Doughnuts: Back to the Nexus

Today was designated beach day. We know the routine now and were there for 11, found a pair of sunbeds with umbrella attached, the man came and sold us an all-day ticket, and we were set.

The good thing about being abroad is the BBC World Service, or in this century, the BBC World News, which has a European weather forecast. We'd seen clouds and wind predicted, so that meant waves! It was immediately obvious that we wouldn't be snorkelling as the waves pummelled the cliffs, but the rubber ring (AKA the wubber wing or doughnut) came into its own.

I stayed in the sea for 4 hours straight with alternating accompaniment by the olds, who did well despite themselves. Of course, our shoes and costumes were totally full of sand and seaweed but that's what you pay for. The waves were large and I appointed myself 'Wave Identifier' because I believed I could tell which waves would remove the bikini tops around me, or just wet our heads.

Thus we got: The Undulator, which you can negotiate by floating alone, The Double Dipper - the same but 2 in a row, and the Bikini Buster, which speaks for itself. Waves were unpredictable and not always in the same direction but close observation and analysis of the collected field data sets told us that on average, if you stood centrally and level with the angled cleft in the rock face, 2 waves would occasionally combine from 2 angles and create a V-shaped Nexus in your position, the constructive interference making it twice the height of the standard Bikini Buster and was capable of propelling me surf-style 30 to 50 yards in one go. Once I got all the way to the beach, lost the doughnut and a bystander had to catch it for me as the wind removed it post haste.

Thus the phrase of the day was 'Gotta get back to the Nexus' which was also the strapline of Star Trek: Generations. At one point the singing wheelbarrow man arrived and sang his Melones Melones Cococleto song so we had a chopped watermelon again. When it was finally showertime it was clear we'd imported half the beach through the nothing to declare customs channel and most of our kit had to go into 'Sandy Corner' on the balcony which is for all the stuff past retrieval which will go home as is, in a double walled irradiated bag.

I alleged that I saw the first hotel cat but if you wanted habeas corpus, you'd be out of luck. We had our afternoon snack surrounded by a blizzard of wasps and bees. Arriving relatively early at supper, we were able to choose our own table and ate fishy repasts with more mini desserts and filled in the 'How have we done' questionnaire and tried to find the advertised cinema screening. It started an hour and a half late (time zones move around in the Balearics so much, clocks are pointless) with Peppa Pig and 2 episodes of Masha and the Bear in which a happy bear's organized lifestyle in a country house with brandy still, honey processing plant, jam making facilities etc is thoroughly wrecked by a female humanoid childling. The bears' innate sense of kinder-protection makes their unlikely friendship come alive as she destroys his beehives and makes him pinecone soup, and he somehow fails to crush her deserving skull in one bite and leave nothing but her shoelaces for future FSB operatives to uncover, for this show is Russian, and we saw it in Crete last year.

Every kid in the complex has a light-up ball on a string so Bud have me 16 Euros to get one. But they were so popular, the only ones left were the doesn't-light-up mini basketball-onna-string for the inflated hoho price of 1.50.

I'd deliberately chosen 'Rock Vs Pop' over the Rent-a-Magician show for evening ents so we reached our local poolbar early enough to have the pick of the seats. I chose an anonymous 3rd row table surrounded by empty tables and bit by bit we arranged our tequila sunrises and proseccos and orange juices and the Party started. One thin lady from Wembley explained that it was a battle between pop and rock so she sang a Kylie Minogue cover of Locomotion to prove it - then a fuller-figured lady with a better voice came on to do a Bon Jovi hit and it went on from there.

At one point they invited audience members of a certain height to invade the stage and show off our moves. I joined in with limited gusto. The 2 Englischers retreated at last and it was bedtime. I can add that 3 different people said hello to Bud because he was wearing a Pompey football club shirt from 2004 but so far during the 5 days I've been here, I haven't talked to anyone apart from saying merci to the bartender.