Appearances can be deceptive

The church in Alins. The steeple may make you think it’s in good repair, but in fact it’s a crumbling ruin, unsafe to enter. There’s a newer church in the town centre which is actually in use.

Today S and I decided to go down the valley to the butterfly museum in Ribera de Cardos. I’ve always been put off by the thought of hundreds of dead butterflies, but it was much more interesting than we expected. Yes, there were many cases of pinned butterflies, artfully arranged, plus some beetles, bees, spiders, and other insects. But we learned a lot from the copious information displayed, much of it about the different ways butterflies and caterpillars protect themselves from predators, ranging from camouflage through nasty taste/smell to confusing bats with ultrasound. All the information is in Catalan, but I can understand enough when it’s written down to get the gist. So instead of spending 20 minutes, we must have been there over an hour.

From there we went to Alins again. This time the bookshop was open, so S did his duty and bought some books, as well as giving Meritxell a couple of copies of his and G’s book so she can attempt to sell it (she doesn’t have many books in English).

Back to Ribera for a very light lunch in the hotel there, with service so rapid we were done and dusted in half a hour, then back to the ranch for a siesta. Later in the afternoon, S and I were sitting in the garden when we were pleasantly surprised to see S and G’s shepherd friend Musta turn up with his family. It turned out that Angels had told him the wrong date for S and G’s book launch event tomorrow (watch this space). Oh dear … but the upside was that we all got to have a good chat with him and admire his delightful four-month-old son, with many photo opportunities.

Musta’s is quite a story. He was brought up in the Atlas Mountains and arrived in the Canaries in an inflatable dinghy. Through a cousin, he got a job herding sheep in the Pyrenees (which is how S met him) and studied furiously to learn Catalan and Spanish. Once his immigration status was regularised he married Fatima, whom he’d met on visits home to his village in Morocco. Now he’s got three lovely children and a job with the council in Sort.

Anyway. Once they’d gone, I was sous-chef for S, who cooked a vast quantity of chicken and mushroom risotto for dinner. It was such a busy day I never got round to even looking at my photos, hence the backblip. Sorry, I am not keeping up with others’ blips at all!