Just offering my weekend report as demanded, Ma’am. What can I tell you…?
Highlights? A visit to Panorama, the kantina on the road out of the village. We arranged to meet up with Jenine for supper, and enjoyed a very juicy beef burger, a great view and a good old chat as we’d not managed to get together for some time. We’ll be doing it all again tomorrow at Harry’s birthday lunch, though down in Yialos, which reminds me, I must wrap the presents. That’s a thing about being on Symi; wrapping paper is hard to come by. I have ordered some, but it’s not arrived in time, so, as he’s my music pupil, I dug out an ancient book of organ music I am never going to play again, and will use some of that as wrapping paper. Last Christmas, again in the absence of anything decent to use (because we’d run out of Jumbo’s finest), we ended up bunging some gifts in Temu delivery bags. Caused hilarity.
So, the kantina (Cantina? Café?) was lovely and is highly recommended. It’s not too far to walk up to. We went up through the village, past the museum and out onto the road and up, but you can also just follow the main road if you don’t want to do more steps.
Another semi-highlight was finishing draft one of the next book, and I say semi, because I still have a couple of pages to put in at the end to round it off, so that’s today’s job.
Sleep was an odd one. Following a mosquito attack, I was forced to take a ‘non-drowsy’ antihistamine tablet, one of the very mildest in the medicine drawer. These things usually lay me out for a night and a day at least, but not that night. Four hours sleep and I was awake with my nose so blocked and my mouth so dry I just couldn’t get back to dreamland. So I got up, pottered about, went to work, had a light siesta around eleven in the morning, but otherwise, no side effects from the tablet, and I carried on carrying on. Saturday night, however, I slept for eight hours solid, but on Sunday… Crikey! I’d slept well but had to have an hour’s doze in the morning followed by another hour after lunch, and was ‘out of it’ for most of the afternoon. Delayed side effects of a non-drowsy tablet. Still, at least I wasn’t itching.
Another weekend folly was trying to identify a plant that turned up in a pot and is growing like mad. Whatever it is, we didn’t plant it. It may well be a weed, but I don’t mind them as long as they have flowers at some point. I ran images of this one through various ‘identify this plant’ apps, and they came up with it being either a rare herb only found by moonlight on the lower slopes of the Himalayan mountain range, or something to do with capsicums. The leaves don’t taste of anything, and there are no buds or flowers yet. Maybe the mystery will be solved one day if and when it does something other than demand water.
Now, I really must get back to the final chapter and decide how this story is going to end…
Ps. Another thing I did on Saturday was put up a tour around my desk on my Jackson Marsh blog – click here to take a look.
