On Friday I showed another group of tourists around the William Herschel Telescope. Afterwards they were going on to GranTeCan, which is the huge telescope the Spanish are building at the Roque (see Thursday, July 26, 2007). I managed to tag along and finally see inside. I’ve seen a lot of telescopes, and I knew it was huge, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of the thing.This…
Although our garden is tiny, our balconies are large, and this year I decided to see if I could grow a little bit of organic veg in containers. For one thing, there’d be no food miles involved. My friends from Franceses gave me three pea plants. When we went on holiday, they were about a foot high. When we came back they were about four feet high, and caterpillars had…
We’ve had a heatwave, and I’ve been busy. On Monday afternoon as I passed through town with my son, the thermometer outside the port read 40C (104 F). In that sort of heat, you don’t feel like doing much, although I did continue my battle against the fleas. On Tuesday my friends Helen and Theresa finally collected their Spanish number plates, so later that morning I went with Helen to…
My friends in Franceses needed some help translating at the Town Hall, so today we went. On the way there we saw this practice rescue. At least I assume it was a practice because that’s the coastguard cutter. I left Julio with Helen while Theresa drove me to the Town Hall. There we established that a) the official permission for them to build steps to the house entrance isn’t ready…
Life’s getting a little less frantic. Julio’s school term has ended and Farida’s better, so yesterday I took my son to see the friends at Franceses for the first time for almost a month. They’ve got a lot of re-wiring done, and they’re busy hacking up the floor to put in a damp-proof layer. While they were doing that, the weeds underneath the vines shot up, so after a lovely…
I sneaked out time to take some photos of El Socorro church. It felt great, since I haven’t taken any photos for two weeks.