Getting fit slowly

June 2, 2020

One good thing about being unemployed is that I have time to get fitter. I’ve had a step counter for a few years. Over the winter I was working so much that I struggled to reach 6,000 steps per day. Now 8,000 steps is a bad day. During the strict lockdown I used to walk 18 steps from the door to the street to the door to the balcony, backwards…

Read More >>

Photo of the week: A Portal

January 27, 2019

I stopped on the way to the observatory to photograph this rainbow. I’ve ocassionally seen rainbows where the colours were repeated (today I learned that these are called supernumerary bows and you get them when the water droplets are small) but this one had each colour three times over. Since rainbows are wide, I used the “panorama” setting on my mobile. I turned from right to left, not noticing that…

Read More >>

The Seer’s Stone

June 7, 2018

Twelve adventures for children under La Palma’s amazing starry sky. by Sheila Crosby (Children’s fiction, paperback, 148 pages, A5) Take a journey through La Palma’s turbulent past, into its present and out into the exciting future. Chedey will tell you how his world collapsed when the Spanish conquered the Island in 1493, Althay will explain what happened when the volcano erupted, Daida shares her visit from an extraterrestrial and Leyre…

Read More >>

Santa Cruz’s New Beach is Open

Santa Cruz has been building a new beach for ages. This morning it was finally opened. I got to hear at lunchtime, and immediately went for a paddle. Of course a big wave came along and now I have damp trousers, but it was well worth it. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to be eight years old for a while.

April 20, 2017
Read More >>

Creative solutions

I’m not really over the flu, but the incoming travel agents were short of guides so I did a 3-hour excursion. On the way back it got interesting. La Palma’s roads tend to be narrow and twisty, and they’re usually widening and straightening one somewhere. Of course, while the work’s going on, the road is usually narrower than ever. In this case, we found a crane on the back of…

January 12, 2017
Read More >>