Tuesday & Wednesday 10th 11th October

Tuesday 10-10-2006
Mundane day today, web log, Albox market day, back to base via Lentisco’s, the petrol station and the communal water trough.
However my day was brightened, whilst down at the Albox market, by the thought of the very Spanish of entities, the rambla.
The rambla is a gorge or gully, either natural or man made, designed to carry away the extraordinary waters that are the results of either the melting snows in the high mountains or the torrential rains that sometimes arrive without warning in the spring and autumn in this part of the world.
If it was not for the rambla’s, then on these flash flood occasions, the whole of the down stream townships would be carried right out to the Mediterranean. Therefore each town ship ensures it’s own safety by formalising the river beds to accommodate these flash flood situations. They will build very deep and wide concrete ductings that will take all that nature can throw at them, without flooding the towns en route.
This flash flood occasion can happen once, twice or sometimes more times per year, but also no times in several years.
The none flash flood situation for only a short time leads to a deja-vu situation whereby the locals seem to forget the last flood very quickly. If you look at our pictures today you will see the Albox Tuesday market. A lot of which is based down on the rambla. Cars park on the rambla today and every day whilst people go about their usual normal business.
Just four weeks ago, when we were nearly moving up to Taberno from El Pinar, it rained so hard that Albox had one such flash flood that swept down from our mountain (Madrono)so quickly that it took many cars off in it’s wake and although no lives were lost many cars were never seen again until they were found a few days later miles down stream.
Today it seems, as per the pictures, that most of the market and business people park their cars or pitch their stalls on this self same rambla with not a care in the world.
In certain areas we are told that people, and developers, build houses right down there on the rambla. Earlier this year people lost their lives in one such flash flood in the local area.
I find this quite spooky.
We own half of a rambla for a stretch of about two hundred metres. We have not yet inspected this part of our kingdom but I promise that if anyone comes to stay we will not (‘onest guv, would I tell a lie) be pitching their tents down on our part of the rambla. However we do rather look forward to seeing the torrents of water shooting down our rambla from The Sierra Mondrono.
Wednesday -10-2006
Today’s blog is different.
We are both in jubilant mood. The furniture etc., which you may recall arrived two weeks ago, has since then managed to hide several high profile items. We have searching nearly every day, we have opened, closed , sealed and written on the outside of each and every box more than once. We have been through all 113 boxes several times until we are dizzy but we could not find, the big camera, one of my walking boots, that was not actually packed with the other one that we found on day two (if you get the drift), the bread maker (how the hell can one loose a bread maker for goodness sake, even in 113 boxes) and the iron. Now I was not too concerned about the iron, but madam had other ideas as to it’s importance and was in deep depression thinking that someone could have nicked it . Today finally we have found the last of these items, in fact we have found three out of the four items today. The camera (which we found on Monday was in a box marked Computer Bits and Bats. My new and very lovely walking boot was ‘crushed’ down at the very bottom of a box, over which were some of my more important tools, thus were missed when the box was searched (very understandable I think that you will agree). The iron was wrapped up in lots of paper together with some china in a box labelled Dining Room Crockery and low and behold the bread maker (which is really quite a size and difficult to lose) was in a box marked Photo Albums. To be fair the continual obscurity of these items for the past two weeks was all down to shoddy workmanship by the search party. However what was going through the furniture removal mans mind on July 20th when he decided to put my walking boots in two different boxes?
Then poor generator this afternoon has complained by taking a low tone as it struggles with the pile of ironing that one happy Elayne has been doing. (I’ve never seen her happy ironing before, it’s all quite worrying really). The generator will probably give up the ghost by way of protest.
Then due to public demand I have enclosed with the pictures a hand drawn map of our little plot of land (it’s quite sad when someone wants to know personal things like where are we going to deposit our ….. …… ablution waste etc., just kidding Mike). The map has actually come out a little like Long John Silver’s treasure island map, in fact we could bury a ten pence (or a fifty euro) piece on the land and invite people to send the map back with an X marking the spot where they think the money is. We could charge a £1 a time (or 1.5€) a bit like Kit Williams did with that gold/diamond rabbit that made the headlines about twenty years back (and made him a ruddy fortune at the same time, but I‘m not really jealous).
We are going to see our new architect this evening after which there is a ‘do’ on at Lentisco’s that we thought that we might go to for a change. TTFN