Life Lately: Heatwaves

 It is August and summer is rolling by. The heat is so intense that even the geckos and lizards hide in cool, shady nooks throughout the day, only venturing out after sunset. The cicadas, on the other hand, screech incessantly in what appears to be a drunken stupor, probably brought on by sunstroke as nothing else adequately explains the sheer joy they seem to feel as the temperature rise to record-breaking heights.

In our family, summers are a quiet time and last summer and this one have been even more so. In our boredom we have 'adopted' one of the geckos in our yard and named it Beau Regard. It reminds me of the name of some medieval castle or a Southern gentleman from the antebellum days. Beau Regard happily squats on the insect screen of our living room door every evening and diligently feeds on any mosquito that lands there. He is my favourite form of pest-control and will soon become very fat from his daily banquets on tiger mosquitoes. Summer seems to make me silly and you can read about last summer's bout of silliness here.

Rose-coloured glasses

They say we should never dwell too long on the past because nostalgia wears rose-coloured glasses. My memories of childhood summers are always rosy: long days at the beach and evenings spent playing hopscotch or riding our bikes blend seamlessly with each other, creating a notion of golden days and happy times. Perhaps that is why the collection of memories that I had written about in The Summers Of My Childhood remains one of my favourites pieces t hat I have ever written.

Local hero

Neil Agius is a long-distance Maltese swimmer and former Olympian. He recently completed a 125km swim from the island of Linosa to Malta which landed him in the record books. Neil's aim is to raise awareness about the harm that plastic pollution is doing to the sea and to marine life. He has created the NGO Wave of Change which urges beachgoers to pick up any plastic trash from beaches or from the sea and dispose of it properly. Participants have been asked to tag their photos with #wave of change and #doublethe wave and to share them on social media. While this is a local initiative, plastic pollution in our seas and oceans is a world-wide problem. So anyone living close to the water can participate and it would be fun to see how far these two hashtags will travel.

On my radar

I have been following Patty B on Instagram for a few months now and am completely in love with her evening bags. They are so pretty that I cannot decide which one I like best. Patrizia Mattoni is the designer behind Patty B. She has been designing bags since 2014 out of her workshop in Rome.

Website: Patty B.

Instagram: pattybricks

I was wasting some time on the Internet, as one does when one has some time to waste or does not want to do what they actually should be doing, when I came across this article about a doll restorer. Rebecca di Biagio painstakingly restores dolls in her workshop in Milan and donates them to loving owners. Her 'Adopt A Doll' campaign started last year during the worst of the lockdown and is still going strong. Di Biagio's aim is to stop these dolls ending up in a landfill and to reduce the consumerist culture which tells us that what we have is never enough. I think that this is a very worthy initiative and hope that other people will take the time to restore pre-loved objects, thus preventing them from ending up in the trash.

I know that many of you enjoy book suggestions and Jeanne, from Collage of Life, has come up with a list of books about women who are 'sassy, strong and brave'. If you think that you'd be interested in reading about such women, you can find the link here.

And I think I'll leave it at that for today. If you're having too much rain, please blow it over here as we desperately need some to cool things down a bit.

P.S. I added these photos in the hope that the sight of the cool, blue water will remind me that there is a perfect remedy for heatwaves just a few miles away. 

I also wanted to point out that the cloudiness in some areas of the water is due to a geologoical layer of blue clay that is very prevalent  in the area where the photos were taken.