Yesterday I succeeded in catching the third smallest fish in the Río Guadalhorce. I landed this modest creature after having previously hooked the second smallest and the smallest fish in this river. Those other two fish proceeded to inhale a fly that was roughly the same size as themselves. Both also flew through the air and landed in the river behind me, having parted company with the fly as they were hoisted from the water. As far as I could tell they landed safe and sound and were unharmed by the whole experience. I imagine that when they re-entered the water after their arching flight through the air and having regained their composure, they said to themselves “Jesus Christ! What just happened there?!”
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I found myself walking around Ávila this morning in the very early hours, before most people were stirring. Shortly into my walk, an illuminated sign outside a farmacia told me that the time was 06.33 and the temperature was 2°C. If I’d had any kind of a brain at all, I would have been tucked up in bed, but Trinny and I were in Ávila for just one night and I wanted to get a feel for the place without the distraction of the visitors. I figured that walking alone on cobbled streets before dawn might be something to savour, and so it proved to be. Apart from one man, unsteady on his feet and likely making his way home to bed, I had the sleeping town to myself.
View full article »Does the world make much sense to you? If it does, even in a small way, you are doing much better than me. Much of what I know about the state of the world I learn from podcasts as I walk my dog along the quiet, meandering tracks of our beautiful Andalusian campo. Listening to the news keeps me broadly in the loop, but it is hardly cheerful. I may be surrounded by peaceful landscapes, but my headphones connect me to the woes of distant parts of the world. Even nature struggles to help at times. A little owl may be peering down at me from a telegraph wire as news comes in of the latest madness from Washington, or some random cruelty meted out to innocents far away.
View full article »You may have noticed that I have been very quiet for some time on the subject of my own local river, the Río Guadalhorce. The simple truth is that it has been through some hard times in recent years but there are signs now, happily, that it is beginning to pull through. The river dried out in the summer of 2023 following a period of drought and the fish dropped back into whatever deeper pools they could find, or down towards the estuary.
View full article »They say that an early morning swim in the sea is a good cure for a hangover and so at 08.00 yesterday we dragged ourselves to the stony beach by the harbour at Hastings and launched ourselves into the waters of the English Channel to test this particular theory.
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