New Year ’s Day started off with great warm gusts of wind courtesy of Colonel Gadaffi. It could have been a spring day; hardly a cloud to be seen. After lunch the winds dropped and anyone wanting to sunbathe would have really enjoyed it. No need to light the fires in the evening it was that warm. Evidently though because of the unseasonable weather, allergies are rampant. You can’t win.
We didn’t bother to see in 2010 but took a book to bed about ten thirty and fell asleep before those midnight chimes. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up with the sound of gunfire as I am sure there must have been any amount of it; that is the way Cretans celebrate an occasion, as well as fireworks. For us the quietest New Year’s eve ever.
An interesting e-mail from The Pardoes in America wishing us all the best for the New Year (it has just got to be better than 2009) and saying they were very surprised to see a long article on Vamos in the N.Y.Times, so I looked it up on the internet and very interesting it is indeed. It appears our olive growers’ co-operative has been cooking the books and taking the European Union for a very big ride with the subsidies. They have presented unbelievable figures in order to rake off a pretty considerable sum of money. For example, an olive tree should evidently produce about fifty kilos of fruit, enough to make five litres of oil but, according to our fraudsters, the trees around here have been producing something like 150 and there are hundreds of thousands of trees! So what’s new? When organisations can cover up their members naughtiness, like the Teamsters or Tammany Hall used to be in America, the boys will feather their nests and enough is never ever enough. Unfortunately in this instance the farmers the co-operative represent lost out. But then the workers in the Teamsters Union also lost out, didn’t they? Anyway, any little piggy who can get his nose in the trough is bound by his very nature to do so and, what is more, squeal when caught.
Caught an enormous rat in the downstairs bathroom trap last night. He was very pretty, not just grey, or just brown, but a bit of both. Don’t think I’ve seen that before. I always feel so bad when one of them is killed like this but they are unfortunately destructive little buggers. This one, or one of his mates, had even started chewing through the plastic waste pipe and that could have been a small disaster. So RIP Mister Ratty.