Bedrock

It seems like months ago that I was last in Spain (on business with a little pleasure mixed in) – but in reality – it is only a couple of months. I came back to what should have been a relatively easy time, some catching up to do, a little work and get ready for our summer in Galera.

Of course life never quite works out that way and one day, returning from shopping, we came back to a flooded house. Nothing to do with the pretty awful weather we’ve been having on and off in the Northeast of England and more to do with an utterly incompetent plumber who had managed to miss off a retaining ring on a plastic pipe feeding mains pressure water upstairs as you’ll see in the little photo below.

As regular readers know, in the summer months, Hollyberry Cottage becomes a beautiful holiday rental cottage and in the winter, that’s where we live. Makes a lot of sense as British summers have been a disappointment for some years now, meanwhile the winters in Spain inland, regardless of the utterly misguided views of those government ministers responsible for the winter allowance, are NOT a lot better than those in the UK.

Anyway, the end result of our Monday-morning plumber’s work resulted in the utter devastation of the bedroom at Hollyberry Cottage. As it happens, the builder with overall responsibility for the project stepped up to the mark and the restoration work is now nearing an end.

Meanwhile we’ve acquired a new cat – she’s called Chloe (on the left) and she’s really very nice indeed aside from a tummy bug which seems to be going away which had me making derisory comments about her bum for a couple of weeks.

She’s had kittens – and very nice ones – we’ve had a great couple of weeks with them – well, great if you ignore the pong that a house full of kittens make – and they’re now all gone – sold and there’s just her and our two boys Simba (right, below) and Ruffy (left, below) are all now getting on famously (though they won’t be making a contribution as they’ve both been chipped and chopped).

We’ll miss the kittens as they were a lot of fun.

The two boys and Chloe are coming with us for the summer, the two boys have done this before and behaved excellently throughout the entire trip. How Chloe handles the very long trip is another matter.

We head off very shortly and it will take us a couple of days to reach our destination. Despite the horrors above, the cottage is now taking shape and by the time it is finished it will look better than ever.

Painting is now all done, carpet comes tomorrow, we took the opportunity to make considerable improvements to the bedroom lighting and the cottage is pretty much well and truly booked up so no worries about empty buildings.

Just a little issue of dodgy broadband to resolve and lots of packing – and we’re ready to take in the sun.

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