Who knew?

Being grandparents is good fun and time consuming. It is not that we have to do much nappy changing and pram pushing, although we did a fair bit of both on our recent trip to the UK. It is more that we spend a lot of time looking at photos, showing photos to others (Mike is a demon now that he has worked out how to download to his ipod), anticipating and reminiscing about skype calls and generally reflecting on the overall wonderfulness of Jessica and Billy, as confirmed by this photograph. It is all as it should be.

I shall be back to the UK soon for some more hands on, but meanwhile here we watch with interest the Spanish general election campaign and that in Andalucia. Spanish TV had a debate on Monday night between the two main candidates for the presidency, Zapatero of the PSOE, who is the current holder, and the Partido Popular challenger, Mariano Rajoy. It seemed to us that it was much more personal than general elections in the UK, perhaps because they are electing a president, although also the MPs, and much more direct. Rajoy accused Zapatero of telling lies, particularly about negotiations with the Basque separatist group ETA and Zapatero accused Rajoy of lots of other nasty things-using terrorist attacks for political gain, lack of policies, obsession about immigration, dividing Spain, amongst others. Rajoy is not a handsome man and his nervous habits, which are probably nothing more than that, come across as shiftiness on TV. To us too he seemed to be offering fewer policies and to more interested in reasserting past values. So, all in all, we felt Zap, as we have come to call him, probably just shaded it. Another thing is noticeable though. There seems to be no coherent manifesto from either party so there is none of the costing of the various promises that both sides are making and, consequently, no one asking how all of these wonderful plans to support and extend mortgages (PSOE) or increase pensions (PP) etc etc etc (and there are a lot of them) are going to be paid for. March 9th is the big day.

Last night we went to see the film Atonement, dubbed into Spanish as Expiacíon at the local cimena in Chiclana-4 euros a ticket, so the total cost for an evening out including a pizza afterwards and a glass of wine/beer came to about 20 euros for the two of us! Although we normally prefer our films in voz original, the advantage here was the dubbing of Keira Knightly's extremely annoying voice. It is a puzzle to me as to why she was nominated for an oscar for her role as Cecilia Tallis. She only has three expressions at the best of times, but in Atonement she used only two. The Dunkirk scene however, which was rather like a painting by Bosch come to life was amazing.

It's Andalucia day tomorrow-a bank holiday in these parts-and the weather is fabulous, so we expect an influx of visitors who will arrive tonight, take Friday off as well (the puente or bridge, as it is called) and stay till Sunday. Not that it interferes with the tranquillity of our little part of Andalucia!