Snakes Alive!

And dead.

I liked this photo of Sal, looking like she might have just strangled and skinned the snake she's holding with her bare hands.

After nearly two weeks in Porch, the children have gone feral. Their skin is the colour of toffee, their hair looks like a field of ripe wheat. They get clean by jumping in the pool and dry by running after the dogs. Clothes are a thing of the past. Jamie and the children were sniffing the waitress as she wafted past our table last night. When I raised an eyebrow, their excuse was that she just smelt 'clean'.

Down in the town last night, three little kids, one brother and two sisters, put on a gymnastic display for the holiday crowd. On the hard baked stones of the main road in town, they flick flacked and tumbled and balanced on sticks. Collecting euros in a tin after the act, they explained they were raising money to get to next year's European Gymnastic Championships. Ok, I may be the world's biggest sucker, but I'd love to believe that was true.

On the same strip, another child, aged five or six, lay asleep on the floor of his parents' food van, as they grimly sold hot waffles and churros to hopeless non-Portuguese speaking cretins like me. The look on their faces roughly translated as 'we hate our job, we hate you and we hate our lives. Each waffle is made with bitterness and resentment and I hope it brings you misery and pain. If not death.'

As Grace took the first bite of her cream and sugar laden waffle, the pathetic paper plate collapsed under the weight of cholesterol and crushed dreams. The cream slid off the hot treat and landed wetly, messily and ploppily on her leg then dribbled down to her dinky foot. Her dad happily yelled 'OOOOH ON YER FOOT!' drawing everybody's attention to the un-coolness of the situation. As Grace squirmed in embarrassment and tried to hide her dairy-topped limb from the local hotties, we knew then that 'ooooh on yer foot' was a keeper. A family-saying, an in-joke, an inane and incomprehensible fragment, that by sheer repetition over many, many years will be one of those trillion tiny threads that bind this family together.

I'll admit. It's not Shakespeare.

There's another snake, live not dead (and not in focus) in extras.