lifestyle – Page 24 – don't confuse the narrator

his ‘n’ yours

I think I’ve been insulted. I went down to buy the paper in the local shop this morning and bought The Observer and the Woman’s Weekly Fiction Special, as shown in the photo.

Yes, it’s true, I read women’s magazine fiction. It’s light – actual weight-wise, not simply ‘light reading’, it comes in a disposable format, and it’s particularly suitable for travel reading. (I also like to know what’s being published these days, in case I feel inspired to turn my hand to fiction.)

But it’s not the only thing I read.
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wild boars and motorbikes

During a break in the rain this afternoon, I went for a brief walk. The whole thing only took me about 40 minutes, and I met and spoke to three guys. The first, walking a small dog along the road down by the river, simply wished me good afternoon. Then I turned off the road onto a trail up between the olive groves and towards the pine woods.

There I met a neighbour whose first reaction was, “¿No tienes miedo de caminar por aquí?” I said no, I wasn’t afraid, and he hastened to assure me there were lots of jabalíes in the area; he definitely seemed concerned when I didn’t pale at the thought of bumping in to a wild boar in the middle of the afternoon half a mile from my own back yard.
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using language

I hadn’t realised that the library in Navarredonda was following a long and honourable Spanish tradition with their sign listing their rules and regulations for behaviour.

Still, the tile in the photograph was spotted embedded in the wall outside a bar in Pedro Bernardo and does seem to be a genuine antique.

Presumably, though, the residents don’t want visitors to think that they are quite so stuck in the past as a ban on blasphemy and the image of a pony parked in the bull ring might lead you to believe. At least, I assume that’s why they felt the need to add the small explanatory tile that reads, “curiosidad antigua”.
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health check

I received a very worrying newspaper cutting through the post this weekend. (Yes, I know people who still communicate by ‘real’ mail and take the trouble to clip and send on articles of interest.) It came from the UK Metro, and the headline read Take the Pill ‘for a long life’. What was particularly disturbing was the following phrase that also appears on the web version of the story: