Had we been waiting for this, it was finally San Juan, the one day in the year that we can legitimately burn rubbish! We lit the fire before dark and spent hours shovelling wood, rubbish, garden cuttings and anything else on we could find! Manolo from the house behind lit a huge fire on the road, we watched nervously as the flames were leaping up over our roof – honestly look at the photos! Luckily we escaped without incident, I could just imagine our new wooden roofs burning if the wind swapped direction or a spark came over, we were on watch with the hosepipe close by! In Mum and Norm’s house the new bathroom roof was fitted after many month’s of waiting for their carpenter Domingo to start work.
Now we had our electric switched on we could complete the installation on the air conditioning, none of us had windows in our bedrooms, just doors which we didn’t like leaving open at night. Since coming to live in Lanzarote we can’t sleep with the windows closed, it is a lovely feeling to be lying in bed but feel the breeze blowing through the house cooling everything down. We had been really struggling with the lack of air and were really looking forward to having a breeze again even if from a machine. During the weeks in July where we had a really unusual heat of plus forty degrees we could programme our rooms to be kept at a constant twenty degrees and all of us slept with duvets on whilst our friends were cursing how hot it was and how they couldn’t sleep!