fishydreams

Sunday is Karaoke night in Villafranco. It happens all year round. In the summer the man with the microphone and the machine takes all his kit outside and the punters, performing al fresco, create a din that I can hear from the dirt tracks leading through the campo along which the dogs and I are walking, fully a kilometer away. Continue reading →

One of the dafter ideas I have had in recent times is to propose a staff show to raise funds for the Red Cross. I had rather naively thought that we might get a few volunteers to come up with some acts but it seems that volunteers are thin on the ground. Nevertheless we soldiered on and put something together. My friend Dave Cale took on the music and the staff band was awesome. Apart from music the rest of the show consisted of me doing some standup.

This is not the first time I have had a crack at standup but the scarcity of other acts meant I had to do quite a lot of it – over an hour!

Thankfully it seemed to go OK and people had a good night.

For the hell of it I have included a short extract from the comedy script. The following lines are part of a dialogue between me and the priest that takes place in the confession box. I had just admitted to all kinds of inappropriate sexual fantasies involving the women in the parish.

Continue reading →

Recently I got a message from another fisherman, Dave Felce, who also likes to fish for carp on the fly. Dave lives in the UK but is an occasional visitor to Spain and likes to wet a line in Extremadura whenever he can. He was kind enough to say that he enjoyed what I had written on the subject in my book and that he has a perspective on the subject of fly fishing for carp that is very similar to my own.

He included with his message an excellent article he had written on the subject and was kind enough to let me reproduce it here:

Continue reading →

On Tuesday I spent a little while playing with plastic building blocks with a delightful young lady in Tangiers. There were about eight of us sitting around a little table building all manner of temporary structures from colourful blocks, or, in our case dismantling them. As it happens we soon discovered that our own particular aptitude was for demolition. The young lady in question would pull apart the two block structure I had assembled and then make a spectacular facial expression to indicate wonder or awe or surprise. I would mirror the expression in turn and we both spent quite a while fully immersed in this little game: assembling, dismantling and then expressing complete astonishment.

The young lady in question has Down syndrome just like all the other children in her school and I was part of a visiting group from the school where I teach. There were 25 of us in all, two teachers and 23 of our sixth form students including my daughter, Pippa. Continue reading →