Everywhere you look in Tenerife you will see banana plantations – or you won’t see them -  but they are there, hidden behind that tatty looking grey net that festoons the island.

Now, for the very first time, Tenerife is hosting a banana festival complete with all sorts of wacky competitions and events – banana sculpting for example.

There will be prizes for the best banana inspired dish and plenty of banana booze as well as non-alcoholic banana drinks for the kids. It sounds like a lot of fun and I am promised more bananas than I can carry if I go along with the weans so I guess I’ll see you there.  I’ll be the one checking out the banana rum…
Festival Del Platano

April 24 & 25th 2010

Troya, Playa de las Americas.

Even before the economic crisis Tenerife’s animal  shelters struggled to feed the animals they had in their charge. Now though, in the current economic climate things are even worse and the need for funds to care for the animals that have been abandoned or have strayed is desperate.

The shelters are already full to bursting and yet they are somehow supposed to struggle on with more animals in their care and no funding. The shelters have no more room and no more money. They need help – and they get next to none of that from the government here in Tenerife.

The shelters raise money through charity events, car boot sales and by donations. If you can help in any way, please call K9 on 608 121 081 (Eng) or 670 845 243 (Esp).

Tenerife’s abandoned dogs have their own blog which publishes news on current events, forthcoming fundraisers, etc. If you want more information on the various shelters, vets, trainers, dog kennels, Tenerife Dogs is the place to go.

Judging by the roving bands of little demons and witchlets that were terrorising the neighbourhood last night, nobody paid much attention to the bishops’ warnings of the pagan nature of Halloween. I thought my own little devils looked great although Sami was a bit miffed with his make-up. He thought it was ugly but eventually got into the spirit after he was forced to agree that there was no such thing as a pretty pirate.

Leaving the kids with Gaga we went off into the night for a bit of trick or treating of  own own. We stopped by at The Penalty and then made our way to Scottish bar.  The owners, Pauline and Bobby cook up a fab fish and chips and great breakfasts but Bobby’s Saturday curry is so good it sells out early so get there before nine if you want to be sure you get some.

As it happens if you missed out on Bobby’s curry you could have stuffed your face with the free chilli con carne that was on tap at Our Place but as Chef Igor doesn’t do mild, you did need to like it hot. Not that that would have been a problem last night because the only people in the place were the evil and the undead.

Everyone was there from Cruella de Ville to a victim of the Whitechapel murders. There were enough skeletons to open a boneyard and more witches than you could shake a broom at.

More pics on Facebook

Modern Halloween, as in kids getting dressed up and going trick-or-treating, is not a traditional Spanish festival. In fact, the Spanish Bishops are getting a bit hot under the collar about the whole thing and are urging parents not to dress up their kids in costumes in celebration of this pagan event.

That doesn’t seem to bother my neighbour, Lola, much. She has been fussing and fretting over her kids’ costumes since the beginning of the month and seems quite bewildered at my lukewarm attitude. To be honest, I am just delighted that Gaga and her sidekick, Linda, are going to be throwing a party for the local kids which gives me the excuse to go out for a bit of kid-free gallivanting of my own. Let’s face it, Sami is a wee diablo for much of the year anyway, while Hania, well let’s just say she can be a little bruja when she feels like it.

Regardless of what the Bishops have to say, you can guarantee that unless you are smart and offl0ad the kids and shoot off out for the night or sit in pitch blackness with the telly off, your front door is going to ring off its hinges on Saturday night. So, just to help you out, I have prepared a little  list so that you  may have the right response handy.

Just fill in the blanks…

¡Caramba! ¡Qué un esqueleto espantoso! (Yikes! What a scary skeleton!)

• monster = monstruo
• witch = bruja
• fantasma = ghost
• vampiro = vampire
• werewolf = hombre lobo
• zombi = zombie

If you are having a party of your own, then there is nothing that screams Halloween more than pumpkin soup for which Andy Montgomery has provided a devilish recipe in the new online Tenerife Magazine.

And finally, I’d like to leave you with a little Halloween riddle that has bothered me for some time. Why do witches never have babies? Because warlocks have hollow weenies. Bwahahahah

So there we were, obviously a shifty looking crew, me, two kids, a grandmother and a big daft dog with a halter-type face mask on. We were plodding along the street at snail’s pace, the dog, huge as he is was neither pulling nor showing any interest in anything other than his ‘weans’ as he likes to keep an eye on them when they are gadding about.

On the other side of the street, a wee hairy mop of a dog was yapping its head off and slinging bribes in our direction, but Tito, to his credit, didn’t blink an eye at it.

That didn’t stop a police car from coming to a stop a couple of feet ahead of us and the coppers inside it, giving me a stern talking to about the fact the dog didn’t have a muzzle on. Actually the face mask he was wearing gives me more control than a muzzle would and also effectively pulls his mouth shut if there were to be any trouble. The pc on the other side of the car got our and bobbed about shouting that this was a dangerous dog. “No, he’s not!” my mother scoffed while Tito threw himself to the ground with a huge sigh of boredom.

Only a couple of days before an elderly lady had been mugged in the area by three local boys on a scooter. One got her round the neck, while a second grabbed her bag. In total they got away with about €150 in booty but they left the woman feeling very shaky and upset. Worst of all is that the locals say even the police know who the wee thugs are but can’t touch them because they are under 16.

Meanwhile, Tito’s eyes had glazed over and he rolled on his side totally disgusted with this interruption to our pleasant family walk. We were finally let off the hook after being threatened with a steep fine and assorted dire penalties if the dog was not wearing a muzzle the next time they saw me with him.

Do you think it would have made a difference if I told the police that Tito was under 16?

Yippeeee! Only a few days to go till Tenerife schools are in!

Having had the week from hell (or to be honest the last thirteen weeks from hell)  I am prepared to admit that mothering is not my forte. Love them to pieces as I do, I find my two darlings in concentrated doses makes me go more than a little round the bend. How I envy those unruffled women who glide through parenthood so smoothly while magically keeping their homes clean and sparkling at the same time.

In comparison at the end of each day my hair is standing on end and I am having palpitations at the scary thought of the mountain of clothes to be washed toppling over and suffocating me in the middle of the night. Then having finally said my last goodnight and waiting half an hour for the inevitable squabble and squawk to die down in the kids bedroom I can then enjoy a precious nugget of silence before Tito starts baying his silly head off at some innocent person out walking their dog past the garden gate.

Having never been a religious person I am more and more drawn to the vow of silence.

But I digress. Back to school or at least back to the subject of school. Oddly where in the past the little ones were taken in a day earlier so that they could get settled, it seems this year that the intake for both infantil and primaria is on the same time at the same day. That can’t be right, surely?

With one set of buildings on each side of a main road and a janny (a janitor to those who do not speak Scottish) who seems to take great delight in ramming the gates shut if you are a nanosecond past the 9.10 am while galloping from one school building to the other, there will be utter chaos on Tuesday.

There is also the matter of the subsidised school books. At third year in Primary, my daughter is entitled to have her text books paid for by the cabildo but what a holy mess they made of that last year.  The list of books was not handed out till the last minute and there were not enough books on the whole island to cover the demand.  If this is your first year dealing with the state school system in Tenerif e you can get an idea of what to expect by reading  The Tenerife TexBook Fiasco and Tenerife Textbooks – the Saga Continues.

So with crossed fingers and a song of hope in my heart I am skipping off down to the school reception this morning with my babies in tow to find out just WTF is going on. Tra la la.

I finally got round to putting up a little video about our Rafting Bike day out just before the weekend. (No cracks about ‘fat-bottomed girls’, if you please).

I made the vid with Windows Movie Maker which has an annoying habit of freezing the computer every 10 minutes so the little clip nearly never got finished at all. Despite a growing urge to turf the whole lot into the briny, I finally got the it done and am quite happy with the results. What do you think?