Sun, sea and sadness

Well Sean’s parents returned home yesterday after enjoying a thoroughly good holiday with great weather. Junior enjoyed it as well of course and was most upset to be waving her nana and grandad off at the port. They promised to return again but with Junior really having no concept of time, she assumed they meant next week! I managed to lessen her disappointment by showing her on the calendar when her aunties will be coming to visit which seems to have helped a little.
It was Junior’s end of year school show on Wednesday evening in which she played a poppy. Not that I’m biased or anything but she was the prettiest poppy I’ve ever seen (she was also the only child who bowed at the end – believing, I think, that all the applause was for her!). She has a few days left in school next week and  then that is the end of kindergarten and she starts in the next school in September just before she’s 6. She says she wants to stay at the kindergarten even if all her friends move on to the other school but I’m sure I’ll manage to talk her round before September.
Before her show on Wednesday we were up and down the island taking pictures for a small guide we’re producing, ending up in Agnanti for a bite of lunch. Normally being in the car in the heat for any length of time makes both Junior and myself feel sick but being able to stop and get out seemed to have stopped that from happening. It was really warm though and seeing people toasting themselves on the beaches just brought home to me once again how much the thought of lying on a beach is my idea of hell. Junior is currently slathered in factor 50 whilst I’m using 40 on my body and 50 on my face and hands. I intend to be one of the palest people on Skopelos or at least only get any colour from a bottle!
On Thursday night the poisoners appear to have been out in their attempt to “control” the local population of cats and dogs. It doesn’t appear as if any of our animals have fallen foul of these evil people, certainly not the dogs but I haven’t accounted for all of the cats yet. It makes no difference to me though whether I knew these animals or not, the fact is they were animals who trusted in the intrinsic decency of people, decency which is sadly lacking in a lot of people. Treating animals this way, disposing of them in this manner, diminishes people, all people. Is this an attempt to “clean the streets” before the tourists come? Would people be so ready to come if they saw the dead bodies of these animals in the streets? Have they not witnessed the tourists photographing the cats and feeding them? Tourists don’t view them as vermin though what they’d think of the people who perpetrate this atrocity is pretty obvious. What I think of these people is unprintable.