181 – Has Anyone Got Any Knickers?

Church halls pretty much anywhere in the western world all look remarkably similar.  This one was just like the one in Yorkshire I went to in the 1960s as a Brownie, and the one in south London in the 1990s when I hosted fundraising jumble sales, and then in Somerset in the 2010s when I ran charity training courses.  This one, though, was in a small Axarquía town in inland Málaga province.

167 – The Turn of Another Year

My fifth Christmas in Spain.  I thought that must be wrong, but it’s not.  Four and a half years since I bought my house, three and a half years since I retired and moved here full-time.  Such a short time, yet it feels like forever.

166 – Catching Up

 

First of all it was remiss of me not to thank you all for the lovely thoughts and messages you sent following my heart attack.  I really did appreciate every one of them – “the kindness of strangers” means a lot.

Since then I’ve been doing a lot of catching up.  Trying to slow down, catching up with old friends, and catching up with long-delayed tasks.

153 – A Different Planet

NASA experts tell us that it’s 25 million miles to get to another planet, but they’re completely wrong.  It’s actually just 25 minutes away along the A-45.

149 – You Just Need Fruit

Sometimes you just need fruit.  It was the big food distribution day at Los Ángeles Malagueños de la Noche, and the end of lunch service until September.  The people in the queue had already queued for breakfast and queued to get a numbered ticket for the groceries, and it was way too hot to be standing in a queue.  Even the volunteers were wilting in the heat, and we knew it was nothing like as bad for us as it was for the people in the queue.

144 – Painting the Town

In three corners of my life this month a blank canvas turned to life, colour and a floor covered with rice.

“La Noche en Blanco” turns Málaga city into that blank canvas.  A night of culture, music, free entry to the museums, concerts in the streets, hundreds of events to choose from between 8pm and 2am and still later into the small hours. 

131 – Sunburnt Angels

Do angels get sunburn?  Sounds like a deep philosophical question.  It’s not, and the answer is yes, they do.  Even in winter.