
In 1996, former Country Living garden editor Miranda Innes decided to change her life completely. Tired of urban living, bored of her career, out of love with her long-standing partner, she & her son spied a romantic ruin in Andalusia amid its own olive groves, & made an offer. What happened next
- selling her London house, & handing in her notice at the magazine
- was going to be straightforward, or so she thought. She had not counted on the sudden emergence of a New Man in her life, the plans of Arsenal football ground to purchase her back garden, a badly slipped disc & the logistics involved in moving a lifetime's possessions. Nor had she realised what a struggle re-building the house, room by room, or planting a garden in the hostile terrain of southern Spain would be. But helped by her new husb&, Dan, & an assortment of eccentric locals, not least by the worldly wisdom of Juan the builder, she made it, & over the ensuing four years, the house & pool were built & the garden began to take shape. This is the story of how Miranda got to manana, of her love affair with Spain, & a countryside where 'great jagged peaks range above little fields, white villages tumble like sugar cubes down the sides of hills, & white houses grow room by room in a puzzle of rectangles, topped by corrugated cinnamon-brown terracotta tiles moulded on a man's thigh'. Illustrated throughout with line-drawings by Dan Pearce, Getting to Manana is a book to read & treasure.