New website

I've just built a new permanent website for the house at www.greenspain.me, using the excellent and very easy iweb software on my Mac. (The above shot - a view from our terrace at dawn - is on the site, along with many others.) "Greenspain" is perhaps a cheeky address, as the term is usually applied to the rainy parts of the country up in Cantabria and Galicia, not down here in the Alpujarra. Literally though, we are green in Granada - not only does the snow from the Sierra Nevada keep things growing all year round, but the whole area is relatively unspoiled environmentally. Anyway, it replaces the scruffy site at the difficult-to-remember-and-spell casasierra.co.uk that I've just allowed to fade into the ether.

Spanish is easier than English

...and that's official. A recent study has found that as Spanish has a more direct and transparent relationship between phoneme and written word, Spanish kids learn to read and write earlier and make fewer errors than English-speaking children. The study attracted a budget of three-quarters of a million euros for researchers in Granada, which suggests they're pretty good at arithmetic, too.

Lemons and Lennon

An article from Andalusian English-language paper the Olive Press here about Driving over Lemons author Chris Stewart and his wife, and their attempts at reducing the carbon footprint of their Alpujarran farm and home. Stewart has managed to squeeze three books out of his experiences near Orgiva, and while they're not Gerald Brennan, they're evocative and enjoyable. I added a comment on another article in the Olive Press, this time about John Lennon in Almería, rashly suggesting that the dead ex Beatle wasn't, in fact, god. And I'm still getting hate mail. I could have published offensive cartoons of the prophet to less opprobrium.

Radioactivity

I was live on Spanish radio this morning, would you believe. Not RNE or SER, but the ambitiously-named Talk Radio Europe, a station for guiri expats somewhere down Malaga way. My old friend Jeremy Hitchin interviewed me about the economic crisis and its effect on advertising for his breakfast show. Having recently been made redundant from a job in that very industry, I felt suitably qualified to voice an opinion. Thanks to the miracles of technology, I was sitting in Glasgow, Jeremy was in a studio in Edinburgh and the show was produced and aired somewhere on the costa, from where a number of opinionated and quite possibly drunk retired expats phone in each day for a good old rant. The station is great fun for a while (the playlist makes Smooth FM sound challenging) and Jeremy, at least, is brilliant. Here's a picture of the poptastic geezer himself. If you ever want a cost-effective comic impressionist voice-over, he's your man. Hear the station on http://www.talkradioeurope.com.

Happy 2009 and a half...

It's New Year again in Berchules, the neighbouring village to our own, where they've been celebrating Noche Vieja on the first weekend of August for the past 15 years. The midsummer Hogmanay thing regularly draws about ten thousand people to this village of perhaps nine hundred residents, and the resulting night-long revelry includes the uvas de la suerte, various silly performances (in the shot above, it's three queens corresponding to the three kings at Christmas), lots of noise and plenty of alcohol. This year the fiesta was somewhat subdued due to the wildfire which has been raging below the village - it's apparently still smouldering away, although it's now under control. Here's a shot of the hillside provided by our friends Carol and Stan; the fire got very close to homes and hundreds were evacuated.