giles on the lake
WATER BABY: Giles on the lake

I WOKE in darkness a few mornings ago, glanced at my watch on the bedside table and saw that it read 1.30am.

Unable to get back to sleep, I decided to catch up on my reading so donned the head torch. (Half past one in the morning is a little early to be trudging down to the end of the garden and turning on the generator. It makes a bit of a racket. Put it this way. After the recent earthquakes shook Marbella, I received more than a few enquires wondering if I had installed a new, more powerful power unit at the lake).

I read for an hour before I was more than a little surprised to hear the first stirrings of the local flora and fauna as dawn broke.

Puzzled, I looked at my watch. It was upside down. The time was actually 8am. I’ve been assured that it’s an age thing…

On the subject of earthquakes, I slept soundly through the recent seismic disturbances on the coast. Maybe because the Casita is a one-storey structure built in the 18th century, with walls so thick they stand a sporting chance of withstanding a direct hit from a cruise missile, never mind a mere 6.1 leg trembler on the Richter Scale.

Looking at Social Media the next morning, however, I thought that the ‘Big One’, as my Californian friends call it, had hit San Pedro, never mind San Francisco.

Tales of beds swaying, walls shaking and plasma TVs falling off walls were all over the InterWeb.

People who demanded penthouses with sea views were more than a little nervous and checked to see if their buildings had been designed to be earthquake proof (as a general rule of thumb, if they were constructed during the Jesus Gil era, not a chance).

I did look out across the lake, however, just to check there was no tsunami speeding towards me.

A few days later, we had a night of heavy rain. Not enough to raise the level of the lake, but once again, social media went into overdrive, only just stopping short of telling everyone to build arks.

Since then I’ve stocked up on tinned food and have been hunkered down at the Casita, waiting for the next natural disaster to strike. I’m fully expecting a meteorite strike any day now, or something a little Biblical in proportion.

Maybe a plague of locusts or, given its Sodom and Gomorrah reputation in the press, perhaps the denizens of Puerto Banus will be turned into pillars of salt.

 

Subscribe to the Olive Press

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.