On Dry Land

It's so boring living in a house! It keeps still, for one thing, and it's so quiet at night, with no water lapping and fishing boats going out at 5am. Can't wait to get back to it. First I have to put up with 5 months in the sun - that's if we can find flights we can afford now that XL have gone bust.

Well, we’ve been pretty busy since the funeral. The tenants left Andy’s house looking superficially ok, but we keep finding more stuff to clear up, clean, paint or get rid of. It’s quite satisfying, though, to get the house as nice as we can for the new tenants. We hope someone is going to take it at the end of November, but it’s not certain yet. So if any of you know anyone who wants a really nice Cotswold cottage with plenty of room for cat-swinging, a lovely conservatory with a view across the valley, super nice kitchen and bathroom, attractive inglenook fireplace fitted with an efficient wood-burner, and private garden, let us know.

Backtracking a bit, I left Andy in Spain all on his own for ten days, during which time he gave himself a crash course in Spanish, using the Michelle Thomas CD Rom set, and, with the heavy aid of a dictionary, managed to communicate with locals enough to buy a valve attachment for the bicycle pump, a new container of Camping Gas, and to get the boat safely hauled out of the water and parked on the land. He assures me he has done everything he had to do to put the boat safely to bed for the winter, all tucked up and everything. I withhold judgement until such time as I have returned to Ares and surveyed the scene.

Meantime, with visits planned to family in Kent, friends in Cornwall, more windows to clean on Andy’s house, more garden to hack back and burn, friends to see and annoy when we tell them how nice it is not going to work, long-lost daughter form NZ to hang out with, little granddaughter to visit until she howls, then leave her with distraught Mum, we’re finding we’ve got plenty to occupy us until Cherry’s Graduation ceremony, after which we intend to leave the country as fast as we can to get away from the failing banks, crashing property markets and businesses going bust.

Hasta luego.

Blogification - 26th September 08

I wrote this episode just before I had to fly back to England, so it never got posted on the blog. You can read it now.

26^th September 08

I’m getting bored now. I divide my time up between reading, doing crosswords and swatting flies. That’s when I’m not going shopping, cycling or going to the Biblioteca to use the wifi and the Skype phone. So far we’ve managed to find British yachtspersons with whom to swap the books we’ve read. It means we get a mixed lot of books to read – Andy’s now reading one by Lyn Andrews, described on the cover as Catherine Cookson of the north. But some of them have been very good.

We have tended to bump into the same people again along this Spanish coast. Yesterday we had drinks aboard a British boat with some people from the New Forest. They told us they’d sold three boats and bought two in the last few weeks! Their “proper” boat was in Lymington. The one we went on here was just their “knockabout”. It was twice the size of ours, with three bedrooms and two toilets. Still, we didn’t mind slumming it for a bit, just to be sociable. Then we had the cockney couple from the cat on our boat for drinks last night, but they’ve now gone south. It’s been really really windy since we’ve been here, and even if we’d been trying to go somewhere else, we wouldn’t have wanted to.

We’re now keen to find Paco to talk to. He’s the guy who’s going to haul the boat out for us, and we want to make sure he’s going to do it before we leave for England in ten days’ time. We fear he may want to leave it in until we’ve gone, then haul it out without us looking. We want to see it come out, be securely settled on land, and inspect her bottom, the prop, the seacocks, the rudder and the keel. We’re going to see if we can find him this evening and pin him down to a date. We may need to find Marco to act as translator. The problem is finding people at work. It’s no good going now because they’ll all be at “lunch” which last from about 1.30 to about 5.30. That’s the best time, we find, to go out and do anything, like cycling or going to the supermercado, because there’s no-one around and it’s quiet. The morning’s no good for us because we get up too late. The early evening to late evening is when the shops open again and everybody crawls outside dressed in their best clothes and goes for a walk. There is a kind of unspoken rule about the etiquette of the “paseo”. It’s a kind of power game as to who gives way to whom on the pavement. The smarter your clothes and the more bling you wear, the less likely you are to get out of the way of other strollers. We are always pitifully underdressed in shorts and tee-shirts and find elderly ladies in high heels with matching bags and sculpted hair walk straight at us knowing that we will step aside.

We’ve just realised it’s Friday, which means the boatyard guys seem to have knocked off early. That’s means we’ll have to try and catch him on Monday, now.

I like and admire the “mañana” mentality – until, that is, I want to get something done.

Sad News

Hi readers, I haven't been on here for a while because I've been coping with some personal sadness. I had to fly back to England last Sunday (28th September) because my mother was ill in hospital. Sadly, she died. It had been expected for a number of years and she was very frail and ill. I am glad that now she has been freed from her worn out body and all the cares and anxieties, depression and pain. She is now with Dad again after a ten year separation. This is the eulogy I have written to speak at her funeral this week.


PHYLLIS 1925 - 2008

83 years ago my Mum, with her twin sister, Betty, was born prematurely, weighing just 2lbs … a bag of sugar . The doctor told our Grandma to put the little mites in a drawer and not to get too attached as they wouldn’t last the night. Well they did last the night. Mum, in fact, lasted 30,267 days and nights. She was FULL of life. She was a tall, strong woman with a powerful character. She was vivacious and passionate and could be quite frightening at times. I can remember her flying down the kitchen with a hair brush in her hand ready to give us our due when we’d done something to make her cross. But she was a bit rubbish at aiming and I could usually dodge out of the way, and as quickly as it had arisen, her anger would abate and she’d give up and be sorry.
But she laughed more often than she was cross. She had a huge sense of fun and playfulness. She liked being a bit naughty. When we were little and still living in St Albans there was a local Bobby who used to call in for cups of tea, homemade cake, a chat and a laugh. He’d come in the front door, take his helmet off and put it by the phone, leaving his cape on the back of his bike which was propped up outside. Mum, in her daftness, thought it would be a great joke to steal something from a policeman, so she nipped out the backdoor, took his cape, and hid it, expecting him to go out and say “’Ullo, ‘ullo, ‘ullo, what’s been goin’ on ‘ere then?” Well, he drank his tea and off he went ……. After a few days Mum didn’t know what to do. She was really embarrassed and in the end she had to go to the police station and own up and give back the cape. Dad would have teased her mercilessly. I grew up thinking “Daft old woman” was a term of endearment …. which it was.
Mum ran the shop in Freshwater for 10 years and was really popular in the village because she was so cheery, laughing and joking with the customers. What people didn’t realise was that she would come in exhausted at the end of the day, take out her plate with the two false teeth on it and leave it somewhere around the house, then collapse in front of the TV with her feet in a bowl of Radox. If anyone knocked the door she’d get up, look round frantically, saying, “Where’s my tooth?” Once I put it in a mug of water in the deep freeze overnight. When she tried to pick it out of the mug on the windowsill in the morning it was in a solid block of ice. She wasn’t cross that time …. she laughed.
People were drawn to her generous nature. When I came back to live in Freshwater when Sarah was little she was ALWAYS, every day, entertaining friends at the big pine table in the kitchen with coffee, home baking, a chat and a laugh.
What were the best things she gave me?
There was so much fun, warmth and the freedom to go off and do things - riding bikes, horses, climbing the cliffs.
But there are three things I’ll mention in particular - all of which I’ve passed on to my own three daughters:
She took me to libraries from an early age and engendered a love of books and reading.
She took me swimming from an early age - although she didn’t share Dad’s love of boats and sailing, cos it made her seasick, but she loved being in the water and was a strong swimmer.
Thirdly, she took us to the Clark’s shop to get our feet measured and made us wear comfortable shoes.
Thank you, Mum, for everything.