Most years I would be heading for
Spain just now for the autumnal visit, but wife support has changed that. So I
am in England and the season has just started in Oxford with a talk arranged by
Skeptics in the Pub on the theme of philosophers and science. Though I enjoyed
the beer and a chat with a friend I was not impressed by the talk. A youngish self-styled
called philosopher tried to convince a packed audience that scientists have no
ethics and philosophers (whatever they are) have a monopoly on both ethics and
logical thought. Fresh from The Edinburgh Fringe, I think he found Oxford sceptics
extremely sceptical and a hard bunch as they repeatedly attacked his Venn diagram.
This had a big circle labelled philosophy
embracing a smaller one labelled science and
everything outside the big circle was labelled stupid! The speaker probably scores quite high on entertainment
value (with some) but low on rational content (with many).
The day before that I lost my
wallet on the Chipping Norton to Oxford bus. The moment after I stepped off the
thing I patted my back pocket – wallet gone. And with it all the usual stuff
from credit cards to bus pass and drivers licence plus an irreplaceable poem on
Turkey. The bus went on to the railway station and I intercepted it on its way
back – wallet gone and a different driver. Sod it.
The day after I received some
photos from Dolors, a good friend in our village in Spain. I could see from the
thumbnails that the pictures were of my caseta - my stone hut at the huerto -
and left the message for later. I opened it at around one o’clock this morning
and could not quite believe what I saw – my two roofs, only completed last
year, wrecked; my solar panel pocked and undoubtedly ruined! Sod it.
Many pictures of Spain feature the
sun, the sea and the beach, and I guess that is the picture that jumps into
most people’s heads when the country is mentioned. Our area is not like that.
It does get hot in the summer, but it also gets cold in the winter. And though
there is much more sunshine than in Britain we are rocked by storms. The Spanish
word for storm is tormenta and sounds
to me stronger, wilder, more tremendous and the storms around La Fresneda are
certainly all of that: ripping lightening, deafening thunder, flash flooding
and sometimes, just occasionally billiard ball hail. The latter is rare, usually
localised, and bloody frightening. If you are caught in one you run for your
life for shelter, the balls of ice usually start small, but rapidly grow in
size and intensity. They damage cars, crops and of course, roofs.
The hail storm that damaged my
little creation over there broke on Monday. When I heard about it early this
morning my reaction was subdued, sad more than angry. When all of my tools were
stolen from the caseta a few years ago I was furious and vented my fury in a
blog (7th September 2012) in which I poured anger and blame on the thieves.
Who or what can I blame for the damage to my roof? Nature I suppose. Global
warming perhaps – and thus all of the car drivers and coal consumers of the
world – not really, I’m pretty sure that hailing predates the discovery of global
warming.
So what’s next? Go over there
sometime to reroof the caseta and install a new solar panel, I suppose. Sadly I
carefully mortared the latter into the roof so that thieves could not take it!
I wasn’t expecting an ice ball attack so soon.
