Journal · 2025–2026
Written by whoever was there. Mostly Marta, sometimes Rafael, once, memorably, by the man who fixes the generator.
We had eleven people on the apron by half past ten and I had told all of them, as I tell everyone, that a meteor shower is mostly an exercise in patience and cold. The forecast rate was around a hundred an hour at the peak, which sounds like a firework display and is in fact one every thirty seconds somewhere in a sky you are not looking at.
At 01:20 the calima that had been sitting over the island for nine days finally went out to sea. You could feel it go: the temperature dropped about three degrees in ten minutes and the Milky Way came up out of the murk like something being developed. Someone said a word I will not print.
Between two and three we counted a hundred and forty-one. Two of them were bright enough to cast a shadow on the paving, which I have seen four times in my life and twice from this ridge. The second one broke into three pieces over the western horizon and left a train that was still visible, slowly twisting, for something like eight seconds.
Nobody went to bed. Nuria came up at half past three with bread and a pan of hot milk and gofio, which is exactly the correct food for four in the morning at eleven hundred metres, and we sat on the wall until the sky started going grey behind the caldera at twenty past six.
The telescope stayed shut all night. It was the wrong instrument entirely and I did not think about it once.
Earlier
2025–2026
3 July 2026
Twenty-eight knots on Tuesday, gusting thirty-six, and two of the four sails over the bathhouse deck came out of their sockets at about eleven in the morning. Nobody was under them. We have gone back to the frames the original builder wanted and we should have listened the first time.
19 May 2026
He has started a green prune in the third week of May on about a fifth of the vineyard, which everyone on La Palma says is madness. The theory is that it holds the acid through the August heat. We will know in November and he will be insufferable if he is right.
28 February 2026
The gauge took 96 mm between two in the afternoon and one in the morning, which is a quarter of the year in half a day. The road above the vineyard lost its top metre and the cove filled with brown water for two days. By Thursday the tedera was out and the whole south slope smelled of it.
14 November 2025
Three days of six-metre swell out of the north-west and the Tazacorte boat stayed where it was. We had eleven guests, four staff, no bread flour and a great deal of fish. Nuria cooked the same three things in nine different ways and two of them are on the menu now.
2 September 2025
The limpets on the north side of the Punta are twice the size of the ones by the cove and take four times as long to get. She has now negotiated with the two men who have always collected there, which took a year, a bottle of Bruma and a formal apology for something that happened in 2023.