I’ve inadvertently electrocuted Enrique

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Paul

It has been a pretty normal day.

I overslept, took the skin off three knuckles in an ivy related incident, witnessed the installation of the roof membranes and batons, met with the architect who seems pretty happy, and electrocuted Carlos’s donkey – known to me as Enrique (see previous blog entry).

Pulling the shutters all the way down and then not setting my alarm is fatal. Fatal in that I didn’t wake up until almost ten o’clock, and then only because the first ‘loud haler’ car of the day came through Taramundi lasting out a message about Sunday’s parliamentary elections.

It was a mixture of drizzle and rain up at the house, so rather than dig through water laden mud, clothes, and goodness knows what else in the horno/bodega, I set about removing thirty years of ivy from its walls, perhaps a little too vigorously. When one particularly tough vine finally let go, my bare right hand (my gloves were in my pocket where they weren’t guarding anything) hit the opposing wall and I was without some of the skin I’d awoken with an hour earlier.

Quietly nursing my injury I decided to spend some time watching Angel, and a new previously unseen member of the team, cutting the hole in the roof for the chimney and then installing the membrane and batons ready to receive the roof slates, which Arturo has now spend two days hand cutting.

Roof membrane and batons

Lunch-time arrived quickly, thanks mostly to my tardiness in starting the day, and while the workers were whisked off for their cooked meal in Pontenova I retired to the Landrover for my empanada and fruit, and as a special treat I’d bought Enrique his very own apple.

My lunch finished I wandered over to Enrique, who has now learnt that it is worth his while to watch me eat lunch from the corner of our paddock. I gave him my apple core, while hiding a nice, whole, shiny red apple behind my back.

One he’d finished my leftovers I moved closer and offered the whole apple on an open hand. Unbeknownst to me I was resting my leg against Carlos’s electric fence and as Enrique leaned forwards to take the apple, the charge went from the fence, through my body, into the apple and gave Enrique quite a jolt to the end of his nose. He was far from happy, running off down the field, the apple still in my hand.

Is this what is known as ‘killing him with kindness’.

I think it’s going to take some time to re-build the confidence between us!

 

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A simple thing of extreme beauty

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Paul

This morning, while I slaved away with pick-axe and shovel in the horno/bodega, the ‘team’ were finishing the roof beams and readying themselves for an afternoon of ‘thermochip’ installation.

Facundo showed up after lunch to join in the great unveiling and ensure that the first couple of boards were correctly in place, and I was doing my usual trick of hanging around and watching when he decided that it was time to unwrap the houses newest present.

A couple of weeks ago I have accompanied Facundo to another house to look at some pine thermochip that he’d recently installed. I didn’t like it and asked him to price up the large chestnut faced thermochip that he’d initially shown us in a different house. For the extra 300 Euros that he quoted I thought it a worthwhile investment (approximately 10 Euros per square metre more than pine). Today my decision was vindicated.

The simple thing of beauty

This is the thermochip that Facundo and his men installed today. 10mm of real chestnut, 50mm of thermal insulation and a 10mm chipboard back.

Facundo, Roman and Arturo fitting the second panel

The panels are installed with the beautiful chestnut side down (obviously) and screwed into place on the beams.

As it looks installed

The final effect is stunning. I am more than happy. With every passing day I can’t wait until we get full planning permission through and get get this little, but perfectly formed, barn complete so we can spend some time here.

On my personal campaign in the horno/bodega. Today I found; a bicycle, twenty more bottles, a dozen rusty scythes, more rotting clothes and shoes for my rotting clothes mountain, and something very large (I know not what) which is still half buried under detritus.

I have now cleared three square metres down to floor level and battle will recommence at 09:00 tomorrow, so long as my ‘glass back’ feels better in the morning.

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I’ve watched my last ‘Time Team’

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Paul

I’ve always loved ‘Time Team‘ with the enthusiastic Tony Robinson, the sceptical Professor Aston, the argumentative romantic Phil Harding, and the upper class toff Guy de la Bédoyère (which has to be a name he either bought, or made up to get his Equity Card).

I loved the three days of archaeological panic packed into an hour, and the one really special artifact that they somehow manage to find on even the most unpromising of digs. But no more…I’m done with archaeology.

Today, while a skeleton staff of Angel and Pepe continued to work on the roof, I decided to make a start of clearing some of the detritus from the horno/bodega which I excitedly broke into last week. The idea was to clear the entrance to enable Amanda, my brother Ian and sister-in-law Karen (who all arrive on Friday for a fleeting visit) to gain access to view the bread oven.

After clearing away the overhanging ivy and brambles it was time to tackle the several feet of rubbish which had accumulated under the collapsed roof. A bit of domestic archaeology, peeling back the recent layers of dirt (starting with the collapsed roof tiles) to uncover the interesting artifacts contained within. And then I ran up against the same old problem which I have encountered elsewhere on site.

The previous owners of our house were either kleptomaniacs, or happy to live in their own filth. It seems that as soon as a room or building fell out of use they turned it into a makeshift skip, filled it, and then forgot about it.

The first square metre cleared

I cleared about a square metre in the entrance (only another 40 to go) and out of that one square metre I have made three big piles of items which should have been taken away to landfill on the day they ceased to be useful.

Ten green bottles lying on a wall

There were enough bottles to set up both a vineyard and a jam factory (all empty).

Shirts, coats, dresses, tights (lots of) and shoes

Enough old and rotting clothes to hold a pretty good jumble sale.

Seed trays, tool boxes and loads of plastic bags

And enough plastics to help you to understand why ICI were such a successful firm in the 1970’s.

And then in dawned on me. Time Team is all about uncovering the rubbish which people threw into disused rooms and forgot about. Give our place another couple of hundred years and they’d love it. They’d be uncovering sauce jars, wine bottles, seed trays and flip-flops.  They make their living by scratching the surface of the redundant, discarded and unwanted.

The gloss has gone off the whole archaeology thing for me. No more Time Team…and just another 40 cubic metres of debris to go!

 

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A case under the trade descriptions act

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Paul

It’s six o’clock in the evening on Sunday and I feel shattered.

Friday night/Saturday morning seemed to go on forever. After a hard days graft I went to bed at a civilised 11:30pm and just as I was drifting off the racket started up.

I’d seen the bill posters around the area for the Fiesta de San Martin, a traditional end of harvest celebration which also signifies the slaughter of the family pig which has been fattened all summer, and an impromptu jobs fair for those who had been working the land and who were now looking for alternative employ for the long winter ahead.

Quite an inaccurate poster

The noise, coming from the school yard about fifty paces away, carried on until around 4am and woke me several times from attempts at sleep as they ratcheted up the public address system volume another notch. After the music ended it took another two hours for the shouting an singing to die down, and two hours after that I was getting up to go to do some work at the house.

On the way back I took a closer look at the posters. Last night had been the pre-amble, the main party was happening tonight. I decided following the old adage of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ and an afternoon nap later I was ready for the main Fiesta.

The posters had suggested an evening start time of 10:30pm (around ‘party curfew time’ in the UK) but come 11:00pm the village was still silent save for the bustling pubs and restaurants. Just after 11:15 there were six very loud fireworks (bombas is the word for them in Spain, a far more accurate description), and then the band started up. I finished my beer and headed for the school yard.

What MANHATAN lacked in talent, they more that made up for in enthusiasm. A middle-aged boy-girl duo with gusto, cracking out Spanish ballads and love songs to an appreciative crowd of about fifty. Around twenty of the audience were under ten and having an impromptu game of soccer in front of the stage, and another ten of whom were over seventy and who were cuddling their other halves while shuffling around the playground.

I got another beer and waited for the main act, Rosa Negra, who I’d researched that afternoon and thought were worth a listen. But MANHATAN were going to give/get their moneys worth. At 1:15am they announced their last number, a sort of Spanish hokey-cokey, which saw me running for cover in a darkened corner and skillfully avoiding the demands for everyone to join in.

Then it was time for the headline act, and I was looking forward to it after listening to Rosa Negras album on Spotify that afternoon. But the two guys who got on stage looked nothing like the woman on the album cover, and when they started up they sounded nothing like the fusion of Portuguese, Asian and Arabic music to which I’d earlier been introduced.

Apparently there had been a late change. Instead of an attractive young lady with a haunting voice, Luis and Miguel Torres are two fifty something traditional Spaniards in black suits and black shirts and with brylcreemed back silver and black hair who belt out what can only be described as traditional Spanish songs with a 1970’s twist. I managed a song and a half before downing the rest of my beer and heading home.

Robbed of Rosa Negra I wondered if I could get my money back, before realising it hadn’t cost me a cent.

 

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The blind leading the blind

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Paul

Our next door neighbours in Liñeiras are English, for the moment at least. The house which they bought a couple of months after we acquired our pile of stones is back on the market and they are renovating another house in a nearby village. I think it was the enormity of the project which faced them, rather than the discovery that we were their new neighbours, which caused the change of plans.

We’ve met David a couple of times on previous visits but at the moment his girlfriend Catherine is over here doing work on the ‘other’ house. While she was up in Liñeiras a couple of days ago we got chatting and she came to have a look at the work on the barn. She was impressed, both with the price and the quality of the work, and she suggested that she’d like our builder Facundo to give her a quote for some work.

I mediated, and an appointment was arranged for Facundo to visit this morning to look at the works and arrange a quote, but it didn’t go well.

My Spanish mobile rang at about 10:30 with Facundo enquiring as to whether I’d be available to meet at 15:30 to go back to Catherine’s house and translate. They’d apparently not understood a word each other had said and agreed to bring me in as ‘piggie in the middle’. I’d been caught totally unawares, and whilst driving back from the house in torrential rain (which had sensibly halted all works), and agreed before really thinking it through.

This is the first trip that I’ve made to Spain on my own, without the castilian fluent Amanda, and up until the end of October the extent of my Spanish was to ask for a beer, or the bill. The rest of the time I spent grinning and nodding while Amanda did the speaking, waiting for a precis at some later time. I’ve hardly got a track record as a translator, but Facundo must have thought I was marginally better than nothing.

As the hour approached I got increasingly nervous. My discussions with Facundo have tended to involve a lot of pointing, re-explaining, miming, and frequently resorting to our ‘Spanish Dictionary for Construction and DIY‘. I was hoping that some of these recently acquired construction words would get me through, I just hoped that she wanted walls, floors, concrete and heating.

Catherine’s approach to detailing works is, to say the least, a little scatter-gun. She switched from describing essential works (heating, plumbing and cooking) to what she’d like to do in the future (balconies, exposed internal stonework, guest accommodation). Facundo was looking increasingly confused as I not only tried to translate but also to try and put some structure and priority to her requests.

What didn’t help, in visiting several of Catherines’ many outbuildings, was her fifteen month old male English bull terrier seeming to mistake my leg for a fifteen month old bitch English bull terrier….on heat. Trying to fend off his amorous advances, while consulting dictionaries and trying to remember what was being said, wasn’t simple. It was like a particularly difficult ‘It’s a Knockout Challenge‘ when just as you think it can’t get any harder they turn on the water cannons…and their tanks are full of farm slurry!

It was one of the most exhausting two hours (yes – two hours) that I have spent since arriving in Spain. Catherine’s Spanish comprises a sentence in English with the occasional Spanish word, which would almost be okay if that Spanish word was pronounced in such a way as to make it understandable to Spaniards. Facundo speaks no English whatsoever…and I was sweating beads of concentration.

It was definitely the blind leading the blind.

Catherine will get her quotation, but what it will be for is anyone’s guess.

 

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