Apologies to regular readers of this column, other commitments at the moment make it impossible to spend the time on writing up this week's column. I am still heavily into writing the detailed text for the publication mentioned in last week's column that will deal with aspects of human skull elongation and overmodelling, and it is complicated stuff!

But readers may be glad to know that the sun has finally reared its head here on Ibiza after three weeks of rather overcast and distinctly wet weather. Great for the land, the island and those still involved in traditional agriculture. Not so good for some rather selfish Italian tourists from Milan who went to stay on Formentera and started complaining about the lack of sun: they said they could not go back to Milan without a suntan! Some readers may remember my series of articles about water, water rituals and water problems on Eivissa/Ibiza in some of last year's issues of The Electronic Ibiza History Culture. Well, the water rituals really seem to have paid off! Things seem, at the moment, almost normal, waterwise (and even the 'dead' river in Santa Eulalia gave a 'gurgle' a few days ago!). The rains (well, very intense storms) of last November and those of the last few weeks have brought the rainfall levels received here back to a bit of normality for the first time in four years. Let us hope things stay that way for a while! Young people now probably think this was always a dry island, but no, all you need to do is talk with an old peasant and he (or she) will tell you what it was really like. I had a talk this morning with an old shepherd friend who is nearly 80 and is as fit as a fiddle - and he was saying that the best old houses are always those that are up on the hill slopes. He said people avoided as much as possible living down on the lowlands, as habitations there were always in the habit of getting regularly flooded. Well, times have changed drastically - people are building all over the place now. If real normal weather like before ever came back regularly, a lot of those living in new houses in lots of low areas of the island would quickly see that the builders and architects should have paid more attention to the older inhabitants of the island before placing their new houses where they are now.