Well, I dropped my son off at summer camp yesterday afternoon. Since I only had 800 words of the current translation left, I was looking forward to some “me time” — sort of. I intended to finally sew the curtains for the living room, so we could watch TV or play video games without having the rigmarole of covering up the windows with whatever’s available. (The TV is opposite a…
When I first came to La Palma in 1990, around 40% of the population depended on the banana trade: growing bananas, packing them, or driving them. But even with the EU subsidy, it’s hard to make a living from bananas. If you’re unlucky with the weather, you can work hard all year and still make a loss. So the economy is diversifying, and a good thing too. But bananas are…
Oddly enough, nobody invited me to meet the king of Spain at the official inauguration of GranTeCan (Gran Telescopio Canario or Big Canarian Telescope) so I had to watch it on the TV. I learned something new. The main mirror is accurate to 15 nanometres (a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre). So if you scaled up the mirror to 10,400 km (and the radius of the Earth is…
Gosh what a long time since I updated this blog! Since I probably can’t catch up, I’ll just carry on from now. Yesterday the council cut off the water all day, to connect new pipes to the existing system. At least they told us well in advance, saying it would last 8 am to 8 pm. This seemed like a really good day to visit my friends in Franceses. So…
This is GranTeCan (Gran Telescopio Canario / Big Canarian Telescope) on the Roque de los Muchachos observatory in La Palma. It will be inaugurated on July 24th. The king and queen of Spain are coming, and there are rumours that Dr. Brian May is coming too. The telescope and its first two instruments cost €105 million: 90% of this came from Spain, 5% from Mexico, and 5% from the University…
Well, we made it back on Tuesday night, and I still haven’t caught my breath yet. On Sunday we took the boys to see the Garoé, the beautiful old tree which used to be sacred to the people who lived on El Hierro before the Spanish conquest. Last time I saw it in the mist. This time it was hot sun, so we could see the view, including La Palma…