Well, fancy seeing you here on a
Saturday evening. The good news is that this wasn’t – quite – as lazy a day as
yesterday. The bad news is that this means it’s rather a longer instalment than
yesterday’s was.
Jen wasn’t feeling too well again
this morning, so she stayed in the Casa Me Duck while I took John out for a
coffee this morning. A few days have passed since the stained shorts incident,
and so I guessed it was probably safe to go back to the Rekreo Bar. We both had
a cup of gorgeous coffee, and a bottle of sin alcool beer. Don’t let that word
sin get you excited – sin means without, and alcool means, well, you get the
gist. So that’s two coffees, and two bottles of no alcohol lager. How much do
you reckon that came to? Just over 5 euros, or about £5.
I didn’t take my sketchbook to the
Rekreo with me this morning, and I hadn’t really made any plans about what I
was going to do for sketching today. Most of the places I’d fancy sketching in
San Isisdro I’ve already sketched, either in the last couple of days or last
year, or the year before. But as I said yesterday, I really wanted to see the
way the land lay until making any plans.
A little while after we came back
from the Rekreo Jen made me up a shopping list of some bits and pieces that we
needed. No problem Jen - said I - I’ll take the Smart. And indeed, there was no
problem at all, until I came out of the Hiperber supermarket in the village,
stowed away all the goodies and the not so goodies, and tried to start the car.
Tried, and for about 10 minutes, failed miserably. If you’ve never driven a
Smart before, and have had most of your driving experiences in cars with manual
gearboxes, starting a Smart is a little bit fiddly. Basically, you put your
foot on the brake, and make sure that the car is in neutral, or it won’t start.
Well, for some reason this procedure deserted me completely, and several times
I tried to start it with my foot on the accelerator and the gear in reverse. What
makes it worse is that I drove this particular Smart several times last year,
and Mary actually owns a Smart, which I have driven on numerous occasions. I
was on the point of ringing the Casa to ask for help, when I finally asked
myself a sensible question – namely – what exactly am I doing wrong here?
Something percolated through the alluvial sludge of memory, and away we went.
Some time after returning to the Casa
I made lunch, and then, as a testament to the hectic schedule of the day so
far, fell asleep on the sofa. (Stop me if the excitement of this episode is
getting too much for you) I woke up about 4pm, and decided that now was the
time to sort out today’s sketching. Jen and John both seemed alright, so I took
my phone so they could ring me in an emergency, and borrowed the Smart again.
My original intention was to head to nearby Catral. However, last year and the
year before I made a number of sketches in Catral, so on a whim I turned off
for Callosa de Segura. In 2018 I took the local Cercania train from San Isidro
to Murcia. The first stop on the way was Callosa, and I was struck by the way
the town was so close to the mountains, and decided back then to pay a visit
when I got the opportunity.
What can I say? It’s a fair sized
town, much the same as many of the others in the locality. However it does have
some very nice narrow streets, which go uphill as well as downhill, which is
convenient for the pedestrian. It also has a rather nice church – fairly
similar to the church I sketched in Catral last year. Like almost all of the
Spanish churches I wanted to sketch last year, this one is hemmed in by modern
buildings, and in the end I decided the best position for a sketch was the one
you can see in today’s second sketch, showing the clock tower from a narrow
street.
While I was crossing the main road
back towards where I’d parked the Smart, I was standing next to a Spanish chap,
and he started a brief conversation with me. His opening gambit?
“Es muy calor!” I nearly laughed,
which probably wouldn’t have been the best thing to do, but it just seemed so
ironic. It’s us Brits who are supposed to want to talk about the weather all
the time. I mean, in Spain you just haven’t got the variety in your weather to
make it worth talking about.
“Es muy calor!” - It’s very hot.
“Si.” – Yes
Topic exhausted - conversation over.
As I said, I made just a couple of sketch, and I was back at the Casa before 6pm. But I thoroughly enjoyed this
mini sketchpedition. That’s no reflection on Jen and John’s hospitality whatsoever,
but it was just nice to be off and out, with every good chance of getting lost
– which I did – and of discovering something which maybe nobody else would be
interested in, but which sparked my curiosity. So all in this is a happy Dave
signing off today. Nighty night.
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