It looks like we will be going to the mountains as Henderson, inspired by the phone call of a few weeks back regarding the lamb for the slaughter has bagged a hare from one of his pupils and hopes to get Killer Jon in on the act of hanging,drawing and quartering or whatever it is these country folk are prone to do on a Saturday night. I will be out of the way in the bar by the river with a nice Enate as more snow is forecast and it is another dream to get snowed in and be unable to return to the big city and work.

The big city is not quite and needs a couple of thousand more bods to be so. It is a town with delusions of something, but doesn't realise that outside, de fuera, nobody has heard of it and I often wonder if it really exists. I was warned by an Englishman who sold 'quality clothing' from the back of his van around the villages that the big city folk 'think they are sophisticated and cosmopolitan, but they're not'. I am reminded of this everytime I see a photo in the local paper with 'a group of foreigners' written underneath.

I never really knew what the green eyed monster meant till I came here. There is 'mucho envidia' but it is often mind boggling and involves a sense that other people have more, have it better or easier. Sometimes it involves women muttering under their breath at other women who, I don't know, maybe washed their hair and put on some eye shadow or something and had the gall to marry someone who looks a bit 'foreign'.

Getting back to the village, it is often thought that going to a village of a handful of people would be a quiet,tranquil experience but is often the opposite with drunkards slamming their car doors at five in the morning. Last time I was there I was delighted to hear an owl for the first time in my life at a reasonable hour of around two in the morning. A couple of hours later the silence was no more as a lorry driven by a hell driver came tearing through the valley with such a disregard that all the birds woke up and seemed to scream a collective agreement that now was not the dawn chorus. There is a church which chimes forty o'clock and a dog which pretends to be dead in the middle of the road just to piss off the tourists who form a traffic jam and even get out of their cars and give him a bit of a kick but he isn't having it. Once during a holy communion with the kids dressed in sailors uniforms and pretty dresses respectively with fireworks and the rest, Killer Jon was asked by some Dutch tourists what was happening. 'They are getting married, it is a custom to marry them off young in Spain' he said with an irreverent look he is prone to wear. This is almost as good as my friend Albina when asked, told some American tourists that the changing of the guards was a public execution.