It has been a bizarre month for Greyrocks. Here are five 60/70s numbers to illustrate the five themes (and George Martin, who sadly died this month, produced three of them):
Buses, Bono and Bounty
Births and Beyond
Buses, Bono and Bounty
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| Greyrocks' Fellow Traveller Friends |
After meeting John
and Tracey on their arrival for The Sardine we saw them several times by chance
or design and hatched a plan for a day trip exploiting their hire car. Greyrocks
wanted to show them the delights of Puerto but we also integrated a stop on the outskirts
so that Ruth could collect her replacement Bono from the bus company office. This is the rechargeable card
which gives a sizeable discount on bus fares to residents of the island. Ruth had lost hers
a month previously and emailed the company. Ironically the office is not
accessible by bus! Mission accomplished we parked on the seafront and set J and
T off for a stroll around whilst Ruth did her exercises on the pedals (see
below) Then we met again
and took a long delightful tapas lunch at the Greyrocks favourite of El Bounty and then went back to base.
On their penultimate night we went to Domingo's, and at the end of a very nice meal were saying Goodbye and Bon Voyage when a customer at the neighbouring table said "It's Ruth from Paleochora, isn't it? How is your wrist? We go home tomorrow and have been looking for you!" It took a while to establish that they were Anne and Tom from Ireland with whom Ruth had spent much of an afternoon outside Finikas during the September purdah! Much "small world" chat ensued and John and Tracey became further resolved to move into the centre of the Venn diagram this summer...
..which is where Ken and Kate now belong, having been in touch some time ago to say that this winter's sun-seeking trip would be to the south of our island. We agreed to meet in Puerto for a day together giving both couples a single bus trip, although theirs would be longer! It should have been easy, but a delay for them, a longer journey time than anticipated and a confusion about which road from Gran Tarajal is used by the numbers 1 and 10 buses led to a farcical half an hour of calls and waving! They were less than ecstatic about their hotel, resort and weather so far but we had a very pleasant sunny but windy few hours together largely replicating the activities of three days earlier, and they too raved about Bounty!
Bed Bugs
Following our visit to IKEA on Lanzarote last month we placed on order on-line for a lovely new bed with drawers plus a pretty good quality mattress and a topper. We picked a delivery date from what was on offer, and further paid for assembly. The deal is that stuff can either be left at a depot near the airport or, for 25 EUR, be delivered to home. A day or so later there is a failed phone call in very fast strongly accented Canarian Spanish further confused by Greyrocks forgetting that everywhere except in UK the company name is not pronounced "eye-kee-ya"
A second call tells us that the bed will be delivered on a Tuesday and assembled the next day. Fair enough - on the Sunday we move into the spare bedroom and Bob gets the legs off of the old bed base and removes the slats. We arrange for the council to collect the whole thing from our nearest skip point across the road which entails us putting it there on Monday evening. We look at the legless base and our convoluted staircase and realise we don't know how it went up there fourteen years ago when we moved in. There is no obvious way to de-construct it! Gary and Nicky from downstairs - not young but very fit - came round to help, but we strike a "Right Said Fred" impasse. It will not go down the stairs! It is resolved thus: We tie a sheet to the base, take it through the French windows and balance it on the wall of our bedroom balcony, It is lowered as far as the kitchen balcony and held there while Gary runs down to his terrace to take it. He and Bob then pass it over the high wall. He jumps over and it is taken to his nearest collection point. The mattress is thrown the whole way down and then passed over Gary's wall. Neighbours have since told us it was a good spectacle. Gary takes ownership of the slats with some plan for a dog enclosure, and by morning everything has been taken away.
Bed Bugs
A second call tells us that the bed will be delivered on a Tuesday and assembled the next day. Fair enough - on the Sunday we move into the spare bedroom and Bob gets the legs off of the old bed base and removes the slats. We arrange for the council to collect the whole thing from our nearest skip point across the road which entails us putting it there on Monday evening. We look at the legless base and our convoluted staircase and realise we don't know how it went up there fourteen years ago when we moved in. There is no obvious way to de-construct it! Gary and Nicky from downstairs - not young but very fit - came round to help, but we strike a "Right Said Fred" impasse. It will not go down the stairs! It is resolved thus: We tie a sheet to the base, take it through the French windows and balance it on the wall of our bedroom balcony, It is lowered as far as the kitchen balcony and held there while Gary runs down to his terrace to take it. He and Bob then pass it over the high wall. He jumps over and it is taken to his nearest collection point. The mattress is thrown the whole way down and then passed over Gary's wall. Neighbours have since told us it was a good spectacle. Gary takes ownership of the slats with some plan for a dog enclosure, and by morning everything has been taken away.
On Tuesday the delivery happens efficiently and we unfurl the mattress as instructed to give it 24 hours to take shape. We leave the many boxes undisturbed and sleep in the spare bedroom for what we believe will be the last time. However on Wednesday there is no call about assembly and no-one has come by 6 pm. It is time for the ritual of "Getting cross in Spanish!" We should never, it seems, have been told assembly would be on a Wednesday and we would have to wait until next week! We threaten them with dire consequences and next get a call to say it would be done on Friday as a special case. It was, and it is very comfortable, although Greyrocks' hearts sank when the nice man called us upstairs to show us a blemish on the headboard. We swiftly decided to accept it!
Bicycle Busting
The campaign to get Ruth back onto the push-bike has rumbled on through the month! Once there had been the first very painful rotation of pedals on the exercise bike at the clinic this activity became part of each physiotherapy visit, and of course it got easier. In addition to this - on days without physio - she used the kit supplied by the councils in the Parque de Mayores of both Corralejo and Puerto del Rosario. It took a while to get any success with this too - particularly as everything is fixed, but now it can be done fairly easily. Greyrocks kept thinking the full Monty would happen soon and would take the bike out to a quiet spot and try, but only beginners' waddling and wobbling followed by fearful and depressing failure happened! We saw the sainted surgeon on 15th. He was delighted with the knee job, told us we were "like boyfriend and girlfriend" in our lifestyle, made arrangements for probable Knee 2 in the autumn and advised us to pay for three more sessions of physio in order to get the knee bending backwards. He later briefed Rrro and she has been doing terrible things to advance this. She has very little English, but has learnt "No pain: no gain!". Greyrocks has continued to use its season ticket for the Spa at Bahia Real once per week and each of us has their own self-devised routine for swimming, stretching and water therapy, thus mixing pleasure with remedy.
Then yesterday - Maundy Thursday and a holiday in Spain - we raised the saddle and Ruth managed two controlled forward turns using both pedals. This was in our courtyard and great was the rejoicing:- to the extent that an alcohol-free day was abandonned and a bottle of cheap fizz was opened. It was 17 weeks since the operation and almost eight months since the wrist incident put paid to cycling.
Today we practised again in the courtyard and then went out to the promenade where an amzing near-normal ride happened. There were two points of pain the operated leg and Ruth is very nervous about the surface and surrounding behaviour, but this was a very significant development and made it - ofr Greyrocks - a Very Good Friday because:
The campaign to get Ruth back onto the push-bike has rumbled on through the month! Once there had been the first very painful rotation of pedals on the exercise bike at the clinic this activity became part of each physiotherapy visit, and of course it got easier. In addition to this - on days without physio - she used the kit supplied by the councils in the Parque de Mayores of both Corralejo and Puerto del Rosario. It took a while to get any success with this too - particularly as everything is fixed, but now it can be done fairly easily. Greyrocks kept thinking the full Monty would happen soon and would take the bike out to a quiet spot and try, but only beginners' waddling and wobbling followed by fearful and depressing failure happened! We saw the sainted surgeon on 15th. He was delighted with the knee job, told us we were "like boyfriend and girlfriend" in our lifestyle, made arrangements for probable Knee 2 in the autumn and advised us to pay for three more sessions of physio in order to get the knee bending backwards. He later briefed Rrro and she has been doing terrible things to advance this. She has very little English, but has learnt "No pain: no gain!". Greyrocks has continued to use its season ticket for the Spa at Bahia Real once per week and each of us has their own self-devised routine for swimming, stretching and water therapy, thus mixing pleasure with remedy.Then yesterday - Maundy Thursday and a holiday in Spain - we raised the saddle and Ruth managed two controlled forward turns using both pedals. This was in our courtyard and great was the rejoicing:- to the extent that an alcohol-free day was abandonned and a bottle of cheap fizz was opened. It was 17 weeks since the operation and almost eight months since the wrist incident put paid to cycling.
Today we practised again in the courtyard and then went out to the promenade where an amzing near-normal ride happened. There were two points of pain the operated leg and Ruth is very nervous about the surface and surrounding behaviour, but this was a very significant development and made it - ofr Greyrocks - a Very Good Friday because:
Bad Boy Behaviour
This is the less acceptable side of living in a growing community! One Sunday Greyrocks was walking back home to make a scheduled Skype call when coming the wrong way down the road were two youths on bicycles being only moderately stupid but as we crossed a minor road they together swerved dangerously and at the last minute to come down said street and make us move fast out of their way. We both yelled at them (in English) and they turned again to come back and one of them clipped Ruth across the head. There was then a protracted follow-up with Bob on his bike, assistance from an Argentinian witness and others joining in the interrogation of friends of the - now fled - perpetrators. Some time later Bob arrived back at the ranch with a slip of paper which said (in Spanish) "A dark-haired boy on a bicycle slapped an old lady!" and the word "Jerezano" which we took to be a name of some sort.
The incident festered overnight and we decided such lack of respect couldn´t go unchallenged so next day Greyrocks went to the only secondary school in town and asked to see the principal. La directora, Alicia, was very understanding and expressed amazement and sorrow,but said she could not, say, show us mugshots without the intervention of the police, but invited us to return the next day. She looked at Bob´s slip of paper and told us it was not a name, but a description of a person from Jerez, but this didn´t help. In passing Ruth admitted her profession. Alicia said she was also a mathematician and invited R to join in with a bi-lingual teaching projrct! Next day we had to wait a while to see her again, and in the mean time got a pretty good sense of what life is like there, and also thought we saw the little blighter involved looking distraught outside her office, but it wasn´t! When we got in she introduced us to another younger teacher, who also expressed regret about the incident, explained they had not identified the culprit amongst the 350 boys, and moved swiftly on to try and convince Ruth to volunteer! Watch this space!
A postscript is that some days later we were having lunch in Domingo´s and were convinced a lad sitting close to us with his mother was the one! His mother didn´t like the way we were looking (staring?) at him and involved Domingo, then confronted us in denial. It all left a nasty taste in the mouth, and we haven´t been back!
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| Archive photo |
A postscript is that some days later we were having lunch in Domingo´s and were convinced a lad sitting close to us with his mother was the one! His mother didn´t like the way we were looking (staring?) at him and involved Domingo, then confronted us in denial. It all left a nasty taste in the mouth, and we haven´t been back!
Births and Beyond
Finally Greyrocks has found a new pastime to stretch the little grey cells: Genealogy!
Early in the month Bob was contacted by a circuitous route about a distant relative. Whilst waiting for firm information we started investigations using one of the dedicated internet sites and hours have spent developing a joint family tree which is now at around 450 people. If you think you are one of them then get in touch!
