Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, when people remember their loved ones who’ve died. Most of the graves will be decorated, and there will be a special mass held in most graveyards. (If you go, please be sensitive, as some of the congregation will be feeling fragile.) And there will be the monthly flea market in Santa Cruz in the morning.
My friends in Franceses thought they’d done all the paperwork necessary to register their house purchase when we dropped the papers off at the Land Registry months ago. But on Thursday they got a letter in Spanish legalese, saying something about missing documents and “a fine of between 60 and 6000 Euros”. This was not good for their blood pressure. So they scanned it and emailed it to me. And…
One of the most exotic looking plants on La Palma are the dragon trees. The latin name is Dracaena draco Although they grow anything up to 12 metres tall, botanically, dragon trees aren’t trees. They don’t have annual rings, for one thing. Actually, they’re classified in the same order (Asparagales) as garlic and asparagus, although they look nothing like each other. In fact, dragon trees look mostly like broccoli on…
John T Unger makes gorgeous firebowls. Since each one is hand made, they’re not cheap, but I can well understand why people lash out on one. I first came across John and his work via this article (which I heartily recommend for anyone facing any kind of crisis, and especially for any kind of artist. But now John has another serious problem to overcome. Someone else is making remarkably similar…
Rosa Vidal is an artist from Puntallana, in the north of La Palma. She makes her own paper from leaves, roots, flowers and fibres which she collects herself from the surrounding countryside. Most of the paper is made into notebooks, diaries and photograph albums, with hand-sewn bindings. She also paints pictures on her own paper, and make lamp-shades (shown above) and mobiles (shown below). Rosa will have an exhibition in…
Nick Griffin, the head of the near-Nazi BNP, plans to complain to the BBC that he faced a “lynch mob” on the programme “Question Time.” Certainly the audience were hostile. One told him, “You want me to leave this country. Where do you expect me to go? I was born here and I love this country. I bet if we had a whip round, we’d have no trouble getting your…