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| If you can't take the heat... |
| 06.30.04 (6:43 am) [edit] |
| There’s lots of talk about a heatwave. Apparently the temperatures have drifted into the 40’s a couple of times, and it’s not supposed to do that till July (but isn’t that tomorrow?), so things must be amiss. The government have “taken measures” this year after the fiasco of last summer. (37,000 people died as a direct consequence of the heat…still can’t believe that number!) So, what have they done? They have put supermarkets and cinemas on RED ALERT. Yup at a given signal all old people are going to be rounded up and taken to air conditioned supermarkets or cinemas. You can just imagine it…”Morning Mrs. García, come on now put your teeth in and get your bikini on, you’re off to the cinema again. What? No dear it’s Van Helsing today.” |
| 5 Comments |
| I guess it's progress |
| 06.29.04 (8:31 am) [edit] |
The photo in the right column “Africa and Europe” was taken from a spot I love to stop at on my way to the beach.  I love the fact that I can see two continents, and just eight kilometres of water (to the left the Mediterranean and to the right the Atlantic) separate two completely different cultures. In the afternoon, with the sun behind you, you can pick out individual houses and at night see car headlights as they snake through the foothills. They’re building a tunnel. They’re going to rip up this beach (and no doubt somewhere equally as beautiful on the other side) for train terminals. If it turns out to be anything like either side of the channel tunnel it’ll be acres of rolling stock waiting to do the crossing. What a shame! However, it will mean (in theory) that you can travel by train from Inverness in Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa. What a trip that would be. |
| 8 Comments |
| New life update |
| 06.29.04 (7:49 am) [edit] |
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There may be a family of kippers living in my downstairs bathroom. I’ve never seen them, but I can smell them. They’re wiley, as kippers tend to be, when I switch on the light they hide. There’s a small gap between the beams and the ceiling just big enough for a kipper to slide in sideways. Antonio the electrician tells me this smell is the sure sign of an electrical problem, but then what does he know about kipper husbandry? Nobody told me there were mutant man eating bugs in the country. My back feels like somebody has written “War And Peace” on it in braille. |
| 6 Comments |
| The ultimate blog posting? |
| 06.26.04 (6:24 pm) [edit] |
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I heard a story the other day which really got me thinking. I can’t remember exact details but it went something like this: Forty five years ago a fifteen year old girl was on holiday with her parents somewhere on the English south coast. It was a wet day and because the girl (an only child) was unable to go out she was thinking up things to do to occupy herself. She decided to write herself a letter, to be posted to her home address but not to be opened till she was sixty years old. I was listening to this woman on the radio, it was her sixtieth birthday and she was going to open and read the letter. She claimed not to remember its contents. It started with something like, “Happy Birthday on this your sixtieth year. I wonder if you’ll remember me, I’m the girl you used to be. How does it feel to be sixty? Silly question, of course you can’t tell me because we can never meet or talk to each other.”It sent a chill down my spine. The woman reading the letter just laughed and said, “oh how precocious” but the style of writing made me feel icy cold. She went on to ask lots of questions, ”I wonder if you ever married…? Did you find love…? Are your parents still alive…?” I don’t know if it was the detachment in the style of writing which made me feel so uneasy or the thought of bumping into yourself in another time. I know I wouldn’t like to *meet* the fifteen year old Andaloo now, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m comfortable enough with myself now to want to *meet* myself again at sixty? It also got me thinking about blogging. Why do we do it? Are we writing to ourselves so that we can read it years later? It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a later in the land of blog. I just write this stuff and let it float around in the ether. I wonder if I’ll bump into it again? |
| 3 Comments |
| Country life. |
| 06.25.04 (7:12 pm) [edit] |
| Tis a shallow gene pool that maketh J de la F. Nuff said. |
| 4 Comments |
| Is it tomorrow already? |
| 06.25.04 (8:20 am) [edit] |
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Long time, no blog. I always feel as if the start of summer is the start of a completely different time continuum. For the next two or three months everything is done really slowly so there never seems to be enough hours in the days. I’m probably doing less, but doing it sloth-like, and blogging goes by the by. I did my annual tax return yesterday and got a rebate! I’ve decided to blow the whole lot in one go. Oh yes, no careful planning or reinvestment for me, I’m going to spend it all. The problem is I’m not sure if you can buy anything for sixty three cents. When I first came to live in Spain (about ten years ago) I was terrified that I’d try to drive on the wrong side of the road, being used to driving in UK. Last week it happened. I could have done it in J de la F where nobody would have noticed but no, I did it in a major city centre. Obviously I was doing the empty headed sort of driving we all do from time to time, going round a roundabout and suddenly thought “that’s my turning”. I thought the turning was a bit tight and didn’t even register when pedestrians were jumping out of my way waving their arms. Then I saw a wall of cars coming towards me. I was half way down a dual carriageway on the wrong side. The pedestrians all stopped to watch, cars swerved to avoid me and the sound of car horns filled the air. Spanish drivers love times like this because it gives them the opportunity to hang out of their car windows shouting and waving their arms while still driving along. I just went all English. I carried on, smiling and saying to the middle distance “oh, I’m terribly sorry...sorry…oh hello, sorry”. When I eventually got to the other end I had to be “guided” through a red light by the Guardia Civil to get back on the right side of the road. He didn’t say a word, just looked into my eyes and slowly shook his head. |
| 5 Comments |
| "The hills are alive..." |
| 06.15.04 (8:44 am) [edit] |
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Once a year sleepy little Jimena de la Frontera comes alive to [url=http://www.jimenafestival.com...]the sound of music[/url] . The programme for this year’s music festival has just been released, and the line-up looks fantastic! The three big names this year are Joan Manuel Serrat, Paco de Lucía and Chavela Vargas, not to mention lots of flamenco, jazz and classical concerts. This is one happy country bumpkin! |
| 5 Comments |
| Great weekend |
| 06.14.04 (8:03 am) [edit] |
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It was purely by chance that we met a couple on Saturday. Total strangers, yet something clicked and we spent hours chatting. They’re here on holiday from London, he’s an actor and she’s a writer. Somebody had told them that J de la F is the perfect place to go to recharge the batteries and forget about city life for a while. The “Grand Old Lady” is looking fantastic at the moment and she drew them in, seduced them. After just a few days they have fallen, hook line and sinker and are talking about extending their stay. One of the things I like about reading blogs is to see life through somebody else’s eyes. That’s what was happening on Saturday. Listening to them talk about here, seeing it for the first time again but through somebody else’s eyes was fascinating. We felt so comfortable with these people that we asked them to dinner on Sunday. Again we spent the whole evening chatting as if we’d known each other for years. It’s weird how we react when we meet new people. Sometimes the warning bells ring, mostly we just do the polite thing, but rarely we let the barriers down. Something tells me we’re going to be seeing quite a lot of our new friends. OMG just thought…she could have just been doing character research for her new book, later to be adapted into a West End play for him to star in. Hmm if “Boring Old Farts” comes to a theatre near you the tall muscular Italian is based on me! (Honest) |
| 4 Comments |
| I tried |
| 06.11.04 (9:05 am) [edit] |
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After seeing SofP go all “Zen” after de-cluttering I decided last night to tackle the spare room. I told the present (other) Mr. Andloo to give me a quarter of an hour and then come and find me. After what seemed like an age he shouted “your time’s up, what’ve you done?” I held up three left shoes. “Do we love these?” He shook his head and I thought to myself, “well that’s a good start”. “Do we need them?” We laughed. “Are we going to throw them away?” …Long pause…”what if we find three right shoes?”…Hmmmm…”Di nner’s nearly ready, do you want a glass of wine?” So, no euphoric Zen thing going on here yet. |
| 9 Comments |
| Memories, you just can't trust them |
| 06.06.04 (8:30 am) [edit] |
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I needed a fix of town life, so yesterday we went back to Estepona. I’d forgotten the toll road would be summer prices now, €5.50 for the round trip…what a rip-off! On the way I was wondering how Juan would be. He has the café on the ground floor of the block we used to live in and I used to go in there at least once a day. We sat outside Juan’s with our coffee (the big reunion I half expected didn’t happen), and watched the world go by as we chatted about how weird it was to be back. In my mind’s eye “El Paseillo” was so beautiful. In reality it looked tired and uncared for. As for Juan, he never was very communicative now that I think about it. It’s funny how we remember things. I’m really glad we went back, and I’m really glad it felt so good to come home. |
| 3 Comments |
| Flash bang wallop, what a picture |
| 06.04.04 (8:25 am) [edit] |
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I am a Brit and what we do really well is to complain. No not complain, whinge. I’ve just listened to a radio “discussion” about digital cameras. I know it’s a strange thing to listen to but it was very early in the morning and my main concern at that time of the day is to put my head through the right hole in the T-shirt. So, I was half listening to this group of middle class twits chuntering on when I was suddenly aware that my face had screwed itself up the way it does when I don’t understand something. I paid more attention. “Well personally” said the woman who sounded like she was wearing pearls, “I think the digital camera is the new scourge on society, it has replaced the mobile telephone”. (Tuts and mumbles of agreement from the others.) A man who I imagined ironed his socks and always carried a hankie chipped in with, “I wrote to my M.P. suggesting they were banned from restaurants”. I realised my mouth was open, a sign that I was beginning to wake up, understand but not believe what I was hearing. To cut a long story short, somebody on this panel of halfwits had been in a restaurant when people on another table had started taking photo’s. “And then” went on the woman who clearly had a mouthful of marbles, “they started looking at the photographs and laughing. I mean, it’s a bit much in a restaurant. What I’d like to know is why they couldn’t wait till they got home?” Thank you, you bunch of pompous bottoms who have nothing better to do than whinge and create more and more restrictions on people having FUN, you reminded me why I left all those years ago. |
| 9 Comments |
| For Debsdailywaffle |
| 06.03.04 (7:28 am) [edit] |
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I seem to have got a morning routine going, finally. I sip my first cup of tea whilst reading blogs and listening to Sarah Kennedy online. Yesterday I heard the following story and it made me think of “Debsdailywaffle”. A heavily pregnant woman wrote in saying she’d visited a friend for coffee. Her friend’s four year old son asked her, “what are you doing?” “I’m knitting a jacket for the baby” she replied. The boy’s mother said, “she has a baby in her tummy”. The boy thought for a while and eventually asked, “so, will you eat the jacket?” |
| 4 Comments |
| Another good job jobbed |
| 06.02.04 (9:24 am) [edit] |
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I wanted a plain white roller blind for the bathroom, so trotted off to (yes you’ve guessed it) Leroy Merlin. I’m now on first name terms with most of the staff, and I’m sure the security guards think I’m stalking them. I got the blind, took it home and opened the packet. It had the word “CURTAIN” written across it in huge grey letters. The fact that it was a blind and not a curtain seems to be a mere detail. So, back I went. (It should be said here that it is a two hour return drive to L.M.) I explained the problem and went off to find another blind. It was amazing, not only can you buy a tasteless blind but you can fill your bathroom with this tat! There’s a soap dish which says “soap” on it, an overpriced plastic bottle which says “shampoo”. Who’d have thought you could buy an entire range of gob-smackingly ugly things for a bathroom? Anyway I found a plain white blind, it’s up and doing a good job. (Side note; On the box it said “instructions inside” and when I looked they said “do not machine wash, do not tumble dry”.) What the…? Anyway, the range of ugly bathroom tat reminded me of being a kid and my Mum had three canisters in the kitchen. They were plastic, with little plastic windows so you could see the contents. However, presumably for people who couldn’t tell the difference between brown granules, white paper bags and white granules each one had “tea”, “coffee” or “sugar” written on it. WHY? |
| 11 Comments |