Not much to tell you about apart from my day-to-day, which I won’t bore you with because I didn’t do much yesterday. In fact, I was at home all day writing, reading and doing not much else. Meanwhile, though, Neil photographed this in the square.
They were only a few feet from his workstation table. The other day, I walked past a turtle dove sitting on the ground with one wing out, and I thought it had been damaged. I stood not two feet away from it, and was about to take a photo (which felt like rubber-necking an accident) but it stood up, waddled away and then flew off. Just sunbathing.
Plenty of that to do right now, with the temp a reasonable 28 to 30 in our courtyard shade, not that I do any sunbathing there or anywhere, come to that. Sunbed Wars continue apace on the beaches it seems. ‘Sunbed Wars’ isn’t actually a war as such, but it is an ongoing discussion between tourists and residents alike about the varying cost of a place to lie all greased up and pinking. There seems to be a fashion among the wealthy these days that a) because they are wealthy, only they matter, and b) they’re happy to pay €1,300 a week for a villa holiday because they can, but then get all hot under the Cavalli if a sunbed costs more than they think it should. They are perhaps the sort who revel in the fact that, on some beaches, one pays twice as much for a thing near the water as you do if you take one at the back. Like the age-old snobby thing of how you ‘Took the opera’ last evening, and ‘Of course had a box,’ while the poorer classes sat in the pit happy with their lot. ‘We were so close, when Bartoli gave us her Queen of the Night, some of her spittle actually reached us! Jeremy has not washed since.’ You know, that kind of baloney which angers me, and to which I say, ‘Ms Bartoli would not sing that area, dear, she’s a mezzo. Get your stories right.’
Anyway, no idea what that has to do with sparrows or sunbeds, where, I think the point was that Sunbed Wars rumble on as pointless as a never-ending TV show (The Blacklist, Payton Place, Eastenders), and I shall keep you informed if I hear anything more.
