It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon

It's not that things haven't happened. We had the festival that celebrates Spanishness last week just a couple of days after the day to celebrate Valencianess, Maggie has been home because of the opportunity afforded by the long bank holiday weekend, we saw some Flamenco in a cave where they gave us dodgy tapas and very watery sangria and I borrowed another book from Pinoso library. Maybe there was a blog entry in my visit to the library but to be honest the place in Pinoso is very much like the badly stocked, book only, libraries of my youth. As such it is unremarkable.

The mega shopping centres down in Murcia where I've been the last two Saturdays are just as unremarkable. Fast food, chain clothes stores, a nice line in pot plants and a multiplex cinema. They are like shopping centres from windswept Minnesota to down town Cancun. They even have the same music. Though the toilets at the Thader Commercial Centre in Murcia perhaps deserve a mention. Above the urinals in the gents are illuminated, life sized photos of young women staring into the space between man and porcelain - some smirk, some gasp, one has a slight, but knowing, smile.

So nothing to report except the old standby - the weather. It has been bucketing down here for what seems like months. In Culebrón it has been steady, persistent, heavy rain for days on end - enough to batter the grape harvest into the mud but not enough to sweep away children in their prams. True there have been occasional streams moulding our track into a mini version of the Grand Cañon but in general it's just been grey, damp and miserable. It hasn't been the same in other parts of Spain - the tendency has been for torrential downpours and hail storms that last for minutes but deliver vast amounts of water. Pictures of cars floating down main streets, of houses shattered by falling hailstones and of people mopping up afterwards have been commonplace on Spanish news programmes for two or three weeks now but there have been none of those pictures, reminiscent of this year's UK floods, of people sitting on rooftops surrounded by fields of water.