74 passengers abroad Flight UX-196 from Glasgow had a bumpy start to their vacation in Lanzarote this morning as their Air Europa Boing 737 failed to stop on the runway and took them a little closer to the beach than expected.

Emergency services helped the passengers disembark and it was confirmed that no-one was injured. The airport has been temporarily closed so those on later flights to Lanzarote can expect some delays.

If you have ever seen a Cirque Soleil performance then you know what kind of athletic and colourful extraganza you can expect from the European debut performance of El Circo Taganai. Taganai is a Russian word for ‘Moon-holder’ and the show follows that kind of mystical theme.

Tickets for the show in the Teatro Guimera in Santa Cruz from 25 to 30 November cost from €25 in the gallery to €35 for front row orchestra.

Reviews of El Circo Taganai from the US leg of its tour include statements like ‘AWESOME’, ‘…the quickest 80 minutes of my life’, and ‘…magical.’ Sounds great to me but if you are still undecided here is a little sneak preview…

Well, it was a beautiful crisp morning in Tenerife today. Walking the dogs in the utter quiet I could see Teide in the distance with her first signs of snow cover. The dogs pottered about and there was not another soul in sight (and yes, I did pick up the poop anyway, Natasha Kaplinsky!). Bliss.

After a peaceful twenty minutes, the flock of green parrots that live in the area started to wake up and their argumentative squawking seemed oddly familiar…

Judging by my son’s mood this morning yesterday’s trip to the clinic was a success. After thundering up and down the corridor to show how fast he can run he asked if I’d like to see him break dance. I can’t really tell if he is altogether better or this is just the first blush of morning fitness which will wear of as the day goes on.

My daughter is laying on her sickie status with a brickie’s trowel, bossing her little brother around as normal when I am out the room and then reverting to a deathbed croak the minute I return.

So both are off school today and now my main worry is my own sanity. I gave up trying to get any significant work done when they are off school at the weekends a long time ago and unless their Gaga volunteers to do her lion-tamer bit for a few hours in the afternoon on schooldays, most afternoons are out too. My working hours are school-time and bed-time.

Still I have every mother’s emergency pack to hand. On the way back from the clinic the second stop after the chemist was The Big Orange. Now I can at least get them settled in front of a DVD. That should score me … oh, 15 minutes of concentration time. If I’m lucky.

I admit I was very tempted to headline this story with Vulture Attacks Two Old Ducks in Jungle Park but in the end I had to admit that having two stone of feathered fury land on your shoulder is surely no joking matter.

The two women who were injured by the Griffon Vulture are still traumatised by the incident and one of them, Mrs Corcoran, quite rightly asks, ‘What if it had been a child?’

In response, the Aguilas Park spokesperson says that this is only the second such incident of its type that she’s heard of in the last 15 years. If that is the case, then I was present at the previous bird attack in Aguilas Park though admittedly that one did not make the international press. Maybe that is because it was only a handler that got beaten up by the birds that time.

The clever lad was in the throes of his multi-lingual presentation describing a particularly dumpy land bird which was blessed with black glossy feathers, red beak and a ton of bad attitude when it took a leap at him and gouged his cheek.

No sooner had the poor soul recovered from that attack and forged on with the show than a vulture took a dislike to him and swooped down catching the back of his head.

The handler was a real trooper as he soldiered on finishing the show with blood trickling down the back of his neck. I was attending the show with my brother whose girlfriend of the time was deathly afraid of birds. She had taken refuge in the cafe at the back and was by this point probably safely tucked under a table.

I’m ashamed to admit that I had one of those awful guilty school moments when you know you shouldn’t laugh but you just can’t help yourself. Something about the way the poor man carried on to the end of the show despite an involuntary flinch every time a bird flew over his head just cracked me up.

I have been to Aguilas Park countless times and always make time to watch the raptor show. The birds are as free as it is possible to be when they are part and parcel of an Animal Park of this kind. During the show they soar so high up in the sky that they are tiny specks and the handlers have no guarantee that they will make their return in time for their appearance in the show. A large part of me wants them to just keep on flying but they always come back eventually (at least according to the handlers I have spoken too) even if the show is over and the public have all gone home for the night.

So okay, last night was not the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. Around about the time when most people are so deeply into REM sleep that their eyeballs are doing somersaults, I was scraping little bits of vomit off the kids’ ladder. My son had not told a lie when woke me to say he had been sick everywhere. It was all over his bed and on every rung of the ladder both kids use to get to their high rise beds. He had fountained from on high and liberally splattered the floor, including quite possibly the cat as I have not seen hide not hair of her since.

After a quick that’ll-have-to-do type clean up and bundling the little guy back to bed with me, I maybe got a half hour shuteye before he rocketed out of bed clutching his mouth. He just made it to the loo before Vesuvius struck again. Poor lad. He wasn’t well at all and so the night went on. When he finally dropped off into a deep sleep I thought I could at last get some sleep myself but then it was the turn of my daughter. “Mummm..” she said shaking me gently, ‘…my throat’s sore.”

Brilliant. By morning I had saddlebags under my eyes that John Wayne would have found very useful but I at least had the opportunity to test Dr. Deadpan’s immediate medical appointment promises. Turned out he was true to his word and rather than be subjected to the disgusted tutting and head-shaking reserved for those who have the nerve to take their sick children to the clinic as an emergency I was the smug owner of two back to back appointments for this very morning.

I wondered if the grumpy doctor would actually smile upon me as he presented me with my two green cards as a reward for following the system. Unfortunately, I shall never know if Dr Deadpan is capable of an impish grin because it seems he has gone. Sitting in his place behind the doctor’s desk was a wee plump lady that looked as if she’d wandered in off the street in search of a cup of tea. No doctor’s jacket and a bit of a slap dash way about handling the instruments between each child had me a bit concerned.

Later on I saw her with a colleague in a local cafe. I couldn’t decide whether it was worse that the doctor had not worn a jacket for the consultation with my kids or that her colleague was wearing one now – in a public place. That’s not right, surely? But it was when I saw the stethoscope coiled on the cafe table between the two that I really thought ‘Come back, Dr. Deadpan. All is forgiven.’

The man might have been a grumpy sod but he was on obsessively clean grumpy sod with a sparklingly white jacket. I’m quite sure he would not have been seen dead gadding about in a public cafe, slinging his stethoscope about willy-nilly. On the other hand, the new doctor seems to have done away with the manic red-yellow-green appointment card system so she can’t be all bad.

News in the Sun reports that house sales in S.C. de Tenerife have fallen by 90% leading to the closure of up to 65% of estate agents in Tenerife.

Funnily enough the photo used to illustrate that story looked quite familiar. Turns out it is spookily similar to one I took myself back in 2001 when I was emailed by a holiday maker who suspected she’d been sold a pig in a poke. She had. That construction site was the same place that the travel agent had described as a ‘new hotel complex’.

Imagine turning up for your two weeks in the sun and ending up there!
The original Is Your Holiday Resort a Construction Site is quite outdated now but it is worth a look when you are booking a holiday overseas. The internet makes it so easy nowadays to look up recent resort photographs or ask in forums for unbiased reviews.

Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth (and that was from my husband), Tito finally lost his family jewels last Monday. Honestly, what a lot of fuss about nothing. He went in at six and I stayed with him after they gave him a sedative. He politely collapsed at my feet and stayed zonked out while two vets hauled him on the gurney. I stayed while they shaved his leg and his goolies and then he was wheeled away out of sight. I collected him an hour later, a little woozy but happy as ever.

Much more traumatic through the week was Tito’s sudden cries of pain and favouring of one leg. His sqeals were horrific but would stop as soon as they started. At first, I thought he’d picked up a thorn though I couldn’t see anything caught in his pads. Given the news about his brother having Dysplasia we were very concerned when Tito repeated his dramatics although each time the pain seemed to pass in less than a minute.

The internet is an absolute fountain of information of course, though I know from experience that you should never rely on it for identifying medical symptoms. Once when my boy was in nappies I scoured the internet for reasons why there might be orange crystals in an otherwise dry nappy. God knows what strange malady I came across that day but I remember dissolving in floods of tears convinced my perfect baby would be strapped to a wheelchair and in constraints to stop him snapping at his carers by the time he was 16.

Nevertheless, I have read a lot about dogs on the internet and although I have never had a dog with pano it seemed to me that Tito’s was displaying classic pano symptoms. When we took him to the vet he confirmed that in a large breed dog, growing so fast, Tito was suffering nothing more than growing pains – panostitis. What a relief!

I have received several comments from Caroline asking for photos of Tito and it has been a while since I posted any.