All day breakfast

Sam and Dave, the British first couple not the soul duo, had plato alpurrajeño when in the Albaicín the other day. This hearty dish is not unlike a good British breakfast. It consists of at least black pudding (morcilla), fried eggs, and potatoes stewed in oil with green peppers (papas a lo pobre). In addition, there will be chorizo, lomo (fresh pork loin) or ham, or a combination of one, two or all three.

You know when you've had a plato alpurrajeño, and I can't imagine SamCam would be indulging on a regular basis, although Dave might make it a weekly ritual, perhaps shared with the fluent hispanohablante Clegg. César, the owner of a restaurant near us, does one that's baked in the oven, but then César is originally from the Basque country, so what would he know? No, for an authentically alpujarran experience, the constituent elements of the plato must be fried in plenty of extra virgin olive oil, like everything else round here. Sadly though, the idea that alpurrajeños have been sitting down to this traditional dish for hundreds of years is unlikely to be true. It was apparently invented - like the Ploughman's Lunch in the UK - in the seventies, as an easy-to-make money-spinner for bars and restaurants. But if you've been working hard in the fields all morning- or perhaps assembling flat-pack furniture for you holiday house - the plato Alpurrajeño is just about perfect, especially with some rough red wine and a siesta afterwards.

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.

Euro, Doh!

Thanks to Jurdy at SpainExpat's forum site for bringing this to my attention. A shop keeper in Asturias found this skillfully re-modelled Euro in a bag of change. Nobody knows who morphed His Majesty into Homer, but one theory doing the rounds suggests it's the work of a shadowy republican group planning to flood the country with similar hand-manipulated currency. I doubt that, as it's a job that clearly took hours, if not days. And a Euro won't pay for a single caña of Duff beer these days.

The power of now

When I check the visitor stats for this blog, I find that on average, about eight people look at it each day. That includes me and, most days, Annie. Two days ago, though, I mentioned Radovan Karadzic (while he was on the front pages of the broadsheets) and got 82 visitors (Tuesday) and 53 (yesterday). Clearly Bosnian Serb war criminals are a bigger draw than stray dogs and rabbit stew. Sadly though, Karadzic has nothing to do with Juviles so he won't be back on a regular basis. And none of these 135 new visitors is interested in booking our house, or even clicking on my ads, so he's not contributing to our wealth. Perhaps we should take up alternative medicine; it clearly earned Karadzic a few dinar.

Comedy priest found alive

We've had enough animals here for the time being, so today I'd like to celebrate the discovery of Father Ted actor Dermot Morgan(left) near Belgrade. He was a fine comedian and reports of his death saddened us all, so the revelation that he's been been alive and practising alternative medicine in the Serbian capital all these years is great news.

Strangely enough, he reminds me just a bit of that Radovan Karadzic, the war crimes fellow.