TRY TO CONTAIN YOUR ELVES

Not much to say or report except the tents are still in the main square and will remain until someone gets a job, or gets hungry or gets bored with living on the tarmac. Everything H and I have been trying to point out for the last ten years has finally sunk in and people are camping out all over Spain. For years people here friends included were miffed that we had spotted all the downsides to living in what is essentially a fantastic country even though it is at times like stepping onto a Monty Python film set. I guess we are dealing with it better than others if only because after such a struggle to make ourselves heard or understood we gave up and decided to just enjoy ourselves, because it is, always, later than you think. Between the uptight Brits and the just woken up Spanish I find myself saying things like 'suerte' 'que te den' and have adopted a happy go lucky cheeriness that I always hoped would come with age and experience and thankfully, sun.

I forgot to mention my lovely lunch I had last Saturday with Stephanie, another teacher here. In between mothfuls ( mouthfulls even..) she told me she was suffering from that dreaded pain that Shakespeare said no philosopher could cure, toothache, and we discussed alternatives to teeth, or at least the ones we have, typical British or European wine stained ones. She told me George Washington had wooden ones and then a grasshopper landed on her shoulder and I suggested she go the whole way and get an eye patch. All this talk was being washed down with copious amounts of wine, all the while Stephanie adding a spray to kill the pain for the toothache and telling me it had a bit of a kick to it. We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting outside the Pedro el Viejo church, one of the oldest Romanesque churches in Spain, perhaps the oldest, where we witnessed a really cute, old Fiat draw up with the driver honking the horn and a beautiful girl stepped out in her wedding dress. She looked adorable but in typical wedding fashion the guests left a lot to be desired. All ill fitting trousers and dresses in colours that would have been lovely if they hadn't, in S's words, 'singed the retina'.