Aldeacentenera

We bought tickets today for the Bob Dylan concert in Mérida on July 10th. He’s playing in the Plaza de Toros, the city bull ring, so I will be going into a bull ring after all. I don’t like bull fighting, but I do like Dylan’s music.

I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan since I first heard him in the summer of 1961 (or was it ‘62). I could hear Hank Williams in his music, though no one else could. Dylan has many times since cited Hank as one of his strongest influences, along with Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson; country, folk and blues, the perfect combination!

Jane and Frank will be going off to Rome in a month’s time for a birthday celebration. I have to stay behind for work reasons, and to look after Sam the dog. I’m not too happy about it, but that’s life.

The birthday celebrations are for Jane and all her Italian friends. They all turn 50 this year. They are all meeting up in a Roman restaurant for a big meal and celebration. Most of them haven’t met each other in 20 or so years, so I guess it will be fun for them. I’ll knock back a glass or two of Pitarra and have a good conversation with Sam on that evening…

We finally lost the cool weather. This week it’s been nice and warm with temperatures in the mid to upper 20s. I’ve even had to use the fans once or twice in the office to cool down! At this time of year it’s still a bit humid though and it feels hotter than it actually is. By August when it really is hot it actually feels better with the lower humidity.

We were in Trujillo on Friday putting the car through the ITV. This is the Spanish equivalent of the British MOT, and it’s a harrowing affair. One of our friends agreed to come with us, which we were extremely grateful for. Even Spanish people seem to have a problem with the ITV.

They use dedicated centres here and not just garages for the yearly car inspections. It’s a kind of a conveyor belt line that you go through. It’s a large building and you enter it at one end and come out the other end. Along the length of the building there are mechanics waiting to check whatever their speciality is: lights, brakes, joints, etc. Then you have to go into the office and wait for the results.

The first bit is the hardest. You drive over a pit with the front wheels on two large metal plates. Then a man in the pit tells you, via loudspeakers placed next to the car, what to do. This is why we took our friend along; he told me what to do as I knew I wouldn’t understand a word coming out of the speakers. I was right too.

The short journey through the ITV building was a series of panic and delayed actions. The Spanish mechanics jabbered at me in completely unintelligible (to me) language, while I grew more and more confused. Our friend just sat their and said, “Tranquilo,” every so often.

Suddenly it was all over. We parked the car and went into the office for the long wait on the results. When they eventually arrived, the woman hesitantly called out my name, realising that I must be a foreigner, and handed us the papers. We passed! The brakes were mentioned as needing attention, but the car still passed its ITV, and that’s all that matters.

There were certain people, who will go unmentioned, who made snide remarks about our diminutive purplish coloured car before we left Shetland. But that same car took us all the way from Fetlar to Aldeacentenera, loaded to the gunnels, as they say, without a murmur. It has never failed us once in the past year, apart from needing new spark plugs and a light switch. It’s also thirteen years old with hardly a spot of rust. I’m impressed!

Sam the dog hurt his foot last week. We put him in the huerta, the small piece of walled ground we have near the house, and he cut his foot quite badly on something, probably a piece of glass. He’s been limping all week, but not complaining or whimpering. The foot is healing slowly and he’s putting more and more pressure on it every day.

The huerta is next to one of the bars. It’s the one where all the young people go, especially at the weekends. On warm evenings they stand outside the bar, next to the huerta and often throw empty bottles into it. I always clean up the ground, but I guess I must have missed some broken glass, hence Sam’s cut foot.

Frank is counting down the days until the school breaks up for the summer holidays. It’s about three weeks now. This is his last time at this school. In September he will be going to Segrado Corazón in Trujillo.

This is essentially a private school, which is state funded, and we feel unbelievably lucky to have got him into it. It’s where all the more well to do parents place their offspring. We really want to give him the best chance possible, and we never dreamed we would have succeeded so well. I dreaded the thought of him going to Lerwick and staying in the hostel there all week when we were living in Fetlar. This is a million miles better by far!

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