Life's a beach

I swam; I ate; I read Madame Bovary; I watched a chameleon scale a lemon tree while listening to the  ex-pat alsatians barking for their Winalot. Well what else is there to do in the Algarve? I wanted to go down to the local bar but couldn’t face the strip lighting and linoleum clad interiors. Ed and I did go off on an adventure to the ambitiously-named ‘Deserted Island’ which, of course, wasn’t deserted at all but had an air of Dungeness about it (without the charm of Derek Jarman’s garden). We wandered up the beach and met a Portuguese Man Friday type with ginger chest hair and a rather too tight pair of Speedos who invited us to shoot the breeze under his beach bivvy. He reminded me of a French man who I once shared a house with when grape picking, who had a suitcase full of tins of sardines, and a nasty habit of weeing in the vines – so I said no. The only other highlight for me that day was, following a lovely swim in the sea, I got dumped on by a set of crashing waves. It left me with a gusset full of shingle – which, I have to say doesn’t look or feel too good – although I suppose you could say my inner thighs got a cheap and rather brisk exfoliation.