Life in Culebrón

We were in Shropshire last week for a family wedding. We stayed in Shrewsbury for most of the time. I think the last time I was in Shrewsbury was 47 years ago when I went to hunt for trilobites on Wenlock Edge. Shrewsbury looked rather nice with lots of fashionable, at least for we Spanish country bumpkins, shops and eateries. Maggie pointed out an organic veg shop offering two figs for a pound, £1 that is. She noticed them because we have three fig trees in our garden. One is a small tree with green figs and the other two are larger trees that produce the earlier higos and the later brevas. Just as mares and stallions, geldings and fillies are all horses to me then all the things that grow on the three trees are figs. Now I like figs alright. Often, when we lived in the UK, I'd eat as many as a dozen over the summer. Here, when the fruit is ripe, the birds feast on the ones at the top of the tree and leave us the rest. I think I've eaten three this year. Sometimes other pe...

I quite like figs. Not that they are likely to replace plums or cherries in my affections but, from time to time, as something a bit different, they're nice. They were the sort of fruit that I would buy, every now and again, in a pack of three or four, when I was in Waitrose. We have two black fig trees in our garden and one of the smaller trees that gives green figs. They produce thousands and thousands of fruits. Being a bit lazy I'd not raked up the fallen fruit this season and the smell of rotting figs was becoming quite pungent. So yesterday I spent the better part of two hours raking up all the fallen stuff. It's not a pleasant job because the sap from the leaves and what not is a skin irritant and in grovelling around under the fig trees I always bump my head or back against one of the sturdy branches a couple of times. And scraping squashed figs from the soles of your shoes afterwards is quite time consuming and sticky too. Nonetheless, when I'd finished a...