My Spanish friends left for home on Saturday having thoroughly enjoyed the Creuse. They took with them a large collection of long stout sticks gathered on various walks. The area is awash with walks; through woods, along river valleys, up and down slopes of various degrees of steepness. They did several from a guide that I have and I went along on a couple.

The sticks were not, as you might have thought, an obsession of Diego junior’s but were gathered by Chus to support her tomato plants at home since sticks are as rare as hens’ teeth in the plains around Valladolid.

One place we started a walk from was the village of Masgot where the houses and walls are decorated with little granite sculptures like these. The man who did them is long gone but the village does a thriving trade in stone-carving holidays on the back of his little hobby.

I had the opportunity to learn a little more about Diego junior’s little hobbies one day. He regaled me with a description of his various collections. He’s got fossils and beetles and feathers and other oddments from the natural world all catalogued and stored at home. One particular joy is his collection of the bones of small mammals. Well, you might say, kids collect all sorts of weird items. True, but it gets weirder.

He collects these by unravelling the balls of hair and bone that form in the stomachs of tawny owls when they have had a good nosh of mice and shrews and suchlike. The undigested matter is balled up and vomited forth for Diego to get his hands on. The balls are soaked and painstakingly taken apart with tweezers and a pointed instrument and the bones cleaned up. It seems that the hairy gunge that held them prisoner is not very collectable.

One last and tangible souvenir of their visit is this portrait. Notwithstanding the fact that one of the party, Antonio, is an artist the portrait is the work of the little collector.

The roof repair man turned up on one of the days I was away. A day or so later it rained heavily and no water came through. Relief all round.

So now it’s back to golf and gardening, or to be more accurate golf and grass cutting with the occasional episode of trimming the more exuberant growths that threaten to take the place over.