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Given
her indoors' inclination towards living on the coast with a lovely sea
view, the inevitable compromise for our dream retirement home is to find
a perfect house with ocean views...
According to any number of property web sites, there are many
picturesque and comfortable homes, perfectly situated right on the
coast, many of them at quite reasonable prices. We rented one for
the wettest week in history and made occasional forays along the
admittedly staggeringly beautiful coast. Sadly the advertised
ocean views were but fleeting, for although the view metaphorically
stretched as far as New York, it literally extended little further than
the bottom of the garden through the driving rain where the clouds meet
the sea mists!
Now I
have lived in both Norway and Scotland. Norway is cold, wet and
windy and Bergen, on the West Coast, is known as the rain capital of
Norway, if not Europe. In Glasgow I learned that rain often sprays
upwards through window seals. Here in Galicia, the rain falls
vertically upwards, downwards and sideways all at the same time and the
average rainfall is higher than Bergen. It is wet, very wet.
It is almost as wet on the shore as it is in the ocean.
Our
friendly neighbours told us that it was a particularly bad week, but it
was obvious from the damp leaking into every orifice of every building,
the penetrating damp, the rising damp, and the impressive lichen,
growing on every external wall, that it is very, very wet most of the
time. Her indoors is reconsidering her desire to live by the sea! |
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