village life – Page 41 – don't confuse the narrator

days of damp and mushrooms

The village is celebrating its jornadas micológicas this weekend, which means that the local restaurants are offering all sorts of weird and wonderful fungal specialities. I don’t expect to be indulging, having had a bad reaction a couple of years ago.

Instead, I have been out observing the hongos on the lawn. Although the weather is beginning to be autumnal and the fog was so thick this morning that I thought we’d lost the orchard, we had more mushrooms last weekend, I think. Certainly more variety.
Continue reading “days of damp and mushrooms”

don’t confuse the slaughtered pig

list of search phrases — blog standard searches

WordPress – which is where this blog is hosted – provide statistics so bloggers can see how many readers they have and what brings them to the site.

I’m intrigued by the readers who arrive from search engines looking for specific things.

Or, more accurately, I’m intrigued by the things they are looking for. The image on the left shows the most popular search strings from a couple of days ago.

The variety of ways that people think of for searching for the same basic idea fascinates me. But, after all, if there’s more than one way to kill a cat, there’s probably more than one way to slaughter a pig.
Continue reading “don’t confuse the slaughtered pig”

last year’s cat

I said the next post would be more about poetry, but if it is, this page is going to begin to be very boringly text-heavy. So here’s a quick seasonal picture to brighten it up:

The photo was taken last year and this cat is no longer with us. The rest of the semi-feral family are doing exactly the same with this year’s leaves, though.

siempre incendiada

The town motto of Arenas de San Pedro is siempre incendiada, y siempre fiel (“always aflame and always faithful”). The coat of arms is a picture of the castle in flames, surprisingly reminiscent of card sixteen – the Tower – in many tarot decks.

The fireworks at the Arenas fiestas are always set off from inside the castle, which provides a lovely backdrop and such wonderfully appropriate images as this:

(This time the pink hues are not due to problems with my camera.)

roundabout they go

Carousel pony waits for rider — Patience is a pony

Over the last few days, the village has been celebrating yet more fiestas.

The main car park area by the river is given over to candyfloss and hotdog stands, the usual stalls selling tat, a bouncy castle or two and a few traditional funfair rides.

It’s all pretty run of the mill stuff. There are dodgem (bumper?) cars in two sizes, a couple of Torito Salvaje rides and a Canguro Loco. (I guess the first is a Spanish equivalent of a bucking bronco ride for kids, and the Krazy Kangaroo is a fairly standard kind of octopus ride.) Then, of course, there’s a carousel with painted horses and other fantasy creatures.

But one thing I don’t think you’ll see in the UK is the pony carousel. (The Spanish use the word pony to refer to shetland ponies.)
Continue reading “roundabout they go”