'Elf and Safety

So there we were at  10.45am  happily picking grapes in the sunshine,  rinsing the dust off them and  picking them from the bunches ready to go indoors and make a batch of wine, when Fernando came up from Yator on his dumper on his way to his cousin's land  to cut firewood.  Of course he stopped for a chat as he always does,  tasted the grapes, told me they were Moscatel and after a while he left. 

Well, almost.  He looked up at the mulberry tree that is outside our house, overhanging the driveway and said it's much too big, dense, overhanging a walnut, fig and several olives and ought to be pruned.   He pruned it about 6 years ago, we've done it since then but it grows so fast!   And it's not our tree!  It belongs to Carmen and family next door and  she loves the shade it provides in the summer.   But for the rest of the year, it just overhangs everywhere.

So it needed to be cut, he said he'd do it and we thought he meant another day but no.  Out came the chainsaw and axe and less than an hour later we were surrounded by logs and greenery. 

at least he stopped work to answer the phone!

Safe?  and he drives an ambulance for a living!

He left us then to do his firewood,  later on he stopped for a beer  on the way down to Yator and to show us his dog which he'd managed to run over with his dumper - luckily she only had a cut foot and a cut leg but was very unhappy ran off!!   I found her whimpering behind our house a couple of hours later,  John phoned Fernando to tell him where she was  and we put her outside by the mulberry branches with a drink to wait for him to collect her.  

This is Copo, - copo de nieve is a snowflake

It took until 5. 30 to get the logs stacked, the branches cut down and the leafy ends stacked so the leaves can drop off and be composted later.

We did eventually get our wine made as well  - but had a 5 hour delay!