Anyway as I was saying...

So there we were facing this estate agent who had aboslutely promised to give us our holding deposit of 2000 euros back if the house fell through and when it did he refused - big mistake - it took nearly a year and cost us nearly 2000 euros but we did get the money back and hopefully taught him a leasson to boot - stop ripping people off.

Anyway where does Galcia fit into this saga - well I'm coming to that - as I said earlier we had had an urge to visit but after our thwarted attempts don south decided that maybe the time wasn't right for a move so we agreed to put it on the back burner for a while and get on with our lives in England.

We were going to visit our friends in Almeria who had successfully bought their land, had their house built and were living the good life - although they had not had an easy passage either so we were booked to fly out at the beginning of August - but always at the back of my mind was this green part of Spain that had a firm grip on me - so we agreed to visit it last August to "get it out of our system once and for all'.

We asked my father, who was 84, if he would like to come out as well - he had been down south with us and was not overly impressed and mindful of his age and not knowing how many more summers he would see, wanted him to at least have an idea of what we were going to do - he duly agree d- he's a very game old boy - and I booked the flights and contacted another British agent with a list of properties we wanted to look at.

We flew into Santiago de Compostela as all the forest fires were blazing so our first impression was not of a green and cold land but of a - literally' blazing hot one with fires raging for miles and the sky heavy with smoke......