Barking mad times

Spot the dog. It took me several seconds, on account of the ear-piercing yelping that normally accompanies the cornering of a cat

or rat having a slightly higher pitch than normal. Tilly the tree mutt was 20 feet up a cypress.

Our Catalan pocket rocket, who weighs little more than breeze is never happier than when taking the game to a cat or rat which has woefully been advised dogs don't climb trees. Agility – nine-months-old Tilly can bound five feet into the air – and gross disregard for gravity mean I have had to remove her from oaks, figs and walnuts. But this was taking things to a new level.

Thinking she might finally have succumbed to vertigo, I teetered on a top rung of a ladder, coaxed her into my arms, comforted her, settled her on terra firma and watched her tear round to the front of the house and bounce from a chair into a fig tree.

Teddy Boy, her brother, remains earth-bound due to lightness between the ears and weight around the midriff. His role in life (when not cracking open nuts for his sister) is to sit, chin up until cat or rat decides to make a run for it.

Which makes life a little uncomfortable for Jess, the long-term fat feline rodent deterrent, who suddenly finds himself in the firing line. I'm having a swell time too, being torn by thorns and claws rescuing an extraordinary assortment of traumatised Toms and Tiddles.

I reckon Tilly is part Yorkshire Terrier, renowned as they are for intelligence, independence and daring. All the same, I'd be curious to know if anyone has heard of them climbing like this. There's a company in the US that sells angelic Yorkshire Terrier Christmas tree decorations, but that doesn't count.

All of the above illustrates our somewhat erratic, pinball beginning to 2010 which I will now share.

Our annual self-employed, midwinter phase of feeling out on a limb financially is easing a little now as the spring and summer holiday bookings begin to flow, and we have topped up with some Catalan weekenders who have relished our Nepalese friend Pusker's ayurvedic massages and Asian feasts. He aims to be with us through the year which significantly widens the charms of Mother's Garden (and means we get to indulge, too).

Since before Christmas our phone and internet connection has been as reliable as a Del Boy bargain. The heavy snows have been partly to blame, wrecking olive groves, bringing down boughs and whole trees across the valley, while frightening winds shook the village where normally unnoticed cables strung across narrow streets writhed like snakes, and lamp-posts bucked and twisted.

It didn't help either that some chainsaw berk on a neighbouring farm felled a towering pine, taking out our wire with a twang before scarpering.

Tired of pacing waiting for an engineer to solve what I thought was a general fault, I walked the line from post to post through our wood, across the wild boar gulley towards our neighbour's abode until our link to the outside world coiled to nothing beneath a telltale drift of sawdust beside a stump and trunk. Fortunately those responsible were long gone. (I'm a mild-mannered man, but when roused there's hell to pay).

About this time, I buzzed away to Liverpool for three emotional days, to speak at the memorial service in Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral for Joe Williams, my friend and the co-founder of the charity Imagine in Mozambique. The charity's key supporters include Allertonshire Middle School in Northallerton. Joe and Lorraine Williams, who chose to go to Mozambique 20 years ago when a bloody civil war was still raging and it was officially the poorest nation on earth, would always remind anyone who would listen that the smallest kind deed can change the world.

Our Joe has settled so well into his new school and is soaking up a new society that last week, as part of the winter carnival, meant rolling up to classes wearing face paints, hats, sunglasses and dressing gowns.

Ella is content too, getting set for a high school exchange with a pupil from ....wait for it..... Transylvania in Romania. The only glitch academically is that, like both her parents did, she has reached an impasse mathematically, namely that mountain range of incomprehension called algebra. Can someone explain why children can't dodge this for a life-skill considerably more fruitful, like music

for example?

My headache remains the farm water supply, the latest disaster being my inability to switch off the irrigation that springs up out of the ground every few hours come rain or shine. So I have enlisted the assistance of Wences, the plumber who installed it, a jovial chap who trundles around in an 1980s mark two Renault 5 that looks like it has just rolled out of the showroom, but for the pipe coil on the back seat.

I have managed, though, to get my head around recording a podcast. If you care to be amused, check out our website and you will see a link to Catalonia Today, a magazine that has been publishing rants by me for a couple of years now.

Click and listen. It might be a cure for insomnia if nothing else. I'm even thinking of risking recording some of my articles for the Yorkshire Post. What do you think?

The winter still won't let go, yet despite biting cold and red in the morning warning our shepherd neighbour on a regular basis to stay in bed, we are contented to see our shooting vegetables have endured.

Now Pusker is sifting through our seed boxes and is itching to extend the garden quite considerably. Just so long as he doesn't gift me the task of digging up half a tonne of potatoes as happened in 2002.

http://www.imaginemozambique.org

See www.mothersgarden.org to hear Martin's Catalonia Today podcast.

Martin's English novel Count The Petals Of The Moon Daisy is published by Pegasus (ISBN 9781903490297).