Anyone who’s spent any amount of time with me has probably noticed the somewhat translucent glow that my skin possesses.
“Pasty”, a totally professional supervisor once described it.
I prefer “English rose”, myself.
So it’ll come as no surprise to hear that I have never tanned in my life. Not from a lack of trying, but sunbathing gets pretty boring when you’re the only one going lobster red whilst everyone else turns mahogany. Me and the sun, we just ain’t simpatico.
It had been 7 years since my last sun holiday, so imagine my skepticism when G was hankering for a week in Sardinia of all places.
However, as much as I try to avoid becoming a leather handbag I am a sucker for a week of doing literally FA, and Orosei just so happens to have the cleanest and quietest beaches I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting.
We went in June (yeah, you can expect most of my holibob posts to arrive 4 months late) because nope to going in the school holidays, so at least there weren’t too many other humans around to ruin my photos.
Beautiful crystal clear water that the camera wasn’t amazing at picking up, but you get the idea.
G, my unwitting model.
Yellow dress. Black monokini. Looking good, I know.
Now, I hate swimming in the sea, it’s too damn cold and I have poor circulation as it is.
But as you may have heard, I stopped washing my hair with commercial shampoo in March this year, and I’d read a lot about how drying salt water is for your hair, so G kindly helped me suck it up by dunking me in the water.
Once my screams had subsided I found that scrubbing my scalp with freezing cold salt water made diddly squat difference, and I spent the entire week wearing my hair in greasy buns. Yaaay.
G, on the other hand, loves the glacial temperatures of the Med.
Whenever G wasn’t coercing me into the water I was quite content to lie in the shade making my way through The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and a tub of cherries.
The Millennium Trilogy was a gift from G’s brother, incidentally, whose reasoning for buying me books for Christmas was that I wear glasses. What can I say, I just own that nerdy bookworm look B-).
The only downside to eating cherries in public is not being able to recreate my parents’ game of Who Can Spit The Pips The Furthest.
Back at the villa we pretty much did nothing but lay around watching Only Fools And Horses and eating all the gluten and sugary fruit. Every IBS sufferer’s dream diet!
One warning about Sardinia: they don’t really do cider. I turned up at the main shopping centre searching high and low for some Kopparberg, only to walk away with the only option they had, Strongbow. Devastated.
The fruit, on the other hand, was pretty fantastic.
Very FODMAP-UNfriendly it may be, but just look at the SIZE of that watermelon.
We also had G’s friends over one night for a BBQ and literally forgot we made all this food for it. Melted mozzarella and flies in your salad, anyone?
We did venture to the other side of Sardinia one of the days.
Being South African, G and his friend were pretty excited about seeing a rugby vets game between SA and Italy.
The game also happened to be on the hottest day while we were there at a cool 40 degrees, with very little shade to be found.
I have to be honest, I remember very little about the game or my general whereabouts that day, everything was one big boiling blur.
We also made plenty of animal pals while we were there. The cats are even sassier than my Fez and Trilby, raiding the bins every morning and letting themselves in the house.
The hardest part was letting G shoo them away, but after catching ringworm as a teenager after my mum let a scraggy little stray kitten sleep in our bed in Spain one year, I’m not overly keen on getting too close to random cats in Europe these days.
Spot the little lizardy peep.
So yeah, that was the laziest holiday I’ve ever had. Ever.
Ever.
