Had supper with Whiplash last night

Dessert was divine


Whiplash is the châtelaine of an apartment block and is currently following the gardening contractors around to see if they actually do anything.

Next week or soon after she and another woman will be helping a friend give birth.

I've made an infusion of clary sage to mist her with once the contractions get going, Lisa's going to massage her face with a blusher brush

There's a soundtrack, when she gets to the last bit she wants to push it out to Led Zeppelin

they visited the birthing suites at the maternity hospital - all the other pregnant women were accompanied by men

We looked a right set of lezzers so I kept mentioning that the father was planning to be there too

I'm home

finally unpacked and laundered, I went to the Brain Surgery - the Brain Doctor was nursing a black eye, he had cancelled all his patients for the day.

I am doing crayoning and games instead

I've only just discovered

Iris Van Herpen

I may need to get a bubble bath dress

I am on my way out of Spain

but not before I have become half whippet myself

It's Sunday here's a church

wondering if I can fit the whippet in my luggage

not sure if I'm going to be able to say goodbye - hoping that he's fold-able and I can take him with me next week.

The weather's been moody as an adolescent - the whippet made me go out and has hauled me through woods bulging with fungi but I'm far too much of a coward to pick any of it.

In the market today fierce people bullied me into buying at least ten times more vegetation than I can possibly eat - I show  them how much I want and they throw their arms up and shout something like

There's no bloody point selling that poxy amount - it's a kilo or nothing

Other market trophies include an uncooked blood sausage that I think needs boiling and some smoked cod that I think is eaten raw and some tins of smoked cod liver which is my favourite thing in the world but I'd forgotten it existed.

Today's weather on the forecast thingy looks like this

outdoors it looks like this

The whippet and I have mostly been inside listening to things like this




Longplayer Conversation 2014: David Graeber and Brian Eno from Artangel on Vimeo.

Virtually no traffic

comes through the village but most days I hear a parping horn that signals the arrival of a van that stops and then people come out of their houses and buy things from it. 


Today I heard the horn and ran out - determined to buy whatever was on offer - it was fish.

A man was also buying fish - I recognised his blackandwhite pointer dog that had followed me home in an elaborate game of Grandmother's Footsteps yesterday.

During the fish transaction we established that I am neither the sister, aunt nor cousin of the lady who owns the whippet

Mystery

Outside the nearby house there is a bottle of clear liquid  tethered to a post with orange twine. A few paces away there are more bottles - these are untethered. The house opposite has bottles of  untethered water(?) on the pavement.

I am bracing myself to make inquiries

Zig Zag

Before setting off for Spain I went to see this Francesca Woodman exhibition focusing on the zigzagginess of her photographic compositions. I now see zigzags everywhere - even when I'm wondering about the animal that needs that nest so big but can also balance itself and babies on top of a bell tower

and the bells must be bothersome - maybe they go out for dinner on Sundays

Dog of the Week

It's cold and rainy and we're curled up on the sofa and some of us are doing drawing


The neighbours and I have been making friendly noises at each other. They can't tell what I am saying because my Spanish is appalling and I can't tell what they are saying partly because my Spanish is appalling but also because they have strong regional accents and also because all the people that I have met so far have no front teeth.

Despite this we are exchanging foodstuffs; yesterday the next door neighbour gave me a jug of milk, I turned it into sort-of-cheese and gave her half. Today I met a man on a tractor who gave me two fat green peppers.

here's a photo of the village

Here are some things I wanted to buy at the market

but they were too big for my bag


I did buy a ham bone, it's still very hammy with what's left after they've made slices of Serrano ham.

I boiled it up and the whippet looked at me and said

I like ham ... she gives me ham

I'm in Spain - whippet-sitting

He's called Lucho and he's keeping a very close eye on me. It's supper time. I put some dried dog food in his bowl and made yummy noises but he looked at the bowl in a sad way and then he looked very directly at me at me and then he pointed to the fridge and he said

She gives me sausages

A mothball cloud followed me

home from London. I was unaware of this until I opened my suitcase and the undiluted smell filled the bedroom and I realised that I've been moving around in an odour cloud like Pigpen from Peanuts.

The napthelene hit my nose when I first walked into Doglady's house but then all the taxidermy and the tapestries and the duck-egg-blue-coloured walls and the deep-salmon-coloured walls and the pistachio-coloured walls and all the voodoo flags and the snakes and the dismembered hands took over my attention and I didn't connect about that previous guest getting set on fire and over the week I absorbed so much of the smell into my clothes and skin and hair that my nose was too stunned to notice anymore.