I fled from paradise

Earlier this year, I returned to my beloved Cala Mondrago on the isle of Mallorca for what was going to be a nearly three-week holiday. It was my first flight since Easter 2019 and the first time back there since the summer of 2018.

As I said, the holiday there was supposed to last for nearly three weeks, but I fled five nights earlier than expected.

There were a few niggles that annoyed me: the food wasn't as good as before; the staff wasn't as accommodating as before; and the air-conditioning system in the kitchen made an extremely annoying noise that I could hear in the little extra house that the owners had built about 100 metres away from the main building. ("Casa Blanca", as it's called, has 9 twin rooms for people who return a lot and who want extra peace and quiet. Me included.) I could even hear that noise in my room with the door and windows shut and with wax earplugs firmly embedded in my ears.

However, what made me flee from a place that really does look like paradise to me was this incident...

It was the last Sunday evening, around 6 p.m. I had gone to the beach for a swim. I normally swim from one bay to the other and back. That takes me around 30 minutes.

I got into the sea, adjusted my snorkel, goggles and hat (I have a pink swimming hat that I hope is visible to others in the sea - just in case a boat comes into the swimming area - safety first!) and then I started swimming.

At first, I didn't notice anything untoward. Yes, there was a lot less biodiversity since my last visit four years before, but that had been obvious as of my first swim back there two weeks before.

It was when I started to round the corner to swim to the next bay that the 'trauma' started. The wind was up a bit and it must have churned the water and caused whatever was lying on the sea bed to rise up. 

I suddenly found myself swimming in what seemed to me to be a washing machine with lots of bits of plastic in it. It was horrendous. Metre after metre of churned-up water with hundreds of small bits of clear plastic - and a few shreds of white plastic, too, just for good measure. Everywhere I looked, there was plastic. The more I swam, the more I saw. There was no end to the plastic waste. I thanked my lucky stars that I had a snorkel in my mouth and that I didn't have to take breaths with my mouth.

Finally, I got to the other beach and got out. This time, though, instead of swimming back, I decided to walk back along the concrete pathway that clings to the rocks leading from one bay to the other. From the top, I could only see the few bits of white plastic. All the hundreds of pieces of clear plastic were not visible at all. Other beachgoers probably believed that all was well in the water. Well, it wasn't. I could barely see any fish as I swam, just plastic.

I remember that when I first started to holiday in Cala Mondrago, large plastic bags and bits of packaging would sometimes end up in the sea, blown there by the wind. And I would leave the sea with both hands carrying the bits I could see close to the shore. I well remember the horrified looks of some holidaymakers when they saw me exiting the sea with plastic bags etc. in my hands.

The very next morning after this incident, I took a taxi to the airport, bought a ticket within 10 minutes, dropped off my old and battered suitcase within 2 minutes and went through security in 3 minutes, then waited 5 hours for my flight. It was cheaper to buy a new ticket than to stay another five nights.

When I returned to Germany, I did some research. The Mediterranean is the most polluted sea in the world. It stands to reason: there's only a small narrow outlet between Morocco and Spain. Everything pretty much stays in the Med. 

Did you know, for example, that, on average, around 730 tons of plastic enters the Med every day? This is the estimate of UNEP (the United Nations Environmental Program). 

See here for more details: https://www.unep.org/unepmap/resources/factsheets/pollution

Here are two more facts from the same source:

• Plastics account for between 95 to 100% of total floating litter, and more than 50% of seabed litter.
   
• Single-use plastics represent more than 60% of the total recorded marine litter on beaches

If you want to have some idea of what I swam through, here's an image from an Australian website:

I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to return to this place (you can see the two beaches clearly here - I swam from the one on the right to the one on the left):

It has taken weeks to get over this 'trauma'. It really was that upsetting. You enter what you think are beautiful clear waters, and then you swim through rubbish, as shown in the previous photo. It really was traumatic.

Green is the colour of hope

A couple of months ago, a large patch of wasteland that I pass when I go to a small post office was cleared of all vegetation, bar a few large mature trees.

I was devastated. Everything gone. Nothing but bare earth remained. I stopped a passer-by and he had no clue as to what was going to happen there. "There used to be a building here about 10 years ago," he said. And I felt sad at the thought that this formerly large patch of green might be built on again.

A fair few weeks later, when I had to go to the post office again, I was amazed. The ground was covered with green again and not much later after that, the plants were as high as they had been before. The power of nature.

I recently read that, if left alone, a cleared patch of the Amazon jungle could return to its former condition in just 20 years. You might think that 20 years is a long time, but geologically speaking, it's a blink of an eye.

 That bit of barren earth near the post office proves this. Nature will prevail. Given time and if left in peace.

When does 21° C feel cold?

I'll tell you when 21 degrees Celsius feels cold: when you've just had five days of 33 degrees Celsius.

In the past, summer temperatures used to be in the low 20s and an extraordinarily high temperature was 26 degrees C. Now, for the last 19 years, we've been having heatwaves in Continental Europe that really are no fun.

In the first heatwave of 2003, 70,000 people died across Europe - 5,000 in Paris alone. The elderly just didn't know how to cope with the heat, drank too like and keeled over. Dead.

Thus, when I went to the outdoor pool last Friday, I shivered sitting on the grass in my swimming costume and beach blouse because the temperature was only 21 and later 22 degrees Celsius. What a shame.

Sitting on the balcony at 7 this morning, I was so cold that I had to go in. Sixteen degrees C now feels like freezing point whereas it would have been a heatwave in Denmark. (I used to have a Danish boyfriend. He found 16 degrees C so hot that he started shedding clothes.)

God knows how we're going to cope with winter - especially with rising gas and electricity prices. These high temperatures of over 30 degrees C are really messing with our inner thermostats.

I've "fallen off the wagon" - but it's not what you think

 Normally, the phrase "to fall off the wagon" means that you have started drinking after successfully giving it up for a while.

Well, a few days ago, I decided to buy chewing gum again. I had given it up more than a decade ago because chewing gum caused my fillings and crowns to come loose and repairing them cost money.

However, since my problems with staying asleep now has a name (sleep maintenance insomnia) and the cause of that is stress and one way to reduce stress is to chew gum....I caved in and bought some Wrigley's spearmint gum again.

I now chew the cud like a cow again, but I believe it has relieved some tension, so that's a good thing.

And fortunately, the packet sizes seem to be a lot smaller than they were in the 70s. Does anyone remember this advert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndS5_0MKWkM

I suffer from OCD - and it's not what you think

I have various hobbies and one of them is 'making things'. This broad category also embraces cross-stitching. I make cards, pictures and tablecloths using this technique.

"Oh," people exclaim, "that must be very relaxing for you."

Relaxing?! Are you kidding??

As I said in the headline, I suffer, really suffer, from OCD: obsessive cross-stitch disorder.

When I start something, I want to finish it as soon as possible, which means I spend all my free, waking hours on it - to the exclusion of everything else. 

Sure, I do any translation work that comes my way and I manage to send out invoices at the end of the month, but housework, keeping fit, going out, reading, meeting people...all such activities fall by the wayside. It is horrendous. 

Hour after hour, I sit and stitch. I forget to drink; I barely move - even if I'm in an uncomfortable position. And all over my home, little bits of embroidery yarn show up as I just let the bits that I cut off fall onto the floor or onto my clothes and you can then estimate how far from the table where I'm doing the work you are by how densely spread the bits of yarn on the floor are.

Last year, I sent my aunts in Berlin a tablecloth each for Easter.

When I went to visit them in January this year, I saw that one aunt still had the tablecloth on her dining table. I returned home determined that they should have more, so I found two designs for the summer and spent at least two months working on them in my free time. 

One summer design:

And the other:

Two evenings ago, I finally managed to finish the two tablecloths for autumn for them. Hundreds of hours again. And, as work has been rather sparse this year, this means I could start work on them at 8 in the morning and carry on until 10 at night. Thank heavens for primewire.mx. Without all the series I've watched through that website, I would not have been so well entertained.

This is one design for the autumn:

And this is the other:

If you want to buy a kit yourself, here is the website:

https://www.junghanswolle.de/sticken/tischwaesche?sortierung=favoriten&seite=2

But now I feel free! No more cross-stitch projects are on the horizon. I am free! Free! Woohoo! 

Now, there are just a few small blankets I want to crochet for Christmas presents this year....

Now I know why pensioners say they never have time

As I have little work right now, I took today off. Freier Freitag - as I call it. Free Friday.

All I had on my agenda today was a hair appointment at 11 and a visit to a cemetery in a nearby town. Easy, right? Lots of free time. A nice relaxing day.

I polished up a brief translation (a questionnaire) and sent it off by 9 a.m., made a social phone call and set off for my hair appointment at 10. Only back home some time after 12.30, lunch and off to the nearby town.

After waiting for the train for 20 minutes and wondering if there was any information as to why it was 5 minutes late, I did discover that the train I needed wasn't running and that there was a replacement bus service. Off I went in search of the relevant bus stop. Another 10-minute wait and, instead of an 8-minute train ride, a longer bus ride.

When I got to the station, the bus I needed drove off as I was getting off the bus I that had brought me there. Another 10-minute wait. 

After I'd finished tidying up an old friend's grave for about 20 minutes, I saw that the bus stop in front of the cemetery had been moved and I didn't know where to, so I walked back to the station. As I was waiting for the replacement bus service to take me back into town, the waiting time grew from 3 minutes to 8 minutes.

By the time I had got back home, the round trip had taken me 3 hours - instead of the usual 1 hour and 30 or 40 minutes. I was knackered.

All day to do two little things. Consider what one achieves at work in 8 hours: e-mails read and responded to, filing, translation, editing, paying invoices, writing invoices, chasing up unpaid invoices, research, queries... And as I work from home, I can add domestic chores to that list.

And yet all I did today on my day off was have a haircut and tend to a grave. And it took me all the working day. It's no wonder that the pensioners' mantra is "I don't know how I managed to fit in work - I'm on the go all day".

I never thought I would ever do that!

I like plants. My balcony is four metres long and is full of at least 20 species of plants. I admire the infinite variety of plants, which is why I even fill in the bare patch of ground around the tree in front of this building's front door. 

Over the years, I've planted all sorts of flowers in the street. In the last two years, I've gone for kalanchoe as it can cope well with the heat. 

However, despite my great love of plants, there has always been one kind that I have loathed: begonias. 

In the summer, the Germans are very fond of these kinds of begonias and plant them out everywhere, not just in gardens but in parks, too:

Personally, I cannot stand them. Firstly, the colour annoys me as does their appearance. There's also a red variety:

Don't they look untidy?

However, last Saturday, in a desperate attempt to bring more colour and variety to the small patch of soil in the street, I actually dared to buy some white begonias as I thought I could at least tolerate them:

Never before did I think that I would ever, ever, ever buy a begonia - never mind three!. Wonders can still happen in this world.