Here are a couple of Extracts from Beyond the Meander to give you a flavour of the story "There wasn’t a great deal I could help them with, so I decided I would wander over to find Juan Ramon’s farm and buy any produce he could sell me. An early start, one morning with Reike in tow got me to the area of his home. I searched out his moped leaning against the wall of his almacèn telling me I had found the right place. Being in a very peaceful location, he soon acknowledged our presence and was out to greet us, even remembering my name and making a great fuss about the dog. ‘Bon dia, Juan Ramon, que tal?’ ‘Hola, Señor Malcolm, muy bien, usted?’ With my little knowledge of Catalan, I thought it would be better to speak slowly in English adding the odd Spanish sentence as and when I felt it was appropriate. ‘Lyndsay has asked me to buy some of your lovely melons and tell me, what other vegetables do you grow that I can buy?’ A wonderful toothy grin appeared on his sun-scorched face. We conducted the conversation in my terminology of cata-anglais, more Spanish than English, but great fun making one understand the other. After much discussion, nodding and shaking of heads and lots of smiles, I found myself with an arm around his shoulder convincing him that I totally understood what vegetables he was producing that I was able to buy. I ended up with 4 large green melons and three kilos of freshly picked habas (broad beans). Then, when I least expected it, I was to get a lesson in what to use for a successful shower. By this time Juan Ramon was involved in miming, in order to explain the luffa. He kept repeating luffa, luffa and all I could do was give him a blank look. He took it upon himself to mimic somebody rubbing themselves all over, still a blank look from me and then when he mimicked pouring water over his head the penny dropped. ‘Ah you mean loofah!’ ‘Correcto, señor Malcolm!’ In my naivety, I had always assumed loofahs came from the ocean, not realising that it would take a 90-year-old Catalan farmer to reveal my ignorance. He beckoned for me to follow him round to the back of his Finca and pointed to a tree around three metres high. and there, dangling from its branches were hanging fruit that seemed a cross between a very green banana and a large courgette. Like some Tommy Cooper trick, he approached the tree and with his knife cut off one of the fruits. Then, to my complete amazement, he peeled it like a banana and hey presto, he held in his hand a perfectly formed shower loofah. Yes, you are right. I felt like a complete fool! In the 10 minutes that followed he explained that it was a luffa tree and it took up to eight months for the fruit to ripen and the luffa inside to form a sponge. He said it was a very old tree that his father had planted many years ago and in a very jovial manner, he explained that he might be very old, but he was very clean! I am not completely sure I believed him, but it was actually a better story than the market, melons and moped. We parted company after I forced him to take some money, and I knew we were going to be great friends, so what my parents used to say was true. You can learn from your elders! I couldn’t wait to get back and relate the meeting to Lyndsay, she was going to be mad that she’d missed out on the afternoon cabaret! Yet an old Spanish farmer could teach a London grammar schoolboy not to go looking in the sea for his shower sponges! " "Most afternoons, we would sit out under the fig tree and admire their work and we were starting to look forward to sitting in the naya in the warm autumn evenings to watch the last vestiges of sunlight slip behind the distant hills and the sky become alive with millions of stars, a phenomenon we would never tire of. Both the sky and the land would become alive, with the bats entertaining us every night with their never-ending flight and as the darkness grew, eyes would often stare back at us from the immediate campo. The animals surrounding us had got used to us interlopers and they knew that we meant them no harm. Even Reike would just sit outside the door and pay no attention to their antics, however close they came to our home, which was wonderful as we had no wish to disturb them. On the contrary, it was magical to think they were our visitors and we could all live in harmony. These early hours, just after dusk and certainly before midnight we often heard the distinctive call of the nightjar, with its clonk-clonk-clonk, rather like someone chopping wood, and I suppose a little like a woodpecker only much slower. "