vamos a la playa

It's the end of summer in London and I haven't seen the sun since the time of the Crusades so fed up of watching discovery channel to remind me how the sun looks like,I book a week-end to Sardinia so I can spend a long week-end soaking in the mediterranean sea and lying down like a python in the white and hot sand.

I arrive at the airport and my cousin Anna Bella comes to pick me up. She is at least 5 stones heavier than last summer but she is in great spirit and tells me that our Nana's sister Gesuina who's now 92 cannot drive anymore as they took her licence away -  I thank whoever is up there as she was the worst driver I ever met in my life, we would ask her to inform us if she was going for a drive so we could stay indoors for safety reasons. You know prevention is better than cure and we were sick and tired to remove femurs and limbs from the front wheels of her fiat punto ! She lives 3 miles away from Auntie Carmela and she keeps hitchhiking to move around the local villages, I'm horrified and decide to have a word with her when we pop in to say hello on our way from the beach.

The beach is a short walk from Auntie's house so as soon I get there, I meet Pietro the milkman who's an old friend of my dad and stop to have a chat. I see close to the rocks two big black things lying down and I think the effects of this bloody global warming are quite scary , I've never seen sea lions in the beaches of Sardinia before so I walk towards the sea lions and realise that those are not sea lions, it's Anna Bella and Auntie Carmela wearing wetsuits !

   

We chat for hours and it's lunchtime. Auntie brought lasagne, chicken, potatoes salad and cannoli siciliani which are little tubes filled with ricotta cheese containing 4500 calories each so a very light meal , it will take me a month to digest all this food and after the first course meal I can feel the elastic of my bikini expanding so much that I could use it as a skipping rope ! We go to visit Gesuina. I find her in the garden with 2 cucumbers on her hands and shout : what are you doing with those firm and chunky cucumbers ? She grins and says : one is for the salad. I don't need to ask her what she will be doing with the other, they don't have sex toys shops in her village !

She brings to the table outside a nice coffee with another portion of cannoli for all of us, I bring up the subject of hitchhiking and tell her that it's very dangerous to accept a ride from a stranger even if she has more wrinkles than a sharpei dog and have bags under her eyes as big as Tesco trolleys and she could fit inside the monthly food shopping, she looks at me as if I have 3 heads but I tell her that she could be sexually abused and she is putting herself at risk , she looks into my eyes and says: that's what I'm waiting for my Dear. I'm horrified and wish I had follow my dream of becoming a vet so I could put her down once for all.