Martin's Monthly update

---

Habla un poco de espanol. Habla usted ingles?

After the euphoria of the Rando Silex cycle race and my birthday the next day (49) the bubble well and truly burst. I call it the “ East- Enders moment”. You know the bit at the end when someone says “ My life couldn’t get much better than this.” The drums play the theme tune and you know in the next episode that everything will go wrong and their life will fall apart.

Well you all know the story from the blog. Dads do not go shopping at Iceland now. My mate Simon summed it up in an E mail when he said “I Bet you couldn’t swipe the Icesave card through the cheeks of your arse worrying about the prospect of losing it all.”

The prospect of losing it all is now in the past. It has not stopped Donna implementing a much tougher financial regime than before however. The chances of me betting on the jump races are now very limited indeed.

At the same time as this I received a call from my mum telling me that my brother Sam was ill. He’s better now thankfully. No thanks to good old Derbyshire Police though. The Derbyshire Police motto used to be “we care”. It’s obviously “We don’t really care about our officers welfare when they are genuinely ill “now. Get well soon mate.

As you can probably tell from the blog Donna became gas obsessed this month. She insisted on buying a Propane cylinder when the temperature dropped a few degrees. This coincided with the temperature in the van becoming somewhat frosty for a while on the back of the Icelandic cold front and the belt tightening crusade. No daily papers or coffees for Banno for a while. A simple tip from Banno to all you men out there who want to make their women happy. Buy her two propane cylinders. It worked for me.

We moved from Le Paradis to Gorge du Tarn and things started to pick up again. The vultures and the boat ride were excellent and the area (like much of France) was superb.

The shower situation has drastically improved by the way and has been good on every site since my last update.

We have had good news about our Chris in the last few weeks. He has got through to the next stage of the interviews/assessments to join Derbyshire Police.

At the end of the month we made the move to Spain. Nearly all of the Brits we have met so far have told us Spanish horror stories. Apparently we were going to be either robbed, burgled or violated as we travelled within 100 miles of Barcelona. Cheery and pessimistic lot aren’t we, us Brits?

As a result of these tales the move across the border began to become a bit of a worry.

When I retired I said that I would learn Spanish. I started the course but other things seemed to take on more importance as we prepared for the trip. To ease the anxiety whilst we were settled in Tarascon I re-commenced the lessons. Unfortunately my brain does not seem to have a memory capacity now. I therefore decided to remember the sentence in the header. This translates to “I only speak a little Spanish. Do you speak English? “.

We have now been in Spain for two weeks and I have used it a lot. My other two memorable sayings are “Tengo Sueno” and Todo recto” by the way.

As I publish this we have just returned to Spain after a six day flying visit home. We flew from Girona to Doncaster. The flights were easy and convenient. On the way back we left home at 1030 and we were back in the van by 1800.

It was great to see and catch up with everyone. We ate and drank loads, and did everything we wanted to do. It was a little strange to be back and we both felt like we were in transit.

I had a bet on the horses on Saturday. I put £2 each way on a horse called “Icelandic” would you believe. It won at odds of eleven to one. I suppose that could be considered the turning point in our dealings with that country. Brilliantly ironic don’t you think?

We were both very proud on Tuesday when Tom graduated from Sheffield Hallam University and we had a meal and drink to celebrate.

We are moving on at the weekend further South with a view to being in Portugal in 3 weeks.

I think that we have done very well living in a box together for 10 weeks without one crossed word or fall out !!!!!!

The early euphoria may have worn off but the adventure goes on as we continue to chase the son.

---

Comments

[Gary Gorman]

Chasing the son
Good to read your update but a bit worried about this son your chasing. "The early euphoria may have worn off but the adventure goes on as we continue to chase the son"

[Bannos Abroad]

Chasing son
I told you the brain had gone!! Faculties always go first with the aged. I apologise to all of my readers. I've been chasing around after my sons for too long obviously. You can always rely on Gormans to spot the mistakes though. Surprised you beat our Dave.

[neil banno]

thats how i spell "son" banjo
good job somebodys checking your spelling banjo 'gaz and our diddy' always did have the upperhand in the brains department good job we bannos got all the looks (tee=hee) ace of spades one moment barcelona the next--life in the fast lane eh!