You’ll have to forgive me for this one; this is shaping up to be a rather narcissistic blog with me as the centrepiece and is something that I am not quite comfortable with as yet.  It may be somewhat stilted and awkward.  Yes, I know, no change there then… Anyway, we have mostly sorted out…

Well, we are at home now after an extremely long week of packing a hired Luton van that had definitely seen better days – it had a stereo with a cd player – and driving it down to a broiling Andalusia and then unpacking it into a house that was already full of furniture.  Sonalee…

Difficult one, this one.   Where to start, really?  These past few weeks have not been easy for either of us.  It kind of caps off what has not been a great time for us in Madrid – or rather a boring commuter town north of Madrid. To sum it all up; I have been made…

I hate January.  Hate it so much.  Always have, always will.  I hate it more now that we are in Europe where the dark mornings and evenings are more pronounced and more, well, dark.  The cold I can deal with; the dark less so.  I need sunshine and lots of it if I am to…

Well, that was a farce.  Sonalee offered to be one of the Three Kings for the parade around the village  –  the dark one of the three obviously.  She was entered into a draw for the honour of doing so but her name did not get pulled out of the hat (a metaphorical one, I…

Here in Spain we have a phenominoninom, a phenorem, a phinomoninoy, a thing called El Puente, the Bridge.   It is where a bank holiday will appear on a Tuesday, for example, but many people and many companies also just take the Monday off as well because, what’s the point?  Unlike the UK, bank holidays are…

Life in the exam factory continues to be difficult with moments of happiness and I think it would be fair to say that the difficult part is slowly diminishing  and the moments of happiness or at least not being unhappy are  increasing as we adjust to life north of Madrid. In terms of the day…

The weather turned quite dramatically this last weekend – coincidentally Sonalee’s birthday.  We have, without warning, gone from Summer to Winter without any pause for an Autumn.  Seriously, one day I was out in shorts and t-shirt of an evening and the next I am in jeans and thermal jacket. It is quite bizarre for…

It’s really hard to try to describe the conflicting emotions at leaving somewhere that you loved living even as you realise that you were never going  to be financially enhanced by being  there.  It is a confusing miasma of feelings that I think you can never really reconcile. Having said that, Portuguese employment laws have…

Wow.  Just wow.  We have come back to Lisbon for a few weeks just because we think we will never get the chance to live here ever again (never say never, I know) but also because we wanted an escape from the unbelievable heat of Spain.  It is, as Sonalee observed, like living on a…