La Palma holds a festival of astronomy, Astrofest, with activities for all ages and knowledge levels. One of the highlights is “The big turn off” (El apagón) where town halls turn off the street lights for an hour so that the stars are visible. The Island Council provides amateur telescopes and starlight guides to each municipality. I used to really enjoy being one of the starlight guides. The closing ceremony for…
Every year I write a Christmas letter to the people I care about, but haven’t been in contact with all year. I take a bit of trouble over it, trying to include some laughs and always some photos. Every year I’ll promise myself that I’ll write the letter in November, so that the cards are ready to go in early December. This year, I actually did it for the first…
Spain doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and we don’t eat a special meal, but I do like remembering the things I’m thankful for. Although I do think once a year isn’t nearly enough. In any case, we spent today on a trip to Tenerife to talk to the specialists who adapt cars for people like me. I was utterly confused by so many options, and I wanted them to see me, see…
La Palma has it’s own version of the stars in Hollywood Boulevard. Ours are stars from astronomyrather than show business and we don’t have nearly so many of them, but in October we got a fifth star, Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She discovered pulsars in the 1960s, so they gave the Nobel Prize to her boss and her boss’s boss, but not her. She’s physically a small lady. She’s 81 now,…
As the car leaves home, say, “Oh, I forgot the tripod, but it’s OK, I can use the car roof.” Drive to the other side of the island, so you can see the sunset. Say airily, “If we go a bit lower, I’m sure we can get below the clouds. When you get lower, find a spot without many streetlights and point optimistically at the gap between the cloud base…
The disabled association phoned. Someone was ill and therefore they had a free spot to go hiking. Was I interested? Was I! Hiking is probably the thing I miss most since I’ve been an amputee. Certainly, I miss it more than the ability to hang up sheets to dry. I wasn’t sure how it would work, but Carlos drove me up to the meeting point at Pared Vieja in the…