Recently I had a very exciting day out around the Cartagena area, in Cabo Tiñoso, where the remains of the most amazing military installation lay. Known as ‘The Cartagena Guns’ there are two huge (and I mean huge) guns, plus other smaller gun emplacements. They were installed in the early 1930s to defend Cartagena Naval […]

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What? A New Year’s resolution in mid-November? Well, our local supermarket went into Christmas mode the minute Halloween was not quite over. That was a good seven weeks before the event, so I reckon it’s time I made my resolutions. And they are certainly needed this year, because 2008 has seemed to disappear before my […]

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During the summer a Mallorcan friend begged me to teach English to her daughter. I hesitated. After all, I’m not a qualified teacher and lessons with a Mallorcan-speaking seven year old sounded like a bit of a challenge. Finally I agreed. After all it would only be for the holiday period. ‘That’s great’, she enthused, […]

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It must be the cold weather, but I can feel another foodie blog coming on. The thing is, even though it is never as nippy in Málaga as it is in the UK, you definitely feel the cold more - well, at least you do if you don’t have central heating and your house is […]

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I was in Barcelona with a group of art students recently. A marvellous time of mirth, frivolity and culture was had. Obviously we did the usual things like look at the Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro museums, as well as visit Gaudi’s famous apartment block ‘Casa Mila’ or as the locals call it - La […]

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It’s November and the weather is unbelievable. On Sundays, my dogs are in for a treat: a nice long walk. But hang on a sec, what’s that noise in the distance? Shooting! It is still the hunting season; rabbit, foxes, wild boar, birds … not sure what they are shooting, but they are shooting at […]

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Sunday mornings can be special times. After a week of grey skies and rain, a bright and sunny Sunday morning can be very special, especially one very recent Sunday I spent in Benidorm. There was a wind, substantially more than a cool breeze, that whipped the sea into one metre waves. The effect of sunlight […]

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This week, I received an urgent phone call to return home immediately. My elderly Spanish mother-in-law is staying with us and I feared the worst. Praying that she was OK and that nothing had happened to her ‘on my watch’, I opened the front door to find my wife in tears. She had slipped over […]

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I still recall a Sunday afternoon as a child. Sunday was a lazy day, a family day and every family in the terraced street where I lived (in the east end of Newcastle) followed suit. It was a day off work/ school and sometimes a lie-in, more often than not a three-hour game of football […]

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If you are reading this and don’t live in Spain you probably find this hard to believe, but I’M FREEZING! I think it’s just the case that I have become too used to the Spanish sunshine and warm weather. My blood has thinned from the consistency of a ruby port to that of a cheap […]

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