Returning to Andalucia is a no-brainer...
IT’S just beginning to snow as I write, but I’ve just had an invite to return to Spain to talk about my copyrighted ‘Passport To Mainstream’’ - a document I formulated when working with disaffected kids.
My Mother once said to me, “If you fell in a muck cart, you would come out smelling of roses!” And so it proved the first time I was asked to visit a Secondary School in Nerja in Southern Andalucia.
The Spanish educators, were keen to hear about some of the initiatives I used in Derbyshire, and I was happy to oblige.
My contact, Jose Manuel, was not only a great teacher, he also happened to be a local wildlife expert - and the last band he had seen in Malaga was the Dubliners, the first band I ever saw.
We hit it off, to say the least, and the students were just as welcoming.
School is out early in Spain, which allowed me to jump into a hire car and head upwards to the Alpujarras, an area of outstanding natural beauty, which starts out as a series of deep cut verdant valleys of hewn rock, and ends up as a snowy lunar landscape.
The road is not for sufferers of vertigo, and upwards I drove, hairpin after hairpin, passing through villages which got smaller and smaller until finally the last habitation was left behind.
Parking up at over 3,000 metres, I headed into the woods, disturbing two lizards and a goshawk. A multitude of tits flitted tantalisingly close to me.
Emerging from the trees, the air was tangibly thinner and I was able to bask in sunshine, looking directly onto the snow.
I thought I was a cert’ for eagles and vultures, but after half an hour of sky-watching, neither appeared. On the way down, I discovered droppings which set the hairs on the back of my neck into overdrive – I am fairly confident that the stool in question belonged to an Iberian lynx, a rare and beautiful feline and possibly the most endangered of the world’s 36 cats.