Gredos – Page 6 – don't confuse the narrator

new neighbours

They moved in yesterday, and although they sound very close when I hear them snorting, they are mostly keeping over to the other side of the olive grove where there is a little more shade.

In the garden on the other side, we have a small flock of sheep and a Shetland pony. Maybe I should write a village memoir and call it Fifty shades of graze.

star’ku

Watching shooting stars,
your arm around my shoulders

No need for wishes

For those who are looking for more perseids, I posted a few other pieces on the subject of shooting stars this time last year.

The last two posts have mentioned the noche de San Juan, when celebratory bonfires are lit, but I had rather thought that that would be enough of the subject for this year. After all, the hogueras are lit on the evening of June 23rd, and today they should all be over.

Sadly, though, someone seems to have got the dates mixed and started un incendio in the middle of the day today.

The whole afternoon has been accompanied by the screaming sirens of the police and fire brigade, and the thrumming of the helicopters called out to deal with it.
Continue reading “midsummer madness”

the way through the fields

I was away for less than a fortnight, but the elderly neighbour has been ill and hasn’t been around with his donkey for a few weeks now.

It seems, then, that the path I take across the field to get onto the road to the village has been ‘repossessed’. (It used to stretch from where the photo was taken almost to the tree and then down to the right.)

I should probably write a poem about it, but I think Rudyard Kipling dealt with the same subject better than I ever will, even if he was writing about woods rather than fields:
Continue reading “the way through the fields”

a visitor

Yesterday I started to worry at a draft poem that I found in my notebook. It was started a year ago and is provisionally called Monsters.

The appearance of the creature in the photo on my verandah today was entirely fortuitous.

That picture doesn’t give much idea of scale, but if you click you’ll see her full length. She was a good two tiles long and they are 24 cm across. (So, allowing for the ripples, I suppose she was around 18 inches from nose to tail tip.)*
Continue reading “a visitor”