Humid days, humming and hot chicks!

It was a strange old day yesterday - a day of things not being quite what they seem.

We know summer is upon us. Not because of the searing heat, blue skies, tourists and plethora of colourful inflatables that hang from every shopfront, but because the bin men are on strike.

Same thing seems to happen every summer. The temperatures go up and the bin men down gloves and leave the bags of detritus to pile up on the roadside**. Allegedly they aren't getting paid, or aren't getting paid enough, I'm not sure which, but I used to feel sorry for them. It's a stinky job - the wheelie bins on Corfu aren't the personal sized ones that it's illegal to overfill and have to be put on the kerb each week. These things are mega municipal ones that are shared by residents and tend to spill over all sort of rancid refuse that it's probably not a good idea to consider to closely.

The bins in our village haven't been emptied for well over a week and the bags of rubbish are now piling high at their sides - cats, rats and stray dogs are having a fine old time!

As I said, I used to feel sorry for the binmen, I know there have been problems with getting paid on time in the past, and it isn't a fun job even in the cooler months. However, my sympathy wained somewhat yesterday during a drive into Corfu Town.

We were travelling just a few kms from the Town proper when I noticed a large and shiny motorcycle waiting to enter the main road from a slip. As a long term enthusiast of 2 wheels I took a prolonged glimpse in my rear view at this black, yellow and chrome beastie of a BMW - and then realised I recognised the rider...

Yup, you've guessed, it was one of our local bin men!

I've checked on the Beema website and a bike of this type will wear a small hole in £11,000 (so that's about 13,000€ at today's exchange rate). I wish I could EARN 13K a year, let along find sufficient spare funds to purchase a bike for that amount, even on the never never!

So I must now surmise that a Corfu binman's life is not such a bad one - a half decent salary and the annual option to down tools and go ride a bike for a few weeks in the summer - lucky beggars!!

On the subject of dumping things, we've had a bit of an incident in the garden with other people's (well chickens) property being disposed of...

We have two chicken runs, a large one for the cockerels who'll eventually end up on the table and the hens whose eggs we collect; and a smaller one for hens who are sitting and/or have young chicks.

Tony went to feed the chickens yesterday morning and see how the laying hens are doing. He has one young lady in particular - a nannas (bantam) who having hatched one clutch had been moved to the larger run, but decided to do it all over again, made herself a nest and is now sitting on 8 of her own eggs and fostering several pheasant eggs too. She's been doing a grand job so Tony was a bit surprised to see that one of her eggs had been kicked out. He went to check and realised that the clutch had increased by 3 eggs - not nannas, not pheasant, but full sized chicken.

It didn't take too long to work out what was going on. One of the larger hens had previously been sitting but then left her eggs and decided to play chase the chicks, disturbing several of the newborn youngsters belonging to other mums. To stop her, Tony had moved her from the 'nursery' run and put her in with the main flock (is flock the right name for a group of chickens? Just looked it up, yes it is, although you can have a brood of hens).

Madam, now in with all the lads, was keen to keep on laying, but rather than go to the effort of having to sit and hatch them herself she was waiting for the nannas to pop off her nest for something to eat, then kicking out the little eggs and laying her own in their place!

And there was me thinking it was just cuckoos who did that!

Quiche for tea last night :0)

** Since writing I have discovered that the binmen were not on strike, there was a fire at the municipal dump and no further rubbish could be put there. My apologies for wrongly suggesting to the contrary! However, given the number of strikes we do experience I hope I may be forgiven for the error ;-)