We have just packed off one group of visitors and have a twenty four hour hiatus before we have the next batch, this again gives me a chance to wonder about our present lot.

Every so often in the last six months I have wondered at the foolhardiness of these two wrinklies heading off to a new life in a new country at their stage when they should have been opting for the comfort of home, pipe and slippers.

It has been a help that we have been so busy readying the house for visitors that there has been no time to have last minute doubts, and no option to do so anyway.
One of the real changes that you slip into in a hot country is one of dress.
Here I wear sandals, when not barefoot, shorts and t-shirts, I seem to alternate between about three sets of each.
I haven’t worn socks, shoes, long trousers, long sleeved shirts, jumpers, or jackets (except for funerals) since early last June when I came out.
It really does feel like I have gone feral, back to a more primitive state.
There is something about living in warm air that makes one feel a little like the Swiss Family Robinson.
Certain chores become much easier.
Yeast bread rises in thirty minutes beautifully, clothes dry on the line in minutes instead of hours-or days -spent taking them in from the rain.

You become aware that most of our civilizations were born around the Mediterranean; Egyptian, Greek, Roman.
The very earliest art has been found in caves in the Pyrenees which we can see from the terrace.
This is not of course wholly accidental.
If we in Ireland were to have discovered the yeast rising of bread we would first have to have discovered central heating to make it possible.
How much of our time in Ireland is spent trying to keep warm, a large portion of our income goes on heating fuel, translate that back to primitive man and it gives him more time to appreciate the pleasures of leisure and the joys of art and music.

On a different tack I have long been convinced that the start of language, and therefore civilization, was when man decided to hunt in groups, and therefore to eat in groups with sufficient food at the table to give them leisure to talk to each other.
I have just ordered a book written by a Harvard anthropologist, Richard Wrangham, which makes an even more interesting case.
He argues that humanity started to evolve above its peers not because of the use of tools, as most other anthropologists seem to agree, but because they started to cook.
You would have to read his book (Catching Fire, how cooking made us human) to get all of his theses, but he does make a few cogent points which seem to back his argument up.
To those who claim that we should eat only raw food he quotes a study which tells us that the raw food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply and that about half of female raw foodists get so thin that they stop menstruating.

Grist, of course, to the mill to one who likes to think that as a practising chef he is following one of the noblest professions in the world.
Now I also feel that I am doing this in the very cradle of civilization.