Home making, Quiet Day and getting connected

A second day with rain, yesterday, albeit more intermittent. I spent several hours finishing off the preparation for the planned Quiet Day at Cortijo Carranque tomorrow. Then, after lunch, we went to the big El Corte Ingles to look for a few small kitchen items, a sieve, some wooden spoons, a peeler, plus a plastic spatula, a fish slice. We have some excellent stainless steel pans spatulas and fish slice. We also have two fine non-stick frying pans. These would be ruined very quickly if used with any metallic implements. We were't all that successful, but we had tea there to make a fruitless search seem more worthwhile. We would have been better off going to one of the many Chinese hardware supermarkets, which seem to stock everything you can think of, even if the quality may sometimes leave something to be desired. I was amazed to receive a phone call from the Telefonica engineer enquiring if we'd yet acquired a key to the local telecoms distribution box. Sadly the answer was no. Tracking one down is the problem and contacting the keyholder is the problem. 

Today started with driving Clare down to Mogens Dahl, the chiropracter who has worked wonders on my back this past month. She fell and hurt her shoulder a couple of days ago. We were fairly certain it wasn't broken, but out of alignment in its socket. I succeeded in getting an emergency appointment, and the delay wasn't a disadvantage as the initial injury trauma subsided, making the joint a little easier to work on. It meant I had delay departure for Cortijo Carranque for an hour and arrive late, after dropping Clare off in Los Boliches to go on a Chinese supermarket shopping expedition. 

Being late hardly mattered however. It turned out nobody had booked in to attend the quiet day. I enjoyed doing the preparation for this as well as the poorly attended Lent Course. It kept my mind active and focussed on things that matter to me. If few were interested in the offer to share these things, inshallah. I still made the hour's trip up into the Rio Grande Valley for lunch in the open air, with a warm breeze fragrant with orange blossom, and enjoyed good conversation with Angela and Martin, followed by a siesta. We then strolled down through the orchards to the river, plucked some roots of wild mint from the water's edge, to carry back for potting and eventual installation in the yet to be created chaplaincy house garden. Angela picked some orange blossom and half a dozen oranges for me to take home to Clare. The fragrance of the spring sierras now fills our dining room, and fresh oranges were served up for pudding.

And yes, the Telefonica man, bless him, phoned again in the morning to ask about the key. I had to tell him that I expected to obtain a contact number later in day, but couldn't say when that would mean I'd have a key. I hope he understood my careful slow English. Indeed when I got back to Los Boliches, just before six, I tried ringing the contact numbers received during the day, but only found office answering machine messages, barely decipherable. The resident key holder's house, just down the street still appears as if the occupants are away. 

Ah well, the world still has the Chaplaincy mobile phone number, but few callers seem to let it ring for long enough for me to find and unlock it to take the call. Then the auto answering service cuts in with a series of nags and a robotic voice in Spanish which is simply too fast (and often too crackly) for a learner to decipher. Still, I am much comforted by the diligence of the engineer who calls daily for a progress report so that he can get on with hooking us up. I can't imagine getting that quality of service from British Telecom.

El Cortijo Carranque

Clare complained of feeling slightly out of sorts a few days before she left, but thankfully was much better by the time she was due to return to Cardiff. Now I know what she meant, as I had a the kind of headache I associate with someing poisonous in my system, and it took me ages to feel fully awake yesterday, even though I was out of the house early enough to say morning prayer with Jim at eight thirty. I arrived without specs, however, which made reading impossible, so I had to leave the reading to Jim, and then slip back to the apartment to collect a pair before celebrating the midweek Eucharist. After the coffee morning, and a spell in the office, I did minimal food shopping and spent the rest of the day indoors keeping warm.

This morning I felt better enough to stick with the plan to drive up to Coin and just beyond on the A-366 road to Ronda to visit Martin and Angela Tomlins at their retreat house of hospitality, ´Cortijo Carranque´ in the rio Grande Valley before you get to the village of Alozaina. It has all the peaks of the Sierras de las Nieves as a dramatic backdrop beyond the immediate hills in the valley. Its the building in the foreground with the white tower, which used to be a dovecote.

The Camino Rural road must be an old road. It´s certainly the one that gives access to many of the small neighbouring farms. Cortijo is the Spanish word for a substantial farmhouse, one that'd be defendable, I learned from Martin, whose labour of love the adaptation of this building has been over the past seven years. The farm with its citrous orchards and nut trees is on 17th century maps of the area, but examination of low courses of brickwork and other features suggest a building was on this low promontory over the river in Moorish times, so it could go back to the fourteenth century if not earlier.

The entrance to the main house retained its traditional courtyard. Martin's adaptation design uses an adjacent yard to re-create in outbuilding space five guestrooms.

Another yard the other side of the house is converted into a cloister-like space - a shaded open air social area, leading off the internal dining room.

There are two more self contained cottages attached to the end wall of the main building. Internally there's a modern kitchen, dining room and the little chapel they've created next together all in a line. I really like that kind of arrangement. It has both a theological and architectural integrity to it.

Angela cooked a marvellous paella for lunch, followed by cheeses and fruit. We sat outside and chatted before and after the meal, then went for walks with the dogs - one down to inspect the rio Grande, fast flowing and stocked with fish. In the rainy season a three metre stream can rise by two metres in a day and spread ten times its width carrying all before it when in spate.

After tea we took another walk up the hillside to a distant cross, set in the landscape apparent by a Scandinavian doctor some forty years earlier who had plans of establishing a healing centre on land below it. His dream never materialised, but the cross remains. Martin and Angela's vision of making a place where exhausted ministers and others could find a retreat and recuperate has come to realisation, and is gradually becoming known. You can find out more on their website here, and my other photos are here.

It was a lovely refreshing afternoon, and we parted with the beginnings of a plan for a Chaplaincy day of reflection to prepare for Passiontide and all this means here in a context where there´s so much liturgical theatre on the streets of every community. I'll enjoy preparing for this over the next two months.