Snowball Oranges

'Look! The weather has come from Scotland to welcome you to Mallorca,' beamed Senor Ferrer. To our new neighbour's delight and my dismay, a cold mantle of white was rapidly transforming our newly acquired paradise in the sun into a bizarre winterscape of citrus Christmas trees, cotton wool palms and Snowball Oranges.It's the stuff of dreams. A Scottish family giving up relative sanity and security to go and grow oranges for a living in a secluded valley in the mountains of the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. But dreams, as everyone knows, have a nasty habit of not turning out quite as intended. Being greeted by a freak snowstorm is only the first of many surprises and 'experiences', and it isn't long before they realise that they have been sold a bit of a lemon of an orange farm by the wily previous owners.However, laughter is the best medicine when confronted with consuming a local dish of rats, the live-chicken-down-a-chimney technique of household maintenance and attending a shotgun wedding. The colourful set of Mallorcan neighbours (including an eccentric old goatherd who eats worm-ridden oranges to improve his sex life) restores the family's faith in human nature and helps them adapt to a new and unexpectedly testing life in this deceptively simple idyll of rural Spain. Full of life and colour, hilarious and revealing, and set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Mallorca.By the same author: Manana Manana and Thistle Soup.