Life on a gall-bladder-friendly diet is rather boring, but I have several things to smile about. Something Wicked are buying Breathing Space, to be published “around December/Jan”. And Wily Writers will be reprinting Loathsome Alyce in BEST OF WILY WRITERS, VOLUME 2. Thirdly, I’ve lost a bit of weight (which figures since I’m not allowed to even look at cheese, chocolate, fried food, egg yolks, alcohol, bananas etc. etc.) Hey,…
San Jose in Breña Baja always celebrates Corpus Christi on the Sunday after Mazo’s celebration. Since the whole thing takes out on a flat, tarmaced street, the tradition is to make carpets of coloured salt, with the altars being much more modest. In recent years, many of the carpets are made from seeds and petals, like the ones in Mazo. Much as I love the petals, I think it’s a…
Back in February I showed a Swiss radio journalist around the observatory. To my considerable surprise, he wanted to interview me. The programme is almost completely in French, with a few bits of me speaking English before they fade up the translation, but if you’re interested, you can find it at http://www.rsr.ch/#/la-1ere/programmes/impatience/?date=16-06-2011 Go down to the bottom of the page to “Les télescopes terrestres” (beside the photo of a telescope)…
After I got back from El Hierro, it was full speed ahead on my course project. My friend Merche helped me with the Spanish for about three hours, bless her! I finally printed it out at about 10:30 pm on Wednesday night. On Thursday morning I had a group up at the Roque, so I only had odd moments here and there to prepare my presentation of said project. I…
Originally, the final exam for the Starlight course was going to be the 26th of May, and that was when the project had to be handed in. So I booked flights to visit my friend in El Hierro for the long weekend afterwards, on the basis that I’d have earned a break by then. Then the course teachers found that it suited them better to move the exam to the…
Because La Palma is an island, the plants here evolved in isolation, and many of them are unique to the island, or to the Canaries. One of my favourites is the Tower of Jewels — Tajinaste in Spanish and in Latin, the Echium genus. It’s related to borage, and most species have a big spike with hundreds of tiny flowers. The most spectacular is Echium wildpretii, which really is…