Beer, pizza and unrequited love

Namaskarum from Varkala. I’m sitting in a cliff top café, breakfasting on fresh fruit, curd and muesli with PROPER (ie not Nescafe) coffee.

Varkala is the nearest beach resort, a small community of locals, traders, travellers and ex-hippy types – utter bliss. I’ve had two days to re-charge my batteries after a full on week of teaching and noisy children (my own batteries, that is; my phone and camera both died on me yesterday and I’m fully expecting the laptop to do the same, given that I forgot to pack any of my chargers…)

It feels like sacrilege to say it, but it’s so-o-o-o-o great to be eating food that isn’t curry. And, although strictly speaking it’s illegal here, you can usually get the odd beer or cocktail. I’m sticking to the juices, though, and have managed to pack in about six different varieties since arriving on Friday. Watermelon and pomegranate is to die for.

My new friends from last weekend are still here. Oszi and Akhi are both jewellery designers from Jaipur. Oszi is a thinker and a dreamer, passionate about stones and their different properties. He told me that a lot of men wear pearls because they calm anger, while harder stones help women to be more confident. I knew there was a reason diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Akhi is very cool and Bollywood handsome but, more importantly,they both speak excellent English and we’ve had some great conversations over pizza (pizza!) and chai.

Natalie is here too, the volunteer from the other Kerala Link project. It didn’t work out for her, so she’s decamped to Varkala for her last three weeks and is busy learning Reiki and enjoying the beach life. It’s been good spending time with her – and excellent entertainment talking to her admirers.

Take last night. Nat, Paul (a trucker from Northampton) and I had gone to Blueberries for dinner. Juice, beer, fish caught fresh that day – and a lovesick waiter in a yellow T-shirt. After mooning around our table for some considerable time, yellow T-shirt decided to confide in me. “You are so lucky to have Nutella as a friend”, her would-be Romeo solemnly informed me. “She is so beautiful – her face, her heart, her mind. She is all three A1.” Needless to say, ‘Nutella’ was the subject of relentless abuse for the rest of the evening.