Hail Princess Destino !

This week I finally received Destino's pedigree papers, so she is now officially Destiny de la Sagra. (For some reason they anglicised her name. She is really Destino, Spanish for destiny). 'De la Sagra' means Sacred. The breeding house she came from was called Persas de la Sagra, (Sacred Persians), so all their kittens have that after their name. So she now thinks she is a real princess and I have given her a crown for the day! For her throne she has chosen my big ceramic bowl, bought in Spain one holiday many moons ago, transported to England and now back where it belongs! It is on the little table under our window, so she can sit there and watch the world go by, and when she is tired she can just curl up inside it. She looks very comfortable. Paco would look very uncomfortable in it. He is long with a firm, lean body, and he prefers to lay out at full stretch for his naps, though he did obligingly open his eyes for the camera.

While walking the dogs this week I found another new flowering shrub. I've no idea what it is but I call it the thorn bush. One day we walked by a group of them and they were bare, except for the wicked thorns all along the pale branches. A day or two later, the whole plant was a mass of really pretty white blossom. Just another of the little surprises that make our morning walks so interesting.

I decided to do a bit of DIY this week. We have some rather nice faux-cane dining furniture on our porch, where we sit for all our meals. It is actually 'plastic cane' woven on a sturdy metal frame. Of course the constant heat takes it's toll on the plastic which gets brittle. The main body of the chairs is still fine, but the plastic that lashes it to the frame had started to break. The loose ends were an open invitation to teething puppies to chew, so they have been getting rapidly worse. The row along the top of the chair backs must have worn before, because the previous owners had done a very good repair job with nylon cable ties. You hardly noticed it at all. So when I went to the Chinese Bazaar in Turre this week, I bought a few pack of these ties and set about mending all the frayed edges of the chairs. I must admit I did a pretty good job, and the chairs are now as good as new again - until the next time!

We had a short break from our Spanish lessons during August, but we went back for the first lesson of the new term this week. Paco, our teacher, had been to England for the first time, with a group of cycling friends. They rode their bikes through the Cotswolds and the South Downs. They were glad to have Paco with them as he speaks such good English and he was pleased that everyone understood him. I asked him what he remembers most about England and he said 'It is so green' and there are so many cows!' Apparently all of them came back with loads of photos of cows. It is something you only rarely see down here in Southern Spain, though there are more further north. It rained on him nearly every day and he couldn't get over how quickly the weather changed. He said they had to keep stopping to put their raincoats on, and then to take them off again. It is interesting to hear someone talk about the things that we took for granted, but I remember the intense green is what struck me most the day I returned from Cyprus after three years away. We certainly don't have much green around us here right now.