Four years

Four years have passed since we moved into our house here in Villalobos. In some ways - as we all say - it seems to be only yesterday when we packed up our things yet again and drove out in the drizzle to the countryside. It was such an exciting day...

The lovely table didn't survive.....it collapsed sometime last year.

The garden in its original wild state

Romy happy in the silly little doorway...now reformed to full height!

Four years on and there has been a lot of work. It's involved digging up existing parts, adding new bits, rather a lot of concrete and huge amounts of toil, mainly by FR but with help from the boys on the more back-breaking things!

There has been a lot of planting, building of walls and the placing of strategic electrical points in preparation for summer living....
Lots of trees....walnut, almond, cherry, nectarine, plum, pear,,,,

There's still a lot to do but FR's vision is taking place. I keep putting bulbs every year - slowly but surely our garden is starting to bloom.

I don't have a lot of time for gardening 'proper' but Mateo is a good helper and a brilliant weeder...I'm looking forward to getting the front of the house done...it's still the original ugly concrete that was here when we moved in. In time, it will be a beautiful terrace and additional living space, with furniture and plants and nice things. In time. 

And today, I have just taken a walk down memory lane as I dropped Romy off at her friend's house, which is the house we lived in before we moved here! It's such a beautiful day that I decided to do my old, favourite walk (though sadly without my favourite little white ball of fur that was Darwin....) up through the pine trees to La Mota, glad that there was no one around to hear my panting and puffing as I plodded up the steep hill. About halfway up, I heard a band playing. Practising for Semana Santa. It was lovely to listen and as I got to the top, I could see that they were rehearsing carrying the platforms that in a couple of weeks will be topped with figures of Christ, the (various) Virgins, plus donkeys, flowers, other figures - making them very heavy indeed. Today though, from an onlooker's point of view, it looked like a large table with about 20 people underneath it, who from time to time, lifted it up onto their shoulders and 'processed' a distance to the music, then stopping for a break. 

The glorious view from the top towards the snow-capped Sierra Nevada in the distance. The playground is new. 

As is this 'recontstructed', in a wonderfully minimal sense, church at the foot of La Mota. 

It really was a gloriously bright and sunny day on Sunday.

My photo is embarrassingly bad - I didn't manage to capture the 'table' or really even the people underneath - and you can't see the band that was just around the corner...I felt a little rude taking photos of a rehearsal. Perhaps I shouldn't have bothered at all!

Anyway - it was a slightly comical sight but will be impressive in a week or so from now once the processions start.

Four years ago, blogging was an integral part of my life. I could hardly carry out any activity without thinking how my blog post would accompany its description. Nowadays, I rarely write and rarely read blogs....and with a few notable exceptions, I think many of my blogging friends must feel a bit the same. It's too easy now to upload a photo to Facebook or Instagram and be done with it. I also have less free time than I had for writing. My free time is usually spent drawing my Zentangles. I am more addicted to this than ever! Partly, this is because every Friday evening, since last October, I have been sharing my passion with a class of, mainly, women in the Women's Association that I am a member of. It started out as the usual sharing of different skills, but very quickly after I did some Zentangle drawing for them, there is now huge enthusiasm and more than a little talent amongst this group and I'm going to show a little of our work here. 'Being Here', for me, is about being part of the town I live in and apart from my children, Zentangle is a thing that has brought me more into the community than almost anything else. It's important to say that I am NOT a certified Zentangle teacher ....yet! I am so determined that one day I will be so for now, we say we enjoy tangling. In Spanish, all those consonants together means that Zentangle is a very difficult word to say!

Our classes are informal and just for fun and we practice different patterns.
Outside the class, people also tangle - and bring in their various artistic endeavours each week. And each week, they are more impressive.

Note, for example, the beautifully decorated box on the right - absolutely stunning work by Aurora. You can see some of her 'practice' work, albeit a bit blurred, in the notebook she's working in.
She's really very good.

This is a final set of tiles, done in the last half an hour of the class. There is a peace and tranquillity that descends at this time that is incredible. A room full of women - Spanish women for the main - and silence. Beautiful, eloquent silence as we slip into a Zen state of concentration and creativity.

And this is in my English teaching classroom - sometimes the drawing creeps into an English lesson. I have one group of young teenage girls and it's a special treat for us all when we have a lesson devoted to the language of Zentangle!























And whilst I started off this post by saying that it seems like only yesterday that we moved house, looking back now, and seeing how life has changed and developed in these four years...it seems like we have done a lot and moved on even more, not forgetting those we have lost.

Life has changed in many ways for us all. What were you doing four years ago?

Axxx

Anyway...

As I was saying..Smart phones have a lot to answer for!

For example, I was leaving work the other evening and as I walked down to my car, I had the most sensational view of the castle, here in Alcala la Real. And so I took out my phone and took a photo of it. And it was up on Facebook before I got home. Pretty impressive, really.

(Here it is, if you missed it on Facebook!) Isn't that inky sky just glorious?

And having almost a week's holiday in the UK with my sister and my parents was made to feel less of a distance from my own family when my daughter sent me this (completely unrecognisable) photo of herself, out on Halloween.

I guess it must be her,,, there aren't too many Romys around.






It was also good to be able to ask her which jumper she liked best by sending her an immediate Whatsapp message to avoid making a dreadful fashion mistake...


This one...

or this one...

(She answered but I bought both anyway and she was happy.)

I had a lovely time in the UK but before I get on to that, which I probably will, let me just share a little lesser known corner of Spain that Mateo and I discovered recently.

Ruy had an Archery competition near La Carolina, which is about an hour and a half's drive north of here, heading to the mountains that delineate the beginning or the end of Andalucia (depending on which way you're travelling.) These mountains, or rather one of the main passes that takes you through the Sierra Morena, is called Despeñaperros - translated quite literally as 'dogs tumble or fall from a high cliff' or (as I rather cynically think as it's not a reflexive verb, ie. the dogs don't do it to themselves)... 'dogs are tumbled or made to fall'. It is a spectacular place with national park status, incredible flora and fauna and an impressive number of soaring vultures usually on display. We almost always stop there on our journeys to the north of Spain. But is it awful of me to think that a place with a this great gorge and such a name might well have earned that name at some point in the past?  Was it not the place people threw away their dogs? I wish them all well, the dogs,whenever we go and we never, ever let ours out at this point unless he's safely on a lead!

Anyway...(I had a feeling this would be a rambly one right from the start!)..after a very early start, Ruy, Mateo and I had a lovely drive up to La Carolina in my smart and sassy little new car. Having reached the town without incident, we then had a rather traumatic 3kms to the archery site where I was convinced I had scraped something vital off the bottom of the car as we navigated, at a snail's pace, the rough and potholed track to the hosting finca. I was almost in tears but we did manage to keep going and nothing seemed to be leaking out or falling off, so after seeing the archers off on their first round, Mateo and I headed off for our own little adventure deep in the mountains of the Sierra Morena.

It took us an hour or so to go the next 30kms - which is slow going, believe me - but we firstly turned off the motorway at Despeñaperros and turned right, instead of the usual left, heading for the strangely named village of Aldeaquemada - Burnt Village. It was 'only' 23 kms....of hairpin bends going up, up, up and ever upwards. Obviously, we eventually started the same process only this time going down. Before we left, I had seen that there were some waterfalls near the village that were supposedly worth a turn of the head and I thought Mateo would like to visit them with me - and I was suitably impressed that he agreed, even though it meant getting out of bed before midday on a Sunday...7 hours before midday. He did say, 'where are you taking me?' at one point but I had lost the plot myself and was just wildly changing gear between 1st and 2nd and hoping that we would arrive somewhere...anywhere..soon! Which of course, we eventually did...Aldeaquemada. It didn't look burnt but heaven knows how the population survived there. I half suspected that there was a backway from another town that probably only took 8 minutes and where you would be able to find shops and bars and possibly even a petrol station....However, it's not. I took the following from its website (translated with the help of Google as I couldn't really believe what I was reading!) and it doesn't do much to encourage a visit..

• Its climate is humid, prone to inertia, quartan fever, dropsy and soreness of the ribs. The prevailing winds are from the west and north and the population has 60 houses of common construction, 6 short streets leading to a square; a granary, a church, a cemetery, served by a priest; a primary school, equipped by parents of students, and an insignificant amount of 'their own; (Google couldn't help me with this but it made me shudder a little); a town hall, a jail, a butchers, an abattoir and an inn at the entrance of the village, built by the government. 
• There are 357 inhabitants... which by my reckoning means almost 6 people per house! 

Anyway, after our first wrong turn as we entered the village, we saw the lot and before we were spotted by any locals and encouraged to stay and experience any dropsy and quantan fever-filled hospitality, we sped off down an unmade track, grinding my poor new car's bottom along as we went, towards my intended destination.

The waterfalls of Cimbarra. 

We had mentally prepared ourselves for slight disappointment as we were coming to the end of a long, very hot and very dry summer. We knew that cascades of water were not just unlikely but out of the question. But we were blown away by the place, even without a dribble.

It was silent. It was vast. It was just mindblowingly beautiful. I posted these on Facebook, but I share them again here on the basis that you just can't get too much of a good thing!

Look at the amazing rock formations in the distance!

And close up!

We couldn't be sure but it looked as though at one time, there had been some sort of mill here. 

Which would explain the millstones...but we were miles from anywhere....most strange.

Fascinating rock strata

And then, the pool of unfathomable depth where, in spring, the waterfall splashes down.

You can see where the water will travel and that we very nearly had a trickle as it had rained earlier in the week.

There is a little water in those top hollows...

A zoom in to the cave behind where the water falls

 And a clip that I filmed as we first arrived and enjoyed the silence and the landscape.

Anyway...we eventually tore ourselves away, hairpinned our way back to civilisation for a leisurely sandwich and coffee - not in Aldeaquemada, I hasten to add - before heading back in good time to wait for Ruy. As always, I hoped he might beat his rival, national champion, Alberto just this once...but as we arrived, I got a phone call from Ruy asking me to come and get him as soon as possible as he'd sliced his finger open with a broken arrow and couldn't continue. So I did...but I didn't drive the last 300m in my poor battered old car. This was on the basis that if I needed to get him to hospital, then I needed the car in one piece. As it happened, the wound was clean, if deep, and not bleeding too much and we decided that a mad dash to A&E wasn't necessary. And it's now healed completely.

And whilst I was in the UK, as well as new pens for tanglin, I picked up a most horrendous cold which only really emerged when I got home. I ended up in bed the last three days and even now, the desk is littered with snotty tissues. Aren't colds just the pits!

When my sister picked me up from the airport, she whisked me immediately off to see a chiropractor that she has started to visit. He specialises in neurology and brain function and has done amazing things to help my sister's foot problems. I don't have time here to explain it all but I am going to do a post on my experience with Anthony soon. I need to keep practising my exercises first though. It's all very unusual!

Just before we went in to see Anthony, my sister warned me that my dad had had a very nasty fit two days earlier and she had thought he wouldn't survive. But he has and I found him remarkably well under the circumstances. I am not entirely sure he is ever absolutely sure that it's me that's visiting. I arrived about 10 minutes before my mum's friend usually comes to play dominoes and he assumed I was her. The idea of dominoes was obviously rather more exciting than my presence because he sounded a bit disappointed....but unfortunately, that is how his life is now. My mother is quite incredible and manages as much as she can with sometimes wicked good humour and acceptance as long as my dad is also good humoured and easy-going. But when he occasionally has bouts of anger or depression, I know she finds it all very difficult. Not being nearer, it is too simple for me to forget how complex it is for my sister....

Anyway, whilst I was in the UK, I met up with Janice! Yes, she was in the UK at the same time - which is very nearly a first for about four years when I saw her in Huddersfield after her treatment and we had a really special hug that I will never forget. We met for lunch in a cool new dining place in Knutsford, where we indulged in sausage and mash but never took a single photo. Not of ourselves, each other, the place, our food...not on our erratic drive back to my sister's, not when we were there, not in the rain or the sun...Janice! We didn't take a photo!! But it was so good to have a few hours to chat and enjoy your company. And you were, as always, looking super chic! I did love that jacket!

I went out again that evening and ate really well in a very lovely pub in the unlikely-named village of Grappenhall. I say unlikely-named but I have checked it out and it was mentioned in the Domesday Book. It is also the birthplace of Tim Curry and is where pianist Stephen Hough grew up.  The carving in the church there is said to be the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat... all of which is slightly more interesting than Aldeaquemada had to say for itself. (I still don't know why it's called that either!)

Anyway, I have rabbited on far too long and far too much and avoided doing any housework this morning. I will be out teaching all afternoon and need to go and prepare for this. I will leave you with the threat that there may be more to follow. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed just blathering on! I never even mentioned the Anderton Boat Lift, musical fireworks, Scrabble, Chester, sculpture, what got packed and what was left behind ...plus what was taken away, vis....there's lots more!

(Proofreading....sorry, no time!)

Axxx

Old friends....

It's been a while since I posted, hasn't it? Hello, anyone out there? .....Well, it's been a while since I read any one else's blogs too and I may appear to have done a runner.

But I haven't and after my lovely weekend, I felt driven to record a few things for posterity and for sharing and for capturing.

On Friday last - yes, the 13th - I unsurprisingly had managed to pick up some cheap tickets to travel to England. Since the summer, my friend Annie Relph and I have been trying to find a weekend to get together and it took us until November. But we did it and it was worth all the frustrations and impossibilities that had gone before. That said, the news from Paris the morning after I arrived was high on our list of conversation topics, even though we had a million and one other things that we wanted to say. And sadly, I don't suppose these events will be the end of the problems.

This probably about twenty nine years ago...

However, that aside; despite the six years that it's been since we last saw each other, no one would have guessed as we immediately settled into our non-stop ´stream of conscious conversation´. Lucky is the person who has such a close friend!!

Mid-morning conversation -
still in pyjamas..

Our plan - other than to talk and talk and talk - took an exciting turn just days before I set off when, through a facebook post, another old friend contacted us to say he wished he could join us.

So on Saturday afternoon, he did!

Not six years since we last saw each other but thirty. THIRTY!! And whatever amazing things have happened to us all in the intervening years, I immediately felt myself transported back to my youth.

We had a wonderful afternoon - not visiting the White Horse of Uffington as we'd intended - but curled up on sofas and chairs in my friend's lovely Oxford home, sharing reminiscences and bringing each other up to date.


In the thirty years since we last saw each other we have, between us, become parents to six children; been married just the once each; been on stage and tv, studied at Oxford University, started up two ongoing businesses, gained Masters degrees, become teachers and trainers and - I'm delighted to say - all confessed to being extremely happy and contented in our lives. There's obviously a lot more too....

(My friend, Annie Relph, is the most wonderful artist and now puts her talent into her business, Scattercake, making incredible (but edible) wedding cakes. She's just finished the most amazing piece of sugarcraft work imaginable and I have to share the photos here:




In case you were wondering, it's not actually a cake in its present format but Annie now has all the templates and ideas prepared should anyone order a 1.5m high cake.

It showcases her fantastic work perfectly.

Even more impressive in real life!

And as I have been writing this post, Alan has been delivering a TEDx talk in Leamington Spa!  The link leads to a summary of his very varied life and work and covers the thirty years during which we haven't seen each other. It also includes some things I didn't know - like the all-human  Circus Burlesque bit...! And I'm really looking forward to listening to his talk - 'Bringing Back the Licenced Fool'. He states that he started playing the fool whilst still at school and one over-riding memory I have is of him being sent out of the classroom....regularly.

I am quite sure it won't be the last time we get together. And we're hoping a few more friends will be able to join us too.


From Oxford, I headed northwards to visit my family and arrived just in time to go out for a wonderful pub lunch with my parents, my sister and my brother-in-law. I confess to enjoying my food, whatever 'type' it might be but there was something super-delicious about the dinner we had - very traditional, a British Sunday Roast with all the trimmings and possibly the best Yorkshire Pudding I've ever tasted! And that's saying something.

Sunday night was a ScrabbleFest. I play online with both my mum and my sister, so it was only right that we had a face to face match, which I enjoyed very much. I was quite confused by my sense of time. As it was dark soon after 4pm. I found it felt incredibly late by around 7.30......we seemed to be playing into the small hours!














I have to confess that I didn't take many photos on my travels. I was either too busy talking or doing whatever we were doing - although for some reason, I took a Christmassy photo of the place Mum and I went to eat on Monday. It seemed so incongruous as Spain hasn't really started working up to Christmas just yet, whilst England is in full flow.





And then all of a sudden, it was over and I was on my way to Manchester airport, where my suitcase appeared to contain a host of suspicious items, (like soap and a glue stick!) but soon I was back in the air and heading for sunny Malaga again.

Just a few short days, but I felt years younger and so very pleased that a) I am lucky enough to have such great friends to play catch up with and b) that for me, life has been pretty good over the past thirty years, but 'being here' is almost as good as it gets.

Thanks for popping by - I do hope to find a bit more time to read my favourite blogs again soon!
Ax

Lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

Yes, the song sung by Nat King Cole that I remember so vividly from my childhood. His voice, so easy, so hypnotic and smooth was one that my father, in particular, loved to listen to. My dad was not musical but I have two clear memories that relate him to the music he obviously loved and that we often heard at home when I was young - up to me being about 8, after which the fish and chip shop they bought and worked in wore my parents out to a frazzle and left them little time for listening.

The first of these memories is the singing of Nat King Cole. We had only a couple of his records but they were played a lot and I knew them all. At the time, I wasn't a fan of any of them, apart from the title of this post - which I thought was great fun and I loved those three rhyming words - lazy, hazy and crazy. The second memory is his love of Mario Lanza and his permanent regret that he missed going to a concert by him as he had an ear infection. I've done a bit of research and I think this must have been the concert in Sheffield in 1957. It would have been amazing and most memorable, I am sure. However, I never really grew very attached to this voice, although his power is undeniable.

Nat King Cole, however, has, in the intervening years, become utterly irresistible for me and I love just about everything he sings.

All this is totally irrelevant preamble - because this is my blog - to sharing a few photos and thoughts from our home and lives during these incredibly hot weeks we've been having. I know it hasn't been the same everywhere - some of you have been feeling damp or chilly at times - but it's been so very hot here for so long that I cannot remember what it's like to get up and not see bright blue sky and know that the temperature is going to be well into the 30s.

So - what do we do all day? Well, I have had a couple of weeks where I've been up early and off to work before the sun really starts to hit. It's been fantastic to arrive home and have a dip in the pool - even the little plastic one that we are still using. But the afternoons are when we have to have all the windows closed to keep the sun out, stay as cool as possible indoors and basically wait until around 7 or 8pm before we can start to do anything useful.... Afternoons here in Andalucia are for eating a very late lunch, watching silly films, having a siesta and probably doing some drawing.

Here are some of my Mandala/Zendalas - apologies if you've already seen these posted on Facebook but on here for posterity, or as long as there's a web and because I scanned some of them so the colours are truer to real life. A mandala is a circular drawing, often done in sand or rice, the process of creating it is partly spiritual and partly meditative. A Zendala is a combination of the circular format and the use of specific Zentangle patterns. I am absolutely hooked on creating these at the moment and can confirm that they really do focus the mind and help relaxation and concentration.

I had to laugh recently as I have another blog, Annie's Tangles, where I usually post all my drawings, Zentangles and challenge entries. I had a comment left on one of my posts from a blogging friend from this blog, who'd popped over for a look. I laughed because she said she thought I was speaking a strange language and was there a glossary? And looking at my other blog from a non-tangling point of view, I absolutely understand how she might have wondered what on earth we were all on about! Annie, for your information, it definitely takes a while to get to know all the right words, descriptions and technical terms...but hope you liked what you saw!

This was the first one I did and it took me ages because my usual pens didn't like drawing on top of the acrylic paint. I also wasn't sure what to do about the bit of canvas that the zendala didn't 'fit' - it being round and the canvas being rectangle. I decided to leave it as it was.

Then I found a canvas that I'd had for a while that was square. It is actually quite white in real life but as the canvas is 50 by 50cms it was too big to go in the scanner, so this is a photograph, done without any real photographic help - ie. taken on my phone in the kitchen! I also tried using a permanent marker, rather than my special Zentangle pens, plus white and gold gel pens . It is very finely detailed and quite pretty, I think.

Then I went and bought a couple of smaller canvases - 20 by 20cms - and prepainted them and I got on quite a roll....

I ran it through a Photo Editing programme to put the frame round it - but the scanner reproduced the colours really well - this is pretty much how it looks. What has impressed me is that I started with just three concentric circles in yellow, green and blue. The patterning makes it look more complicated than it really is. 

In this one, I painted and blended related colours - yellow/orange, yellow/green, green/blue, blue/red and red/orange on the canvas to begin with. Then I added a Zentangle 'frame' which you can see around the edge before doing a Zendala starting from the middle and moving outwards. 

And then, utterly inspired by colour, I decided to add some to a tangle I did quite a while ago, just for practice. Here it is in a photo edited frame. I have decided to go and get them framed in town and then I shall put them somewhere in my bedroom and enjoy looking at them.

OK - enough about drawing, painting and Zentangle....or is it????

There are three of mine just about visible in the sea...

Last week, we went to the beach for the day - all together - and decided to go left at the coast, rather than the usual right. We ended up in a lovely place called Calahonda - or rather a little area just before Calahonda called, very appropriately, La Perla de Andalucia - where the beach was clean and long and quiet and the sea was divine.

We wanted a pebbly beach as we had a plan....and the pebbles were spectacular - smooth, round, lots of white ones, lots of sparkly ones. Perfect pebbles.


I had a couple of pens with me, of course, and so now, someone sometime will probably find a smooth, round Zentangled pebble!

During the course of the day, we gathered three big bags of pebbles to put in the garden. However, when we got home and unloaded them, we only filled a quarter of the space - so we have to go back at least another three times!

And after a day on the beach, what did our children do when they got home? Went in the pool! I swear they'll grow fins and flippers before long.....

And our garden? We're definitely learning to live with the ugly floor. We have to, so we are doing. I bought some little mosaic solar lights and love them so much that each evening, at about 9.45, I go outside to count them all as they light up.

A close up of the colours and patterns - bought from Amazon, of course - and Amazon UK at that. How can it be that they are cheaper and the postage is less from there than buying them from Amazon Spain?? And not a bit less but a lot less!

I have them lined up along the terrace and also all around the curved part opposite and they do look lovely, although difficult to photograph with my phone. I may try and get some better shots with my proper camera - if I can remember how to use that... I'm very out of practice.

A few people around, 
but a quiet Paseo de los Alamos.

Did I say 'lazy'? Well, a bit of that, but quite a lot of 'crazy' too. We've had visits and sleepovers and Etnosur in the past couple of weeks. Etnosur, a big music festival held every year in Alcala la Real, seemed more subdued this year. Many local residents leave the town during this weekend but many others have opened their doors in the morning to find someone asleep  or cooking their breakfast on the doorstep...and perhaps have got a bit fed up of finding evidence of a lack of toilet facilities outside the houses. For the first time this year, a lot of wire fencing went up to protect park areas and streets from the visitors who come in camper vans or on the bus and doss down anywhere. They have been directed to designated parts of the town instead - but on the morning and evening when I went into town, the places that are usually packed with people, were very empty.

The shops and stalls around the edge of the park were also fewer than usual and without much custom.

The fountain is always a fun place to go
 and these are not locals, but there aren't many there.

The music was apparently quite good. Mateo went on Saturday night and was out all night. He said there was a real mixture of styles, including rock and African and he enjoyed it. However, we got there at about 2am, with Romy, Ruy, Jasmine and Isabel and there was some really awful music that we didn't like at all. This year, as usual, on the Friday night, we'd heard the distant sound of music in Villalobos. But the organisers had changed to position of the stage to face away from the town, instead of towards it and I was amazed as we walked down from the Paseo de los Alamos, at the top end of town, to the stage area as we simply couldn't hear anything at all! It must be such a relief for the local residents - it's one thing to have a free concert in town, but to not get away from it is quite stressful. I couldn't believe the difference it made. Wonder why it has taken 18 years for someone to think of this solution?

And so the summer continues and the 'hazy' comes from the rolling of one day into the next and then one week into the next. The children have already had one month of holiday - another six weeks to go. There are plans, not quite in place but in mind, to send the children up to their grandparents in Valladolid at the beginning of August, but first, there's the Medieval Festival at La Mota, here in Alcala this weekend and this year, our neighbour, Sergio, has succeeded in convincing the local council that an Archery competition is just what is needed to add authenticity to the event. So he and Ruy will be donning their costumes and taking on all comers...although actually, I have no idea what is planned. Maybe it will be a proper competition and maybe it will be the chance for visitors to fire a few arrows themselves. I will report back! Should be fun either way. Do come along if you're in the area, won't you? There is always some good fun activities for the children - last year organised by a friend of ours - and the food is excellent. And there could hardly be a better setting than the wonderful fortress castle in our historic town.  If you go in costume, it's free entry too!

A photo taken from a previous event that I found on the internet.

So - lazy, hazy or crazy - we definitely feel like it's summer at the moment.
What's the weather like where you are?

When you find a little time....

Write a post.....

This is the first Sunday in a while that I've had a bit of time. Writing posts during the week is practically impossible nowadays as I am teaching every day, including Saturday morning, and by the time I get home, the computer has been well and truly taken over by one of my three.

Usually, on Sundays, I take Ruy to do archery and have a lovely, leisurely breakfast in a nearby cafe. I suppose I could write my blog then, but it would have to be on my phone and to be honest, this is very difficult. And as I get older and become more a creature of habit, then this time has become my tangling time....I can't imagine not tangling whilst I sip my coffee and crunch on my 'tostada con tomate'.

I'm loving my teaching hours - and now I have plenty - but am very glad to have arranged a week off. I find that I get a lot of energy from the teaching process but when I come home, I find I'm quite drained!  I have recently discovered that my teaching 'technique' has a name - Dogme - which basically allows a conversation to follow in any direction, using the 'journey' as the opportunity for learning. I do usually prepare something for my classes in advance but these are generally things that simply set the ball rolling and I don't feel the need to deliver exactly what I've prepared. This means we often talk about incredibly interesting subjects, even if some of my students find it difficult to express themselves well in English. But they are so keen to try that some learning is absolutely inevitable! And it gives them greater confidence. Even with my basic group, we've covered things like global warming, book and film reviews, solar and nuclear power...in fact, life, the Universe and everything!

Barney is still with us as I write but as it's Easter this week, he may well be missing from our garden by this time next week...

Here he is looking rather majestic, if a little out of focus.

And another of him under his umbrella.

I recently posted a couple of pictures on Facebook and a number of people commented on how big Pip had grown...yes, he's a large dog! He's incredibly handsome and sweet natured but still has a tendency to jump up, particularly at me as he does love me so much. He's fantastic to take on a walk and never goes far from my side, which makes me feel very safe indeed. Here are a couple of him today, hunting a bumble bee in the grass...

And just being handsome in the sunshine.

We have some wonderful blue skies now and the blossom is well and truly out - even on our old and rather unproductive almond tree, seen here. The smell is, of course, wonderful - honeyed and sweet and everywhere. It is a most perfect time of the year.

Tomorrow, we're planning to have a visit to the Sierra Nevada to take advantage of the snow whilst it's still there and the days are warm and pleasant.

And later in the week, I'm hoping to have a trip to the coast, so maybe I'll be able to take photos other than of the sky, Pip and the turkey!

I have no problem whatsoever in the repetition of the days or even my numerous trips in and out of Alcala. I have reached an incredibly settled and happy period of my life and I'm just enjoying each day. Nothing can buy this feeling, I'm sure, and ups and downs do happen, so I don't expect it to last forever.
But be quite sure, my silence in the blogging world is nothing to do with wanting to keep quiet or out of sight. It's a sign that I'm really very busy being here and being happy right now.
(It's almost boring ... but not quite!)

Hoping to get another post in before the Easter weekend and also to start catching up again on all the lovely blogs that I like to follow. Take care everyone and may you have a very happy week - whether busy, sunny or otherwise.

Axxx