Life between the mountains and the sea
Somebody stopped the clock. Regardless of the growing chaos in the world, the sun continues to shine in our little corner of it. The weather is glorious, in fact. The blossom is out on the trees, the garden is bursting into life and the birds sing loudly from dawn until dusk. The days stretch […]
The last place you want to be on a Friday 13th, just as the country declares a State of Emergency in the face of a fast-approaching, potentially apocalyptic virus, is at the hospital Emergency Department. But that’s exactly where we found ourselves last Friday despite all our best laid self-isolating plans. Day 1 of school […]
Spain has declared a state of emergency and we are in lockdown, obeying the ‘quedáte en casa’ (stay home) edict. It may be that after all these years of living here I have gone native but the strategy, aimed at protecting the most vulnerable in society, seems to be a good one and sits far […]
The first time our friend Graeme came to visit us here we met him at the airport and he followed us home in his hire car. We chuckled to ourselves as we wound our way ever higher, up from the coast and into the hills, wondering what his first impressions would be of this wildly […]
Somebody please shoot me if I threaten to buy another house that needs renovation. Truth is, I am not a lover of Do-It-Yourself. I am a lover of visualizing the end product, of adding value, of maximising potential. I am a great dreamer. But I am a lazy-arse when it comes to the reality of […]
I’ve been largely absent from this blog for quite some time, happily wrapped up in family life over the lengthy summer holidays, so it seems appropriate that this week’s Gallery theme of ‘Family’ should be the jumping off point to draw me back into the blogging fold. This summer was the first time that my […]
It was the last day of our holiday and we had just been smugly congratulating ourselves on how epic-free it had all been. Three mums let loose from their families for a week of climbing together, we had swapped responsibility for little ones for the simple responsibility of getting ourselves from crag to crag […]
After eight years of living in a tiny hamlet where the silence is broken only by the gentle jangling of cow bells and the sartorial code simply dictates clogs over slippers and never being seen in public without a large stick in your hand, it seems I have reverted to full country bumpkin mode. Any […]
‘Is it real, Mum?’ Jack turned saucer shaped eyes to me. The slow passage of kilometres as we trucked our way home from Catalunya had just been enlivened by the sight of a floodlit castle, turrets and all. ‘It is. It really is,’ I smiled. ‘Oh, oh, oh. Do you think they need a knight?’ […]
