Thursday, 2 May 2024

Seafood Tapas

A pleasantly warm and sunny day with washing to do and hang out after breakfast. Then a drive into Nerja to visit the shop and chat for while. We had some shopping in Mercadona on the way back to the car, and called in to the small Pescaderia el Artesano in Calle del la Cruz in the town centre. As well as fresh fish, you can have a drink with a fishy tapa and a racion or tapa of anything you fancy from the stock of fish on the counter, freshly cooked. It was quiet when we got there and ordered, but within minutes each table was filled with chatting customers. Our tapa was a dish of berberechos (cockles), tiny in comparison to British ones boiled and flavoured with lemon.

It was quite noisy in a confined space, but never mind. We had a dish of British sized patatas fritas between us, unbelievably light and crisp, thanks to whatever cooking oil is used. Clare had Rosada, and as usual, I had deep fried Sardinas - no batter, fresh and juicy. Simple, effective. We both ate well, for half the cost in a more formal restaurant. The fresh taste of seafood doesn't get any better than this.

In addition to getting food at Mercadona, we had to buy washing machine cleaning fluid and detergent. Towels aren't coming out smelling as fresh as they could. Routine maintenance is inescapable when you take over a church provided house for a couple of months' locum duty. There were some clothes to wash by had when we got back. Clare went for a swim, and then I made a video slideshow for Ascension Day Morning Prayer and uploaded it to YouTube. This month it's three years since I started doing this regularly, though I had previously covered for Mother Frances, but then she had the idea of delegating the task on four weekdays, with her and Fr Rhys covering the other two, and I've done it ever since without missing a week. 

This small piece of creativity has become part of my spiritual discipline, but I have little idea of what use it is to followers, and wonder how many followers there really are.  YouTube viewing statistics may not paint the whole picture if it's possible for people to view without this being recorded. I admit I have doubts about it, but neither can I envisage what might replace it, to represent the on-going prayer life of the local church community, listening to and learning from scripture - which is after all, the point of the exercise.

We had a salad supper, followed by a walk down to the bins with the re-cycling, and for a while on the senda litoral. There have been strong gusts of wind this evening driving away high cloud accumulated in the afternoon. Finally an hour with the last section of my Spanish novel until I started nodding off, unusually tired at the end of this day.

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