Raining Mud

This is yesterday's post but it got delayed by stuff - funny old day.

F went cycling.  She said she was going to be away for 4 hours.  I set my clock. 

Do you like my kohl?

It looked like impending rain, and some 'precipitation' did precipitate, but if you come from anywhere north (or south) of 48 degrees of latitude, you wouldn't have called it rain.

Two hours later my sleep was disturbed by F returning covered in muddy speckles and this was her tale:

She was nearing the ferry at Perama when a man rode up behind her on a motorbike and tootled past yelling 'tha vrexy', tha vrexy'.  It means 'it will rain'.  The stuff falling out of the sky did intensify slightly so that riding into the wind she had to squint sideways, but it still wasn't rain.  

A lighted sign on a pharmacy announced that the air temperature was 18 degrees. (that is Celsius. For folk who still use Fahrenheit, you will just have to do you own conversions - an average summer day in England say).  The water that hit F and her bike dried off pretty quickly and while pedaling along she realized that everything on the bike was covered in mud spots.  Her white top was speckled with mud spots.

Mud was falling out of the sky. 

She decided against taking the ferry to Salamina, turned around at Perama and came home.  A short while later she ran over a euro coin, and stopped and picked it up.  A mile or so further on she discovered a smart phone in the middle of the busy road.  It can't have been there long as it hadn't been run over. She stopped and made the traffic go around her while she picked that up, and discovering it was still alive, tucked it gently into her bag and rode on, wondering where the nearest police station might be, and whether she would be able to feed it if it got hungry in the meantime.  

While she was waiting at some traffic lights on a complicated intersection and contemplating the conundrum of the mobile phone, a scooter squeezed past, running the lights, and headed off to the right and downhill in the direction F was about to go; out of sight behind some shops and cafes.  Green light and just as F moved there was the sound of man-made machine encountering man-made paved surface and sliding a long way, and she rounded the corner to see the scooter rider just coming to a stop on his side having slid about 30 metres down the road with the bike on top of his right leg.

She braked to avoid hitting the car that braked to avoid running over the scooterman. Then - the bit I don't quite get - she described 'losing her back end' and narrowly avoiding joining the scooterman polishing the street.  

I'm still in control of my back end, hers appears to be still attached, so I am not sure where or even what she lost.

With a thin film of water on it, the street had become frictionless it seems. F picked up the scooter and helped the bloke off the busy street, made sure that even though he was shaken he was not actually broken, offered to get medical help for him which he declined and eventually left him to deal with his shock in his own way.  In all that time cars drove around them, cars drove past them, and people sat in the cafes on the other side of the footpath and not a single other person came to the aid of the poor scooterman.

That doesn't seem right.  

BTW she said running the lights might have been bad karma but there was no way he was going to stay upright on a motorbike going round a corner downhill on that street surface, so even if he had waited a couple of extra seconds he was still going to be downside up and drifting with the asphalt grating the skin off his right lower leg.  He probably saved F from having it happen to her. (She gingerly walked her bike to the next intersection where the downhill ended and rode on from there.)

At Port Gate 10 F stopped to take a picture of mimosa so I could post it on my blog, and while there the rescued phone buzzed gently a few times.  Poor wee thing ...

It's screen said Michael (yes Michael not Μιχαήλ) and she figured there was an outside chance that Michael might speak English. It turned out to be his Mum's phone. In the end they made arrangements to meet somewhere to return it to it's home and F did another 8km loop around on the bike to hand it over.

Like I said strange old day, but it wasn't finished. The family of the cat-torturer came round to pick up our gas BBQ. It has been my cave on the aft balcony for the last three and half years - still wrapped in the packaging that it wore to move over here.

My humans have never had a BBQ in Greece! Can you believe that? Well it has a new home now.

I used the space under it as a place to escape from cat-torturers when they visit. Where am I going to hide now?

Another friend sent a message to say she had been in a car accident. There might have been a few frictionless roads in Athens yesterday. It turned out to be a bump, not serious, no one injured, but none-the-less we hope she got more help and kindly attention than scooterman.

Some more yacht racing

PS: scooterman WAS wearing a crash helmet and didn't look to be at all a young man. It has made F think about carrying a more comprehensive first aid kit - more comprehensive than a single sticking plaster.