Today’s kitchen sink drama is brought to you by The Horses in the Back Field; brightening quarantine since 2020.   A frolicking weeks-old foal makes a fine backdrop to dishwashing and a distraction from drudgery. Interesting to note how adept equine babies are at wrapping their mammies round their little fetlocks. This one nuzzles his… [Continue Reading]

My dishwashing view

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… [Continue Reading]

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I say day 9 but I’ve already lost track of the days if I’m honest. We started self-isolating the day before the government officially shut the schools, which in turn was the day before they declared a state of emergency and subsequently a state of alarm. Then, of course, in the midst of all this… [Continue Reading]

Trampolining in the privacy of the garden

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… [Continue Reading]

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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… [Continue Reading]

It's not all frenzied gardening. There's some reading happening too

Silent Sunday

Leaving Potes - Desfiladero de La Hermida

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I still feel like I owe you an explanation for my lengthy absence from these pages. So, finally, here it is. *Points excitedly*   This 448 page behemoth of a bilingual sport climbing guide to the Cordillera Cantábrica here in northern Spain has just been published. The product of two and a half years of hard […]

Back in the Water

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It’s been a stressful couple of months here at Casa Asturian Diary. No time to climb, no time to surf, no time to blog. And I’ve resorted to some time-honoured stress management techniques: eating too much junk, drinking too much wine, and generally not getting enough exercise. (Better coping strategies are available. See: long walks, […]

Silent Sunday

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May Day

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Yesterday was a blissful May day. The sun shone, school and work were closed and we spent a long day in the outdoors, putting behind us an April that I shall be glad to see the back of. (You know the kind; stressful.) We headed over the mountains to León, to the municipio  of Senas […]

Itching for a Holiday

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Facebook is perhaps not the best place to visit when you’ve just spent the Easter holidays locked up indoors with a moaning, scratching, chickenpox-ridden small child. Unfortunately, it’s the only place I can actually visit in my quarantined state. Glorious instagrammed photos abound of trips to the seaside, walks in the Lakes, rock-faces scaled and […]

Silent Sunday

Good Friday Sunrise

Carnaval, Asturian Style

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The pace of country life can be a little slow. I’m not complaining, I’m just trying to explain why our local Carnaval celebrations took place last Saturday instead of on Shrove Tuesday, some weeks ago. Better late than never though, and mistiming your celebrations can have some advantages. Not being in competition with the larger […]

Of Holidays And Epics

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  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 […]

Silent Sunday

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