We had a good one today. I was tour guiding at the Roque, and for some reason the mobile phone tower wasn’t working, which was a pity because two of my group were driving round and round the observatory trying to find me. They managed to call Ana Garcia, who was trying to work out where the heck they were from their verbal descriptions. Eventually they described the impassible barrier…
My terrible hard life
Almost as soon as I got back from the Story Tellers’ conference, I plunged into a storm of tour guiding. El Time, La Zarza and the Roque one day, a walking tour of Santa Cruz at the weekend, down the south for volcanoes and wine and up north to the laurel forest and rum factory. In the process, I was paid to eat salad, cheese, sponge cake, bananas, and chocolate…
Storytelling in La Gomera
Well the conference was great. Vallehermoso means “Beautiful valley” and it is. You know those ceramic Christmas villages you can buy, where the cottage windows light up? That’s what Vallehermoso reminds me of. But most of the weekend was fantastic. The storytellers are a great group of people: very creative, very friendly, very generous with sharing their ideas. They also have great taste. I know because they were all interested…
Storytelling Conference
Tomorrow I’m off to another conference, this time a 3-day one for storytelling. Not the advertising technique, the “Once upon a time…” type of oral storytelling. Last year was the first one and I met a wonderful bunch of people, so I’m really looking forward to meeting them all again and seeing them perform. The catch (and maybe the best part) is that I’ll be performing too. You see, I…
Rock Art
I’ve been having fun hunting up the local rock art with an archeologist from Northumbria. There’s lots of it, but while the rock art from the North Pennines is about 5,000 – 3,000 years old, the Palmeran art is much newer at 1,200 – 500 years old. We went to El Verde near El Paso cemetery, where most of the carvings line up with midsummer sunset or midwinter sunset (well,…
Paris
I’m appalled. Well of course I am. So many innocent people just trying to have a peaceful night out. In what universe is this justified? And in what universe does it make sense to attack refugees fleeing from the same appalling idiology? Look, the enemy isn’t Muslims. The enemy is hate and violence. “The bully doesn’t fight because he wants to win; he fights because he wants a world in…