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January 2001 |
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Monday 1 January Plus ça change... New century, new page design for the journal. Well, not really a new design, because the page layout is exactly the same as before. All I have done is to remove the wallpaper and tinker with the colours slightly. I have come to the conclusion that the most attractive web pages are those with the most minimal design. So, no frames, no sound, no bells, no whistles. I have kept the Arial font, which I like, and the dark green font colour (just a tad darker than before). The background to the text is a very pale pink (provided you have 24 bit colour -- otherwise it will be grey or white), and the pastel stripe down the left side of the page will change colour with the seasons. On a less trivial level, what changes do I plan to make to my life in the 21st century? Well, nothing at all, really. To be quite honest, I am very content with life as it is. Careerwise, I have achieved as much as I could reasonably have expected, and I am content to spend my declining years coasting along and taking things easy. At a personal level, I have a loving and stable family, and I could not ask for more than that. In fact, the only change on the horizon is that in five years or less I shall retire and have a whole lot more leisure time. To some extent, I seem to be putting my life on hold until then. Mary has starting making fun of the way that whenever I think of something that needs doing around the house, I say that I'll save that up as a retirement project. That does not sound like a good scenario for an online journal, does it? Don't come here if you are looking for high drama or existential angst. You are unlikely to find it in these pages. But then that has been the case ever since I started this journal over two and a half years ago, and it hasn't stopped me from writing yet. The only unresolved element of tension in my life is the continuing one that has been there all along: I'm gay, and in the closet, and would like to come out to Mary, but don't want to do so in a way that would cause any harm to our relationship. And I don't see how to do this. And I'm very jealous of Michael Kaiser, who came out to his wife a couple of months ago (and had a totally sympathetic response). I still hope that some day I will find the opportunity to do what he did. But don't hold your breath. So for me, 2001 looks like being not much different from 2000, or 1999, or several other years on either side. That suits me fine. I hope that it will be a good year (and decade, and century) for you.
Wednesday 3 January ...plus c'est la même chose The University is closed from Christmas until the New Year, so I have spent the past ten days at home. I was not completely idle during that time, because I brought home some student projects that I had to read and assess. But that only took a few hours, and I'm not entirely sure how the rest of the time passed. I certainly didn't seem to have either the time or the inclination to make journal updates. Liz and Paul were here for some of the time, but we didn't see a great deal of them because they operate on a different schedule from us. By the time they get up, it's nearly our bedtime. In fact, a lot of the week after Christmas was spent socialising. Several neighbours invited us round, and we had various friends and acquaintances dropping in to see us. I think I coped pretty well with it all. As regular readers will know, I'm not the most sociable of people. I can usually cope with an hour or two of company, but then I tend to switch off and go kind of catatonic. I don't think that happened too much last week. In fact, Mary actually complimented me on being reasonably talkative after one evening with neighbours. Today I went back to work, but only for one day because we shall be away for the next two weeks. In fact I was only at work for half a day. I came home at lunch time in order to say goodbye to our American friends Pat and Stan, who have finished their sabbatical semester in Leeds and left this afternoon to go back to Texas. We shall definitely keep in touch with them, and we'll hope to visit them in Austin some day. This time last year we spent a couple of weeks in Spain, first a week with Steve, Jo and Tom and then a week in the Canaries. That was so successful that we are going to do exactly the same thing again this year. We leave tomorrow afternoon on a direct flight from Leeds to Málaga, and we'll stay at our usual hotel, the Venta Los Arrieros in Colmenar. The last time we were there was in July, and Tom will have grown a lot since then. He is now 16 months old, and is walking but not yet talking. For the week in Gran Canaria we were unable to get a booking in one of the idyllic apartments that we stayed in last time. People have evidently found out about them, and the whole complex is fully booked from Christmas through to Easter. But we managed to find another apartment in the same village, Puerto de Mogán. I hope it will be equally satisfactory. We fly back from Gran Canaria to Málaga on the 17th and then to Leeds on the 18th. For the night of the 17th, we originally thought in terms of finding a hotel in Málaga itself, since it hardly seemed worth while renting a car and driving out to Colmenar for just one night. But it just so happens that 17 January 2001 is a particularly significant date for me (seeing as how I was born on 17 January 1941). I decided that I would much rather spend it with my son and his family than in some anonymous hotel in Málaga. So we shall spend the night at the Arrieros, and I am looking forward to having a birthday dinner there with the family. It's a pity that Liz can't be there too. Other than that, I am still in denial over the prospect of turning 60, and I don't want to think about it. But that needn't stop you from sending a birthday greeting on the form below (please?). It will give me a great deal of pleasure to read all your messages on my return to Leeds.
On our first day at the farm, Mary was feeling ill with sinusitis. We decided that I should take her back to our hotel in Colmenar to rest. But just as we were about to set off, there was a phone call from the two WWOOFers that Steve was expecting to come to work for him for a couple of weeks, to say that they had arrived at the bus stop in Colmenar. So I offered to collect them and bring them to the farm. They were a friendly Canadian couple in their mid twenties, Doug and Danielle from Toronto, who were spending several months travelling round Europe. This was their first experience of WWOOFing, and they were not sure what to expect. I drove them to the farm, where Steve gave them a conducted tour. I spent the afternoon wiring up the pump for the new borehole. Steve and Jo have had to spend several thousand pounds (or rather several million pesetas) having the borehole dug, because they have been without water on the farm since their spring dried up last year. Steve has been installing water pipes from the holding tank above the borehole down to the house. (In the picture, Tom is helping to bury one of the pipes.) They are really looking forward to having running water in the house for the first time. When I had finished the wiring, Steve turned on the generator and the pump, and water started gushing up to the holding tank. Mary stayed in the hotel that evening, still feeling unwell. I had dinner with Steve and Jo and the new WWOOFers, and we were joined by a friend of S&J who was passing through the area. The next day, 6 January, was Dia de Reyes (Three Kings' Day), which is a bigger festival than Christmas in this part of Spain. It is the day when children get their presents, and everyone goes to a restaurant for a traditional Andalusian meal. Unfortunately, it had been raining hard overnight, and the muddy track to S&J's farm was impassible in our little rental car, so we had to find something else to do for the day. S&J wanted us to buy some supplies for them, so we asked Adolfo (the proprietor of the Arrieros hotel) whether the shops in Málaga would be open on Dia de Reyes. Yes, he said confidently, everything is open. Todo es abierto. But when we got to the Lidl supermarket, it was closed, and so was almost everything in the Rosaleda mall. There was a cafe open there, where we had lunch. In the afternoon it was drier, so we went to the farm for dinner. Did I say I wasn't going to give a blow by blow account of this trip? I have only covered the first two days so far, and I don't have time for any more this evening. I'll try to post another instalment tomorrow.
On the Sunday of our stay with Steve and Jo, we spent all day at the farm. I started sawing up some pieces of wood to form the frame for a sandbox for Tom, and Mary helped out with the cooking and washing up. There was plenty of cooking to do, with six adults (including the two WWOOFers Doug and Danielle) to feed, plus young Tom. In fact, there were eight of us (plus Tom) at the dinner table that evening, because Sim and Wendy were also there. (Sim is presumably short for Simon. In any event, he was a real person, not just a character from The Sims.) They had WWOOFed for Steve and Jo some time last year, and were passing by on their way to Málaga airport. Sim was a good looking boy, but quiet; Wendy made up for him by being bouncy and voluble. They brought with them a small black kitten in a sack. Steve and Jo had agreed to look after the kitten because Sim and Wendy were leaving the country and could not take it with them. Cookie, their other cat, looked suspicious and jealous of the little newcomer. Nutmeg, their pathetically abject and eager-to-please dog, looked more abject than ever at the prospect of being demoted still further to the bottom of the pecking order. We all had a long discussion about naming the kitten, and eventually settled on the name Pepper. The kitten, meantime, gradually emerged from the corner where she had been hiding and cautiously started to explore the farmhouse, taking care not not get too close to Cookie. Before long, she decided to make a nest for herself in the log basket beside the wood burning stove, where she looked very cute and comfortable. Then we had dinner, for which Jo cooked an excellent vegetable curry and a red lentil dhal (no meat, because Sim and Wendy are veggies), and Steve made one of his delicious banoffee pies for dessert. I assumed from the efficient way in which they made the meal that they must be used to catering for biggish numbers. But Jo said that this was the first time they had ever had so many people round their table, and in fact they had only ever once cooked for more than four people. The next day (Monday) we drove Steve, Jo and Tom to a mall in Málaga, and bought them enough grocery supplies to last them a month or more. When we got back to the farm, Doug and Danielle were looking uncomfortable, and Danielle nervously said that they had some bad news. They were very embarrassed to say what the problem was, but eventually admitted that they were not enjoying WWOOFing as much as they had hoped. They had not realised quite how primitive conditions are on S&J's farm. Unlike other WWOOFers, they had not brought sleeping bags with them so they were having to sleep on S&J's very thin and unyielding guest futon. I sympathise with them. Mary and I once tried sleeping on it, and that is one of the main reasons why we now stay at the Arrieros hotel when we visit S&J. Sleeping on their futon is not much better than lying on a concrete floor. Also, Doug and Danielle are used to North American standards of hygiene, and they found the lack of running water hard to cope with. No daily hot showers here. It turned out that they couldn't face the prospect of even one more night there, so after dinner we drove them to the Arrieros and they stayed there for the night before taking the bus to Seville the next morning. They are a nice young couple, though, and they worked hard for the few days that spent WWOOFing. They plan to visit England next month, and we exchanged email addresses and invited them to stay with us if they come to Leeds. Tuesday was our last day at the farm. In the afternoon, Steve made an alarming discovery. He went to start up the water pump, and no water appeared. Either the borehole had run dry, after only a couple of days of operation, or the pump at the bottom of the borehole had failed and would have to be hauled all the way up to the surface to be repaired. Whichever of these two things had happened would be fairly disastrous. We tried dropping small stones down the borehole to see if we could hear anything. But the hole is so deep (135 metres, or about 440 feet) that we could not be sure whether we were hearing a watery splash or a muddy splat. Mary and I were appalled at this bad luck. But Steve and Jo have had so many problems and difficulties since coming to Spain that they have become laid-back and philosophical in the face of disaster. Steve continued to work on installing the pipework for the kitchen, optimistically hoping that sooner or later there will be a water supply. In the evening we all had dinner at the Arrieros, and Mary and I said goodbye to Steve, Jo and Tom before setting off for the next leg of our journey early the following morning. Next instalment: the week in Gran Canaria.
Online journal news: my first and best online friend, Scott, has updated his journal (twice) after having neglected it for far too long. He is missing his hubby Corey, who has been sent to Chicago for a month on business. Corey has also written a rare journal update, from Chicago. And Mickey has returned from Israel and written up the first episode of his travelogue.
One of the members of the Leeds M.E. group, Nick (not to be confused with our surrogate son Nick), has spent the past few months in an apartment in Puerto de Mogán on Gran Canaria. He thought that the ideal climate there would be good for his health, and so it has been. Before he went there he was mostly confined to a wheelchair, but now he goes out walking and swimming every day. Mary and I enjoyed our week in Puerto de Mogán last January so much that we decided to go there again this year. But the apartments that we stayed in last time were fully booked, so we asked Nick if he could find somewhere else for us. He succeeded in finding a place for us, but he was a bit vague in telling us where the apartment was located and how we could get hold of the keys. He was equally vague about where his own apartment was. All he told us was that it was next door to the back entrance of a certain restaurant. So I was expecting that we might have a bit of difficulty finding the place. But I wasn't expecting what actually happened. When I travel, I pack as little as possible in the cabin bag (just our tickets, passports, a book to read on the plane, and a few essentials like a toothbrush so that I can survive overnight if the luggage goes astray). When we left Leeds for Málaga, I made sure that the tickets for that leg of the journey were in the cabin bag, and I put the documents for the Málaga-Las Palmas flight into the checked baggage. Before we left Málaga, I transferred the flight tickets from the suitcase to the cabin bag, but somehow overlooked all the other travel documents, which remained in the suitcase. The flight from Málaga took us across the Straits of Gibraltar, down the coast of West Africa, over Tangier and Casablanca, with the snow-capped Atlas Mountains in the distance, then out over the Atlantic before coming down to land at Las Palmas on Gran Canaria. Even in the airport terminal, we could feel the subtropical heat. I stood by the baggage carousel, picked up Mary's suitcase, and waited for mine. And waited. Eventually the carousel stopped circulating, and I realised that my case had gone missing. I went over to the Enquiries office to report this, and an official started to fill in a form for me. I had to describe what the case looked like, and then he asked for the address where we were staying. I told him that we would be in Puerto de Mogán (which is about an hour's drive from the airport), but that I did not know the actual address. Well then, said the official, how are we going to deliver the baggage to you when it turns up? I began to realise that there might be something of a problem there. Even the scanty information that Nick had given us about the apartment was locked in the missing suitcase. Then it suddenly struck me that we faced a much bigger problem. The travel agency in Leeds had ordered a rental car for us for the week, for which I had pre-paid. But the voucher for the car rental was in the missing suitcase. What's more, I could not even remember which rental agency was involved. It seemed that we were completely stranded, miles from our destination, with no baggage and no transport. This was not a happy moment. I seem to have run out of time to write any more this evening, so I'll keep you in suspense until the next instalment of our holiday saga.
Standing by the missing baggage office at Las Palmas airport, I could not believe that I had been so stupid as to leave all our vital travel documents in the case that had gone missing. I was not exactly panicking, because the situation was not in fact totally desperate. After all, we could have rented a car at the airport, although this would have meant losing the fee that we had already paid for another car. But I was not thinking rationally. My brain seemed to have shut down, and I was just thinking how much I wanted to see the missing luggage reappear. I looked round to see where Mary had got to, and I saw her walking towards me alongside an airport official who was pushing a baggage trolley with a couple of pieces of luggage on it. One of these cases looked as though...could it be...was this the missing case? Yeah! I never did discover how it had failed to appear on the carousel, but I was very glad that Mary had spotted it as the official was about to take it off to some lost luggage graveyard. Just occasionally the Universe reprieves us from the consequences of our stupidity. I hope that I learned a lesson from this experience. In future I will double check that I have all important travel documents in my hand luggage when travelling. I was still feeling highly stressed even after the missing case reappeared, and I was snapping irritably at Mary. But she understood the reason, and she was very patient with me. When we finally located our rental car, I sat quietly at the wheel for a few minutes allowing myself to unwind before driving off. We reached Puerto de Mogán at about 3 p.m. Our friend Nick had said that he would leave information about where to find the keys for our apartment at the Mogán Internet Café. We found the Internet Café easily enough, but of course its opening hours included a long Spanish siesta, and it was closed from 2 to 5 in the afternoon. Plan B was to locate Nick in his apartment from the vague directions about its location that he had given us. This was successful, and he told us that the owner of our apartment had left the keys at the Marina bar. He came with us to the bar, where we had a drink and picked up the keys. The apartment was in the old, non-touristy, part of the village, among a jumble of fishermen's cottages in a maze of narrow alleyways behind the main street. It was a small but attractive studio apartment with a tiny bathroom and a spiral staircase leading up to a roof terrace. After our long and stressful journey (I left out some of the niggling details, such as the fact that the flight was delayed for an hour before leaving Málaga; and that when we eventually arrived at the apartment, the key would not fit the lock and I had to go back to the Marina bar to find someone to show me how to operate it), we were glad to relax in the apartment and unpack before going out for dinner at the Mozart restaurant, where the gay German waiter remembered us from last year and we had a good chat with him. The next day was cool and cloudy, with a few showers. I didn't think weather like that was allowed on Gran Canaria. I wandered round Puerto de Mogán looking at the changes since we were there last year (a huge new tourist complex is under construction behind the beach) while Mary stayed in the apartment, recovering from the journey. Fortunately, this was the only day of bad weather, and the rest of the week was warm and sunny. More about that in the next entry.
Our friend Nick has been living in Puerto de Mogán for several months, but without a car. He has explored the parts of the island that can be reached by public transport, but that is very restricted. We asked him where he would like to go if we took him out for the day, and he at once suggested Playa de Veneguera. This is the next bay to P de Mogán, and is only about 5 km west of it, but to get there is not at all easy. Gran Canaria is essentially an extinct volcano, mountainous in the centre and sloping steeply down to the Atlantic ocean on all sides. There is a road along the south coast from Playa del Inglés as far west as P de Mogán. The road winds around the cliffs, and wherever there is an inlet with a sandy beach it has been ruined by tourist developments -- ugly high-rise concrete hotels and apartment blocks spreading right up the cliff face. The exception to this is P de Mogán itself, where the tourist developments have been sympathetically designed to fit in with the traditional fishing village and harbour. To the west of P de Mogán the coast becomes too wild for the road to follow. Instead, it turns inland, about 12 km up an attractive fertile valley, then swings westwards over the hills. A rough dirt track leads down the next valley, past a number of banana plantations, about 10 km to a completely unspoilt beach. This was what Nick wanted to see. I hate to think what the journey along the track will have done to the suspension of our little rented Fiat, but we made it down to the beach, where there was a car park with a dozen cars in it (mostly fairly rugged vehicles with four wheel drive). Some people were camping there, others like us had just come for the day. Apart from one ruined house, there were no buildings anywhere, just a sweeping sandy beach with views across the sea to the hills of the next island, Tenerife, in the far distance.
Nick and I enjoyed a swim while Mary stayed on the beach. Then we had the picnic lunch that we had brought with us. We noticed that, as with remote beaches in most parts of the world, there was a very relaxed dress code. There were several nude sunbathers and swimmers among the other groups of people on the beach. Nick commented how much he enjoyed the sensation of freedom that comes with nude swimming. I completely agree with that. Swimming feels quite different when you don't have wet swimming trunks clinging to you. So after wandering along the beach for a while to digest our lunch, we both stripped off for a second swim. Mary pretended to find this embarrassing. At least, I think she was only pretending. :) Thus the Atlantic Ocean joins the list of places where I have enjoyed swimming in the nude. The other places are several pools in remote Scottish glens, the Mediterranean (a nudist beach in the calanques near Marseilles) and the Pacific Ocean (a beach somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway between Malibu and Ventura). Incidentally, did you know that you can get ticketed for nudity on Californian beaches? Patrol officers can issue citations just as though it was a driving offence. I nearly got caught that way, but I smiled innocently at the officer and told him in my cutest British accent that I did not realise it was not allowed because I had seen several other naked swimmers there. He let me off with a warning, but a little while later he came back again. Fortunately, a fellow sunbather saw him before he spotted us, and warned me. We just had time to get decent before he saw us. Apart from the day out with Nick, our days on Gran Canaria followed a predictable pattern. In the morning, we had a leisurely breakfast up on the roof garden of our apartment, then went down to the beach at P de Mogán where I went swimming. Back to the apartment for lunch, then in the afternoon Mary rested while I drove along the coast to my favourite place on the island, the sand dunes of Maspalomas, near the noted gay tourist resort of Playa del Inglés. The dunes extend over an area of several square miles. Some of them are hills of pure sand without any vegetation at all, like the Sahara. Elsewhere there are areas of shrubs and trees to give some shade and seclusion. What I like most about the dunes is the atmosphere of freedom. In the afternoons there are hundreds of people walking around, or sitting and reading, sunbathing, chatting, cruising in the bushes or whatever. Some areas are predominantly gay, some straight, some nudist, some clothed. But everywhere there is an atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance. Everyone does their own thing without bothering anyone else. There is something very special about the place. The first afternoon I was there I got blisters on the soles of my feet from walking on the hot sand. After that, I made sure to keep my trainers on (but nothing else, apart from my backpack). You'll be getting the impression that I'm becoming some sort of naturist freak. I have to admit that given the opportunity, and a warm enough climate, I could easily become one. Around 4.30 in the afternoon, as it starts to get cooler, everyone leaves the dunes, and you see hundreds of people streaming across the sands back to Playa del Inglés. In the evenings, Mary and I ate out at one or other of the many excellent restaurants in P de Mogán. Many of the restaurants specialise in fish, and some of them have their own fishing boats which go out each day to bring back a fresh catch for the evening's menu. One evening, I ordered pescado al horno (fish from the oven). The waiter brought a large frying pan to the table, containing three fish steaks and a huge quantity of thinly sliced potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, braised in a totally delicious sauce. The fish had a dense, meaty texture, and we asked the waiter what it was. He told us that it was gallo, which according to the dictionary is called john dory in English. Another evening, I had a similar dish and was told that the fish was herrera. This word is not given even in our largest Spanish dictionary, so I may never know what it was. Whatever it is, it tastes good. On our final evening in P de Mogán we invited Nick out to dinner, to thank him for finding the apartment for us, and again I ordered a fish dish. This time, instead of giving us the name of the fish, the waiter pointed to an uncooked specimen of the same fish in the restaurant's cooler cabinet. It had reddish scales, a bit like mullet, but different. It was not as good as the herrera, though. There is still at least one instalment of our Spanish trip to come, but I want to came back into real time for a brief mention of what I have been up to in the past couple of days. On Friday, I had one of my regular trips to London. The trains are still pretty much screwed up, but at least the service has improved to the extent that it is once again possible to get from Leeds to London for a meeting and back again in the same day. After the meeting there was even time for a visit to Chariots. There I met a very attractive young oriental guy calling himself Steve, who lives in Zurich. He suggested that we should go to one of the private cabins. I won't say what happened there because I'm coy like that, but I will say that it was a big boost to my ego to find that at the age of 60 I can still occasionally meet a man who finds me sexually attractive. So to all you guys who are fretting about being left on the shelf because you have not yet found a partner by the age of 30, let me tell you that you still have plenty of time in hand. Yesterday, by way of contrast, was spent on a walk in the Yorkshire Dales with some of my colleagues. I took my new digital camera along with me. If you want to see what the Yorkshire countryside looks like in winter, you can find the pictures here.
Wednesday, 17 January was my 60th birthday. It was also the day for us to leave Gran Canaria and travel back to Málaga. Fortunately, the journey was much less stressful than the outward trip had been a week earlier. We arrived at the Arrieros hotel in Colmenar in the late afternoon, where the manager told us that Steve and Jo's van had broken down, and they would be coming by taxi to the hotel for my birthday dinner. When they arrived, they explained that the van had been overheating and was currently having the radiator repaired at a garage in Málaga. The first thing we wanted to ask them was whether there was any news about their water situation. When we left them the previous week, their new borehole was not producing any water, which could mean either that the pump had broken (expensive and difficult repair) or that the borehole had already run dry (total disaster). All they could tell us was that an electrician was coming to inspect the pump some time in the next few days. Tom was in an adventurous mood, and insisted on demonstrating to me how he could climb all the way up the hotel's main staircase and down again without any assistance from me. He was clinging firmly onto the stair rail, but managed to stay on his feet the whole time. [That's enough of the proud grandfather talk, I think you'll agree.] The hotel's kitchen specialises in traditional Andalusian country cooking. For dinner, I had sopa de picadillo (a soup consisting of a broth poured over a dish of croutons, diced ham and hard boiled egg, and flavoured with a sprig of mint) followed by estofado de chivo (goat stew, in a rich gravy). The hotel presented us with a bottle of champagne on the house.
Steve and Jo gave me a litre of their own olive oil, grown, harvested, pressed and filtered by themselves. Both these gifts mean a lot to me, but best of all was to have most of my family around me on my birthday. <GRIPE> After the broad hint I gave in the entry for 3 January, I was hoping that on returning home I would find that lots of my online friends would have sent greetings for my 60th birthday. I don't often complain or feel sorry for myself, but I have to say that the response was disappointing. Within the pile of junk mail and circulars there were only three birthday greetings. It kind of made me wonder if there was much point on continuing to write here.</GRIPE> But in the ten days since then, several others have written either welcoming me back or sending birthday greetings. To all of them, many thanks. I very much appreciate it.
There were not many other people in the Arrieros dining room on the evening of my birthday dinner, but we noticed a woman dining on her own at the other end of the room. Little Tom was the one to make contact with her, of course. He trotted down the room carrying some toy and presented it for her inspection. Then Mary went along and started to talk to her. When I heard the American accent I went over to her table too. Her name was Elizabeth, from Scottsdale, Arizona, and her mother had died a few weeks previously. She was spending a month travelling round Europe coming to terms with her loss and trying to sort out her life. We invited her over to our table for a drink, not realising that Steve had already swigged the remains of the champagne. But that didn't matter, because Elizabeth brought her own bottle of wine with her. We enjoyed chatting to her for the rest of the evening. Then Tom started to get tired, and Steve and Jo had to take him back to the farm (by taxi: their van was at the garage in Málaga). As they left, we saw that Steve was talking to the manager of the hotel. It occurred to me that maybe he was paying for the meal. The next day, when I went to pay the hotel bill, I found that he had indeed paid for my birthday dinner. I thought that was a really nice gesture, and I told Steve so, adding that he shouldn't have done it. He replied "Well, you didn't make much of an effort to stop me!" Our flight back to Leeds was not until the evening, so we had most of the day available to drive Steve, Jo and Tom into Málaga to pick up their van. The mechanic at the garage said that they had fixed the radiator, but had not been able to do a road test because Steve had forgotten to leave the ignition key in the van. Steve's face fell when he heard this, because he did not have the key with him. (*sigh* That is just so typical of our Steve.) We had to drive them all the way back to the farm, about 45 minutes each way, to collect the key. We stopped for lunch at a roadside inn in the hills above Málaga and then dropped the key off at the garage so that they could do the road test. We went to the nearby Rosaleda mall to while away the afternoon before saying goodbye to our little family and heading for the airport for the flight back to snowy Leeds. This holiday is a great way to spend half of January, and we are already planning to do the same again next year. In fact, Mary is stepping her campaign to get me to take early retirement so that we can spend the whole winter in Spain. I might not need too much persuading. The only thing that stops me from applying to retire right away is that I can't afford it for the next couple of years while I am supporting Liz through college. But after that...
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The
visit to Spain was pretty much a rerun of 
For
my birthday present, Liz and Mary had decided to club together. Their first
idea was to find a nice piece of glassware for me. I love