Our Dawn Chorus
Our morning starts with a cockerel crowing in one of the neighbouring fields, and then the family of birds who live in the orange tree start to gently tweet amongst themselves… … and then Ludvig starts! From just after dawn…
Kate Pullen
Ian gets stabbed by the vet
Bobbins have never truly recovered from her canine coronavirus last year and last week she started taking a turn for the worse again, with seizures and bad diarrhea. Ian’s been taking her to our old vet in Llerena which has…
Easter
So this would normally be the start of the Easter parades for Semana Santa and for the second year they have been cancelled. I’m not sure if they’ve been cancelled throughout Spain, but they have here. We still have our…
One Year On…
So… we’re a year on from our when words like ‘pandemic’, ‘border closure’, ‘mutant strains’ and ‘lockdown’ became a normal part of our vocabulary. Here’s my recollection of the year interspersed with snapshots of Ian and my chats which…
Emma
Emma died last Friday night. I don’t know if she was in hospital or at home, but I do know that Ed was with her and holding her hand till the end. He emailed and said that Emma ‘just slipped…
And the winner of the messiest member of the household is…
Despite close competition, the lovebirds are most definitely the messiest members of the household. When their size is factored in, they are probably the messiest creatures in Spain! They strew debris with gay abandon around their cage. It doesn’t help…
A covid carnival (and the first asparagus)
Normally there would have been big carnival parades this weekend, however they didn’t happen this year. There was a covid-safe carnival celebration in the village on Monday, but I think it just involved people in their costumes all stood 2…
Month 11 – life nearly one year into a pandemic
So now we’re nearly a year into life with the virus and the new normal has started to feel decidedly, er, normal! The situation has been improving – which is good news. Spain has kept schools and businesses open since…
Month 10
It’s just over 10 months since the pandemic hit Spain with a wallop. I think this time last year we were beginning to hear the first rumblings of a new ‘virus’, but given that we (at the time) didn’t really…
Snow!
We were at the back end of storm Filomena which resulted in the heaviest snowfalls in Madrid for 150 years with many roads blocked and lots of building damage. We had a bit, but not a huge amount. There was…