Treats for us and birthday treat for JP that is several runs short of perfect
22nd April 2006

The eagles have landed
And they come bearing gifts
One Day International, one dire performance
Beach lethargy (reprise)
Fine dining and old churches
Peace and quiet for the holiday-weary holidaymakers

Annual home company dose

It may seem that we rather fail to report in graphic detail about our wonderful friends Tricia and JP somewhat in this bit of journal. It’s just that while we are happy to bare our souls through the medium of our web site, folk that are out on holiday are entitled to a bit of privacy. Before we commence then, a big thank you to them for once again choosing to spend their hard earned holidays in our company. We feel privileged.

Palolem is one of the backpacker enclaves that are flourishing along the Goan coastline. It’s not hard to see why. Although folk had warned us that we were heading into oppressive heat by journeying south, in fact the summer weather was no more uncomfortable than an average beach in southern Europe. The steady breeze wafting in from the Arabian Sea is quite refreshing which is surprising when you discover that the water it’s passing over is luke warm. In fact inland the heat was worse and even a few 100 m from the coast when the sea breezes get absorbed into buildings. Goa is far enough South that the temperature does not change much throughout the year, but the oppression is due more to varying humidity levels.

What was once a stretch of sandy beach where the fishermen with their rustic outrigger craft would pull up to disgorge their catch is now an unbroken line of beach huts and bars. The huts vary in standard from wobbly, raised stick house with a bed and two chairs surrounded by sand (our type of thing) to fancy substantial buildings with comfortable beds, bathrooms which include both showers and baths situated in neatly manicured gardens (Tricia and JP’s) preference. The restaurants in town serve all manner of Indian, Goan and generic seafood dishes along with a complete range of burgers, pizzas, pasta etc. I sometimes wonder why people go on holiday. Why not just turn the heating up and dial Dominoes. Because, Blackpool does not have guaranteed sunshine and palm fringed beaches. Fair point.

We were pleased that in this gringo mecca the shop keepers were playing fair. Whether it be the Portuguese background of the folk, end of season desperation for trade, ruthless monitoring by authorities or our travel worn experienced look, I don’t know but in our time in Palolem we were not overcharged once. Even that most precious of commodities, drinking water, was available in larger containers and so at a lower price than we’ve seen it elsewhere. Other than the swanky resorts, huts could be found as cheap here as anywhere else. Can’t help thinking that another few years will turn this place into a tourist rip-off as it has in so many other places.

Treats galore

Our mates arrived and moved into their palace. Instantly the treats started to emerge from their bags; all manner of bits that I ordered for Berthette including that all important shock absorber (frustratingly the other thing that Berthette really needs is a new air filter and our spares supplier had missed it off the order), for me there was tobacco and a tin of Old Speckled Hen and for Helen a tin of cider and some Thorntons chockies. I’d asked a favour of T and JP to bring the chocs for Helen and hadn’t really considered that these delicacies from Derby are tailored for the UK market and struggle to maintain integrity in the heat of India. There was something rather decadent about scooping gooey truffles and parfaits from their wrappers and eating them with a teaspoon. I am sure that the messy finger eating was not what Thorntons had intended, but for me it was wonderfully indulgent. Since childhood we have been trained to eat cleanly and tidily, to have the excuse, in adulthood, to get chocolatey fingers and then spend the next half hour sucking the last morsel off, made my treat all the more pleasurable. Thank you.

We took to the beach for a change to witness the most extraordinary thing. An endless series of the outrigger fishing boats were turning up at the shore and discharging ... beds? As other items joined the imports; tables chairs, sheets of rattan walling, it became clear that a resort somewhere was being dismantled and brought to Palolem for storage during the monsoon season. When the beds arrived, a few ignorant tourists took them for sun loungers and claimed them for the afternoon. The poor folk carrying the materials up the beach politely ignored the folk on the beds and carried the rest away. I couldn’t believe how blind these bednappers were. Could they really not see that all the others were being carried away and that they were obstructing the process. When they finally buggered off as the sun set, a skeleton staff quietly picked up the final beds and took them away. A perfect example of tourist arrogance/ignorance and Indians’ ability to just let stuff happen without worrying about it.

This temporary resort status, can only be a good thing, hopefully, the beaches of Goa will never get to nasty twenty storey hotel complexes and abound in some European resorts. The fallow period allows the land to recover and the towns to get back to fishing for a few months. We chose not to visit the 5 star Intercontinental complex about 10 km down the coast. Maybe its golf courses and swimming pools blend perfectly into the surroundings but somehow I doubt it.

We were easily sucked into the soporific nature of Goan beach life. We sunbathed, read, eat drank and chatted. Days were consumed, doing very, very little. We also felt like we were on holiday. With so much competition from different eateries on the beach the quality was maintained, and thanks to being on the coast we got a welcomed change from our pure vegetarian diet, lots of wonderful fresh fish. The Goans a reputedly passionate about good food, a leave-over from the Portuguese influence. In the two weeks that followed, nearly all of what we ate, I would have happily eaten again, occasionally through a either a communication breakdown or incompetence we got a different thing to what we thought we had ordered, but it was all tasty. Now imagine Portuguese fish peri-peri blended with indian fish curry and there is no surprise that the notorious vindaloo curry is from Goa. It could warm the cockles of the average devil in hell, probably a bit much for the unprepared, but to a pair of stomachs baptised and inoculated with nearly 5 years travel, it was fiery and deliciously rich. A personal favourite on the eating front, was gobi manchurian, which is not so much of a local dish but for no reason in particular we had refrained from trying it further north. There was something about the name that meant I could not disassociate it from images of mushy peas and the Arndale Centre. Anyway, its graphemic nearness to Mancunian had hitherto made it hard for me to take the dish seriously. It had been a mistake, the cauliflower is served in a rich caramelised onion chutney is the best way to describe it. Which as it happens would be an wonderful compliment to chip shop chips. So maybe the mushy pea imagery is not so unreasonable.

With a healthy array of restaurants and tourists, and tropical climate comes the inevitable animal scavengers. Racist dogs wander the beaches. How do I know that? Generally, they wander nonchalently along the beaches, stopping to shag in front of sun-worshipping tourists (whether it be that they get a kick out of being watched, or the tourists and the dogs coincidentally like the same bit of beach) and to sleep in the shade of sun loungers. But they only ever bark and become aggressive with Indians. One evening as dusk was falling we looked out over our beach hut encampment to see rats doing the rounds of the ground level huts. Now these were not your average sized rat, they were huge, rabbit sized things, which could happily dismember the standard domestic cat. They seemed content to confine their grazing to the ground level and we were relieved that we had gone for the deluxe elevated accommodation.

It may sound like we were just lying around doing nothing but we were simply psyching ourselves up for a day out supporting the English cricketers in their futile attempt to win a one day series in India. There were elements of the ‘barmy army’ holed up in Palolem who had disgusted a couple of mellow Germans that we met with their antics. They were repulsed more by the ‘see who can get the worst sun burn’ competition than anything else. While we were resident, they were almost invisible - maybe they had burnt themselves out by then.

And so to the cricket

The cricket ground in Margao is in fact a football stadium. How they manage to keep the wicket in playable condition is beyond me. Perhaps during football games only the kick-off itself is allowed from within the centre circle, thereafter entering the wicket zone is a sending off offence. As we patiently queued in approximately a quarter of a mile of bamboo fencing to get into the ground, an express queue for those with tickets for the ‘pavilion’ passed by like greased lightning. I copped a look at one of their tickets when they showed them to the stewards and they’d paid the same 2000 Rupees as we had. What was their secret? Most frustratingly (particularly for poor JP who had suffered an hour and a half in the queue nursing a jippy tummy) when we got to the very front of the queue a steward advised us to pop through the barrier into the ‘pavilion line’ as they admitted one to the same area anyway. There were rumours that the lines took so long as there were concerns about counterfeit tickets. There seemed to be scant checking of tickets or indeed searching so the hold up can only be attributed to the SIAFU factor. (think SNAFU and replace Normal with Indian).

Personally, I was expected utter mayhem at the ground, considering that at the previous match the tear gas was brought out on rioters who were refused entrance to the ground despite having valid tickets. We heard a variety of versions of this
a) forged tickets were sold and when the ground was full, they closed the gates.
b) the police had allowed in loads of their mates without tickets so those with valid tickets rightfully were angry. Whatever, when the queues were orderly, although slow, and there was no riot, everyone with a ticket got in. It was all refreshing saner than one could have hoped of. Mostly, I was relieved that the something that could have turned very nasty was at worst painfully slow.

The game must have been broadcast to the UK, the home of most of our readers, and so the majority will know that there was little for us to cheer about. A dismal day was only cheered by Anderson nearly making a century. I was totally amazed about how little the Indians teased us, if we’d been at Old Trafford and we’d been Indian, I dare say we would have been somewhat humiliated. The atmosphere had been kept alive by a band of peripatetic drummers who toured the stands playing beats for a consideration. The Indian batsmen were thus psyched up whereas when it came to our innings either the cash had run out, the drummers had tired or they realised that the atmosphere was more conducive to batting than fielding and so a rather more sombre audience reaction ensued. A couple of Indians were fired up over something or nothing but were just about to come to blows until large numbers of cops came and sat on them. Meanwhile the ‘barmy army’ were desperate for alcohol.

Sad, beer craving fans (is this a new puritanical Patrick we are hearing?) cruised the stand to find out where the illicit supply could be found. It’s one of those Indianisms; on the ticket you are told you cannot bring cameras (hence a complete lack of photos as we were worried it would be confiscated) or booze or fags or ......anything much into the ground but you aren’t really searched and if you acquire it within the ground there’s no problem anyway. Those folk in the ‘pavilion’ had access to the amber nectar and some enterprising types were buying a few extras and apparently passing them behind a pillar somewhere for a small consideration. I was more miffed by the camera prohibition which is apparently because they are hard, throwable objects. I’ve never heard such a load of old hogwash. Like a bunch of irate fans are going to chuck thousands of pounds of cameras at each other. More likely they would throw empty plastic water bottles at each other. And they did. Clearly the England batting performance was so boring. Leaving the ground wasn’t nearly as annoying as getting in. Rather than allow us to exit through the large gates that had been opened, we were directed from the wide stairs to a single person wide gate and so an inevitable crowd built up. When it became clear that folk were getting miffed, the police started ripping off sheets of corrugated iron to let us through to the main exit. Nice to see someone had some wits. Remy, our driver for the day was another example of an Indian with common sense. With only a couple of relapses, it was evident that he was doing his best to shed the conditioned idiocy of the average driver around here.

All in all, though we lost in predictable fashion, a day out at the cricket in India is an experience that should be taken in at least once in a lifetime. We really can’t claim to be too disappointed as we’re not really followers of the game. Some chap called Flintoff is to cricket as Beckham is to footy or Wilkinson to rugby. Seems that Britain can only manage to rear one superstar at a time. This trip really reinforces my regret at not having gone to see a footy match in Argentina or Mexico. Next time.

Silliness and reflection rather got the better of me. We had shared a taxi with some other Brits to go to the cricket. There was lots of chatter, about people’s various jobs, home towns and the like. Normal stuff really. But I became overwhelmed with a feeling of unbelonging. I was no longer part of all that, I couldn’t find the words to say anything meaningful, couldn’t find a point of common ground. It’s hard to explain why, but I found myself fighting an urge to cry. All this normality was waiting us back in England. Friends and relatives, would be expecting us to slot back into the groove of British normality. (Err, were we ever normal dear?) Our experiences of the last 5 year’s would have to filed away as irrelevant to the ‘real world’. I am not sure I can do that. There must be so many that suffer even more acutely than us. People who have spent years fighting a war, are suddenly sent ‘home’ and expected to have extended conversations about decorating. What of those who have been in prison, who suffer from mental illness, or those recovering from cancer? It is not that I find these conversations boring at all, I just simply am out of practice with how such conversation goes, what to say, the etiquette, the niceties. In fact, I find them more fascinating, but I feel a bit like an alien looking in, rather part of the flow. Likeness, our ‘normal’ topics of conversation produce glazed eyes within seconds. How the bike is running? Whether we have time to do the hand washing and dry it before we move on or not? Which route to take through India? Our worries about the posturing going on between Iran and America. There is no base of reference for many people about the life we lead, maybe they feel they cannot contribute or that their comments would be trivial, just as I did if tried to join the ‘normal’ conversation in the van. Maybe it is nothing so esoteric for others and our conversation is simply dull. I haven’t been in our ‘home’ for 41Ž2 years, it feels to me a space with some of our things it in. I only had a job for 9 weeks. It was as if we were living in parallel worlds. We both know the other exists but we don’t really feel we belong in it. I tried my best to shake off my melancholy when we got back to base. I would have found it nigh-on impossible to describe why I wanted to cry, if anyone had asked me, and I hoped that my emotions would not expose themselves and spoil the day.
Eeeh, she’s a funny one, our Hippy.

Back to the beach

We had another couple of days back in Palolem before we moved on to Panjim for a few days. Tricia and JP were finding the nightlife on the beach something of an intrusion and missing sleep because of it. We kept getting woken up by a weird swaying sensation first thing each morning. When we lost the blear in our eyes and managed to look out of the window, the only peculiarity to be seen was a superbly toned little chap, in his fifty’s shimmying up pre-cut steps in the coconut palms to tap off the ‘toddy’. Our hut was reinforced by a couple of palms and so it must have been his climbing that had wobbled us awake. The collection of the juice from these palms to make palm wine is an open secret. No one could try and pretend that the sap harvesting is not going on in order to turn out the illicit palm hooch but there would be a public outcry should the authorities try to stop the toddy man going about his business. Elsewhere, the palm steps were being used by another guy scrambling up to displace the loose coconuts and leaf matter to prevent serious injury to the guests of the swankier resorts. I wonder if holiday insurance covers you from coconut impingement. I do remember a couple of friends of ours on holiday in the Caribbean had a rather embarrassing incident with a coconut and a borrowed car, but that’s another story.

Out on the beach a quartet of day-glo green clad waste management operatives went about their daily comb of the shore. They seemed to be quite conscientious but I was strangely suspicious of the fact that their bags were rather empty when I knew for sure that huge amounts of waste had been left behind and I really must point out that it was mostly dropped by the tourists. As I watched, one of them teased a coke can into an upright position and bore down on it with her heel. “Cool,” I thought until I realised that this was not to render it small enough for recycling but to force it further into the sand. A couple of scuffs of the foot kicked enough sand about to perform the perfect concealment. How very sad.

To lose an afternoon at the peak of JPs illness, we all completed a newspaper ‘analyse how you cope with stress in your life’ type questionnaire. When the results were calculated, Hippy was mostly C’s which told us amongst other things that she has the correct balance of work and real life, whereas my B’s revealed that I need to get out more. Interesting.

A second dose of Panjim

Second viewing of Panjim was more promising than our first visit. Not wanting to be too far away from the Croxton Two, we managed to find a pretty respectable place (astoundingly posh and expensive by our normal standards) run by the most charming family. At first we were told that they had no rooms but when mum got home she decided that the folk who had booked but were a couple of hours late could go fish. She’d had bitter experience of keeping a room free for a telephone booking only for them to not turn up and now has a policy of taking in guaranteed guests. The family turned out to be a tad intrusive, though, barging into our room while Tricia and JP were round to make sure we weren’t up to no good. Actually it was nice to know that they cared and wanted to maintain standards.

When we popped over to see the workers on holiday, we found them chilling in their air conditioned, twin 4-poster bedded, refrigerator and cable TV equipped room. So there are benefits to having a job after all, my love. ‘Twas not perfect, though. Poor things had traded their potentially peaceful but bar noise plagued, deluxe beach hut for a potentially peaceful but Bollywood plagued deluxe hotel room. Yes, just when you don’t really want it, a director choses your locale for the shooting of a music and dance street scene. Cameras, lights, sound, action! It could have been a lot worse, there could have been evening and night scenes to shoot, too. What astonished me most was the reliance on a reel-to-reel tape deck to play the dance tunes. Come on guys, get digital will you!

Our real reason for visiting Panjim was for Tricia to satiate her quest for architectural influences. Being a professional of that discipline, it would be rather poor form if she didn’t take the opportunity to check out neo-Indo-Portuguese style. There are some rather Iberian looking buildings about - probably a greater proportion then the British influenced buildings in ‘British’ India. It has been said the the British were rather cunning about their management of Indian affairs in that they used the systems that were in place to their advantage; mainly keeping the masses in order by keeping the maharajas happy. The Portuguese seem to have taken a rather more dictatorial stance; promoting Catholicism, wine consumption (not a bad idea) and architecture. It must be said that the foreign influence is still more obvious in Goa than other parts of India we’ve seen so far.

Goa still has a European feel about it, the manager of the Hotel informed us that schools teach in English with the option of French or Portuguese as second languages. The demeanour of the Goan people was much less ‘Indian’, there was no head wobbling, there none of the staring at us that we grow to live with in other parts of India, none of the overly servile obsequiousness of waiting staff, even the traffic was more sane than in other parts of India and the people have a Mediterranean look about them. We also felt like we were on holiday. We could see how many overlanders, end up recharging their batteries here for a few months before moving on with the rest of their journey.

Panaji is so far the nicest Indian city we have been to. Brightly painted Hispanic type buildings lined the streets, in varying states of repair. Arched doorways and verandas, and colonnades abounded. The colonial section of town is small enough to wonder about on foot, making it a pleasant tourist haunt. Of course there were dozens of old catholic churches, the most famous being the white Church of the Immaculate Conception looming high up a double stair case over the main square. Catholicism had been Indian-ised, crosses hung with garlands, little trays of offerings around the altars, people’s houses had little Christian shrine outside with the normal Indian collection of incense candles and bits of food, that would typically adorn an Hindu shrine.

Panaji has a decent array of eateries, stylish Chinese restaurants where all the clients are rich Indians and they have the British Indian restaurant tradition of giving the ladies a rose as you leave, rather bohemian avant gard type of places, to down to earth, efficient Southern Indian restaurant keeping the local workers fed. In the latter of these JP was hit with same conundrum we often face in converse. Four of us had eaten and drunk for 174 Rs, we had all liked the food, the place was clean and the service and been swift and friendly. Up until that point we had been eating in more swankier places and eating for a minimum of 500 Rs and in some cases over 1000 Rs for four. Here is the dilemma, JP rightly in many ways felt that working on the percentage theory for tipping gave the man in the cheap place too paltry a tip, and that we had tipped far more when we had on occasions been disappointed with the food or service, because the bill was bigger to start with. I knew that the 26 Rs I gave him, he would be grateful for, and was more than most he clientele would give him. JP felt bad about leaving so little, maybe he understood the angst I had felt at giving so much in a flasher place, simply because the bill is more, not because anything was better. In the end because I could see his point we left an extra 10 Rs. In the end a 20% tip, but still half of our tips elsewhere. Generally, the percentage concept, to use an Americanism, sucks! Why should a good waiter, serving good food in a cheap place get less than a bad one in a posh place? For the same reason, I have never understood the fairness in percentage rises in wages, with the good cleaner getting an extra 25p an hour and useless chief executive getting an extra £25 an hour, because of a flat rate percentage increase. I know the economic arguments, that this is done to maintain the wage differential, proportionately the lower wages will catch up with the higher ones. But what’s wrong with that, an extra £25 an hour to a cleaner will probably be appreciated more than the chief executive.

A taxi to Old Goa cost 250 Rs and the bus cost 7 Rs each. It was only 9 km how bad could the bus really be. So we went for it. There was standing room only when we eventually found the correct bus stand, that our hotelier had said was immediately on the other side of the river (he lied). The fullness was not the first thing that hit my senses, but it was the smell. In the still air of the bus station the hot sticky atmosphere pervaded eau de body odour. Backpackers who use public transport all the time must become oblivious to it, but for us it hit you a wall foetid air. I wandered if we had done the right thing opting for the bus, as we pulled off. Fresh air flowed through the aisle giving us relief from the smell and the oppressive sweat saturated humidity. At each stop on the way we shuffled and squeezed to let more people on, the Max. 9 person standing sign had been exceeded before we left the station. It is one of those truisms of developing countries that the concept of a bus being full goes to a whole different level. We had learnt years ago in Guyana that even when in Western terms a bus was full, you could easily double the number of people and still have room for a crate of live chickens and the odd bicycle. In some ways, this is good, the expectant passengers do not have to wait in the sun for the next bus, and it means the most efficient use of fuel. The disadvantage is that you can be contorted into wholly unnatural positions to fit in that extra person and you will often have to wait until a bus seats are full before the bus will even contemplate leaving.

Old Goa just down the road, is in fact a bunch of old churches and the accompanying monastic buildings. They range from the plain and simple to the delicately, frescoed and the humungously municipal. My personal favourite was the frescoed one where Tricia informed us a painter had been brought out from Italy to train the locals, all subtly set off by Moorish style carved dusty pink sandstone.

Going back we took a taxi.

Agonda wins in the chilling stakes

We had managed to beguile Tricia and JP, with the tranquility of Agonda beach, where they could finally get some peace from the bar and the Bollywood. We checked into our rattan hut whilst they relaxed into bohemian luxury. A couple of 100 m down the beach was the Turtle Lounge, set up by a German and a local family. Inviting, black framed four poster loungers with orange furnishings, draped in toning muslin for shade set the ambience of the place. Their 2 storey accommodation seemed to perfectly combine the simplicity of Japanese furnishings with the richness of Indian textiles, giving a sense of luxurious modernity. There was a large veranda to look out to sea, an open roofed bathroom that Ikea could only dream of, and a huge sumptuous bedroom that begged for romance.

Unfortunately the luxury haven still had a few teething problems, not least of which being a resident rat, and an overly frequent cleaner, which rather marred the expected tranquility of their last few days in Goa. Now that Tricia had taken over the baton of ill health, and we even managed to cock up the seemingly simple mission of getting in some wine for JPs birthday. It was all left with a feeling that it had all gone a bit wrong.

The illness thing gave us an idea, though. Pat and I had annoyingly had not twinge of an intestinal problem, whereas the tourists had both suffered. Is there are market for ‘essence of traveller’. We could extract our unhard earned antibodies and sell them on the holiday makers to ensure an illness free holiday. OK, I see that there are logistical problems with the money making plan, but there is definitely a market, and to maintain our antibody level we would have to travel for large chunks of the year, nip back for a few months and sell our antibodies and set off again. We could set up a clinic where travellers returning to the UK in need of a few quid could pop in, in there first few weeks back. OK you would have to screen for any nasties, like dengue fever, but it may still have some mileage. (Then people wonder why I have never taken illicit drugs. With a brain that thinks so bizarrely, who needs ‘em.)

We had asked Ramon to get us a couple of fish for dinner for the four of us. What he got was enormous, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was too much they had had to go all the way to Margao for it. Don’t ask! I know we were next to the sea, but all the bigger fish are taken up to the wholesale markets, apparently. It was so big that we asked for half to be a curry and half fried. Later as platters and more and more dishes of food filled the table, it became obvious that there was no way we could eat all this. We overate to the point of pain and then two other guests returned from their day out. I couldn’t bear to see all this wasted and invited the pair to join us. Bob, a Scot and his girlfriend Michelle from the Lakes, were lovely entertaining company.

The true saving grace of Agonda is that it’s Agonda. The sea is warm and the stars are bright. On their last night the full moon shone out, JP managed to be served a passable Bladdi (sic) Mary and Tricia got a decent G and T, but despite the cocktails the feeling of being in India was inescapable, as a cow leant over the wall to snack on the restaurant’s flower beds. In the twilight hours I was awakened by a flashlight on the beach, bursting through our rattan walls. But it was no torch that had woken me but the moon setting over the sea the reflection twinkling on the crests of the waves. It could not have been more beautiful.

We said our farewells to our dear friends. I find it hard to express quite how much we have appreciated their visitations. We thank you. Now that we are hoping to get back to the UK in the next 6 months or so, they can have their next holiday somewhere less problem prone, somewhere normal like France maybe. It would be remiss not to thank them for the most wonderful presents of all which were consumed after perfect chilling in their refrigerator in Panjim. For Madam, a can of cider, for Sir, a can of Old Speckled Hen. Aaaaah.

Just before we left Agonda, I was having a chat with Ramon about matters Hindu. He explained a few things about Hanuman (the monkey god) who rescued Shiva’s girlfriend from Sri Lanka and Ganesh (the elephant-headed god) who received his pachyderm physiognomy after his father mistook him for a burglar or something like that and hacked his head off, filled with remorse he dispatched the servants to bring back the head of the first animal they came across which he appended to the child’s torso. I think I find the Hindu tales just a little too strange to base a religion upon. Water into wine for me is slightly more credible and a very fine idea. There followed something of a Ted Simon moment; he had been told that he was Jupiter by a guru, now I was being told that Berthette was my Nandi, Nandi being the mount of Shiva, manifested by a bull. I guess that makes me Shiva (the destroyer) and Hippy must be Parbati, my consort. I’m not sure how Berthette will feel about being compared to a bull.