My birth mother arrived two days ago and as we have been doing absolutely nothing except laying on a beach I have had very little to say, surprisingly. The sun has been shining and the sea is the most beautiful selection of blues you ever did see. We have been travelling the length and breadth of the island in order to sample the best and worst beaches it has to offer, I have my board in Vanley but the default setting at the moment is mill pond so no luck there and I don’t have a paddle board. Yesterday was spent very productively having hot dogs and onions in the South at a beach overlooking Paxos.
We went to Glyfada beach today where we were sitting quietly and peacefully with our well behaved and gentle dog. R had noticed, over the previous few visits that there was a particularly odd woman wandering up and down the beach.
Today, wearing a pink bikini top, red bikini bottoms and a pink swimming cap she began marching up and down the beach behind us. Sunny having had enough of this ridiculous behaviour, ran over and started barking wildly at her, clearly thinking she was mad. She started screaming and jumping up and down waving her arms around like a spider on a hot plate, he took a step backwards eying her uncertainly, we called him back and for once, he obeyed immediately where he stood guarding us and growling at her.
Well, I can understand that it must be a little bit scary to be barked at by a dog, even a small one, but she launched into us, screaming at us, how dare we have such an aggressive dog on the beach? Didn’t we know she had a heart condition? How could we have such a dangerous dog? She can’t have shocks like that and so on. She was Eastern European and very very expressive.
She was the only person he barked at that day, she was 50 metres away when he ran off to bark at her.
She was totally incensed, she stormed into the sea where she stood in her swimming cap, water up to her knees, bent over, put her hands in the water and pretended to swim. She stropped off back to her house and returned half an hour later without her hat and in a different swimming costume, proceeded to shout at herself all the way down the beach, before once again standing in the sea up to her knees and pretending to swim.
My dog is a superb judge of character.
We finished the day with a celebratory ice cream at the waffle of death shop and a hair cut for mother.