Roland Routier

As preparing the shop in Xalo (Hullo?) is the top priority, my first job has been tiling the food preparation counter in the shop. As the building has poor ventilation and the small extractor fan vents to a communal flue, nobody is allowed to cook on the premises. Fortunately, the delicacy to be sold here doen't need cooking so "food preparation" means making sushimi - the cloggies favourite snack of raw Herring. Can't wait.

We have been sustained in our work by the dulcet tones of the "singing bartender" Andre Hazes singing songs about failed relationships in a late 50's style, (think Edith Piaf singing Country in low German) - a genre called levenslied ("song about life") - This is so attractive to Rob that his CD player is set on 'repeat'. Oh joy! Andre apparently lived an unhappy, alcohol fuelled life and is now deceased. Perhaps he llistened to one of his own recordings.

Two young Lithuanian boys drove a semi-trailer from Holland with 3 pallets of stock. Regrettably the silly truckers at HQ had not seen the need to replace the control cable for the rear hoist, so we were forced to unload everything on the truck and to ferry the boxes 30m into the store on wheel-barrows. Took a couple of hours while we were all nervously watching out for the Policia Locale or even worse, the Guardia Civil, in case they disapproved of a TIR lorry treating a bus stop as an unloading bay. The narrow streets of Xalon do not lend themselves to international transport operations.

I've also been roped in to install the Point of Sale system, a job beyond my capabilities I fear. I can get the thermal and the label printers working but not the bar code scanner, cash box or "shopmate" software. Trying to install them on a second hand XP machine with a defective hard disk fan and drained on-board battery may be aggravating the problem.

Next job was converting an old Dutch, 3 phase bread slicer with a 4 pin plug to the more modern 5 pin Spanish supply socket. Of course, the owners could pay 150 Euros for an electrician to do the work, but I am going to do it instead. I am guessing that the original did not have a separate earth and since a 3 phase supply does not need a common return, I will simply connect the old common wire to the new earth plug. (Clue: the wire is green and yellow!). Lets hope the inspector doesn't notice!

Actually it was started in my absence and worked perfectly. No one was more amazed than I, because all the texts about wiring these motors suggested that the motor would only rotate in the correct direction if the supply wires were connected in the correct order, which it is not possible to discover by examination.

Finally I have been a plumber and fitted a new sink unit after digging the waste pipe out of the wall and lowering its exit point.

Tiler, loader, IT technician, electrician and plumber. Is there no end to this mans talent?Läs mer

I took last Sunday off and walked up the neighbouring hill to take some photos.
The path disappeared a couple of hundred metres below the summit but I stuck to the plan. Soon I was stuck to the hill. I felt a bit of a prick: in fact many of them.
The Romans had introduced terracing to the stony hills and once upon a time the entire slope up to the 300m summit had been terraced. Each terrace was only about 2m wide and the retaining walls were no more than stacked stones. The dry-stone walling familiar to Northern climes was not deemed necessary. In recent times the land had been abandoned, the walls had collapsed, and prickly plants have sewn themselves into a cover for the rocks. No way of knowing whether ones footstep will land on hard ground or stomp through scratchy veg for another metre. The predicament is to decide whether to scrape your leg out of the hole and hope for better luck next time, or keep going and let the other leg take a turn at suffering an angry stab strike from the side.
But I made it and took these photos of the sea at Denia, the gateway to the Balearic Islands, and of the casita where I am staying.

On my return I discovered that my hosts had vanished leaving the gate locked so I could not leave. Unfortunately I needed by 4 o'clock to be at another Dutch couples place as they had invited me to dinner. Nothing to do but wait and at 5 my hosts arrived and kindly drove me down to the other house.
Rijn and Else are in their 70's and also live in a Dutch bubble here. She was an HR manager for the now defunct Wang and he was an ex-Burroughs man who had been in the computer business even longer than me, so between us we had a good winge about the decline of systems knowledge and the inability of accountants to understand the difference between commercial and Home computers. Then we watched Dutch TV for an hour because the final of Maestro was showing. This competition is between a number of wannabe conductors who are given the opportunity to conduct a professional orchestra in a variety of pieces. They were surprisingly good and it really demonstrated the difference the conductor makes to a piece of music. So there is a novelty, I found a game show I actually enjoyed.Läs mer