Crumbling pegs

It's been sunny and hot for a few days now. Everyone, everywhere is complaining. I'm surprised too. Imagine, hot in Spain, and in August.

I was just bringing in some washing. Five or six pegs crumbled in my hands. The plastic just gives up the ghost when faced with day after day of bright sunlight and heat. That's why Spaniards park their cars in the shade. If not expect the paint to peel off the bodywork and the headlight lenses to go cloudy in time. Oh, and expect singed skin and lots of oohing! and aahing! getting into the car.

Garden furniture doesn't have a chance. The chairs that have the nylon seats and metal frames have proved to outlast the nice rattan designs, the good looking wooden furniture and even the very basic, very cheap, plastic, stacking chairs. Even then, eventually, the thread fails. You realise it's happening when you hear a faint ripping sound and your bottom begins to sink earthward though, usually, fortunately, there is time to save your drink.

When you start to realise that the Spanish climate makes short work of almost anything left outside you start to look for answers. Surely it can't do anything to a glass and steel table? But the steel will rust as the constant expansion and contraction produces little fissures in the paintwork which let in the moisture and the glass will discolour. Often the repeated expansion and contraction means that the legs end up different lengths too so that the tables start dancing or limping as Spaniards say. Years ago my partner, for whom looking at garden furniture is a bit of a hobby, realised why lots of Spanish gardens have furniture that looks like marble but it actually concrete. It holds up well. We bought a table with benches maybe ten years ago. It still looks fine but close inspection reveals the stresses and strains even there. And it's not that soft, being concrete.

A couple of long weeks ago we had a "reventón seco"? The reventón is a short lived very fast, very hot  wind. The explanation is something to do with rain evaporating before it reaches the ground. The mass of air that held the rain continues downwards, hits the ground and flows out leaving a void into which ground level hot air rushes. One of our trees, one of those that doesn't do the bend like a reed thing of the Chinese proverb but prefers the Battle of Little Round Top dictum - Stand Firm Ye Boys from Maine - was swaying quite a lot despite the girth of its trunk. I moved the car in case it fell. I couldn't move the house. The chairs skipped and hopped like the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk.

When the thunder and lightning comes so, sometimes, does the torrential rain. It gouges great trenches in our roadway. In towns and cities it tears down the street carrying cars and containers before it. Fifteen minutes later it's all over and the neighbours start brushing out the mud and quarreling with their insurance company. Sometimes it comes with hailstones, often it comes with hailstones, big hailstones that dent cars, break windscreens and destroy the crops in the field.

Extreme weather is commonplace in Spain. Too hot, too windy, too stormy, too hailstoney, two rainy and, in our living room in winter, even too cold.

The rain saves a soggy post

I started to write a blog earlier this week. I didn't post it because it was boring. That's not going to stop me now though. Here it is.

"Leaves are swirling around in eddies outside our front door. More sweeping. It's what I expect. September has come, the weeds have started to grow again, there are piles of rotting figs under the trees. Where the branches overhang the path it is painted purple with gravity squashed fruit. The flies are out in squadrons and the crickets have stopped singing. Out in the vineyards the tractors and grape harvesters are doing their stuff and the air smells of sweet fermenting wine. Temperatures have dropped considerably and before setting the washing machine going I need to scan the sky to decide whether it will be a good drying day or not. This morning I couldn't even sit outside to read with my second mug of tea because it was a bit nippy and a bit blowy. The one good thing about the hot weather going away is that everyone stops moaning on about how it's unbearable and how did people manage without air conditioning ad nauseum and I can go back to wearing shoes and socks and jeans without lots of stupid comments.

When I was at school, sometime shortly after the wheel was invented, my headteacher often said that whilst  most of the world had a climate the UK had weather. It's one of the few things that the bullying fathead said that I would not disagree with. In England, in August, one day can be sunny and the next can be cool and wet. It's not like that here. Obviously the weather can change, a cold front can come in or we can find ourselves in a heatwave and time after time we have tremendous storms with torrential rain or hailstones the size of Cadbury's Creme Eggs but, in general, we get the same sort of weather for days and days, and sometimes weeks and weeks, on end. It makes it easy to predict. It will be hot and dry in late June and all through July. August will be hot to start and cooler later and by September the cooling will be noticeable. Although most days from November to February will be sunny with bright blue skies we'll be cold in the house. And March will be a terrible disappointment, temperature wise, and we'll have to wait for the official Spring before we can change to lighter bedclothes".

That's as far as I got. Now to start again. Our yard is awash, the garden looks like a lake, there is water everywhere. The kitchen floor is a pattern of muddy cat paw marks. Lots of schools, including the Pinoso ones, were closed today because of the threat of rain. It has been wet, the rain has been heavy but we've been lucky.  So far as I know, it's not been catastrophic locally. Close at hand though it has; utter devastation. Torrents of water flowing in and out of people's houses. People killed in Caudete (not far away) when their car was washed away with them in it, two more killed further South, Orihuela cut off, both local airports under water and big towns like Cartagena and Murcia with serious problems.

As I was checking closed windows this morning Maggie made a throwaway comment "Well, it'll soon be back to being warm again, we're not done with the decent weather yet!"

You see she agrees with that long dead headmaster too!