Life in Culebrón

Last night, well this morning I suppose, the windows started to rattle and the wind howled and the thunder thundered and the lightning lit the bedroom from time to time. When I got up a couple of hours later the sun was shining on the puddles on the patio and the cats were tiptoeing from dry spot to dry spot. It's a sign of the time of year. Like my feet hurting. Neither is new. I've complained about this, the feet that is, a lot. It stems from walking miles in flat bottomed sandals at Benicassim pop festival but the foot pain was always bad each summer long before the Benicassim debacle. Really the trouble starts as I move from proper shoes with proper socks to sandals and lighter shoes worn with those funny short socks. In Spanish the socks are called pinkies. Isn't that a great name? So Summer, early Summer when it's still Spring, is big storms and uncomfortable feet. And flies, hundreds of flies, thousands of flies. No, not just flies really; all sorts of small flyi...

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...

Maggie told me the other day that she hasn't read my blog for ages. I may be putting words into her mouth but I think the suggestion was that I'd really run out of material. Being pragmatic I wondered if I could start again - talk about the differences in bar or restaurant etiquette or why Spaniards think we're odd drinking coffee with a sandwich. So I started to look back at the early blog entries. I see that, in February 2006, I brought a hoe from the UK to Spain. I took the handle off and just brought the blade part back. I remember I was surprised I didn't get more grief about the hoe head in my bag. On that very trip a jar of marmalade in Maggie's bag was dealt with much more harshly. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737 but the security staff at the airport seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve. On the other...

Our palm tree is fit and well. You will remember that I was alternately worried about it bringing down power cables or being eaten by beetles. Well everything sort of miraculously self resolved. All I do now is spray it with some deadly chemical every six weeks and that's it. Just another routine job. I bought the pesticide from the bodega. In their shop they sell all sorts of things for we horny handed sons of toil. Much later I was checking information that I'd heard on the local radio about the the beetle plague with the local environment office. I mentioned my spraying regime. The Park Ranger I was talking to, you could tell she was a ranger because she had those trousers that are baggy behind the knee and have lots of unexplained and apparently useless flaps, asked me if I had a certificate for handling pesticides. I don't of course. No problem she said. Nobody is going to bother you about it but really you should either do the course on how to spray safely or get...