village life – Page 47 – don't confuse the narrator

utilities are useful

Water, electricity, telephone, adsl… we tend to take them for granted, don’t we?

water: one of the things we take for granted

That’s one of the things about living in rural Spain: you never know whether the standard utilities will actually be available. You may go to bed with everything working fine and wake up – like I did today – with certain basic services unavailable.

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baaaa, humbug!

Although the festivities go on for the best part of a month – starting with la Concepción Inmaculada on December 8th (or possibly el Día de la Constitución on the 6th) and not ending until Twelfth Night when los Reyes bring the children’s presents – it never seems very Christmassy in Spain.

For a start there may be snow on the mountains, but there’s also glorious sunshine and it’s still daylight till after 6pm.

For the last few days we’ve been having carols piped over the council tannoy system for a couple of hours every morning in the village, but other than the Little Drummer Boy, Continue reading “baaaa, humbug!”

a critic barks

It’s always nice when the walk to the village has some kind of productive outcome, other than the purchase of a not-quite-a-baguette Spanish loaf and the inevitable associated longing for proper English wholemeal.

Today there was the pleasure of finding two ‘letters’ in the PO Box. Well, “letters” es un decir: one was a glossy flyer from the bank assuring me that if I use my credit card over Christmas and get further into debt, Continue reading “a critic barks”

hai’ku

Sunward
ivy snakes
scaling trunks of pines

east, west…

… home’s best.

After nearly a month of travelling and living out of a suitcase, I am back in the pueblo in Spain. It’s gloriously sunny, there are huge drifts of leaves, snow on the mountains, cats on the verandah…

Thanks to Randall Munroe at xkcd for his thoughts on the relativity of east and west.