From ‘Driving Over Lemons. An optimist in Andalucia’ by Chris Stewart

 It eyed us for a moment, then performed that trick that has so endeared the goat to mankind since the beginnings of time, the simultaneous belch and fart.

 

A thick silence ensued. I felt like a dead pig in a tea room.

 

…. few country people over fifty here have an inkling about their written language.

 

Seven o'clock, the afternoon gone, but now not only was the sun burning fiercely from high in the sky, but all the hills and rocks were giving back as good as they had got and radiating heat vengefully back into the air. The air, sandwiched between its tormentors, had given up and lay draped over the valley like a rag.

 

It must have been the Perseids: mid August is usually the time for this shower of meteors to pass

 

……….pigs love figs and they would squabble and bounce about with glee………. everyone around here keeps pigs, fattening them through the year and killing them, at the traditional matanzas, in the fly-free days of winter……… any other time and flies and wasps would amass in a frenzy of looting and spoil the neighborly business of slaughter. For the same reason the days grim deed starts early in the cool of the morning.

 

Then he helped himself, while Maria crouched beside him and picked at bits from his plate. This seemed to be their preferred way of eating, she like one of those birds that pick the ticks off the backs of hippopotami.

 

She was currently working through maths and physics and veterinary science, and in order to prevent her outlook on life becoming too earnest, was reading Swiss satirical magazines in French and German. Try as I might, I found it impossible to imagine the Swiss as a fund of satirical humor. I said as much to Janet. ‘Yes… yes, Chris, you’re perfectly right. They don't have any humor at all. In fact, the Swiss have the sort of sense of humor you'd expect a dog to have!’

 

Manuel’s stories were too good to doze through. He told them well, fluently and with a fine sense of balance and dramatic timing. Those who cannot read or write have the advantage in this; the ability to keep a long story in one's head tends to diminish with literacy.