After a mixed career as an aircraft technician, London fringe theatre playwright, Franciscan friar, and secondary school teacher, I find myself looking after the needs of four donkeys in a remote location in the mountains in the Costa Blanca. I like to listen to BBC Radio 4 and the wind in the pine trees. I am writing a comedy about a school in Benidorm. My favourite film of all time is "Jean de Florette". If I had my time again I would not have spent the early 1970s working for Special Branch.
I am very glad to be wrong. Or to put it more exactly, I am glad the prognostications of the largely conservative Spanish media were needlessly pessimistic and quite ignorant in their understanding of what preparations had been made by the socialist leader Pedro Sànchez before the sudden surprise demolition of Mariano Rajoy’s government last … More Spain can still surprise us
It is time to leave behind my share of the sense of collective shock of the past week in Spain, as described in the previous two blog posts. In this country they celebrate funerals the day after the death. Then Spaniards move quickly on with life. I haven’t written very much here on the blog … More Time to celebrate Spain
Once again, I shall try to summarise the political situation in Spain, and then we shall return to normal donkey blog mode with great news from Ireland (no, not the Irish referendum but the birth of rare twin donkey foals.) For the few people interested in reading this blog for an interpretation of the unexpected … More A slow motion car crash
13.45 Today in Madrid the showdown has begun. The euphoria that Spaniards experienced last September – cheering and sending columns of Guardia Civil and Policia Nacional along the autovias of Spain to put down the Catalan nationalists – has now turned once again to cynicism and confusion. This blog post is not polemical and has one … More Spain at the turning point
Today I had a very good meeting with a kind and helpful bureaucrat. In these times such a contradictory statement is like saying, “I had a pleasant encounter with a traffic policeman who stopped me on the motorway”; or “I just enjoyed afternoon tea with an amusing axe murderer.” The meeting was arranged for me … More Getting to grips with the manure
When I was a child, it was the family tradition to race across the room to turn off the radio during the first few bars of the theme tune to The Archers, and I still do the same today. For readers of this blog in the USA, I refer to a long-running BBC radio drama about country life … More Oh no! Not The Archers…
It has seemed for the past few weeks as though my broad-ranging life has been crammed into a narrow funnel in which I have been stuck and struggling to squeeze through to the light at the end. A rather stupid metaphor illustrated in the photo by yet another piece of plastic which will end up … More Light at the end of the funnel
No not this one… geogcostablanca.blog is now finished. Please take a look at that blog to see why. This blog will resume on Tuesday with a blog post from Rubí.
We are coming to the end of the third week in Lent. It was International Women’s Day on Thursday and this became a point of reflection for me in my Lent spiritual reading because my text is the first book known to be written by an English woman. An element of humour has always been … More All shalle be wele, and alle maner of thynge shalle wele
I was going to write the Tuesday blog this week, but Rubí got in there first. So you get two Tuesday blogs this week. The nasty people who get their thrills by stressing a worried donkey, in the benighted village that the Refugio del Burrito brought to our attention, claim to be doing this because … More Goodbye to tradition
