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 husband 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.