A new year begins.
Oh well, yet another year over, how time
flies. It’s hard to believe that we are into our 8th
year in Spain. Sometimes, it seems like only yesterday
that we arrived, though at other times its hard to
remember a time when we weren’t living here.
A good side effect of living in Spain, I have found, is
that you don’t seem to suffer from the January blues
that is so often a problem in England. At least we have
plenty of sunny days here and that feeling that spring
is just around the corner. Saying that though, the
winters here can seem very harsh, compared to the mostly
mild winters of England with the central heating and
carpets.
I often feel like I am living in one of those old black
and white films where the family is fighting the
elements, trying to get the harvest in while a monsoon
is wreaking disaster – thats me on a wet and windy day,
trying in vain to hold on to the tarpaulin covering the
horses straw before it blows away, soaked to the skin
and almost blowing away myself, or trudging through mud
in my wellies, trying to feed the horses and clean them
out without falling over while icy horizontal rain
blasts me in the face. Life can be very hard, but there
is also a satisfying feeling, when you come in from the
cold and sit in front of a roaring log fire.
Writing about the problems with the tarpaulin has just
reminded me of something that happened with my cockeral.
The wind had torn the tarpaulin literally into shreds
leaving strands of blue fibre littering the riding arena
like wool. One evening when I was shutting the chickens
in for the night I noticed that the poor cockeral had
what looked like balls of blue wool wound round his feet.
I can’t imagine how he could have got into such a tangle.
Anyway, I set about trying to unwind the material from
his feet, thinking that he would not be too happy about
it and expecting to be pecked. Unbelievably, he just sat
on his perch and let me get on with it. It wasn’t a
quick task, but he seemed to know that I was helping him.
The chickens are funny creatures, and usually quite
scared, running off squawking at the slightest thing.
Choco (our water dog) still sends them into a frenzy if
he even as much as walks near them. Poor Choco, he
doesn’t want to hurt them but they don’t understand that.
 Mind you, Choco is in the dog house for a different
reason – I thought that some of the hens had stopped
laying as we were getting very few eggs, that was until
I found him in the hen house today, eating the eggs – I
wonder how many more he has eaten? The hole into the
chicken shed is quite small, and I had no idea that
Choco could fit through it. I’m sure that too many eggs
can’t be good for a dog, so I will have to be careful.
Its bad enough that I have an egg mad horse to contend
with. Lola always follows me round to the chicken shed
and hangs about outside hopefully – she loves eggs and
will eat one whole, shell and all, taking it straight
from my hand. Apparantly it doesn’t do a horse any harm
to have the odd egg so I do occasionally give in to her
– its fun to watch her bite in to it and dribble it
every where. The other horses always think they are
missing out on a treat and have all tried an egg, but
none of the others like them.
The weather is definately more dramatic here and we are
always thinking of ways of making our life easier when
dealing with the extremes. We really must build a barn
to store the straw as tarpaulins are a waste of time and
money. Another job to add to the list! We do enjoy it
though, as it does give you that feeling of adventure
and at least we can rely on good weather more often than
not.
A few years ago we were lucky enough to have an advert
for the Audi A4 filmed at our house. It was in May and
the weather on the run up to the weekend chosen for
filming was perfect. The film company were busy building
a mock up of an antiques shop on the end of the house,
you wouldn’t believe the amount of work that goes in to
filming an advert that lasts a few seconds. Of course,
on the day of filming the weather changed and we had
torrential rain with mud every where. The catering lorry
that was parked on our threshing circle got bogged down
in the mud and had to be towed out, leaving muddy ruts
for us to sort out. Just to add insult to injury, we
never did see the advert, though it was apparantly shown
on one of the Spanish satelite stations.
At the moment it is hard to even remember what rain is,
it seems so long since we have had any. It is very
worrying as we certainly don’t want a repeat of the
draught two years ago.
Being keen skiers, we had all but given up on getting
our ski fix over Christmas, with the Sierra Nevada
website showing limited runs open and over crowding. We
had decided to give it a miss, but thankfully we had a
friend from England staying who was very keen to go up
there so we risked it on the day before the three kings.
We expected it to be a waste of time and money, but
apparently so did everyone else as it was pretty near
perfect conditions and almost empty – what luck!, we
won’t dismiss it in such a hurry in future. Our friends
couldn’t believe their luck either, especially as all
week they had been basking in sunshine, riding and
cycling and even swimming in the pool.
We finally found homes for all of the puppies the week
before Christmas. (For those of you who haven’t read
previous articles, our dog had eleven puppies in
September). What a horrendous depressing task that was,
I felt quite desperate at times, worrying that I would
never home them. They were all so cute and the older
they got the more attached I got to them.
 With a
combination of advertising and taking them to local
farmers markets I gradually whittled them down, keeping
one for us (how could I resist). It was sad to see them
go but what an amazing episode, though never to be
repeated! (Chici has been fixed now) The site of eleven
puppies running around was like something out of a
Disney film. Their poor mum was incredible, to raise
them all to be fat and healthy is quite an achievement.
By the time they were eight weeks old she had had enough
though – it was quite hysterical watching her trying to
run away, with puppies clinging to her teats and
dropping off all over the place as she made her get
away. Choco was like a gentle giant – the puppies loved
him and were forever climbing all over him and teasing –
he was so tolerant and never snapped. Scruffy and Suzy
were not impressed and kept well out of the way, as did
the cats, though the younger ones were happy to play
sometimes.
With seven cats to choose from, the puppies didn’t go
short of reluctant play mates. We did have only three
cats until last summer when Clive found a beautiful blue
eyed grey kitten in a dustbin and a few weeks later we
had three more tiny kittens dumped on us. It has been an
expensive time lately, having them all fixed, not to
mention the food bill.
As luck would have it, our guests during the puppy
period were all families with small children. They
thought they had gone to heaven having eleven puppies to
play with and the puppies enjoyed it too. I even learned
the phrase for ‘can we have the puppies out’ in Danish,
as it was the constant cry of the three little Danish
children we had staying with us. They had driven down
from Denmark and were tempted to take a puppy back with
them, though worried about driving all the way with such
a young dog. Fate intervened half way through their
holiday however, when a beautiful, pitifully thin little
black dog was dumped outside the house. I could not
resist feeding her as she was starving, but we decided
to take her into the town and leave her where she might
be more likely to find food and even a home. There was
no way we could take on another dog and we were so fed
up with always having to deal with stray dogs. Anyway,
we took her the 5 km into town and left her one evening
and to our amazement she was back outside the following
morning, having walked all the way!
Our Danish family were so impressed by what she had
done, and quickly fell in love with her. She was such a
gentle dog and great with the children. I ended up
taking her to the vet to get a passport and micro chip
etc. and now she is living very happily in Denmark.
Her incredible persistence had paid off.
To be continued……………………………
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