It’s January and we are basking in bitter cold. It’s literally freezing outside, though it is dry and bright. Jane is in England visiting her parents who live in Lincoln. She is due to fly back to Spain on Sunday, but the weather will decide whether or not that happens. We are supposed to be driving up to Madrid to meet her, but there’s a snow forecast for Cáceres, Toldeo and Madrid provinces, all of which I will have to drive through, so that’s not so exciting. We’ll see…

The weather is much more extreme here than it ever is in Shetland. Tonight it is forecast to drop down to minus nine degrees Celsius. That’s cold, and colder than Shetland usually gets most of the time. It can and does get colder sometimes. Somehow it feels colder here though. I think it’s the low humidity combined with the cold that makes it feel that way. I don’t recall ever shivering as much as I have done here.

In summer it’s the other way around. It gets hot. During our first summer here the local people told us we were lucky. It was a relatively cool summer, compared to many they remembered. I tried to feel grateful as I sweated in the middle of night, scared to move as any movement invariable broke out a fresh wave of sweat in our stiflingly hot bedroom. And that was the coolest part of the day too.

I’ve seen temperatures reach 45 degrees Celsius here in localised places on two occasions. That’s hot! Usually the mid-summer temperatures hover around 35 or so, which becomes quite bearable after a while, and even quite pleasant too. Driving without air conditioning can be tricky though, but you get used to it - almost. After our first summer here I seemed to get quite aclimatised and the last two summers have been easy to manage.

We had air conditioning installed this past summer, and it was a very good idea too. It cost a small fortune, but we reckon it was worth it. It’s a heat exchange unit that can give out heat in winter, and that works really well too. How it can find heat when the outside temperature is below freezing will always remain a mystery to me, but it does.

Soon it will be February. They have a saying her, a little rhyme about the late winter weather. The gist of it is that the dog leaves the house in February to enjoy the midday sun outside, but crawls back to the fire in March. It’s right too. It seems to suddenly get surprisingly warm around mid February and can be very pleasant too with midday temperatures in the high teens. March, on the other hand is usually colder and wetter.

By late May we no longer bother wondering what the weather is like on wakening every morning, something we always did in Shetland. We know it is hot and dry and very, very sunny - every day. Summer is one of the reasons why we are here. That wonderful warmness that wraps itself around you and keeps you comfortable all day has to be experienced to be understood. But of course, the whole way of life here is really the main reason we are here. Tranquilo is a wonderful Spanish word. It’s meaning should be obvious from the English. It’s how life is here most of the time - tranquilo.

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Yes, there are big supermarkets here too - Dia, Carrefour, Corte Ingles, Lidl, Eroski, etc, but they are mainly in the bigger towns and cities. Rural Spain is still very much a place where little shops rule. You will find shops that only sell a very narrow range of products, and people know that it’s the best place to go to if they need that kind of item.

Maybe the situation will change eventually, and I see that a Hipermercado (Hypermarket) is due to open in Trujillo, our nearest town that’s about the same size as Lerwick later this summer. Will that drive out the little shops? No. The Spanish seem to really appreciate their little corner shops and they will continue to use them as they always have done. This is a country where everyone and everything is allowed a place. It’s hard to define exactly, but they just seem to have an accommodating nature that works.


Rural Spain is actually a lot like the Shetland I remember of around 30 to 40 years ago. OK, so the weather is different - no gales, no snow, and lots of hot sunshine - but it’s the people and how they live and behave that reminds me of an earlier time when I was growing up. The crofter mentality is alive and well here. People love to have some land where they might rear some sheep, several pigs and a few hens. They will also grow some vegetables and maybe some fruit.

The friendliness and generosity of the people here is simply amazing. We have neighbours who are forever giving us lettuce, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, figs, grapes, or whatever is in season. Sometimes we struggle to keep up. At Christmas we were given some reestit mutton from Shetland. In an attempt to return some of the generosity shown to us here, we made a big pot of reestit mutton and taatie soup, made lots of bannocks and invited a bunch of our friends along. They loved it! I played a Shetland fiddle music CD too, which also went down well. I almost felt homesick.


The old and the modern live comfortably side by side here in Cáceres province. In the quiet country roads you might come across a man riding a donkey one minute, and then be overtaken by someone driving a brand new Mercedes the next. This was a very poor region historically, but they have pulled themselves into the 21st century in a way that is quite admirable. There’s a tenacious spirit here in Extremadura that has a “why not” attitude, rather than a “we can’t do that” attitude.

A perfect example of this happened a few years ago when the Junta de Extremadura decided to change all the government office computers in the entire region over to the free and open source Linux operating system instead of the expensive Windows operating system. They did it over a single weekend and saved millions of euros in the process. Meanwhile, the city of Munich in Germany has spent several years planning a virtually similar operation, which the world’s IT community has been watching with interest. Munich still hasn’t made the changeover; Extremadura just did it, probably because they didn’t know they couldn’t.

When the oil arrived at Sullom Voe in the early 1970s, Shetland was quite a poor place. The people soon discovered though that they had a new found power that they could put to good use. No longer did they feel insecure and second rate. The county of Shetland moved forward in a very positive way, gaining in confidence and prosperity all the time.


Spain is a bit like that now. They have recently come out of the Franco era where repression was a part of life. The people lost confidence in themselves, felt second rate and behaved that way too. Now that is changing. Spain has embraced everything that the EU can offer. They have replaced their old roads and now there’s hardly a bad road to be found. Every village, no matter how small, has broadband in place as information exchange and education is seen as being very important for the future.

Spain’s latest demonstration of “why not” happened on Sunday evening when they took on the mighty German football team and won the Euro Cup 2008. Their elderly manager summed it up by saying that he had told the players before every single match that there was absolutely no reason why they could not win, so they simply went out and won every single match.

It’s hard to describe the ecstatic reaction this country has had to the football victory. We were in Trujillo watching the match with friends. Afterwards we went to the Plaza Mayor, the town’s main square, to join in the celebrations. At least 10,000 people were there, many of them, like us, from surrounding villages.

Young people were dancing in the large central fountain, cars were circling the square with horns blaring, strangers were hugging each other, flags were waving, people sang themselves hoarse, fireworks exploded constantly, and all this went on for at least three hours. And that was in one small town. Can you imagine what the entire country’s reaction must have been like?


With all the noisy celebrations going on among such a huge crowd of people, we did not see a single drunk person, or a single policeman either. There was absolutely no trouble of any kind - just very loud celebrations. The Spanish celebrate and may take a drink or two - or not, unlike the British who often seem to need a drink or two to celebrate. The entire nation took Monday off work and every employer expected it to be the case too and accepted it as inevitable.

It feels like this country is finally shrugging off the chains of the Franco era. The Spanish team winning a major football tournament may seem like a minor thing in the overall context of things, but it has been a catalyst, a kind of awakening that has strengthened the “why not” attitude. The slogan throughout the tournament was “Podemos” - “We can do it” - so we simply did it.

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I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan since I first heard him in the summer of 1961 (or was it ‘62). I could hear Hank Williams in his music, though no one else could. Dylan has many times since cited Hank as one of his strongest influences, along with Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson; country, folk and blues, the perfect combination!

Jane and Frank will be going off to Rome in a month’s time for a birthday celebration. I have to stay behind for work reasons, and to look after Sam the dog. I’m not too happy about it, but that’s life.

The birthday celebrations are for Jane and all her Italian friends. They all turn 50 this year. They are all meeting up in a Roman restaurant for a big meal and celebration. Most of them haven’t met each other in 20 or so years, so I guess it will be fun for them. I’ll knock back a glass or two of Pitarra and have a good conversation with Sam on that evening…

We finally lost the cool weather. This week it’s been nice and warm with temperatures in the mid to upper 20s. I’ve even had to use the fans once or twice in the office to cool down! At this time of year it’s still a bit humid though and it feels hotter than it actually is. By August when it really is hot it actually feels better with the lower humidity.

We were in Trujillo on Friday putting the car through the ITV. This is the Spanish equivalent of the British MOT, and it’s a harrowing affair. One of our friends agreed to come with us, which we were extremely grateful for. Even Spanish people seem to have a problem with the ITV.

They use dedicated centres here and not just garages for the yearly car inspections. It’s a kind of a conveyor belt line that you go through. It’s a large building and you enter it at one end and come out the other end. Along the length of the building there are mechanics waiting to check whatever their speciality is: lights, brakes, joints, etc. Then you have to go into the office and wait for the results.

The first bit is the hardest. You drive over a pit with the front wheels on two large metal plates. Then a man in the pit tells you, via loudspeakers placed next to the car, what to do. This is why we took our friend along; he told me what to do as I knew I wouldn’t understand a word coming out of the speakers. I was right too.

The short journey through the ITV building was a series of panic and delayed actions. The Spanish mechanics jabbered at me in completely unintelligible (to me) language, while I grew more and more confused. Our friend just sat their and said, “Tranquilo,” every so often.

Suddenly it was all over. We parked the car and went into the office for the long wait on the results. When they eventually arrived, the woman hesitantly called out my name, realising that I must be a foreigner, and handed us the papers. We passed! The brakes were mentioned as needing attention, but the car still passed its ITV, and that’s all that matters.

There were certain people, who will go unmentioned, who made snide remarks about our diminutive purplish coloured car before we left Shetland. But that same car took us all the way from Fetlar to Aldeacentenera, loaded to the gunnels, as they say, without a murmur. It has never failed us once in the past year, apart from needing new spark plugs and a light switch. It’s also thirteen years old with hardly a spot of rust. I’m impressed!

Sam the dog hurt his foot last week. We put him in the huerta, the small piece of walled ground we have near the house, and he cut his foot quite badly on something, probably a piece of glass. He’s been limping all week, but not complaining or whimpering. The foot is healing slowly and he’s putting more and more pressure on it every day.

The huerta is next to one of the bars. It’s the one where all the young people go, especially at the weekends. On warm evenings they stand outside the bar, next to the huerta and often throw empty bottles into it. I always clean up the ground, but I guess I must have missed some broken glass, hence Sam’s cut foot.

Frank is counting down the days until the school breaks up for the summer holidays. It’s about three weeks now. This is his last time at this school. In September he will be going to Segrado Corazón in Trujillo.

This is essentially a private school, which is state funded, and we feel unbelievably lucky to have got him into it. It’s where all the more well to do parents place their offspring. We really want to give him the best chance possible, and we never dreamed we would have succeeded so well. I dreaded the thought of him going to Lerwick and staying in the hostel there all week when we were living in Fetlar. This is a million miles better by far!

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