CHOICES - a 100-word story

CHOICES                                                           

                                                                

“Marry me, Hanna,” Yakob begged daily, “And we will make many beautiful babies.”

Yakob had dark, expressive eyes, but he was only a fisherman, whose hut crouched on the beach with its roof weighted by rocks. Aaron was ugly, but he would inherit his family’s bar.

“Build me a house first,” Hanna said, “And I’ll think about it.”

Then a storm spread Yakob’s hut all along the beach, and Hanna searched frantically through the debris until she found him.

Now their daughters take tourists on fishing trips and their sons run a beach bar where Yakob’s hut once stood. 
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Thanks again to http://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/ for the photo that prompted this story.
Follow the blue frog link on her blog to read many other interpretations of the image.
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Our Tenerife apartment is for sale - click on the page on the right to look at the photographs. We plan to return to England before our grandchildren are too much older!

WHETHER THE WEATHER

Whether the weather be cold
or whether the weather be hot -
we'll weather the weather
whatever the weather
whether we like it or not.

I'm not sure whether I've quoted that old ditty correctly, but the childhood when I learned it was a long time ago!

Isn't our perception of weather strange?
My friends and I have been complaining this week about having to wear jackets when we go out, yet in England people are turning the heating back on.

"When are we going to get some decent barbecue weather?" someone in the bar moaned a couple of days ago, but last weekend my family in Sussex ignored the rain and lit their barbecue under a parasol.

People come out here for a holiday and walk around practically naked while we cover up - we can pick out the tourists at a glance. "Dressing up for the evening" to them means short sleeved shirts and strappy dresses - to us it means wearing long trousers and jumpers.

Opinions vary as to how long it takes for an ex-pat's blood to thin - some say weeks, others claim months - but the fact remains that for us the drop in temperature from 40F last week to 25F this week has come as a shock, and we're freezing!

WATCH OUT - THIEVES ABOUT!

Tenerife must be lying several centimetres lower in the Atlantic at the moment – apparently there’s hardly a spare bed to be had. This is good news for the tourist industry and a much-needed boost to the economy of an island that has more than 35% unemployment.

Not all visitors are welcome, of course. Those who come to swell the membership of foreign gangs of various nationalities are indicative of the downside of tourism. When we go to meet a friend at the airport and find the place crawling with police, we know they have been alerted to the arrival of more criminals.

Although one shouldn’t blame the victims, it is difficult not to when many holiday-makers are so incredibly careless.

Some of them – not always the younger element, I might add - get stupidly drunk and become easy prey for muggers when they stagger back to their hotels in the dark.

Far too many men carry their passports and wads of cash in the back pockets of their shorts instead of using the hotel safe.

Both sexes leave handbags and bum-bags unattended while they swim in the sea.

They buy tablecloths from swarthy women in the street when there are shops that sell them much cheaper, and the tourists often hold their purses so carelessly that the women’s nimble fingers can steal enough money to buy a dozen tablecloths.

One of the criminals’ latest tricks is to stick a piece of paper on the rear window of cars in car-parks. The driver slings handbag, camera and shopping on the back seat and starts to reverse, then sees the paper and gets out to remove it. Before he/she has reached the back of the car the thieves have got in and driven off.

A variation on the car-park theme is to wait until a driver has unlocked the car and put their belongings inside, and then shove a map under their nose and ask for directions. While the driver obligingly looks at the map an accomplice steals anything of value from the car. This actually happened to a friend of mine – her handbag was of no particular value, but she lost her credit card, her cash, her Residencia, her Health card, her prescriptions and her house keys. After a lengthy visit to the Policia she went home via a ferreteria and changed the locks, then set about replacing all her lost paperwork. Her husband suffers from dementia so he forgot about it quickly, but she was traumatised for days.

But don’t let me put you off! Your chances of falling into any of the above traps are the same wherever tourists go, and Tenerife has more sunshine this time of year than the Mediterranean. So come here and enjoy your holiday, but do please be careful.

BLUE SKIES, nothing but blue skies...

We have had no rain for over a year – one shower exactly seventy-four seconds long doesn’t count – and the Government have finally admitted there’s a sequia – a drought. They have asked people “not to waste water” though they haven’t actually banned its use – that might cause an uproar – and we can’t upset the tourists by asking them to use less. The street cleaners are still hosing debris off the pavements rather than sweeping first, and the public gardens are still watered daily, often with sufficient pressure to wash passing cars as well.

Savings are being made, of course. The plantation owners have been suffering from cuts in supply, frequent enough for some of them to be reduced to watering their fields by bucket – an arduous task in temperatures of over 40*C. Private complexes such as ours have tried to economise by reducing the number of trees in their gardens, so we have had the sad sound of chainsaws.

Despite all this, nature refuses to lie down - there must be some moisture in the air because my bedroom door is sticking.

 The barbed-wire plant has gone from grey to green, the weeds on the abandoned building site look healthy, and even the pepper-tree stumps are trying to grow again.

¡Viva la naturaleza!

HOLIDAY-MAKERS & HAZARDS

HOW was your weekend? We had rain! Wonderful, life-giving, crop-saving rain after a year of drought. I did spare a thought for the visitors who thought they were escaping bad weather, but then it didn’t rain everywhere, or constantly, and it was warm rain.

HAVE you ever wondered what item is most often left at HOME by HOLIDAY-MAKERS? Passport? Essential medicines? HAIR-DRYER? Nope – what they usually forget to bring along is HALF AN OUNCE of common-sense.

I HAVE waited for my own visitors in Airport Arrivals often enough to be able to distinguish between the two-week-tourist and the returning resident – the tourists are HAULING the biggest suitcases. When you see them going home a fortnight later, burnt a painful red and peeling like gum-trees in autumn, you can tell that the women spent their entire holiday in bikinis or strappy dresses, and the men never wore shirts. So why did they HUMP along 20 kilos of luggage each?

HEALTH INSURANCE is something else they don’t think about. Accidents do HAPPEN, and even if they’re not fit to fly home, they can’t stay in their HOTEL room – it’s been let to someone else. HOW will they pay for their extended stay? And who pays the HOSPITAL bills?

HAZARDOUS sports are another thing. People who wouldn’t dream of HANG-GLIDING over the gently rolling HILLS of Sussex leap HEEDLESSLY off the precipitous cliff-faces of Tenerife. I have watched, HEART in mouth, from a roof-top in Arona while a HELICOPTER searched for a glider who had misjudged the wind.

Then there were the two young men who HIRED a HARLEY and rode off on this powerful motorbike to explore while their girl-friends shopped. When the boys failed to appear that night a search was started, but it took two days to find them. The bike had left the road and fallen into a barranco. It ploughed a path through some shrubs which closed behind it, HIDING the young men. Two days, lying badly injured and without water, in this climate – they didn’t stand a chance.

And to add to this warning – the local papers are reporting that such foolhardiness is going to be costly – anyone who undertakes a dangerous sport without due precautions is going to have to pay for being rescued.

HALF-ARSED PARENTING

My daughter and son-in-law both work in the tourist industry. HE is a resort manager, and has so many HAIR-RAISING tales that they deserve their own book – maybe he’ll write it after he’s retired! She is a sun-care advisor and visits hotels on a rota, giving a brief chat by the pools and selling Aloe Vera products. One day the pool guy brought her a screaming toddler and she used her microphone to ask for its parents. No response, so Reception checked passports and located the room. The door was wide open, Security found the child’s dummy which quietened it down, but no-one was there. TWO HOURS LATER the parents came back. They’d left their baby asleep in the hotel room and GONE SHOPPING. Beggars belief, doesn’t it?

HURSTPIERPOINT is the village in West Sussex where we used to live, and where many of my family still do. When I win the lottery I am going back there to be a round-the-corner Nan!