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| SCORCHING SAND DEADLY FISH AND GUARDS WITH MACHINE GUNS! OUR HOLIDAY PARADISE! |
One evening I jumped into the sea off the pontoon and turned to ease Dylan into the water beside me to show him the magnificent pair of Dragon Fish ( more probably Scorpion Fish but whatever ! ) swimming lazily around my feet and which I had no idea harboured a deadly, highly poisonous and excruciatingly painful sting!
Thankfully, he was too scared to come in and so I climbed out undead but by how tiny a margin I'll never know!
There were small reefs literally yards from our beach teeming with brilliantly coloured fish, so my advice is to not bother with the torture of the snorkelling trips and simply float out, have a quick look and nip back for another exhausting slurp of a cocktail !
If you own a camera capable of taking pictures underwater and can get sponsored by National Geographic you could con them and the world into believing that you had risked being eaten by sharks exploring the five thousand mile long Great Barrier Reef when you had actually been floating in three feet of lukewarm bathwater an arm's length from your beach-towel!
There is nothing to buy in Sharm that you can't buy much cheaper at home and that's the problem with today's holidays.
We British think that the artisans of Spain, Crete, Egypt or anywhere else are out there beavering away hoping that the tourists might be kind enough to spend a few coppers on their hand-crafted works of art but in truth find ourselves on a rainy day wandering aimlessly through a terrace of identical shops each selling the same range of overpriced Chinese rubbish!
Perhaps that's why I do so well when people visit my stall on Newcastle-upon-Tyne's Sunday Quayside Market and find themselves staring in disbelief at my huge range of leather bags and purses, each one made individually by me in my tiny workshop and sold at a price well below that of any shop!
Oh! If you haven't read any other of my fifty Blogs, my real job for the last forty years has been and still is making things!
It's a great stall and I am a brilliantly funny man who people just love to stand and watch and listen to, gasping in wonder at my tales about the fascinating life of a small leathergoods manufacturer!
Now where was I? Oh yes Egypt and talking about myself !
This train of thought all started because I couldn't find anyone to make me a new pair of sandals in Sharm after the strap on mine broke in Newcastle airport!
I thought that I would be overwhelmed by sandal makers lining the main shopping strip!
But no! I spent the entire week slapping about noisily, with people tutting and elbowing each other whenever I appeared.
And uncomfortably too with my toes curled under my foot, walking with a strange gait which turned out out to be identical to the dance steps which we would later see at our 'Bedouin' night, as I vainly attempted to keep the bloomin thing on, all the while with the additional burden of a cumbersome four year old on my dreadfully sunburnt shoulders onto which ( shoulders not grandchild ) I'd folded a beach towel into a rudimentary saddle in a losing battle to ease the pain!
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