Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Figs

I quite like figs. Not a staple in my diet but, every now and again, one of those little packs of three from Waitrose.

The question though is what to do with thousands of the little blighters. We have three fig trees and they are all very fecund, we have green figs and the dark purply brown ones. There are thousands of them. The windfalls make a right mess of the bottom of your shoes. The birds swarm in the tree tops.

It's not the same with the cherries, plums, pomegranates, peaches, quinces, nisperos, grapes, tomatoes and apples that grow in our garden. Those crops are manageable or non existent; we usually get plenty of peaches for instance but each one has a resident beast which makes them inedible whilst the birds always get to the cherries before we do. The figs though just come and come.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Smokey Joe

Plodding tractor and trailer rigs on the road suggest that it's grape harvest at the moment though I think the main wine crop is still on the vines. It was almonds in the trailers a little while ago but it looks as though we're right at the tail end of that crop now

The almonds end up drying in big piles outside the local processing plant. Shelling the nuts makes the crop more valuable and cheaper to transport. It also leaves tons of almond shells to dispose of.

I've heard that before we got here someone had the bright idea of burning the shells (they're loaded with oil, burn well and produce stacks of heat) to provide the fuel for a power station. So a power station was built. Unfortunately the burning shells produce a thick black smoke and the locals weren't too keen on the layer of soot that settled on their houses. It didn't help that someone had forgotten to get the proper permissions to build the power station in the first place.

So it stands empty. That's it in the photo. Well it's one of the photos. The other is of almonds.

Don Quixote

Have you ever read Ulysses, Tristram Shandy or Moby Dick? I've managed to get through a couple of these literary classics but, more usually, I grind through the first twenty or so pages, skip a few pages, try a few more chapters and eventually give up. Classics they may be but the style is so ponderous or distant that they just don't do it for me.

After our trip to Castilla la Mancha I was reminded of Don Quixote which I did read when I was young. I can still remember that dread almost of ploughing through it, a few pages each evening until boredom set in.

I still have the same copy, pages browned at the edges now but useable enough. 940 pages including the introductions. And I read it, and what's more I enjoyed it. I was amazed.

My dad once commented on my liking for the bitter lemon sweets. "You won't like those when you're older, your tastes will change." He was wrong about the sweets, they're still one of my favourites but maybe he would have been right if he'd talked about tastes in literature.

I don't think I'll bother with the re-read of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes Saavedra in the original Castillian though!

Thursday, September 02, 2010