Bye everybody...

I'm off to Sicily tonight for a week, will tell you all about it when i get back ;o)

This is an amazing article posted on another blog - a 1959 op-ed on the subject of miscegenation (mixed-race marriage). I never realised how much the anti-interracial marriage and anti-gay marriage camps had in common. It's eerie. Check it out:

http://moderateleft.com/?p=2287

The encouraging thing is that mixed-race couples beat this kind of bigotry. My very best wishes to same-sex couples - may you be as successful!

Whinge, whinge, bloody whinge

My mum isn’t well (menopause-related problems) and has been more or less confined to bed for the last week or so. My dad is away, so naturally we are all rallying round to help wherever we can. Lola and my brother still live at home, so they’ve been doing as much as they can. My second sister (C) and her boyfriend (K) have also been round there every day after work, cooking, gardening, etc. C & K live in a rented bedroom and so do not really have a home of their own. K works fulltime but C only works 10-4.30. Their room is a 5 min walk from my parents’ place. Even when Mum is well, they’re round my folks’ most nights as my folks’ place is comfortable and nice, and they feel at home there. K likes gardening and handyman jobs, so he has been doing those for my folks for a while, as he doesn’t have his own home at the mo.

Now, I DO have my own home and my own responsibilities outside of work. I live further away (not massively far, bout 15 mins drive) and work longer hours. My SO thinks my parents are great but he hasn’t bonded with them like K has. He also works long hours and now has 2 jobs.

So here’s the rub. My mum is not well, and I have been round there 3 or 4x last week, including most of the weekend. I am doing all I can – helping her take a bath, doing the shopping, taking the dog for a walk, etc. And I feel guilty, because C & K are practically living there and I can’t. K has been giving me ‘why aren’t you helping more’ vibes and it’s driving me mad! I CAN’T DO ANY MORE!!! If I am to have any time with SO, any opportunity to do my own housework and occasionally a moment to myself, not to mention trying to see friends every now and then, I can’t be round there every evening. My mum says ‘Oh, I know you have your own life and I’m grateful for whatever you can give’, and to me that implies that I should be giving more. As if anything short of total self-annihilation is too little.

Now I have to say, this is mainly my own guilt and frustration talking. My mum has been very appreciative of my efforts, and the ‘why don’t you help more’ vibes are coming from BIL, not from Mum. But it still kills me. I’m the oldest, it has always been my role to take care of things if my dad is away. And this time I can’t do it.

Had to go into the toilets at work and have a little cry earlier. I rarely do that, but today it was necessary.

Please forgive me, but I wrote a poem this morning and I’m going to post it. I beg your indulgence, as I don’t do this very often and that is my excuse for inflicting the following on you:

- Together -

His smile makes me laugh
His pain makes me cry
His puzzlement makes me think
His daughter is my daughter
His anger troubles me

My laugh makes him smile
My tears give him pain
My thoughts intrigue him
My family is his family
My disquiet troubles him

An attack on one is an attack on both
A kindness to one is a kindness to both
To love one is to love both
This is us, together.

Hey kids, I’m back!!

Have been home a week now, sorry I didn’t blog before this but it’s been a bit mad. It’s nice that everyone wants to see us & hear our holiday stories, but it also means that we’ve been slightly rushed off our feet! And of course there was an enormous pile of shite waiting for me when I got back to work on Thurs, lol! Oh well.

Anyway, the holiday ROCKED! We went to Kefalonia, which you might know of from the book/film Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Apparently it’s one of the most beautiful islands in Greece, and it was absolutely stunning. Unfortunately we forgot the digital camera, so I can’t post any pix at the mo!! There are some nice ones here though:

http://www.ionion.com/

If you enter the English site, then go to About Kefalonia/Slide Show/Capital, Lassi was the resort we stayed at and Argostoli (the capital) was the nearest town to us. Both very beautiful, although Lassi is really just a tourist strip. I doubt if much goes on there in the winter. The main street is just shops and restaurants (no non-touristy businesses) and there seemed to be more hotels & tourist accommodation there than homes.

Our accommodation was in an apartment complex with a pool and bar, which just happened to be situated at the top of a fairly steep hill! Bearing in mind my recent mishaps (dislocated kneecap), this was rather challenging at first, but it got easier as the holiday went on. The pool & bar were very nice, and the barman was this lovely bloke called Artor. He was an absolute genius when it came to cocktails, and of course no-one bothers to measure alcohol over there! None of this ‘British Standard Measure’ rubbish. If you ask for an Archers (peach schapps) and lemonade, you get half Archers and half lemonade! Strangely though, we didn’t get properly drunk once. DM commented on that, and I said ‘well, we aren’t stressed. We don’t need to get drunk to relax – we’re already relaxed.’

The beaches were superb, especially Malos Gialos (Long Beach), about 10 mins walk from our apartment. The water was so clear, DM was standing in it up to his chin (he’s 6’1”) and could still see his feet! There were little fish swimming around in the shallows, and DM and I had a wonderful time just splashing around and playing in the sea, lol!

Of course one thing I was really looking forward to was the food. I don’t believe in going abroad and eating British food. DM is slightly less adventurous, which is to say he does exactly that, LOL! However, if I got a local dish that looked reasonable, he tried it. And that’s how he discovered lamb kleftico, which he now wants me to try to make at home, lol! Kleftico, btw, is lamb shank with potato, onion, sweet pepper, olive oil etc wrapped in foil and (probably slow) cooked in the oven. And it is utterly GORGEOUS! He did generally stick to the safe stuff though, while I was eating moussaka, souvlaki, Greek yogurt & honey, local specialities (eg Kefalonian meat pie), seafood and so on. I had fun :oD AND I didn’t get a bad tummy once!

Our two favourite restaurants in Lassi were Zorbas and Sirtaki. We went to Sirtaki for breakfast nearly every afternoon (yes, we rarely got out of the flat before noon ;o)) but only went there for dinner on the Sunday night before we left. If there was one thing I could do differently about the holiday, it would have been to go to Sirtaki earlier in the holiday and more often! It was just wonderful. The food was amazing, and the owner made everyone feel individually welcome. He came to our table and compared gadgety watches with DM (boys and their toys), recommended a dessert for us (although we got Brownie instead of the Brulee we’d ordered. It was delicious, but I think he had a stern word with his kitchen staff!) and when we were leaving, invited us to look at his garden. This turned out to be a stunning outdoor bar area behind the restaurant, with comfortable seating, porch swings, big bucket wicker chairs and a very tropical-style bar. Not to mention the ENORMOUS flat-screen TV that was showing the football! He brought us up to the bar, and poured us a shot of an ouzo-like drink that I think was called Kazi or Kari or something like that. Anyway, it burned all the way down and left me somewhat wobbly, lol! I had to sit quietly and have a nice Archers and lemonade before attempting to stand ;o)

Zorbas we discovered quite early on and went to twice during the week we were there. Our last Greek dinner was there, and we got to see (male) Greek dancers doing all the traditional dances, including fire dancing and lifting a table in their teeth. Inside the menu was a list of the names of the dances they were doing, and I was very interested to see that Bellydance was on that list. The bellydancing I do is primarily Egyptian, so I was very interested to see what Greek bellydancing is like. The male dancers put a small table in the middle of the floor with a chair by it, and then brought a girl out of the kitchen who stood up on the table and danced. I was disappointed to see that she was not a trained bellydancer, and what she was doing was what you might see any girl do in a club. She also didn’t look too comfortable dancing on that table in front of an audience, and I gathered that she had been sort of press-ganged because they wanted a female in the act. Anyway, Uncomfortable Girl got down, and they started to pull girls up from the audience to dance one at a time on this table. And, after a couple others had gone up, they pulled me. Well, there I was, on a table and expected to bellydance. So I did! Hip shimmies, hagallahs, hip drops, camels, shoulder shimmies – I was doing my thing. And the room went mad, lol! I wasn’t paying any attention to the audience really, I was just trying not to fall off the table! But DM said they were raising the roof. In his words ‘It was obvious you really knew what you were doing’. He was v proud of me *blush*. All in all, a rather groovy evening!

The best thing about the holiday was the time DM and I got to spend together. Just the two of us, no phones (except for when he called his daughter), no TV, no radio, no work, no responsibilities, no worries, nothing we HAD to do except be together and have fun. It was sheer bliss!! And now I can really see us being a doddery retired old couple with nothing else to do but annoy each other. In fact, I can hardly wait, lol!

Sigh. I love my man.

Thank you for your patience if you’ve read this far, I hope it was reasonably entertaining ;o)