Rocking Your World 2018; Week 49

Well it has been a lovely week here this week, so there is plenty to smile about. The sun has shone all week, at least for most of the day, and there has been some real warmth in it, with little or no wind to make you feel chilly. So on Monday morning Chris and I went to a Christmas Fair at the camp site near us. There was a good turnout, and plenty of stalls to browse through. Some were trade stalls, but most were hand-crafted items with everything from soap to chocolates, jewelry and a variety of Christmas decorations.

I was very lucky because Chris bought me two presents and let me choose them. The first was a lovely crystal pendant, but the lady wrapped it up so beautifully, so I can't show that yet. The second was a very colourful pair of hand made leather shoes. They are light as a feather and will be very comfy I am sure. I managed to take a quick picture of them before they were tucked away in Chris' office until Christmas day. I don't normally have quite such vibrant footwear, but they are fun, and I shall enjoy wearing them. My son's comment was "There is nothing wrong with having an aging hippie for a mum"!

When we had finished at the market we decided to have our lunch out, but the first place we tried was closed. A lot of bars and restaurants around here close on Mondays. So we went on up the steep windy roads behind our village, to the little cluster of white buildings known as Bédar. It is a small village with narrow streets, and cramped houses, but there are now many new villas on the surrounding hills and they all command an impressive view. We went to the Mirador, a restaurant we used to visit quite often, but it is a few years since we were last up there. I wouldn't chose to drive up to it after dark, but it is a lovely place for a menu del día. We sat on the open roof terrace and it was really warm in the sun. And we had one of the best meals we have had in a long time.

I took this view from a little further up the hill, where we managed to find a parking space. You can see right down passed our village, passed Turre and Mojacar, to the sea. It is hard to tell where the sea ends and the sky starts.

Monday was a busy day as we also went out in the evening, to the traditional festival of nine lessons and carols in the big, ancient church in Mojacar Pueblo. This is one of my favourite celebrations. It is a joint venture between the Spanish catholic church and our Anglican chaplaincy. Our two priests lead the service together, readings are alternately read one in English and one in Spanish, and the carols are also alternately Spanish and English. And at the end we sing Silent Night each in our own language at the same time, and it works surprisingly well. The English carols are sung as congregational hymns with everyone joining in, but two of the Spanish ones are sung by the church choir and two by the local gypsy choir. This is the highlight for me, and in case you have never heard a gypsy choir singing carols (and I'm betting most of you haven't), click HERE for a short video of one of their songs. This is singing in the Flemenco style, and it is never as gentle as some of our carols are, but there were only four men and eight ladies in this choir, and they sure filled the church with their joyous voices.

This is a nice photo of our two priests. On the left is father Miguel who oversees four Spanish churches in this area, including the one in our village and this big one in Mojacar. On the right is our vicar, Rev. Vincent, who oversees the three little churches in our Chaplaincy. It is great to have such a good rapport between these two groups. Of course the Catholic churches are not exclusively Spanish and we welcome Spanish folk at our services, but it is mainly split in that way, due to language as much as anything.

For the rest of the week I have been mostly wrestling with a craft project I promised to do for our carol service at our church, later in the month. I am glad to say it is done now, and yesterday I took it to a meeting with a few other people to try and inspire them to have a go too. I won't show it here until after the service though.

We were very surprised to find that the village Christmas lights were turned on this week. Usually they wait until the week before Christmas. I always assumed this was because they stay on until 7th January, after our Three Kings celebration.  So I now have a little white angel at my gate each night, with golden hair and a golden star. They are different from the angels we had on a previous year, as they were blue when lit. She is very pretty isn't she?

I had to laugh at Arwen this week. She has her full winter coat now, and has just adopted my low step stool as her 'perch' for a while. From on top she is almost a perfect circle.

I called her to try and get her to look up for a photo, so we could see her big yellow/green eyes, but she hates having her picture taken, and if look could kill...

On Wednesday I did a little shopping after my sewing group, while I was in Turre, and I noticed that the little garden centre in the middle of the town, had a new display of poinsettias in, so I thought I would buy a couple while they were fresh and I could take my pick. In the end I bought this beautiful peachy yellow one. Most of the yellow ones were a hard acid yellow, but this one was a warm shade with pink tinges to the petal edges, and it had a light spray of fine glitter on it. It is now on a low stand on our front porch, and it is a real beauty.

Of course you can't really beat a true red poinsettia so I have two smaller red ones on either side of the yellow one. And I also bought a small red one to sit on our dining table.

I forgot to take a photo of these today so these two were taken after dark, with just the porch light on, so they are a bit darker than they should be. I may take a better one tomorrow.

And lastly, here is a picture of my little lemon tree. We planted it as just a small thin stick, several years ago. They have to be four years old before they bear any fruit, but this usually manages to have four to six good lemons on it. But this year it has nearer twenty-six, and I have had to use straps to support the thinner branches now the fruit are quite big. I have just looked up a recipe for lemon curd, and I think there will be a lemon meringue pie and maybe a lemon drizzle cake making an appearance very soon. Any other ideas for using them are very welcome.

At lunch time today our choir sang a programme of music from our London concert, some Christmas songs and some carols, for a private function at Arboleas gardening club. The theatre was full and they all seemed to enjoy it. They keep asking us back each year so they must like what we do! We have our own concert for "Family & Friends" next Friday evening. It is a very popular concert and we always get a good crowd there.

And that just about wraps it up for this week, so feel free to stop reading there if you want to.

But now I am going to show a few pictures from my visit to son number two last month. I have decided that I have too many photos from my trip to Denmark, to include them in this blog, so as soon as I have time to sort them out, I will do a special post just about them, and link it into my next Friday post.

My second son Michael recently moved to a new house in Llanymynech, near Oswestry and very close to the border between Shropshire and Wales. He wanted me to see it, and I do like to have seen their houses so I can picture them there, so while I was in UK I travelled to Wellington, (where Mike works), on the train, and he picked me up from the station on his way home. His house is lovely, with much more space for his big family, but it was too dark to see outside, so I was looking forward to the morning. We had a lovely tea together and then my granddaughter and one of my great-grandsons came round to chat which was  nice surprise. I spent the evening being sat on by two dogs and tormented by two kittens until they all got warm and sleepy and settled down together.

When I woke up it was rather cloudy but the sun was doing its best to break through.

Mike had the morning off so after breakfast the boys went off to school, and Mike, Lucy and I took the dogs for a walk, (Well Lucy walked the dogs and Mike took me up the hill in his car!) and we walked along the edge of the golf course. The views were stunning. You could see right out to Wales, as well as back to our home town of Oswestry.

The trees were still showing their autumn colours and it was beautiful.

The path we were on was right on the edge of the cliff, and it looked a long was down so we were careful not to slip on the wet grass.

We then got back in the car and drove down to their house and a short distance further on to some woods that led to the old lime kiln. This is now a heritage site and has been renovated a little, and it was interesting to see. The lime kiln itself is still intact.

You can walk inside it. It is dark and damp and it was hard to imagine it full of rocks, packed round with the burning coals used to extract the lime from them.

There were still some outbuildings standing, and lots of equipment that would have been used there.

This poor man had the job of walking on the roof opening and closing small vents to keep the furnace burning at the right temperature.

It was a tough place to work and many of the men died young because the lime dust got in their lungs.

As we walked back through the woods to the car I saw this old tree branch covered in a deep green moss.

Very soon it was time to get back in the car. Mike then drove me to visit our lovely host Annie, coming back for me an hour later so he could drive me back to the station on his way to work for the afternoon. I packed a lot into a very short visit, but I am glad I manged to see them all. (I showed my photo with Annie a couple of week ago).

And now I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles, and Rocking Your World, and go and get some much needed beauty sleep.

Rocking Your World 2018: Week 48

Hello again. I have decided to start this week with a couple of little things that have made me smile this week, and then I will have a very condensed version of my time in Birmingham and Manchester.

I am happy that the weather has improved greatly this week, and most days we have had some sunshine, with bright blue skies. It comes to an abrupt halt around 5.00, and we have really needed the fire to be lit most evenings, but blue skies days are fine by me. 

One morning I noticed this little ray of sunshine sitting on my front step. The plant is a very old  house plant, a chrysanthemum that I put there, because I can't bear to throw them away while they still show signs of life. The flowers were much bigger when it was new, but it has produced so many little ones that I am glad I kept it.

Yesterday I heard a lorry engine running outside for longer than usual, so I peeked out and saw a man unloading this.

It made me smile because it meant the Town Hall were getting ready for Christmas. From my posts of previous years you will know that we have a telegraph pole outside our gate, and every year we have a Christmas light hung from it. There is one the same every few metres down the road. I assume they are hired as every year they are different. I could see we have a star this year but I didn't realise what the rest was. Soon the man was lifted up by the bucket crane. He was having trouble fixing it to the pole arm. I think his hands must have been cold.

Today it is clear that we actually have pretty angel under the star. We have had an angel before but I think this is a different one. It won't be turned on until the week before Christmas, but I am looking forward to seeing it.

We had a bit of a health scare with Chris last weekend, and I had to take him to the urgencia in Garrucha. (Urgencias are emergency drop-ins found in most large towns, which are open whenever the doctors surgeries are closed. By going to one, you can often avoid a long drive, and a long wait in the hospital A&E). They were very good there, and kept us for three hours while Chris had regular checks, plus oxygen and drips, and when everything was back to normal, they sent us home. We knew he had an infection but the antibiotics hadn't kicked in at the time. Thankfully they did do the trick, and he is now fine.

Last week was cold and wet, and as I can normally dry my washing outside, I do not have a tumble drier, and there is little space inside for hanging things up to dry. So I was reluctant to tackle the pile of worn clothes I had brought back with me, and I was really glad to see the forecast showed we would have better weather this week. So Monday I managed to get two loads on. By the time the first load was done, a sharp wind had got up, and I had a battle to get things on the line. I doubled pegged everything and hoped for the best. I did have to rescue a couple of items than blew down, but I was happy to get everything washed and dried by the end of the day.

I had another mince-pie session also on Monday. I made five dozen for my boys while I was in UK, and then six dozen last week for the church Christmas Fair last Saturday. They had a sunny, though a bit chilly day, and there was a good turnout. I was happy to see my pies selling like 'hot cakes', and the event raised 3,436€, which is more than last year, and gives a much needed boost to our church funds.

This weekend I am on tea duty after Church, so I made a further six dozen pies, half for church and half for us. I will need to do one more batch so I can donate them for after the carol service on 18th, but that will be me done then.

So back to my holiday. As I have so many photos I have made collages with some of them. After the concert in London, Chris returned to Spain, and I went to Birmingham with our youngest son Ben. He had to work some of the time, so I jumped on a bus (a luxury we don't have here), and had a lovely wander through the city. I am not a city person really, but we have no big stores around here, and my shopping trips usually are just to food stores, and hardware centres, so it was good to take my time and see the various trends this year. Debenhams had a great clothing sale and I was able to buy a few treats for myself. I always used to go to British Home Stores, and I really miss them, but I am very pleased with this year's purchases.

I also like to go through the New Street Station. It is a slightly odd design in my opinion, but I like it as a visitor. I took a photo of the 'eye', just as the changing photo came to the iconic bull. This was my landmark for getting back home, but when I came back out under it, I couldn't find my bus stop anywhere. Ben later told me that there are three eyes. I didn't know that, and I was obviously under the wrong one! 

In the main atrium, the floor had a special display of photos of women making up a photo-mosaic of a vintage lady. I didn't have time to read up much about it, but it was all to do with the Suffragette movement, and the anniversary of women getting the vote.

As I walked down from my bus that first morning I was again delighted with all the autumn colours in the trees. The leaves were falling rapidly, and I dare say the trees are bare by now, but I enjoyed seeing them.

After a few days I went out to visit our son Tom in Denmark. Then I visited our second son Mike and son number one in Wolverhampton,  (More about those next week).

My last trip was to Manchester where son number four, Jonathan, lives with his wife Ella. I made friends with their new dog, Rudy, a staffie/greyhound cross. Jonathan took the afternoon off and met me at the train station. Just outside was this very poignant armistice day display, to comemorate those who lost their sight during the wars. 

Together we walked down into the town through the newly opened Christmas market and I loved it. It is far larger and more exciting than the one in Birmingham. I loved all the stalls piled high with decoration, little wooden houses, elves and gnomes, etc. etc. Of course there were also lots of food and drink stalls. We had a warming mug of rum punch, and tried tasters of some other liquors too.

There was a large inflated Father Christmas, high above the square, and everyone was cheerful and enjoying the atmosphere.

I offered to buy Jonathan a decoration for his home and he chose a black star with flowers cut out and backed in red and yellow. It lit up from inside and was very pretty. 

For his wife Ella I bought three little ceramic owls that were "See no evil; Hear no evil; Speak no evil".

She knew instantly what they were, and she loved them.

The next day I had to get back to Ben's as I was flying home from Birmingham the following day. Jonathan took me back to the station on a tram. We decided to walk the last bit and we went through a big park area where this fountain was flowing. In Spain they usually turn them off at the end of the summer season, but it looked as though this one would be going all winter.

I very rarely take selfies, but I realised I had been so busy at each of my sons' houses that I hadn't got many photos of them. So I stopped him by the fountain and took this one of Jonathan and I.

Ben's partner was out on my last night in UK, so I quickly packed my cases, (and made up a parcel for Ben to send of all the things that wouldn't fit in!), and then he sang for me. He has all his music set up in his room, and he played a bit of piano, and then did some karaoke. Here, at my special request, he is singing Ed Sheeran's 'Supermarket Flowers'. It is one of my favourites but he won't sing it in public because it makes him tear up. But I got my own private showing!

When he had sung enough, we went downstairs and he persuaded me to try his Virtual Reality headset. I was unsure as I have seen people falling over and feeling sick with one, but I stayed firmly sitting down and he talked me trough it. I actually amazed him because I completed a big roller-coaster ride, and I am never willing to go on one for real. (I still wouldn't). But it was a very strange sensation to be sitting in an empty theatre, with the lights dimmed, when in my head I knew I was sitting on a sofa in Ben's room! I didn't know he had taken a photo of me but he showed me this the next day.

And then it was time to fly home!

So I will close this week with some stunning sunsets that have happened just this week. The first set were taken on Monday. They all happened within  about a quarter of an hour, so I sat and watched the amazing light show.

And finally I have two from last night. I popped out around 5.30 to look for something I needed from the Chinese bazaar in Vera and as I parked the car I saw this lovely sunset.

It was just dying down, and as the colours left the sky I saw this big flock of birds (probably Spanish starlings), heading home to roost for the night. I just managed to catch them before they flew off.

Phew! Well done if you stayed with me through all of that. Now I just have time to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and then I am off to a double choir practice. First I have one for a small group of us who are learning a Spanish lullaby for our church carol service, and then the main choir as we have two concerts before Christmas.