When you are miles away from home in a place you have never visited before you are out of your comfort zone. You meet or notice new people like Giovanni or like Mark and Rachel from Runcorn in Cheshire. They were lovely people and they were on holiday with their daughters aged eighteen and twenty one.
Like us they had not flown abroad since 2019 - before the pandemic. We got talking with them after dinner one night and it went like this...
RACHEL And so what does your son do down in London?
ME Well he's involved in the food industry. He's a vegan chef and he's published a few recipe books with his mate.
RACHEL What's his name?
ME He's called Ian. Have you ever heard of BOSH!?
RACHEL BOSH!? Yeah course I've heard of them. I've got all of their books. So are you guys the parents of the BOSH! boys?
ME Well we're the parents of one of the BOSH! boys - not both of them . We're Ian's parents.
RACHEL Oh my god. I can't believe it!
⦿
We also met two moaning minnies called John and Stella from South London. They had come to Sicily for three weeks to celebrate Stella's seventy first birthday. Nothing was right for them, from the food to their room and from the staff to the swimming pools. Now bearing in mind that I will be seventy this year and therefore just a year younger than Stella, I asked if they had visited the Greco-Roman amphitheatre in Syracuse...
STELLA When you get to our age, you have seen plenty of old ruins and after a while they are all the same so we didn't bother visiting the archaeological site in Syracuse.
Later with regard to Mount Etna...
STELLA We have visited Vesuvius and we found the trip up Mount Etna quite boring. We have also been to see the volcano on Tenerife. The only volcanoes I would like to see now are in Iceland.
ME Oh I've been to Iceland and I have seen volcanic activity there. I was there back in 1991.
STELLA & JOHN (They are not interested and ask no follow-up questions before returning to their endless grumbles). And the rep is useless. We told her we wanted a transfer to a different hotel. They call this four star? I wouldn't even give it a two star. We just can't wait to get home.
After that encounter, Shirley and I studiously avoided Stella and John. That kind of negativity can be infectious and we ourselves had no significant complaints about the hotel and the services we received. After all, we had done our homework and we knew exactly what to expect.
Of course while at our Sicilian resort hotel, we spent a good amount of time observing Italian holiday makers - mostly from the north of the country - Milan, Bologna, Genoa etc.. On the whole, they seemed like a happy bunch with few histrionics and the children were generally well-behaved. We met an Italian couple who now live and work in Northampton, England. Their little daughter Lydia was fifteen months old and very sweet
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/oFZDGIc