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

Al azar.....

Since the summer last year, at the invitation of a great women's association here in Alcala, I've been giving Zentangle classes on a Friday evening. I think we have around 25 people, mainly women, who come regularly, either to the beginners or the advanced classes, I often leave the house feeling quite tired after a long week, but invariably, I am rejuvenated when I arrive home a few hours later.

Al azar is a 'Spanish' phrase which I recently discovered and which has made my Friday evening's teaching SO much easier all of a sudden. 'Azar' is not originally a Spanish word, as you may imagine. It seems to originate in Persia, is found in Arabic (which is probably how it entered Spanish) and is quite common in Hebrew too. It can mean chance, fate, bad luck, 'Al azar', however, means randomly, frivolously or by chance. This is the meaning I need in my classes.

The point being that I became ridiculously excited when I discovered this phrase, because my alternative was a very long word that I could never remember...aleatoriamente ....but which I need to use very often during the classes to explain - 'make random dots on the paper'. Random is one of my favourite words - and indeed, concepts. Doing or thinking things 'at random' sparks my imagination and can set me on a wonderful path of discovery - finding something by chance is so exciting. It's one of the things I love in teaching and in my drawing. You never know where you'll end up or what you'll end up with.

It's how writing my blogposts go. I sit down with an intention in mind but many of my posts take a direction of their own at the production of a random word that triggers a set of thoughts.
I'm labouring the point. I'll stop.

I was on my way home today from taking Romy to a friend's birthday celebration. It has been raining quite a lot in the past couple of days so I was quite surprised to see a neighbour out and walking up the hill, still at some distance from her house. I stopped and asked if she wanted me to take her home, but she grinned and said no, she liked walking in the rain. She was wearing her dressing gown. Couldn't see her feet. But she did look very happy! Just thought I'd share.

A couple of weeks ago now, the wife of Edward Bond died. Edward is FR's guide, mentor and friend and he knew Elisabeth personally. At random, he opened a book of Bond's poetry a few days later, only to find the poem, 'She died'. FR was genuinely moved by this chance occurrence.

Strange random things sometimes encourage us to look for patterns in life. I'm not saying we always find them but there is a sense of reassurance for me that today - 4th March - is the birthdate of my great grandmother and FR's father. And that both our sets of parents got married on the 10th June - which is also the birthday of my oldest and closest friend. They make little links in our lives. Randomly, of course.

This is the pattern that sparked my need for the word 'random' in Spanish. It starts off with a set of random dots on the page which are then joined together with five lines. So simple and so effective - I use it sometimes with my English students if I ever get on to the subject of tanglin...by chance, of course!

Random questions make great conversation topics in my English classes. It's incredible how an unexpected question or statement can spark several memories or thoughts in people's heads. No need to worry about a language barrier if people really want to speak. Recently one of the best random questions was 'How would the world be different if animals could speak?....It really got my 13 year old students talking and made many of them think deeply about eating meat, visiting zoos and protecting the environment.

Quite out of the blue, I got a message last night from my nephew, Will. Several years ago, I bought him a wooden box for his birthday. It had a dragon on it and it caught my attention for him as he often uses the name 'Wishdragon' when online - a lovely name in itself - so the box seemed perfect. Being Will, I suspect he was a tad bemused at receiving an empty box but it made him think how he could put it to use. I am so delighted with what he came up with...a musical box, complete with the roll and beautiful tune he composed himself. Hope you enjoy this.






I will randomly end at this point, stopping only to say - do share any random thoughts or ideas you might have at this moment!

Thank you!
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

Carpe diem...

I have such a horrible cold. FR has it too. I feel guilty because we got the cold from Ruy, who got it from Mateo and both of them continued to go to school and do what they had to do. We've been pathetic. I haven't been to work since Tuesday and FR went to the doctor this morning as the cold has gone to his chest and he has an infection. I made my children go to school.

'Seize the day' because I seem to have so little time to write my blog - illness being one of the few times when I seem to have a moment! The positive side of not feeling well is that I can indulge myself in Zentangle again. It's an age since I did more than doodle on a pebble. But of course, there has been one big distraction recently.

As Romy and I were coming back from town last Tuesday, we saw a Land Rover at the other side of the road and I spied a couple of kittens around the man who was standing next to his car. I stopped immediately as I suspected he was throwing them out....
He denied doing so and said that he just saw them as he was passing. He went to pick one up and put her through my open window, where said kitten snuggled in and started purring....what could I do. I saw he was trying to pick another one up, which hissed and spat at him and had a distinctly unfriendly air about it. He assured me again that he hadn't dumped them and that he was going to come back and feed them but I am not convinced. There were four. I'm allergic to cats and FR is not a cat person in any sense of the word. But I had the cutest thing sitting on my chest and a wide-eyed Romy not quite sure what to think, sitting next to me. I handed the kitten over and we carried on home.

Pretty

FR was duly agitated, irritated and predicting dire warnings about the dangers of cats (not sure exactly what these are but he was muttering something about diseases) but in she came. And here she still is. An absolute little beauty. FR totally and utterly won over - she sits on his knee, he even allows her to walk on the kitchen table, which I baulk at! We let him name her just to ensure the attachment continues. Meesha. Here are a few photos...

Tiny

5444444444444333`45`(She just walked across the keyboard....)

Super cute

Sits on people

Even FR

Does kitteny things like play with handbag fringes

She doesn't like Pippin - puffs up twice her size and hisses menacingly - but Pippin keeps his distance, instinctively knowing that she's not to be messed with. Poor Pip!

My allergies are invisible at the moment probably due to the heavy cold I have. I'll see how I go. (Before the cat, I expect.)

We also have a crack in the wall that makes Dr Who's problem look like nothing a bit of polyfiller couldn't fix. Since we moved in, there have been many hairline cracks appearing and some that are somewhat bigger than hairline. All over. Everywhere. FR went up to try and fill one of them and agreed, he had to knock away a bit of plaster but this is an impressive crack to have in your house....

Impressive and rather disconcerting.



It's all filled and repainted now and FR has gone around putting 'testigos' - which means 'witnesses' - on some of the others cracks. This is a simple measure involving a bit of polyfiller on the cracks with a date to see how long it takes for the crack to open more. I keep checking but since the 3rd October, we don't appear to have moved too much.


I'll keep you informed.







Now I think it's time for yet another cup of tea - nothing like a nice cuppa when you feel rough. I'll leave you with a couple of tangles too just because I have nothing else to say.

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?