Life in Culebrón

Have you seen those photos of the Greek Islands? Blue and white paintwork everywhere and the boats apparently suspended in mid air on a transparent crystal clear sea. It's the light that makes those photos so stunning and it's the same sort of light that we have here. A popular late 19th and early 20th Century Spanish painter, Joaquín Sorolla, is most famous because of the way he captured the Mediterranean light. I often think of Sorolla when anyone comments on the limpid, flawless blue sky in even the most mundane of my snaps. So, when we first came to Spain I envisaged a house with big French windows, with gauze like curtains moving gently on a whisper of warm breeze making and unmaking pools of light on the tiled floor. Obviously we would wear, white, probably linen, clothes as we Virginia Woolfed our way through the days sipping on ice tinkling lemonade or a more alcoholic gin and tonic. Nobody sweats in those images, we would just luxuriate in the brightness of it all....

There has been a big forest fire in Yeste in Albacete. It consumed about 3,300 hectares, equivalent to a tenth of the area of the Isle of Wight. The fire was started, almost certainly on purpose, last Thursday and it was only brought under control yesterday. Firefighters had to battle the blaze along a perimeter of over 32 kilometres. Yeste is about 150 kilometres from Pinoso and we reckoned that the white powder that dusted our cars over the weekend came from there. Often, when it rains in Pinoso the cars, and the outside furniture, end up covered in thick red dust. The story, and I have no reason to doubt it, is that the dust comes from the Sahara. The nearest bit of the Sahara is in Morocco or Algeria about 1,200 kilometres to the South of us. When I went in to town this morning I thought I should, perhaps, remove  a few layers of Algeria or Morocco from the car. Thirty other drivers obviously had a similar idea about their vehicles. There were long queues for the car wash...