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Veiw from Shoestrings |
I apologise
for the silence. These last two weeks I
have been researching the impact of tourism on the Greek economy – well, mainly
my impact on the beautiful island of Zakynthos.
Turns out that the major impact is on local rose wine sales which went up
by at least a third....
It is a lovely island. The sea is all turquoise and
aquamarines and in August the skies are bright fierce blue with the occasional
build up of cloud over the hills. It is
hot, of course. Very hot. White rutted tracks wind through the olive groves and
vineyards and up into the hills if you care to explore. Many don’t and in the resorts tourists
stumble along pavement-less roads between tavernas and bars and shops, eating
ice-creams and comparing insect bites.
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Myrtle, water and wine |
Currently, excuse the pun; they are drying
grapes by the roadside in the sun to make raisins. The thick dark blankets of
fruit smell delicious. The next crop is for wine. They will certainly need more after we have
left....
Last Sunday,
had you been a seagull gliding high on the warm wind over Alykanas, its long
narrow strip of beach littered with sun beds and people bobbing lazily in the
warm water, you might have seen the little taverna perched overlooking the sea. If you
had flown past the taverna and a few hundred yards further inland to the nearby
fields, you would have glimpsed a middle aged woman running after a goat in her
knickers.
Err... that would
have been me.
I was trying
to lasso the goat with my skirt. It’s a
long story but suffice it to say I had been horribly conned by a kid. Over the two weeks of our holiday (the couple
watching me chase down the goat are my sister and brother-in-law) we had made
the almost daily pilgrimage through the white rutted paths amongst the olive groves
to our very favourite beach hang out, Shoestrings ( more on that gem to follow.)
Being me and in full Disney operational mode, I had begun to befriend the
horses we passed with carrots and stolen sugar and had also made passing acquaintance
with a couple of goats, a mother and her young daughter, tethered in the field.
It happens
that on the Sunday we find the goats so tangled up together by their ropes that
they can barely move.
‘We can’t
leave them like this!’ I say. I have
been listening to far too much ‘Game of Thrones’ on my kindle. If I had a sword
I would be waving it.
We all give
it a go but we still can’t figure out how they got into such a knot. The rope
is wound around the mother goat’s horns and around the younger goat’s legs. They
look up at us pathetically. The little
one almost falls over.
Then I have
a brainwave.
‘I’ll just
take off the little one’s collar,’ I hear myself saying. ‘And we can undo the
knot.’
‘Is that
wise?’ asks my brother in law. He is a scientist
and likes to debate the evidence and think through consequences.
Too late I
realise he has a point.
The little
goat feels the thick leather slide from her neck and leaps gleefully just out
of reach. Freeee eee eee she bleats rapturously and dives on some fresh
grass.
‘Shit!’ I
say.
‘Holy shit!’
says my sister, the vicar.
She watches
horrified as the goat feints sideways as I try a rugby tackle.
‘We will go
and get someone to help,’ I hear her and Steven sighing as they pull out the
Greek-English dictionary to look up the word ‘goat’ and head away from my
shameful attempts at kid wrangling. By
this time I have taken off my skirt and twisted it into a useless kind of lasso
and am running around the field like a crazy person. I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t come
back.
Goats are
nimble aren’t they? This one dances just
out of reach of my skirt and disappears into the grape vines and maize. No amount of swearing or cajoling can get her
out. I realise the tangle thing was a ruse. She had this whole thing planned.
Luckily for
everyone I had put my skirt back on before my sister and brother in law had got
hold of the farmer who took less than a minute to catch the kid and re-tether
her. Goat farming was his second job, it turns out. In high season he was
mostly off hiring jet skis to tourists.
‘Thank you
for untangling the goats,’ he says. ‘Would
you like a jet ski?’
‘We are
leaving today,’ says my sister.
The farmer
looks rather relieved. The goat bleats something rude.
The Greek
word for goat is ‘katsika’, apparently. I however am called an ass.
Next blog
involves graphic descriptions of seafood platters, the terrors of turtle spotting
and more annoying pictures of sun and sea from Shoestrings.