What I'm doing at the moment

From my walk, yesterday

When I started this blog it was with the intention of showing the photographs of interiors taken around southern Europe and the characters I've met. It was definately not a personal blog, and I tried to keep myself out of it. However, every now and then I need to give you some background information to keep you up to date and this is one such occasion.

In December we moved out of our house in Spain. The sale had been agreed in July, with a completion date around the end of November, which dragged on a bit. Because of the quarantine laws and the movement of animals into Britain, the cat and dog have to be 'passported' and free of rabies for six months before they are allowed in the country, this is done by taking a blood test and sampling it over a 6 months period, they also need a micro chip implanted under their skin.

Of course we should have had the animals blood tested and micro chipped years ago, and although the pets have had regular check-ups and vaccinations at the vet, we never got around to arranging passports for them. So as soon as the house sale was agreed in July we arranged for the vet to take blood samples and send them to a lab for analysis. When the results and documents were returned to the vets it was the 7th of August, which means we can't travel with the animals until those six months are up, on the 7th of February.

In the meantime, as you know, we've been staying in a delightful apartment in a small village a few miles from where we used to live. Everything is nice and comfortable here but all our possesions and books are in storage, so my days are different than they used to be. I have no office or studio and I have to share a computer.

I'm filling my days taking long walks, reading borrowed books and cooking. I'm also writing ideas and making sketches for new photographs, and taking snap shots to remind me of the last 8 years in Spain.

So there you have it, I have about 4 more weeks of 'pet sitting' before we move on to the next big adventure, and what an adventure it is. I'll start telling you the details over the next few days to bring you fully up to date.

The ski photographs

We've had appalling weather here for the past week, just solid rain. Yesterday the clouds parted and the sun shone, and the ski slopes were opened for the first time in over a week.

I arranged to go up the mountain with a friend who is an experienced snow boarder and was happy to guide me around the runs. However this meant that I had to spend five hours on top of the mountain while my guide had his fun.

The adventure went smoothly! I was warm enough and I took a couple of photos that pleased me.

I'm spending my time now, planning some new photographs for next year. So far I've pencilled in the Tour de France, New York and India for 2010, I hope I manage it.

I also hope that you have a wonderful New Year, and fulfill all your wishes for the coming year.

All the best
Tim

El Gordo and fried chicken

The big loteria, el Gordo, was drawn yesterday in Spain, and as it's a national event I always watch the draw from my favourite bar. I don't buy a ticket, it's too complicated - but I enjoy the atmosphere once a year. I recorded my journey for you, it is a road trip, so I hope you'll enjoy it.

The weather has stopped me photographing the ski centre in the Sierra Nevada. Apparently high winds have prevented the skiing, and together with poor visibility it has had to close for the last few days. All is not doom and gloom though! I've used my spare time to perfect Thai red curry and KFC style fried chicken. The Thai curry was easy and it tastes and smells like I remember it in Bangkok. The KFC style chicken was a little trickier and I've been struggling to replicate it since the summer. However a friend of mine let me into the secret of the missing ingredient, it's MSG, and adding it turns the humble fried chicken into a taste of heaven.

Here is my gift to you this Christmas:

'KFC' style seasoned flour mix
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)

Cook the chicken pieces in milk for 10-15 minutes. Allow to cool then coat the pieces in the mixture above. Fry in vegetable oil until golden. Eat and enjoy your spiritual experience.

A small but special hotel

I'm very well thank you! Tired and a little frazzled, but happy as Larry. I've had a very busy week, but things are returning to normal, almost.

I hope you are keeping well and happy. Sorry this is a few days late, but I have a good excuse.

We (wife, cat, dog and me), moved out of our house last Thursday and into temporary accommodation until next February. You'll have to wait and see what's happening in Februray, but there are some big changes in the air for me.

Most of our possessions are now in storage and I'm sharing a computer to blog to you. I've decided that until I get straight, I can only promise to blog once a week and because of my restricted time on the computer the blog will be photo biased.

So here goes!
Yesterday was Monday and I had to visit the coastal town of Motril. I had some business to do there but I also arranged to visit a small but very special house which has been restored into an equally special hotel, called Casa de los Bates (named after an English gardener).

I've restricted the photos to the garden, which is magnificent, I'll blog about the interior another day. Many of the plants and trees were originally brought from the US and Cuba. There are strong links between this part of Spain to Cuba because this coast used to export the sugar cane for the rum.

I love this house!

Entrance to the front of the house

Spooky gargoyles for drainage

Front terrace

Original features

Patio furniture

Steps to the rear entrance of the house

Water features and trees from the new world

Stairway to heaven

Snow on the mountain

View of the mountains, from my village

For the past few days the mountains have been obscured by thick clouds, yesterday they cleared leaving the snow you see above. So it looks like the ski resort will open in a few days and I'll have to go up there and take some snaps.

Anyone who doesn't take climate change seriously should take note that until very recently this mountain used to be snow capped all year round, but over recent years the snow comes later and melts earlier.

This weekend is the start of a big fiesta in Spain in honour of the Immaculate Conception, so the country shuts down until next Wednesday. The only people who are busy for this period are the priests and nuns who I've seen a lot of this week. Even when you can't see their dog collars you can still recognise them by the light grey anoraks they wear. I shall probably take a photo or two to show you.

I've got a busy weekend ahead, lots of repairs to do around the house. I hope you have a very relaxed weekend and I look forward to meeting up with you again next week.

All the best Tim

A wonderful little shop

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!
I can't divulge the secret location of this shop.......... all I can say is, it's in a back street in Granada. It would kill it for me if there was another customer, you see I believe I'm the only person who knows this shop.

The shop is very, very small. So small that I have to remove my camera bag to avoid breaking things, and there's a lot of stuff to break. There is treasure everywhere, on the floor, inside drawers, behind cabinets and on the ceiling, plus it's constantly and mysteriously changing from week to week.

The contents of the shop comes from all over Europe, and it's all good quality. But it's the diversity that amazes me. I once found a set of 19th century photographs from a vicarage in Hertfordshire, England.

The shop is owned by a very elegant lady who always wears a suit, tweed in winter and lightweight in summer. She has big hair that looks hard, and a constant smile on her face. She's a brilliant salesperson. She gives ridiculous discounts and gifts. She hums tunes while she pretends not to be watching me as I pick up valuable china and glass to inspect. Plus she gives you candy, usually small violet scented sweets from Madrid.

Anyway, I've given away too much. Here are a few photographs, just to give you a taste.

Getting to my favourite shop

This blogging lark is hard!
Yesterday I planned to visit a fabulous interior designers shop in Granada. I know the shop well having spent heavily in there over the years. I know the owner and the staff too, so I turned up yesterday morning to be welcomed by the cleaner, who I didn't know.

The shop was closed to the public for 2 days and the cleaner wouldn't let me in :-(

I'll return to that shop in a week or two. In the meantime I drove to my other favourite shop, the location of which is a secret I'm not prepared to divulge unless you get me drunk, but I'll happily show you my snaps.

It was 11 am and quiet, so I decided to take a short cut and cut across Granada, that was my big mistake.

The whole city is in chaos because of a new tram system being installed. I know it's a big job but I wonder if every major road in central Granada had to be dug up at the same time! It took ages to get to the shop, being diverted all over the city. After 40 minutes of crawling around I finally parked the car (miles from the shop) and walked. The sillyness made me laugh.

But it's not a laughing matter for the empty shops that have been cut off by the road works for the past year or more. On my walk I passed shop after shop with no customers, and a few had already closed up. But my favourite shop is still open and full of wonderful things. See my next post.

The oldest man I know

This is Pepe, the oldest man in my village. How old? I'm not sure as I can never get a straight answer, but he's old.

I'm going to leave you with Pepe while I take a couple of days off. I won't be skiving. I plan to use the time to do some work and take some photographs for this blog.

I'll be back on Monday. Have a good Thanksgiving and a peaceful weekend!

All the best
Tim

Interesting door

I promise I'll return and knock. We deserve to know who's inside.

Chloride Arizona, murals and tumbleweeds

I'm going through a large file of my negatives and slides, the file is marked LA - Phoenix, 2002. It's one of several files I'm wading through at the moment. I'm attempting to do this in an organised way, looking at absolutely everything.

Somewhere amongst the files are a set of panoramic negatives of abandoned gas stations in Arizona, which I think may be saleable now. Sometimes I have to wait a long time before fashions change and a photograph becomes desirable. When I find the negatives I'll put a few here and would welcome your opinions.

Last night I scanned this negative among others. It's from a series of photographs of Chloride, Arizona (an old silver mining town), which is a weird and wonderful place that I recommend you visit when the opportunity arises. The reason for my visit was to have a look at the Roy Purcell murals, which are painted on rocks in the desert a few miles outside the town. After spending time painting in the desert, Roy found fame and fortune designing neon lights for the strip in Las Vegas.

All this rambling to plug a photograph. Anyway, I can tell you that I took the photograph somewhere between the town of Chloride and the murals in the desert, on a bitterly cold day in 2002. It's going on sale today for the first time, check it out here.

All along the watch tower

Andalucia has hundreds of 'atalayas' (ancient watch towers) dating from the 15th century. It's a mystery to me why the people in charge of tourism in Spain don't promote these treasures, but they are almost unknown. So to redress the balance I spent a couple of hours over the weekend snapping watch towers, just for you.

On Saturday I walked for 15 minutes from my front door to my local atalaya, that's the photograph below. It has a commanding view of the south, where invaders would naturally come from. There's a walled garden that, by the look of it, was maintained until fairly recently, it's almond trees are still producing fruits. The ascent to this atalaya has become overgrown though and it's taken me many attempts to conquer it!

The tower below is in Jaen province, a one hour drive north from me, and about 2 hours from the coast.
I cheated here and used a photograph I took in July. This is a tower (in the distance!) on the road to Cordoba.
Finally, yesterday I drove to the town of Moclin, north of Granada. The town is built around the the castle and atalaya. Can you spot it?
So, now we all know what an atalaya is!

The new road

This photograph shows the last piece of road (autovia), being dropped into place that will link the southern coast of Spain dirctly to Madrid and the north. The section is about 20 miles and runs a few miles south of Granada to Motril on the coast. The road opened a few weeks ago and the next phase is to link the entire coast via autovias.

I made the 20 mile journey down to the coast on the new road, but for my return journey I came back on the old road and drove past deserted gas stations and empty cafes. The new road has killed stone dead the business's that flourished up until a few weeks ago.

When I made my little film, Cafe, I asked an owner of one of these cafes how many cups of coffee he made a day. He said 600 cups every weekday morning. When I called back a few days ago there were just 4 other customers drinking coffee.

However, the old road replaced an even older road sometime during the 1950's. This original road was used by traders and seasonal workers to get to the coast where sugar cane was cut, plus herders used the road to move livestock. An elderly neighbour in our village told us once that she went on the 'old' old road with her father when she was a little girl - they went on his mule and the return trip took one week!

To conclude this post I did the same journey on the original old road (the old, old, road). To see how that was affected by the new road in the 1950's. To be honest I didn't complete the entire journey because as beautiful as the scenery was, the road was twisty and unpleasant to drive on resulting in my feeling rather sick!

5 miles down the old, old road and I found this abandoned hotel, home to dozens of cats.

A little further on is this abandoned arab style fort. I couldn't give this photo any scale but this is a big building, the door is a lot wider than my car.

Rugs from south of Granada

About an hour's drive from where I live in Andalucia is a stunning range of mountains, known as the Alpujarras. I was in this region earlier today to buy a handmade rug. They're very versatile and I fancy using one as a throw. Each village in the region has weaving workshops and the designs are unique to the villages. The rugs are made from locally dyed cotton.

They come in all colors and sizes, and each shop owner displays them outside which decorates the streets in a wonderful way! The prices are amazing. I bought an 8' x 3' turquoise and citrus greens & yellows for 20 euros. They are incredibly heavy and have to be collected in person, so each one bought will always have its own special memories of a few hours spent in beautiful surroundings, while breathing fresh clean air!

Fabulous Amazon reviews

I was tipped off to this amazing Amazon product and thought you deserved to see it.
Sometimes a product is so bad that the reviews take on a life of their own, well this is one such product. The description says "Easily convert your car into your personal automobile office!”

I recommend you visit the page soon before it's pulled. But if you're too late here's one of my favourite reviews:

I received this product from my ex-wife during our attempt at a family reunion Christmas. She knew how much I like to eat while driving (fat guy here ... guilty as charged!) and joked it would help me keep the stains off my pants. Well imagine my surprise when I made a left hand turn and not only spilled my plate of ham, but I now have a nasty red mark on my face from being slapped in the head by the desk which turns along with the steering wheel. I wrote a letter to the company and they did offer me a new ham. The doctors say the black and blue marks will clear up as soon as I dismantle the desk.

Fishing baskets

An 18th century definition of a fisherman is "A stick and a string with a fly at one end and a fool at the other". As a fisherman for most of my life I'd tend to agree. My thoughts today are about fishing and how I miss the streams and rivers of Britain, yet I live within walking distance of a lake heaving with fish, but because they're not the right sort of fish, I ignore them, more fool me.

I've just finished a very good fishing book and I'm on a high, so the next best thing to sitting next to a river, in the rain, not catching fish, is to clean and inspect my fishing tackle. It's all contained in the willow baskets above. The small semi circular basket is a french trout creel, very pretty but useless for fishing. The large basket I've owned for about 20 years and is my current favourite. The small one on the right is probably older than me, I used it for many years from the age of 10, but it's retired now because it's got a wobbly leg.

Anyway, before you fall asleep, the point of this post is: Fishing baskets are great for storage, they're quirky, look good and can hide all sorts of things like dirty linen. There are craftspeople who still make them - look here - but they're expensive. If you keep your eyes open you can pick old ones up cheap. I bought the french creel 3 years ago for 4 euros!

Library of Congress photography collection

You know this photograph don't you!

Florence Owens Thompson and her children. Nipomo, California, 1936

Did you know that this photograph belongs to you and that you can have a print (any size you want), for the price of the paper.

How about a Walker Evans like the one above. This will cost a little more but it's definately affordable?

Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans amongst other great photographers, worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, the images are in the public domain and are available from the LOC, Wahington. These are available to either download to your computer or buy for a small fee, so you can own a true original and genuine masterpiece.

All the scanned files are available in a range of formats, but you really want the "uncompressed archival TIFF" versions which will contain the most data and allow you to make impressively large prints. You can print the photographs at those "do it yourself" machines inside shops - look for Fujicolor Crystal Archival, or Kodak Archival printing, but you will have to convert the TIFF to JPEG (converter here). Personally, I wouldn't bother using an inkjet printer, the ink and the paper aren't really appropriate for photographs of this period.

The problem is, the Library of Congress has millions of photographs and is scanning hundreds more everyday. Last night I intended to spend an hour looking at historic houses but ended the search 3 hours later with a fine portrait of Sitting Bull.

I think it's wonderful that such special historic images are being made available to the people - long may it continue!

Rastro made from doors

Rastro (secondhand shop), Granada, Spain. Built entirely using old doors. Note the roof built around the street lamp! This rastro is run entirely by women, and they re-cycle absolutely everything that is donated to them. This is the place to go when you need just one particular type of wall hook, or a cup to complete your set.

View from inside the shop, looking out.

A few frames that were 2 euros each, yes I bought them.

I won't list everything in stock, (as it's a secret) but I found quite a lot of large, heavy, brass letters, they were 5 euros each. They were a nice serif font, and about 15 inches high. The alphabet was missing a few characters including my initials "T" and "I" but I did get a rather nice "L"................

Olives

I've been avoiding my neighbour all week, sneaking out after he's gone to work in the morning. The reason is - it's the start of the olive picking season, and I'm trying to avoid making excuses for not joining in with the picking.

When I first arrived in Spain, over 7 years ago I used to volunteer a few hours of my time to help the locals pick fruit during the season. That first year I helped pick oranges and it was a great fun day out that included a memorable 3 hour lunch. The following year I volunteered for a spot of olive picking which I can only describe as purgotory, it gave me more aches and pains than anything I'd ever done before. It also gave me an insight into the value of olives.

Spain produces more olives than any other country in the world. It has so many olives that it exports the raw olives to other countries around the mediterranean, where they're pressed and re-exported as native olive oil. This is something to think about when you buy Italian olive oil!

Most olives are produced by modern trees that are bushy and grow about 10 feet tall. These are easy to manage and the olives are harvested by machines that shake the trunk and catch the olives in a net. But where I live the trees are old, some as old as 2000 (yes, two thousand!) years, and very big, so harvesting means climbing the trees and first shaking the branches then finally knocking the stubborn ones off with a stick.


But that's not the end of it, oh no!
My neighbour's nets are not big enough to catch all the olives which fall amongs the cabbages growing in the soil below, so we crawl on our hands and knees picking individual olives off out of the soil. After a short while the boredom and repetition becomes hypnotic, I can imagine it's similar to practising a Gurdjieff lesson.

One old olive tree takes two people 2 - 3 days to harvest. It's hard on the back, neck/shoulders, legs, knees, and finger tips, which get stained purple. I have so much respect for the elderly men and women in this village who tackle this annual task without complaint.

So it's no to olives but I'm still happy to pick a few oranges.

Abandoned houses

I have no idea how many empty houses there are in the white villages of southern Spain.

Some houses appear to be abandoned, but then in the Summer they come alive with city dwellers visiting the cooler mountain regions.

In my own village there must be about 2% of buildings which truly are abandoned, but in other villages I visit there are whole streets of empty houses, which probably accounts for 10% of the village. The village below is one such place where houses with occupants are the exception.

I was shown around this casa by one of the residents. He said it belonged to his uncle who died 20 years ago. He now uses it to house his mule and store potatoes.

To some, a second home would be a liability, but this is just convenient (and rather quirky) storage space!