Santo Stephano

A day on the beach

This morning I woke up alone .... often the case as Dear Richard is an early riser and leaves me to sleep., bless him. The sun was shining and the beach beckoned. Once again we made excellent use of the kitchen facilities.....hot scrambled eggs with hot spinach and toast... I am emphasising the hot because it was a bit of a novelty to enjoy food that had been freshly prepared and served at a temperature above freezing. The insect repellant seemed to have been a success as there were no new bites and the originals were not yet causing much discomfort, so happy days.

Once again we had reason to be grateful to the clever chappy or chappies or even chappesses whose forward thinking had given us the internet......without them shit creek and not a paddle in sight would have been where we found ourselves on many an occasion. Any road up... we found a beach nearby and set off to spend the rest of the day doing sweet F All.

After a bit of dithering about..... said beach was a little harder to find than the internet had promised.... even though it was about 3 miles long and clearly visible from the balcony of the apartment!!......we found a spot on the ( not very nice looking if I’m honest..... ) ( but at least there was some ) sand. And so we come to the topic of swimwear.....and in particular that favoured by Italian men...... yes I am indeed referring to “speedos”!!!!!

Young and old, tall or short, fat or thin.....they are sported by all and sundry and I found it rather disturbing!!!!

Apparently they were invented by a former milkman who founded a Hosiery company in 1914 selling underwear under the brand name of Fortitude. In 1927 he introduced a line of swimwear called a “racer back costume”. In 1928 a competition among the staff of the company led to the swimwear being re-named “Speedo’s”,and sold with the slogan “ speed on in your Speedos!!!” Good news for the milkman whose brilliant idea was instantly adopted by men, mostly continentals, our boys were still sporting jaunty crocheted or knitted little numbers which soaked up water like a sponge and were shapeless and soggy at the same time.......I wonder if many drownings were caused by the rapid uptake of water and subsequent increase in weight of these attractive garments ?

Any way back to the continentals and their love of swimmers which leave absolutely nothing to the imagination!!! I can just hear the comments from early package holidayers, “look away Daphne....you will surely have your head turned by such a proud display of foreign manhood!!”

Thank F**k for sunglasses thinks Daphne....I can get a proper eyeful

and no-one can tell where I am looking!!!!

I tried to take a few pictures to illustrate this part of my story, but it’s really hard to do it surreptitiously without looking like a complete perve, I have a couple but will keep them for my own personal use for the time being!!! And so we lay on the beach and soaked up the sun, we dozed for a while , we had a sandwich and then dozed some more. It was lovely but I was getting a little bored ..... until, that is, things started moving next door. The couple occupying the sand just down the beach began to unload a large bag.... well she wasn’t doing much, but he was clearly assembling something, for about 45 minutes there was a lot of unfolding, laying out, pumping up and walking up and down with bits of string. Eventually it became clear that he was putting a windsurfing kite together... all on his own, probably because his girlfriend hadn’t got the strength.... she looked as though she hadn’t had a good meal in years.... I am not lying when I say that when she stood side on you literally couldn’t see her!!!

So finally the kite thing was ready ....now he had to prise himself into his wetsuit..... he clearly had enjoyed plenty of good meals and so had a bit of a job....but with a little help from his undernourished partner( she zipped him up!!) he was ready for action.

It was quite windy, but unluckily for him the direction in which the wind was blowing was from sea to shore...I’ll give him his due he tried very hard to get going, but after sinking for the twentieth time as the kite dragged him back to the beach, he gave up. I felt that if conditions had been conducive to stomping( it’s quite hard to stomp in the sea) he would have exited the water like a frustrated two year old! And then of course there was the whole palaver of putting the flipping kite away again. At this point we decided to go for a walk along the beach but that was a bit something and nothing as there wasn’t really anything to look at.... also the mossy bites had now started itching with a vengeance and so I was ready for leaving. As we walked past our neighbours he was lying on his stomach and she was consoling him by kneeling on his back....not sure how much good it was doing as he probably didn’t know she was there!!!!

And so back to the apartment for dinner.....all good, but our bites were now driving us mad, no amount of wine.... and trust me I gave it my best shot..... could alleviate the irritation.... and of course there was more spraying to discourage their little bastard biting brothers and sisters.

Falling asleep was not easy as my legs were on fire, but eventually I must have drifted off ..... only to wake up every hour fighting the urgent desire to scratch the skin off my legs in an attempt to get some relief from the agony of itching.

And during those periods of wakefulness I plotted the demise of all bity creatures, wishing them a slow painful end and swearing a lot!!!