Duende
In the velvet early hours when sleep is elusive and the moon is dark, I wander up to the Mirador San Nicolas. The alleys are silent, lit by soft yellow lanterns glowing above plants gently breathing out the heat of the day into the clear mountain air. A pomegranate tree droops over a whitewashed wall and a bird sings softly from the unripened fruit, the spindly branch quivering beneath its weight. The flamenco spectactular has finished in the Generalife, the gardens of ...
Ballad of Three Rivers
In the cool crystal air of a Granada dawn, I sit on my terrace and write. Traces of summer snow glimmer on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. The sky above is pale gold deepening into high blue, the first rays already lighting the oak trees on Sabika Hill emerald green. A breath of mountain breeze curls about my legs, a last sweet lick of mountain cool before the fiercely joyous heat of an Andalucian summer day descends over the valley. Birds swoop ...
Alhambra Days
Welcome to the new site! Blogging is something I’d more or less stopped doing. But lately I’ve been looking around my adopted home with new eyes - something to do with Spring, maybe – and realizing just how extraordinarily beautiful it is. When I first returned here from Australia just over a month ago, it snowed. Really came down. Big fat white flakes that settled on the orange tree over my balcony, and decorated the ochre walls of the Alhambra in a ...
Mountains and Sea
I’m rolling two posts into one here, so you get both coast and mountains in one hit! For those of you mercifully spared my endless gloating on Facebook, this is my new home on the Costa Tropica – Almuñecar. Initially I was a little skeptical about moving to the Spanish coast. It’s a tough job to impress Australians with coastline, and I’d already seen the Little Britain enclaves that line the Mediterranean coast. I wasn’t too sure that ageing Manchurians drinking a ...
Sun, snow, and a new job
Whilst the rest of Europe has been inundated with snow and ice, Granada has enjoyed the kind of winter that makes a lie of the word. Day after day of blissful sunshine, so strong one can sit on the terrace in short sleeves quite comfortably, whilst incongruously gazing at the white capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada. It’s been a dire snow season for the resort so far. In the evening the lights of the Kasborahs are visible from my balcony, ...
Sacromonte
It is raining in Granada. Water runs off tiled roofs and splatters fatly on the cobblestones. Flamenco guitar from a neighbourhood show drifts through the wrought iron window bars. I’m sitting on my couch, drinking a bottle of cheap red and watching the world pass by my ground floor window. In the Albaicin, where I live, everyone is interesting. Or at least they look it. The style of the day is arty hippy, all loose cotton trousers bought from the Moroccan ...
Granada …
We all have expectations of what a new life will look like. Perhaps that's what makes it hard to uproot oneself. The fear that the reality may not match the dream. I had secret fears it would happen to me. That the Andalucia I fell in love with when I walked through six years ago was remembered through romantic eyes, by naïve recollections. I wondered if the potent mix of cultural heritage that intrigued and delighted me had perhaps been diluted by ...
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I 'download' books all the time. Legally. It's called a Kindle, l
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