Hola, hola, hola...

I just advertised our Spanish house on a website for Strathclyde Police, offering the boys in blue a discount of 10-20% depending on the season. It's only fair to extend the invitation to other police forces around Britain and indeed the world, so if you're a copper, you can save a little silver. However I wouldn't want anyone to think I was showing unfair favouritism towards the law - so if you can show proof of membership of a generally recognised trades union of thieves, rogues or ne'erdowells, I'll let you have the same deal.

Bees for tea, anyone?

It's cold and miserable in Glasgow, snowy in the Alpujarra and the news is profoundly depressing this weekend. But as Shelley puts it, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" We've taken a booking for May 2009, by which time some of these colourful little fellows should be back in our part of Spain. Bee-eaters, abejarucos, are regular visitors to the Alpujarra, albeit not in great numbers. I've only seen them once, but you never forget seeing birds as colourful as jockeys.

Live webcam...

...of the ski-slopes at Sierra Nevada here. Keep refreshing your screen and you can have endless fun watching Spaniards falling over in the snow. This is only a few miles from our place as the crow flies, but the crow would have to ascend about 2,200 metres (as the ski lifts start at about 3,500m). Meanwhile, snow is forecast for everywhere above 600m this week, so Juviles should see a white out.

More happy clients

Our latest visitors, Vicki and Paddy Salmon (from just outside Paris) loved their stay despite cold, wet weather. Paddy wrote "we thought the house terrific - you have great taste and imagination and have done it up so well. We only had one afternoon when we could sit out on the terrace, but what a view!" He sent me this watercolour of the view in question.The ridge in the mid-ground is the hill on which stand the remains of Juviles' moorish fortress. There's not a lot to see architecturally speaking, but it has great views back over the village and up towards the Sierra, or in the other direction, down into the valley where our local market town of Cadiar stands, about 300 metres lower down.

Paddy and Vicki own a beautiful holiday rental property in Normandy; take a look at it here.

It's all downhill from here

The ski season at the Sierra Nevada (above our house) starts a fortnight earlier than last year, with 11 lifts and 27 kms of pistas opening on Saturday 15th November. Lift passes are on sale at a discounted rate if you're quick, and our house is available until 20th December, and then from 2nd January, for about £250 or €300 a week. Latest news from the ski station here.

New flights from Ryanair

Economic and environmental concerns be damned! Ryanair has just started taking bookings on four new routes between the UK and Malaga, which is good for us, particularly as the new motorway is bringing the journey time to the Alpujarra down towards the 2 hour mark. And of course Malaga is a pleasure in its own right, despite the horrors of the Costa del Golf that starts just the wrong side of Ikea. The new flights go out of Prestwick (or Glasgow Prestwick to the optimistic), Edinburgh (one of Britain's more civilised airports), Stansted and Birmingham. Now if we could just get someone to fly to Almeria or Granada from Glasgow, we'd be away to the races.

Spain's hangover

The jury is out on whether Spain will get through the economic crisis in a better or worse state than the rest of the world, but any downturn is going to feel like a disaster in comparison with the unprecedented boom of the past twenty years or so. At least they don't have to give all the EU money back, as they've already spent it on roads, railways and, probably, excellent shellfish. Interesting article from The Economist here. It's so beautifully written it makes me want to subscribe. And use words like fissiparous and autarky whenever possible.

The rain in Spain...

...fell mostly on the Alpujarra last week, when our unfortunate guests from Paris were staying. The brilliant AE Met weather forecast site for Juviles has a great feature - it gives you a percentage of probablility of precipitation. Last week it was between 50 and 90% depending on the day, and this week it's between 0 and 5%. It also has max. and min. temperatures, wind speed and direction, UV index and provincial snowline level in altitude, which for most of the winter hovers about 1,600m but occasionally zooms down to us at 1,200m. By contrast, the best the BBC can do for Glasgow tomorrow is the rather unscientific safe bet of "heavy rain". I spoke to our guests though, and they loved the place despite the weather. Hopefully they'll go home and encourage all their Parisian pals to book our house for next summer, when of course it will be too hot to move.

Incidentally it's a myth that only the British talk about the weather. In my personal experience the Spaniards, the French and the Americans never shut up about it, and I understand it's a national obsession in Japan.