it rains it's often like this and when the wind blows it destroys things. It hails a lot. And of course all summer long everyone goes around complaining about the heat. Extremely harsh seems a fair enough description Rosie!

I've always depended on the kindness of strangers

I was with a British pal yesterday as we went to the fruit and veg stalls in the town market. He had been charged, by his wife, to buy potatoes and tomatoes.

At the stall he pointed to the potatoes, showed five fingers and said kilos, he repeated the mime for the tomatoes (though with a different number of digits) and then held out a handful of small change from which the stall holder took the appropriate amount.

His wife mentioned that they have been living in Spain for six years.

A plague on both your houses

Back in Culebrón for the weekend and I noticed that there were a lot of small moths hanging on to the kitchen ceiling. Something similar happened a couple of years ago we had tens, if not hundreds, of moths inside the kitchen cupboard where we keep the dried goods.

Being murderous and ecologically unsound I set about them with the fly spray which worked to a degree in that the moths had soon gone. I forgot all about them but later Maggie noticed that there were grub like caterpillars undulating their way across our ceiling. Horrid.

Manual harvesting along with a thorough clean out of the flour and cereal cupboard seems to have done the trick for the moment.

Going, going, gone

We Brits have been running auctions at two spots around Pinoso for a while now - one at the Country Hotel, La Pinada and the other at Bonnie's Bar and Campsite.

We went along to Bonnie's as we were looking for things for the flat in Cartagena. My guess is that we will not be regular attenders.

Don't forget: with our weeks now split between Culebrón and Cartagena new posts will be on both sites.