Granite Fence Posts…

Fence posts are very much a part of Shetland. You can hardly travel any distance in any direction in the isles without seeing one, or more likely many. Here in Spain they have fences too, but the fence post here is not the same as the familiar square-profile wooden one that is dotted all over the Shetland landscape.

For one thing, fence posts here are not made from wood. There doesn’t seem to be any standard either; pretty much anything goes. Sturdy angle iron is commonly used, as is pre-cast concrete, though many of the fields still have old dry stone dykes surrounding them.

We recently took a trip down south in Extremadura, as mentioned last week, and passed through the area of La Serena where there is an unusual abundance of grey granite. They use it for everything imaginable in building; it unfortunately reminded me a bit of Aberdeen.

Driving along a small access road to a museum we visited, I could hardly believe my eyes when I spotted a line of granite fence posts. It was certainly unexpected, though they seemed to do the job just fine.

Wood is not used at all in building work in this part of Spain. Houses are built entirely of concrete blocks, bricks, stone and steel. They have wooden doors and window surrounds of course, but they don’t use wood in the main structure. Perhaps this is why the idea of having granite fence posts makes sense here. They certainly won’t need replacing very often!

Last Sunday was the feast of Corpus Christi. There was a parade from the church through the village streets. All the children of around 10 or 11 years old who had taken first communion, a very special day for them, were near the head of the parade in their special white clothes. Although it rained in the morning, it stayed mercifully dry while the parade was underway.

One different aspect of this day is that many people create a small shrine outside their houses. As the parade reaches a house with a shrine, they stop and the priest blesses it. With perhaps half a dozen or so shrines to attend to, it took a while for the parade to complete the long loop back to the church.

The Corpus Christi parade happening in Aldeacentenera is interesting for the fact that it was a native son of this village, Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, an explorer and map-maker, who first explored and mapped much of the American Gulf coast from Florida to Mexico.

Alonso and his crew sailed into a large bay on the feast of Corpus Christi in what is now Texas in May of 1519. They named it Corpus Christi Bay, and the settlement they founded there became the city of Corpus Christi, which has a modern day population of a little over quarter of a million people.

Alonso Alvarez de Pineda and his ship’s crew were most likely the first Europeans to set foot in Texas. Alonso is credited as being the first European to see the Mississippi river, which he named Espíritu Santo.

This famous explorer from Aldeacentenera met with a tragic end, however, when in 1520 he and most of his fellow crew members were attacked and killed by Indians from the Huastec tribe at another settlement they had founded on the banks of the Rio Panuco, not too far from Corpus Christi, but a long way from his humble home in Aldeacentenera.

We visited the theatre last week. The little theatre in Trujillo is slightly smaller than the Garrison Theatre in Lerwick, and it is an excellent well used facility. The reason we were there was that pupils from Orellana secondary school were performing two plays in English. We know their teacher and he had previously asked Jane to record one of the scripts so that the pupils could practice their English better.

The first play was called, The Enormous Turnip (El Rábano Gigante). The children, aged around 12 or 13, did very well. It was colourful and well acted, though the heavily accented English was a bit difficult to follow at times.

The second play was the one that Jane had recorded for the children to practice on. This one was performed much better. It was called; The Little Old Lady Who wasn’t Afraid Of Anything (La Abuelita Valiente).

The theatre was packed with parents, who no doubt didn’t understand a single word that was said throughout. They were evidently proud however of their children’s achievement of performing in a foreign language. Cameras flashed constantly and every second parent seemed to be wielding a small video camera. The pride that parents’ have in their children is truly a universal thing.

We sat at the back of the theatre thinking that it might intimidate the children if they knew that there were people in the theatre who could actually speak English. However, the children did remarkably well. One girl in particular, who had obviously listened very carefully to Jane’s recording, actually managed to sound like Jane!

Two scientists from the University of Extremadura are part of an international team made up of five universities between Italy and Spain who have just developed the fastest calculating computer in the world, a computer they call Janus.

Your laptop or desktop computer is fast, but Janus is unbelievably faster. It can calculate 8,000 trillion individual operations every second. Put another way, it would take the entire human population of planet earth a whole month of concentrated calculating to achieve what Janus can achieve in one single second!

Extremadura and Spain as a whole is quite rightly proud that its scientists have been part of the team that have developed this new generation of super computer.

The Eurovision Song Contest is possibly the most awful thing ever imposed on the world. This year’s Spanish entry didn’t fare too well, despite an incredibly hyped up publicity campaign over the past few weeks.

Chiki Chiki performed by Rodolfo Chikilicuatre, looking like a badly made up cross between Elvis and Buddy Holly, was embarrassing in the extreme for most adults, though he seems to have gained a kind of cult following with the younger crowd. He did better than the UK entry however, but then everyone else did too.