Book description
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 and her son spied a romantic ruin in
Andalusia amid its own olive groves, and made an offer. What happened
next - selling her London house, and 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 and 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, and an
assortment of eccentric locals, not least by the worldly wisdom of
Juan the builder, she made it, and over the ensuing four years, the
house and pool were built and the garden began to take shape.
This is the story of how Miranda got to mañana, of her love affair
with Spain, and a countryside where 'great jagged peaks range above
little fields, white villages tumble like sugar cubes down the sides
of hills, and 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
Mañana is a book to read and treasure.
Former garden editor of Country Living, and sister of Jocasta Innes,
Miranda Innes lives in Spain with her husband, Dan Pearce, and an
assortment of dogs and cats. Her first book, an account of the
restoration of her house and garden in Andalucia, Getting to Manana, is
published in paperback by Black Swan.
