Sounds like a 1950s B movie, but last night was definitely the night of the mosquito. The joy of wearing earplugs is that you don’t hear the little blighters, but that doesn’t stop them from treating you as a pin cushion. I’ve not yet started on my summer habit of rising early (like, three in the morning), and I’m still on my winter timetable of rising at around 5.30 or six, so being woken by my own scratching at 5.45 wasn’t so bad, but I’d rather not wake up looking like a Picasso. I didn’t know which part of me to scratch first, so I left all alone and went straight to my instant cure, haemorrhoid cream. No, honestly. If you buy the stuff with the anaesthetic in it, it takes away the itch and reduces the swelling, which is exactly what you need for both conditions. The pharmacies here sell a very good one called Procto Synalar (the orange/white one), and I find it’s the only thing that works, for me, at least.
There. That’s today’s Symi survival hack dispatched, now let’s have a random photo.
Photo by Neil
Taking of piles, I was sitting on a friend’s roof the other day, as you do, and I took in the view, which was, in a way, one thing piled on top of another. A restored house, a ruin, a church, the sky… it reminded me of an A Level English lesson years ago when we were studying A Passage to India. Mrs Purvis, our teacher, had us read the chapter where there’s a polo match going on, and pointed out the way Forster uses the scene to subtly describe the Indian caste system. He describes the grass, the near distance, the rising hills, the mountains and the sun above it all. She called the technique… something I can’t presently remember, and told us how magical the writing was, the nuance, and the subtlety, and what did we think? What nonsense, we said, he’s only talking about the scenery.
There was no point to that anecdote, apart from to illustrate this second, not-so-random photo taken from that roof.
