Painting Shows

I have been working for two paintings exhibitions, one takes place on the seventh of Ausgust whilst the other one a solo exhibition is on the 10th and my kind friend Sue, is going to organize the nibbles, the wine and the invitations for the opening, I have managed to paint a small series of landscapes plus other paintings for the four walls of a room in my solo exhibition, which I'm hoping will do well. On top of that, I have a House Warming Party here at our home of which I'm organizing and looking forward to, plus my dear friend Marilyn and her daughter Ximena are coming to visit us later this month too, so August is going to be packed of fun and only fun for me. Then in September our friend Carlo is coming to visit us and we will also go and visit him in Florence so that is another exciting event to look forward to as well, then in November we are off to Gibraltar and we have already booked Christmas in a hotel in Oxford, so we pretty much, have got the rest of our year mapped out. As soon as I put on the finishing details of my last landscape, I will post it on the blog but now I must run !

Heir Hunter´s Show

The BBC has approved the seventh series of the ´Heir Hunter´show. We have now finished the sixth series which will be shown either Jan or Feb of next year and the BBC liked it, they are pleased with it so that´s why they have now commissioned the seventh series too, which in my opinion will be even better than the last ones, because we have very good, exciting stories and they will be surprised by them when we write them the new ones for their approval, as this show has in itself become an effective tool to reach more people and even solve cases that have remained unsolved until now.. in very surprising ways but I won´t be letting the cat out of the bag as I want people to see the show and find out for themselves. Peter is also getting more used to the cameras, so he looks more natural having had all this experience now is coming to him like a second nature.

I learnt that David Pacifico from Fraser & Fraser's is a keen ball room dancer so if the series continues the way it is going.. I can see myself dancing with David in that other show for celebrities! ha,ha,ha. I had better start to learn how to dance though. Just kidding here. It was a member of the public who told me this detail about David Pacifico she is a Jewish lady who watches Heir Hunters and had met David somewhere. Also, the BBC has sold the show to the History Channel and also to the Australian T.V. where some of our clients have seen us in the show there too. They also put sections of the show in You Tube. In the new series, we will appear at the new office, so you will be able to see how it all looks, with its wooden beams, Oh.. and before I forget as this is the most important thing, is that the BBC are going to start showing the programme at Prime Time, round seven O'clock maybe they will have Peter and Hector presenting the show or they might just re-edit it the series for a one hour show in the evenings, we are not sure yet what they will decide to do, but all in all, things are going very well.

Once the show hits the prime time slot ( which it has already been approved ) everyone will see it, as right now, we are missing the people who are at work in the mornings but this new slot will reach people who come back from work and sit to watch their telly whilst having dinner. I can see that it will really take off. Although at one point last month, it was being shown in the morning and again in the History Channel at 7 P.M. so I suppose the viewing was good and have now decided it will do well at the other BBC channel in the evenings. Well, that's all the news.

Sketching in the summer

"Every life can be told as a novel, each of us is the protagonist of his own legend" wrote the famous author Isabel Allende. I prefer to tell what I see in drawings driving through the beautiful countryside in my car; stop when I see a pretty view and set to work. The sun was shinning and the troubles and cares of this world vanish the moment I find my pastel colours. The only way to describe it is bliss! I work quickly before the weather decides to change and the image of that first impression is gone. Somehow when you draw, the scene gets imbedded in your memory and it becomes part of you. That is my tree and my hills. Are things really as I remember them or as I have painted them here? When it's done, I always feel disappointed that I have only managed to grab a 10th of what I saw. Still, the impressions of the day are there in mere chalks of what it was like to me that day.

Lone toddler's Bus Trip Shocker

The things that happen around here. A TWO year-old got on a bus and travelled 24 miles to Shrewsbury unaccompanied. He was just wearing his pyjamas, a nappy and socks, but no shoes, he somehow got on the bus and made the one hour trip to Shrewsbury without anyone noticing the parents were nowhere to be seen. The bus picked up people as usual and this little child managed to crawl on unnoticed and make his way to the back seat. Everyone in the bus naturally assumed the child's parents were on the bus and didn't make any comment about the child sitting on the back seat among a small group of teenagers. The bus driver tells the child wasn't in the slightest way distressed and didn't call out for his mother or father at any time. It wasn't until the bus pulled up at Shrewsbury's bus station that people started to realise the toddler was alone! When the last of the people started to get off the bus, the driver asked 'What about your child? to which everyone replied: 'It's not mine.' That's when it dawned on everyone that this child had made this trip all alone! Until that moment, everyone thought the child belonged to someone else and kept quiet. The concerned bus driver and one of the women on the bus, who had a pram, took the child to the nearest police station, a few hundred yards away and reported the incident. The police have commended the driver for his actions because he made sure the child was safe. The woman the driver was with, also purchased wet wipes and nappies to change the child. Isn't that something ?

Hi ! I'm back.

I have been devoting my time to my painting; the views around here are magnificent, everywhere you look and I have plenty of material to keep me busy painting away landscapes. I go in my car, to my chosen location with all my painting gear and its just really wonderful, we are having a good summer here of sun with a little bit of showers, so I have chosen to paint with pastels, that way, I don't have to scamper into the car with a wet oil painting that will smudge everywhere and also carry in the umbrella, the easel, the brushes in a real hurry when it rains! a dry medium like pastels means I can paint inside my car, for the most part, I try to choose locations where there is easy access to parking and where I can be seen but not disturbed as I hate being watched when I work, but at the same time, I like places where I don't feel isolated in a lonely spot, in case something goes wrong like the other day. The battery of the car went flat when I wanted to come home. I had borrowed Peter's mobile phone but unfortunatelly for me, these modern mobiles think they are computers or cameras or calendars or playing consoles except a real phone and for some reason, I only kept getting his list of contacts and unable to call him but just before panic set in, all of a sudden as If by magic, I spotted one of the RAC lorries that go in aid of broken down vehicles, so I flagged him down, his company isn't the one we are affilliated with but he still helped me to charge my battery and he didn't want to accept any payment. Without his help, I would have had to continue struggling with the blessed mobile phone to call Peter or.. walking a few miles back home. Anyway, I took my car to the mechanic which is only a short walk from our new home. You would never know the garage is there, the shop is a quaint looking cottage but inside it, it has all the modern equipment to service a car. Now, I love to paint plein air landscapes and it seems not a single day is the same, the second day I was prepared with a new car battery, a new simple mobile phone but got stung by a wasp that day and unfortunately I had to cut the painting session short. The lesson here, is to be prepared with a good insect repellent, a sun blocker and continue to persevere whether it rains or shines.

Moving House

A new dawn will start for us this Friday when we move to our 'new' home with new friends and neighbours. They say one of the biggest upheavals in anyone's life is to have a death in the family, a divorce or moving house but Peter and I have been for the past two weeks gradually moving there and not in one go as most people tend to do, this has made the task easier and pleasant. I have already moved the most delicate things like my china cupboard with all my precious Lladro figurines and my Wedgewood dinner set plus the Venecian chandellier which had to be disasembled piece by piece from our present ceiling and then I carefully washed each individual piece and delicately packed it, then it was transported over there and the electrician assembled it again and hunged at our new home, it took a whole day but it was worth it, as it looks simply marvellous. The new beds are also there, so today I will go to make the beds with the new bed linen and place the curtain poles in the bedrooms. Some clothes and furniture have already been transported there, so we can say we are half way done as we can comfortably stay there as it is right now. We are lucky in the sense that there will be more space at the new home than we have here right. The only hicup his been British Telecom who have already transferred my private line to the new house, or at least is in limbo as is neither here nor there since the telephones have not yet been connected at the new house so I'm incomunicado until the beginning of May. We have been promised by BT that we can retain the same telephone numbers so I hope that goes through alright as I have no desire to remember another set of three different telephone numbers. I think we will be very happy there as we already have friends and the last time we went to our new home we were made welcomed by a really nice group of ladies with whom we shared a joke and a laugh and we were informed that there will be a street party to celebrate the Royal Wedding in front of our home! I feel so happy to hear about this, as I have never been to a street party before. Everything here seems to be so unreal and happy. The town is self-sufficient as everything seems to be either in front of our home, along the road, behind our home (like the doctor's surgery) or around the corner. It is simply fantastic! this lovely market town is located at the foot of a castle where the views are of outstanding natural beauty. It also has a small museum where you can see the inside of a real house and how it used to be furnished long ago, with interesting memorabilia of the people who has lived there over the centuries and how life used to be then. The museum is run by volunteers. There are so many things to do as they have a calendar with lots of activities throughout the whole year and I can learn to do things I always wanted to do, like grow strawberries and cucumbers in an alotment for fun. There are cinema days where for a couple of pounds you can see a film and just across the road a new French restaurant has just opened too. The owner is French and he has a good reputation as a cheff since he owns another restaurant at a nearby town so this is very good news. Visitors come here every summer and I over-heard a lady saying: 'There aren't very many towns like this one left. It is such a pretty and quaint town that I wish I could live here' I just felt doubly lucky that we are going to move there this Friday, only two days to go! I'm so excited and the weather has turned sunny and pretty today with limpid blue skies. I can't believe our good luck!

My ADVENTURES IN MEXICO

Have you ever gone through the feeling that this might be your last day alive ? Well, that happened to us on the way to Merida. When I saw that we were going to board a small airplane on a pitch dark tarmac taxiway as we walked towards this plane, I said to Peter: ' haven't I told a thousand times that I hate small planes ? “ He didn't answer me. When we boarded, I noticed there weren't any lights inside this plane, just in the pilot's cabin and I counted 20 passengers in the dim light that came from the runway lights outside. We took off alright, the weather was very bad, furious winds and rain battered the small plane and at one point it felt like if the plane was going to flip upside down as it had already flipped sideways as
I could tell we were not flying straight; we had to hold on to the seat in front in order not to slip out of our seats and the wings of the plane were tilted sideways. When things couldn't get worse they did: We hit turbulence, bad turbulence and the plane was shaking like a milk shake in a can. I looked at Peter and instead of being scared I got cross with Peter and asked him: What airline is this? He replied: 'Maya Airlines' then suddenly the little plane plunged 100 feet in free fall; it looked like the pilots couldn't get any control of this sudden plunge and gust of wind. Everyone in the plane was screaming. I watched the pilots in the cockpit crossing themselves and I thought to myself: when even the pilots are crossing themselves it’s not boding too well. Then I turned to Peter and still cross at him I told him: You realize we are also going to fly over the Bermuda Triangle where ships and planes disappear without a trace and we are also flying with an airline no one has ever heard of, where small planes frequently fall of the sky like mosquitoes around here, we won't even appear in the news, no one will know where the hell we are. I thought about my friend Robert who doesn't like airplanes and Hector and our new house that I would not see finished and then I started thinking how we could survive if the airplane went down, thinking that maybe airplanes should have a large parachute in case it failed. The flight seemed interminable after what it seemed an eternity the weather got better and we could finally see the lights below of the city of Merida.
Phew! it looked like if everything was going to be fine after all. When we landed in Merida I heard a passenger saying she would have been better off travelling in a third class bus with the chickens! She thought that would have been a lot safer than this flight. If that was her first flight I'm sure it put her off for ever but I think I would have sooner travel in third class with the chickens had I known what an awful flight this was going to be.