Well, it has taken a while, but we are finally here and connected (albeit sporadically) to the Internet.
After a three-day drive we arrived at As Petas to be greeted by the welcome sight of smoke issuing from the shiny new flue of our log-burning stove. The ever-wonderful Billy had lit us a fire, which was just as well as at the time we had no other form of heating available. It has been a hard winter here - Jose, our roofer, called it "a mountain winter" - and keeping warm has been the biggest challenge so far. It is so cold that we have heard wolves in the night, driven down from the mountains. Luckily the cats have escaped unscathed so far.
The place is still in chaos but we have made progress on several fronts. Our fruit trees and bushes are all planted out, the roof has been patched up, a man has been booked to sort out our old and rather dodgy electrics, and best of all we have taken delivery of a load of firewood. In addition we have managed to get the ancient cocina economica up and running, which will give us an additional heat source and hopefully an extra option for cooking. So we are managing to sleep warm at nights, we are eating well, and the hot water is still working.
We have also acquired our first chickens, a little sooner than we intended. The other day we came home to find couple of chickens in the orchard (which we assumed belonged to next door) and a couple of gifts by the door: a pot of parsley and half a sack of chicken feed. The parsley led us to think (wrongly) that these had been left by our herb-growing Belgian friend Jan, we thought that the sack of feed was a gift towards our declared ambition of keeping chickens, and thought no more of it.
Later that evening there came a knocking at the door. It was our neighbour, an amiable man whose accent we find almost completely impenetrable (he is continually giving us what is doubtless excellent advice, if only we understood it). It seems there were some unauthorised chickens in his veg patch which he was convinced belonged to us. Despite all our protestations that we had no such creatures, he insisted on leading me to his veg patch where the miscreants were rounded up and handed over to us.
It turns out that once again we had Billy to thank. We are now the proud owners of Rocky the Rooster and his consort Mabel, enormous things that appear to be the result of the union between a Rhode Island Red and an ostrich. Apparently Mabel was also supposed to have been a cockerel (they have clearly been bred for meat) but was wrongly sexed. This doesn't appear to have left her with any kind of complex, however. They are happily installed in the pig-room and Mabel has so far produced three eggs, even though it is still January. We hope to add to our flock shortly.
The chickens are just one example of the wonderful generosity we have experienced on all sides. Our friends Dawn and Steve braved the low temperatures and general anarchy to visit us, bringing a store of wise advice and a delicious lemon cake which has boosted morale more than once. Asun at the local bakery pulled strings with a friend of her father-in-law to get us a stash of firewood (which is like gold dust at the moment). There is an awful lot to do, but it is good to feel we are not facing it alone. We hope to repay some of this generosity when we can.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
And they're under starter's orders...
After a long and tortuous saga, we have finally managed to exchange contracts on the sale of our UK residence. So after one last family Christmas in the UK we shall be moving our goods and chattels on the 7th of January, assuming the roads are open and the ferries are afloat.
It's quite strange to have an actual date after such a long period of dreaming and planning. Time to start working through those to-do lists...
It's quite strange to have an actual date after such a long period of dreaming and planning. Time to start working through those to-do lists...
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
The mysteries of Galician plumbing
As luck would have it, we had booked a week's holiday to go and visit As Petas before our house in the UK sold. This turned out to be very useful, not least because it gave us a chance to discover the truth about our water supply.
We always knew that the water supply to our house was a little eccentric. The water comes in through pipes that are partially embedded in the wall outside the kitchen, and there are two structures nearby that we knew had something to do with it all: a small square breezeblock unit in the orchard and a concrete tower about 15 feet tall next to the horreo. We had seen our neighbours fiddling with the square thing and knew it contained a pump of some sort but were less sure as to its exact function. As to the tower, there was blue plastic piping leading up to the top and a tap on the side which seemed to be the master control of the whole system. Several other taps were to be found on the pipework on the side of the house which seemed to control which parts of the house got water.
Luckily for us, there is a connection of our neighbours by the name of Joaquín who seems to understand the system and was willing to step in when the blue plastic pipe came unstuck, which it did fairly regularly and with spectacular results.
We arrived at As Petas in the early stages of a major storm to discover that we had no running water. Also, the magician Joaquín was not available. Panic!
It's at times like these that you discover who your friends are. There is a small expatriate community around Friol centred on John and Sieni, the Dutch couple through whom we bought our house. John was able to put us in touch with a marvellous man called Ron who numbers plumbing amongst his many talents. Ron came to our rescue.
The big question was: how did it all work? This turned out to be a somewhat involved problem, and at times it felt more like an archaeological dig than anything else. Ron consulted the neighbours, but their grasp of it was only partial. They did however provide the first important clue: we had two sources of water, not one. Further up the hill is a prado (spring) shared by both houses. Water from this comes down the lane and there is a stopcock beside our barn which can be used to turn off the supply - that part we knew, as Joaquín had pointed out its location; what he neglected to mention was it was buried about a foot deep, so we had to excavate that first.
The other source of water is a pozo (well) which is entirely ours. The pump for this is in the mysterious square structure in the orchard.
So how did all this connect up? And what was the function of the mysterious concrete tower?
It would be pleasant to be able to give a complete account of all this, à la Hercule Poirot, with all the loose ends neatly tied up. Alas, in the end, after much digging and head-scratching, Ron cut the Gordian knot by laying a new pipe from the pozo to our house and replacing the dodgy old pipework. Now we have one source of water and one tap to turn it all on or off, and the concrete tower now serves only as a handy perch for our local robin to assert his proprietorship.
He seems happy with that state of affairs, and so are we.
We always knew that the water supply to our house was a little eccentric. The water comes in through pipes that are partially embedded in the wall outside the kitchen, and there are two structures nearby that we knew had something to do with it all: a small square breezeblock unit in the orchard and a concrete tower about 15 feet tall next to the horreo. We had seen our neighbours fiddling with the square thing and knew it contained a pump of some sort but were less sure as to its exact function. As to the tower, there was blue plastic piping leading up to the top and a tap on the side which seemed to be the master control of the whole system. Several other taps were to be found on the pipework on the side of the house which seemed to control which parts of the house got water.
Luckily for us, there is a connection of our neighbours by the name of Joaquín who seems to understand the system and was willing to step in when the blue plastic pipe came unstuck, which it did fairly regularly and with spectacular results.
We arrived at As Petas in the early stages of a major storm to discover that we had no running water. Also, the magician Joaquín was not available. Panic!
It's at times like these that you discover who your friends are. There is a small expatriate community around Friol centred on John and Sieni, the Dutch couple through whom we bought our house. John was able to put us in touch with a marvellous man called Ron who numbers plumbing amongst his many talents. Ron came to our rescue.
The big question was: how did it all work? This turned out to be a somewhat involved problem, and at times it felt more like an archaeological dig than anything else. Ron consulted the neighbours, but their grasp of it was only partial. They did however provide the first important clue: we had two sources of water, not one. Further up the hill is a prado (spring) shared by both houses. Water from this comes down the lane and there is a stopcock beside our barn which can be used to turn off the supply - that part we knew, as Joaquín had pointed out its location; what he neglected to mention was it was buried about a foot deep, so we had to excavate that first.
The other source of water is a pozo (well) which is entirely ours. The pump for this is in the mysterious square structure in the orchard.
So how did all this connect up? And what was the function of the mysterious concrete tower?
It would be pleasant to be able to give a complete account of all this, à la Hercule Poirot, with all the loose ends neatly tied up. Alas, in the end, after much digging and head-scratching, Ron cut the Gordian knot by laying a new pipe from the pozo to our house and replacing the dodgy old pipework. Now we have one source of water and one tap to turn it all on or off, and the concrete tower now serves only as a handy perch for our local robin to assert his proprietorship.
He seems happy with that state of affairs, and so are we.
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