Eos Log
Lack of fantasy – can't think of a more original title. I thought of copying Balvenie's idea of using song titles, but for that I don't even have the fantasy. And anyway, river winter life continues and after all the festivities life is back to normal.
We started the new year with a nice crowd of boat people on our neighbour's catamaran. One of the things to be said for a cat is that it can accommodate a lot of people! There was a flute to
accompany our Auld Lang Syne and we let up an enormous Chinese lantern, a kind of hot air balloon on which we all wrote our wishes for the coming year. Don't know how they'll manage to come true
because they burn eventually, but it was a wonderful sight to see our flame float away towards the moon.
At the Los Reyes fiesta, the arrival of the Three Kings, on January 5th there was a procession with the kings and their knights on horses lead by a donkey with a pretty young girl dressed in white bearing the star of light, all throwing lots of sweets for the children to scramble after, and no doubt to get sick on later. It was nowhere near as large and impressive as the procession with all the many floats we saw last year in Cartagena, but standing waiting with all the villagers and seeing the lights descending from the castle hill made it all very lovely.
Of course Andalucian children aren't
scared to pick up sweets from between
the horses' hooves.
The kings visit baby Jesus in the church.
(what's the pink shirt doing on a baby boy?)
And afterwards we had a good party with lots of people in the house of an English ex-boating couple who make this into a yearly happening with plenty of wonderful food and plenty to drink of course, and with several instruments being played.
The remarkably dry, windless and sunny weather has continued as before and it has been great to be able do a few hours of boat jobs outside everyday, so my
varnish work is quite on schedule. Being on the pontoon makes it easy to go off for walks in the surrounding hills, which we've been enjoying regularly. It's great for exercise, and by now we can
already admire the first spring flowers.