The weather has finally turned from very wet, at least temporarily, and into the normal kind of weather we associate with Cordoba i.e. hot and dry. It has been pissing it down for about six weeks now, which is not exactly normal and it does seem that a lot of rain has fallen in a…

For the first time in human history the majority of people no longer live in a rural environment. According to the United Nations, over 50% of the global population now lives in cities. The abandonment of the rural environment has grave consequences for society in general, as these areas are healthier places to live, produce…

Tuesday night football playing against the year 12 boys is continuing for me as is the pain in the legs for the two days that follow it.  I am very gradually improving my awareness, touch and fitness but it’s a slow process.  Tuesday night football is also the night when I fully experience the cold…

Priego de Cordoba is the nearest town from our village of Fuente Tojar. It is nearest in distance as the crow flies but is only accessible via a zig-zag road through the local hills; a road that is difficult for huge trucks to access easily. This is being rectified by a new, straighter road that…

Well, that was an interesting year.  And a good one, for the most part. I didn’t manage to finish the book that I have been working on for years but I did write more of it. I didn’t finish the other book that I started in the summer but I am very much nearly there.…

El Higueron is where we live during the week, albeit on the outskirts of it. When we tell people at work where we live they always look a mixture of puzzled, slightly alarmed and unsure of what to say next. This is because El Higueron is in the top fifteen places of deprivation in the…

The seasons have definitely changed here.  We have taken delivery of a trailer-full of olive tree wood and have stacked it in my superbly built* woodshed and have used it for a few weekends now. *please treat the word “superbly” with caution The change was, unfortunately, brought to vivid life in the disaster that befell…

This is not a blog So, El Higueron is a settlement on the outskirts of Cordoba that could be described as “Rough and Ready”, “Chavvy”, “Gypsy Town”, “A bit of a Dump” and many other similarly themed descriptions. It’s where we live. It has, next to the open railway lines, a huge piece of post-industrial…

So there has been a hiatus of a few months and much toing and froing about a home for this blog and whether it was something that I still wanted to do, in part thanks to the toing and froing that was doing my head in. Anyway, it is back.  It will be here for…

Apologies for the terse style and the hundreds of photos. We went on holiday to northern Portugal for a month. It was great. We needed to get away from the extreme heat of the village for a few weeks and it worked.  We had temperatures in the lower 20´s and even some rain.  We had…