Today I went with my friends, Helen and Theresa, to look at a house in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the island. It took some organising because my son gets out of school at 1:30, and the earliest the estate agent could meet us at the house was 12:00 – and it’s at least a 2 hour drive between the two. So another friend, Norma, who doesn’t work on Fridays picked him up.
Me, Helen and Theresa are three large ladies, and the exit to our house has a steep ramp. So my friends can’t get in until I’m at the top of the ramp, or the bottom of the car scrapes on the concrete. We all set off over the mountain, playing Norma’s CD (Norma is a singer songwriter – see http://normawilow.com ) It was so nice to get out of the rut! If I’m not careful, my word shrinks to home, the supermarket and the school run, which is criminal when you live on one of the most beautiful islands in the world. So I felt like I’d been let out of school.
My own camera broke on my birthday a week ago, but my friends let me borrow theirs. It’s a bit like letting a dry alcoholic have one drink. I went a bit mad taking photos of Mt Teide and the clouds. We carried on to the telescopes at the top of the mountain, where I took a photo of the Magic telescope.
Then we carried on to Llano Negro, where I took photos of a house. We met the estate agent and drove to the house for sale. That is, we drove most of the way. The drive was full of deep ruts, and three large ladies made the car suspension sink down far enough to scrape. So we got some nice healthy exercise walking up the steep drive to the house.
The house is like a lot of country houses here. One building has a kitchen downstairs and a bedroom upstairs. Another tiny building is one bedroom, and a third is another kitchen (odd, but that’s what it is) and a fourth is a bathroom with a terriffic view. There’s a fifth building without a roof because they never got planning permission. It makes for a lot of character, but it does mean that when it’s raining, you have to get wet to go from one room to another. The place also has quite a bit of steep land, some terraced land,a nd a selection of fruit trees.
And while my friends were looking at it, I photographed the stray cat that lives there.
And then we had a long drive back, and got home just as my son was asking next door for the key to get in.
