Jerez has its own colour palette. In San Sebastian, Jess tinkered with watercolours and came up with some amazing stuff – particularly for a beginner.

Under the ancient, gargantuan fig tree in the plaza 100 yards from our front door a festive crowd is going off to Zambomba. Zambomba is Christmas flamenco for the masses.

"You'll struggle down south – their accent is really difficult to understand." This from a San Sebastian local a few months ago when we told him about our impending move to Jerez, at the opposite end of the country.

If you've ever seen flamenco you'll know that it's the dancing-and-singing equivalent of punching a baboon in the face and then attempting to make love to it.

You don't get much sleep the night before you take a cat who's prone to bouts of stress-induced diarrhoea on a plane. Pets here are allowed to travel in the cabin with you.

I've always been tempted to try to make some money on the side as a street artist. I can't draw, but I can write. I imagine sitting down with a couple of tourists and carefully composing an elegant word-portrait along the lines of “You are a fat balding German man with expensive but ill-fitting clothes and a wife who's obviously only with you for your money.”

I remember a few years ago in a busy shopping centre Jess announced that she really needed a toilet, could I see any signs? I answered that no, she looked perfectly comfortable to me.

This is the view from my face most mornings from about 6am. It's blurry because I don't have my glasses on yet. It's effectively my daily friendly reminder that the cat is empty. Somewhere along Ted's six-day odyssey to Spain the evil shipmasters chopped off some of his mane, presumably because it was covered in poop.

It's been a rough few weeks for the cat and also for the toilet officer in our house but thankfully the fluffy little bastard is his old self again. The cat, I mean. So now when we go out we can be reasonably sure that we won't be returning home to any cat-related floor schmeers.

This is one of the plazas in which the annual winter festival culminates in the ceremonial 'burial of the sardine'. According to the government website we were right on time – 7.31pm – yet, as you can see, there's not one sardine in sight nor are there sufficient personnel on hand to bury it even though the hole required presumably could be quite small.

"That fat woman over there eats too much food," she said, rather more loudly than I had anticipated.

We're sitting on the hard floor in an apartment with no furniture watching our cat Ted, heavily burdened with diarrhoea, scrooching his arse along the otherwise pristine vinyl in an attempt to clean himself after a particularly nasty litter box event.