© J Darley

I spent yesterday in Salisbury in southern England, soaking up sunshine and scenes of inspired eccentricity. The cathedral city’s international arts festival is currently midway through, though they clearly aren’t shouting about it. There was no celebratory bunting, flags or declarations to let us know it was happening, but that understated approach is part of the charm.

As my friend and I meandered through the gorgeous old streets, we were drawn by applause and laughter to a piece of street theatre called The Dinner Table, which began with a rather salacious lesson on etiquette and ended with a girl slathering herself with mayonnaise in order to attract a mate…

Bizarre moments like this demonstrate the wealth of talent drawn to lit fests and the like. While top-notch authors and musicians take residence in theatres and arts centres, purveyors of street theatre and surreal performance art settle into more public areas such as parks, market squares and cathedral cloister gardens.

I kid you not. That’s where we found another glorious piece of three-dimensional art, called IOU. We were drawn into this sun-strewn, tree-shaded space simply to gaze at the medieval archways and columns surrounding it, but as soon as we stepped inside we heard piped whispering emanating from every corner -poems filling the air while shards of slate scrawled with similar fragments lay in the grass among the tombstones.

The whole thing was immensely peaceful - it was the kind of environment that made you want to lie down, close your eyes and let all your anxieties filter away into the air.

Who needs expensive masseurs when you can lie in a garden and have someone whisper poetry into your ear?

If I ruled the world, every village, town and city would have a street like this, a district or a single building - open to the public and filled with a sense of magic and unpredictability.

© www.sxc.hu

Oh no, we seem to have reached midge season. The little blighters can’t get enough of my blood, leaving me with itchy bumps.

I have to remind myself how little it compares to the mozzie bites I suffered during my gap-year, beginning with a lengthy stint on a kibbutz near Haifa.

My first glimpse of Israel was of Tel Aviv’s lights as we swung in towards the airport. After several hours of queuing to get through customs, I was collected by a girl not much older than me who took me to the hostel where I would try to sleep through my excitement, despite the prickling heat and the extraordinary night time sounds of the city. The streets roared with noise as cars, buses and bikes hurtled past, and people called out to one another, shrieking and laughing.

In the morning, relieved to be giving up on the pretence of sleep, I caught the bus to Haifa, and from there to Sha’ar Ha’amakim, the kibbutz where I would live for the next three months. My heart sank when the volunteer coordinator, Yossi, told me I was to work in the factory, but this was one of most coveted jobs, doing everything from cleaning to checking the solar panels for leaks. I was the only volunteer there - and the only woman. Most of the men were Russian and hardly any spoke English, so they just smiled at me a lot.

I left the volunteer house each day before 6am, relishing the silent walk to the factory in the early dawn shimmer that flooded down from the mountains to make the factory roof blush pink.

Within a few days, though, I discovered that as I fell into bed exhausted each night the mosquitoes woke up for breakfast, feasting on me until my limbs were a mass of irritated bites. As I raked my fingernails over my legs, Yossi tutted and shook his head at me.

“You know they’ll bite you more if you scratch because you’re drawing all the blood to the surface of the skin.”

“Really? In that case I’m doomed,” I said, glowering at the swollen red lumps covering my shins.

“No you’re not. Winter’s nearly here and the mosquitoes will die then,” he told me, “You just have to hang on until it gets cold.”

But as September turned into October, the weather continued balmy and warm, though the kibbutzniks declared it winter. The plus side of their attitude was that it meant that we volunteers had the pool to ourselves, accumulating around the dubiously green-tinted water as soon as the majority of us finished our work at 2pm.

Each day, I ran straight from the factory to the cool water, seeking a respite from the itching mosquito bites. The surface closed over my head and I plummeted until my heels struck the tiles at the bottom. A stream of bubbles escaped from my nose, and I crouched low, wrapping my arms around my knees.

It was shadowy and quiet down there, with just the occasional limb dipping through as people swam past overhead, the hollow sound of their voices seeping down from above. My chest tightened and I let myself rise back up into the air, sucking breath after breath into my lungs.

Chores were divided up neatly and we each took time out of swimming and lounging by the pool to clean the volunteer house once a week. When it was my turn I slopped water across the grimy floor, mopping vigorously to try to get the task over with as soon as possible.

Lost in my own thoughts, I was startled out of my daydreams when a tiny pink lizard ran out of the shower I was sluicing, and I managed to scoop it up before it took refuge in one of the cracks in the wall. It lay in my hand, quivering gently and blinking crimson glistening eyes like pomegranate seeds.

“Look at this,” I called to the boys who were in their usual prone position in the TV room.

One of them grabbed for it, and the poor startled creature’s tail fell off, twitching in his palm as though still receiving electrical impulses from the lizard’s brain.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.

I looked at the stunted lizard still nestled in my hand and smiled.

“Lizards eat mosquitoes, don’t they? This little chap could be just the room-mate I need.”

I released my new friend into the bedroom and watched it pad speedily up the wall to the corner of the ceiling, where it paused, gazing down at me, and flicked its tongue across scaly lips. I hugged myself with glee, imagining the surprise that lay in wait for my nightly visitors.

The bump

My sister’s baby is officially due in mid-July. Chances are he’s coming out a lot sooner.

Like me, my sis is diabetic, and one of the many issues regarding pregnancy and diabetes is that at this point the baby begins to grow. Enormously. Like something out of a sci-fi film.

In fact, in the past three weeks, Badger Bulldog has achieved an alarming seven-week’s-worth of expansion.

Having sailed through the first trimester with only tiredness and the occasional hint of nausea, Sis now has the issue of sporting a near nine-month belly with more than a month still to go.

The major issue is that though Badger is accelerating his growth, he’s not speeding up his development. This means his lungs, heart and other sort of important things are still at the stage of any other 7.5-month-old foetus.

Sis has been told that the optimum scenario is that Badger’ll make it to three weeks before the birth date, when he’ll officially be ‘cooked’.

Fingers crossed he’ll make it that long, and that my sis doesn’t burst at the seams in the meantime…

Mmm, Cyprus

I’ve just got back from a week in south Cyprus, and it’s been a bit of a culture shock. My life in Cyprus consisted of lazy mornings by the pool, meanderings along country lanes, long mezze lunches, visits to historic villages, and lots of other lovely things.

Despite being with six members of my husband’s family, including two under the age of six, I managed to read and write to my heart’s content, starting three features and writing a complete short story.

I didn’t have a laptop with me or my mobile, and I didn’t miss either. It made me realise that sometimes a notebook and pen (and a decent pair of sunglasses) are all that you need.