In Geoffrey's bathroom wall just under the shower head there is a hole through the wall just big enough for your eye, that looks out onto someone's abandoned patio below, full of weathered containers and wild plants behind a backdrop of grey concrete wall. Nobody can see through, though if you care to have a view while showering you can stick your eye up to the hole.

Quite a number of the houses that can be seen from the rooftop are needing a coat of paint, which Geoffrey would be more than willing to do, if it were up to him. The whitewash is no longer white and it would not look to most of you like something belonging to an average neighborhood in a first world country.

I knocked some space out of a wall around some pipe fittings that needed to be soldered, helped put up a cupboard, mixed cement and patched a crumbling wall, helped clean a gutter and make speculations about where the leak could be coming from, took the cover off a spray painting machine, which Geoffrey then hardwired onto the power supply or converter, as it was from the US and he had long since removed the useless plug.

Sunday I washed the white paint off the rooftop patio just below the walls, after he sprayed the walls white, and translated for him and his neighbour, the elderly Maria, who has a sparkle in her eye and likes to tease him, though they don't understand a word each other says.

In return he paid my train ticket, bought me drinks at the pena Friday night, made me food the whole weekend and took me out to a venta (definition = place Kim would like to stay forever) yesterday afternoon.

Mara thinks I am weirder than weird, going to Jerez to help a guy I just met work on his house. Mara is correct.