Stop, look, listen

As I was settling down to sleep last night I heard the whine of a mosquito nearby. Both Clare and I have been bitten, but neither seen or heard evidence of the offender(s). This time the insect was inside the lamp shade on the bedside, unable to find its way out, or maybe too tire or sick to fly up or down and escape. It was easy prey, retribution for all the itching misery we've both endured. I'm unrepentant of taking its life!

I woke up at seven with the sun's early light dimmed by high level cloud turning into haze again and it was humid. A morning to endure patiently, put finishing touches to my end of stay report and Sunday sermon. I go over things time and time again looking for better ways to express what I want to be heard.

At half past one, Adrian called to give me a lift to the Chinese restaurant where John and Judy took me on my first evening here. We were joined by Judith, another church council member for a meal to say thank you for my ministry to them. How kind of them! I had Tai Chicken salad for a starter - small slices of meat on a bed of lettuce made soggy by an overdose of salad dressing which was like mayonnaise thinned out with a little lemon juice. Nothing to suggest South East Asia about it. 

I followed this with something called 'Fuzhi' I think, a mixture of pork, beef, fish and chunks of king prawn with a few bean sprouts and other unrecognisable leaves on a bed of rice. This was served in a savoury brown sauce in an oven hot cast iron pot. Chinese hotpot I guess. It contained more protein than starch, went down comfortably and stayed down. Not a dish I would choose to eat again. Nevertheless, the company was enjoyable and conversation interesting. I was surprised that the house wine was labelled almost entirely in Chinese, apart from one tiny corner which read 'Rioja'. Quite a good one too,

It was four by the time we parted company. I returned to Church House on foot to be sure of getting most of my daily exercise quota, and get my digestion working. Walking alongside the N340 I noticed for the first time the avocado bushes in the orchards either side of the road starting to bear fruit, albeit numerous and still tiny. I'd love to be here long enough to learn how the bushes are managed by the fruit farmers. They had multiple headed flower stems early on when I was here. Where the fruiting is really prodigious, branches must get very heavy. I wonder if some of the fruit fail to develop if packed close together, or if some fruit are harvested early and sold. In the shops they often come in a variety of sizes. Spending time in a place where small scale commercial horticulture is part of everyday life arouses curiosity. There's so much I'd like to know.

The slopes of hills and valleys all along this coast from shore to summit are covered with dry stone wall terraces. Some of the lower ones are given over to cultivating avocado, if not aubergine, carob, citrus or almond. But there are many more higher terraces which are empty, overgrown, abandoned. I wondered if these were the relic of some sort of water catchment scheme to supply the lower levels, or stabilise the ground. 

Then I came across a simpler explanation, in an article about coast path walking trails in this area. Vineyards. Large scale vine cultivation from the 18th century onwards. But no longer it seems, although the terrain is harsh enough to suit many varieties. Was it phylloxera that killed off the industry in the l9th century? Or the economics of transporting the finished product to market? Or not profitable enough to sustain commercially in an impoverished region? I'd love to find out why.

Oh dear, here I go again. Fascination with the environment in places where I sojourn, leading me to look for the relics of past industry. In Mojacar it was minerals transported by rail from the sierras to the sea. Same in Watchet Somerset too. When first in Nerja, discovering relics of the sugar cane industry. Then in Rincon de la Victoria and in Malaga the coastal railway (now a walking path), which transported cane sugar to port. How a landscape and its ecosystems tell you a story, if you stop, look and listen.

When I was eleven years old, one of my birthday presents was an autograph book. My Dad wrote inside the front cover those three words 'Stop, look, listen' - his lifetime advice to me. It took me half a lifetime to realise these words can be found on panels alongside railway tracks, especially at junctions. His job in the coal mine was running the underground transport system, and ensuring its safety. 'Stop, look and listen' was what he made sure everyone did in order to stay alive in a dangerous environment. My life and context are utterly different from his, but his words of advice apply to me equally six decades later.

After a generous lunch I didn't feel much like an evening meal. I settled for a couple of ripe peaches and a handful of black olives with a glass of white wine. Then a walk up the hill and back, and then bed. 

Late night success

Failure to recover those Garrucha photos was still bugging me, after midnight, when I should have gone to bed, but I would have only dreamed about the annoyance anyway, and wondered what I did wrong. So I googled and found a free 'try before you buy' Windows 10 file recovery program

I'd not seen before (it depends of the key words you enter into Google search), then to my delight, it delivered the lost photos within seconds of downloading and running it. It's called EaseUS data recovery program. Well done, those who designed and provided it.

Needless to say, I edited the pictures and uploaded them to Google Photos, as I'd intended to do this afternoon. Such a relief, to find this, regardless of the sleep I may lose catching up. One of the benefits of retirement is, what happens on Monday mornings doesn't often really matter now.

Looking through recovered photos, including more of the industrial site, I got some key information from John, a retired engineer, at this morning's service, which finally made sense of the place. Firstly the narrow gague railway track didn't use an engine to bring the ore trucks (or 'drams', as they were known in South Wales pit parlance) from the inland mines, but were towed by cable partly powered by the weight of empty trucks returning. Just like the transport systems my father worked on for thirty years of his life underground, and became an acclaimed expert in running, to the point where he wrote and published a book on the subject called 'Colliery Haulage and Rope Splicing. I still have his handwritten original draft at home.

John also pointed out that the strange structure, subject of my conjecture, wasn't buried remains of furnaces, but a level ramp where the the trucks ended their journey and unloaded ore, possibly to a long chute for the last hundred metres journey to a ship's hold. This makes sense of its careful solid construction. It means there's no trace visible of smelting furnaces that might have been on the site, but I daresay soil on cleared and tidied up ground tells its own story when analysed. 

The poor you have with you always

I walked down to the Church shop to celebrate the Eucharist for nine people first thing this morning, then sat and before returning to prepare the house for Geoff and Carol's return and pack ready for my departure, I chatted outside Rosie's Bar for an hour. 

Nerja breathes an air of quiet prosperity with such a huge number of holiday visitors all year round, yet there is another side to life. I learned about regulars who come to the shop who are homeless, sleeping rough on benches and in parks when holidaymakers have returned to their hotels.  Others with remnants of stable life behind them but with not enough to rent a room. There's a woman living in a parked car near a remote beach, who walks several miles into town daily.  For much of the year, it's warm enough to sleep outdoors, but it's terrible to have no shelter when it rains hard. Some people beg in the streets, peddle cheap goods, or are casual labourers - there's plenty of seasonal fruit picked to be done in this very productive horticultural region

I've seen young mothers quietly begging outside of each bigger supermarket, bearing a card stating how many children they are having to fend for, alone. There's severely physically disabled and very thin young man begging at each Tuesday Mercadillo, and I've seen him in town as well, stripped to the waist holding a crucifix in one hand, like a figure from a Goya painting. Somebody must bring him there. There's no sign of a wheelchair nearby. I've not seen poor people trying to survive here given a police escort away from the public eye.

Last Saturday night, a man installed himself in a corner under a tree near the entrance to our section of the urbanizacion. He had a plastic chair, sleeping bag and rucksack, and a transistor radio to keep him company. He might have been a peddler arriving overnight early to grab an early pitch at the Sunday morning flea market cum car boot sale. He wasn't there the next night.

In these severe economic times, state social services must be under great pressure. High unemployment amongst the young is coped with by supportive families, but what of those who become estranged from their kin? Impoverished older folk, isolated by chronic health issues, relationship failures or lack of family aren't always looked after by neigbours, particularly if life has displaced them from a community where they once belonged. In this era of increased longevity it's an increased concern.

My final walk out with a camera was in the late afternoon, to visit the site of the abandoned sugar factory and rum distillery near Maro. It's a few hundred metres up a stone track in between plastic sheeted fields which act as greenhouses, still irrigated by the brick channels laid down 130 years ago for the sugar cane crop that fed the St Joachin factory. The water channel still runs fast and fresh, across and out of the front of the building shell. It's a magnificent ruin in yellow and red brick.

Only two outlying buildings have the dangerous remains of roofing in place. All else is stripped and the brick shell is open to the sky, like the remains of an ancient monastery in a deserted place.

On one side below the building, an unusual circular vegetable garden had been created in the middle of a larger field. The reason for this layout is hard to fathom, but it's very pleasing to the eye in its context.

I was told that the large open space of waste land surrounding the factory is now used by model airplane enthusiasts. The estate still belongs to the company that took it over from the local family which had built and run it at first, before closing it sixty years ago, when industrial production methods changed. It's a remarkable piece of industrial heritage, with complete 'at your own risk' unregulated public access. I can't imagine the being permitted in Britain - just on health and safety grounds, let alone heritage.