Inept Eco-warriors

Saturday 6 March 2011

Another day, another puzzle – on Saturday Dave started constructing the shower cubicle, as hot water might happen soon (if the sun would come out).  We’d cut costs on this one, and bought a folding plastic cubicle.  The instructions were in pictograms, and lacked something of detail, but eventually, after medium-level swearing and some hacksawing, it was constructed. 

It turns out to be more robust than expected, and has little magnetic strips where the doors meet, to give a good seal.

I reckoned it was time to start clearing the camper, so I got to work on folding and tying the tarpaulins, plastic sheeting and olive nets that were cluttering the interior.  The tarps went under the back of the truck, but the precious olive nets went into the shed loft space.   Which still left lots of room for anything else we want to store up there.

Happy with the shower enclosure, Dave suggested that we put both Howard’s sinks into the worktop in the camper.   A radical idea!  The worktop already had two smallish holes in it – one where a cooker had been and one for a tiny sink.  Our current apartment has a small sink, which is a constant annoyance: washing up creates so much splashing, you come away with a large damp patch at waist level.  Two big sinks – how wonderful!  I scrubbed them clean, Dave cut the two holes into one big one and we tried them for size.

We had to tear ourselves away at 5 ish, as we wanted to join the Carnival in Lefkas.   Some friends on Facebook had been talking about the proposed waste oil refinery in Vassiliki.   Apparently, despite years of struggle by the local ecological lobby, a licence had been granted to the refinery to start work.  As I understand it, the refinery accepts used machine oil and processes it, it also takes olive stones and crushes them for a low grade olive oil.  Both these operations release smoke and toxins into the environment, polluting the local water supply.  Why anyone would licence a factory of this nature in one of the world’s best windsurfing resorts is a mystery.   (Thinks ...) or could it be corruption ...?

So we wanted to join the protest, which involved dressing all in black, getting to Lefkas for 6 pm and joining the Carnival procession with whited out faces and red rimmed eyes.  We got to the appointed meeting spot in plenty of time, and found no-one there.  The Carnival had already started to move off, so we trotted quickly after it to find our group.  They weren’t at the end, where some floats were still waiting to start, so we moved on down the line.  We walked the length of the procession - inside the barriers as the crowd was too thick on the pavements – looking for them.  We weren’t made up – that was supposed to happen when we met them, but we were wearing black, and looking cool.  At least till we got to the very front float and I turned round to find that while I had escaped all the spray string and confetti, Dave was covered!

We made our way back, disappointed that we hadn’t had a chance to make our presence count.  Later we found out that the group had had a late flustered start and had joined the Carnival just before the final float at the last minute – after we had gone past.