It’s the season of the almond harvest, apparently. Almonds are a bit amazing, really. If you check on any ‘expert’ listings of what are the very best things to eat, the ‘superfoods’ if you like, almonds will always be in that list. One of the greatest benefits of eating them is that they help the body to reduce harmful cholesterol, while also helping with the retention of the ‘good’ cholesterol. There are so many other benefits of eating almonds that I can’t go into them all here. If you go searching on-line, you can discover them all for yourself anyway. Greece isn’t often listed among the top almond-producing countries of the world, which always strikes me as odd, because everyone’s got almond trees here. We found this to be so on Rhodes, and we see it’s the case here in south eastern Crete too. In fact, Giannis, our nearest neighbour whose house is behind ours and whose veranda sits above our ‘top’ garden, has several trees, two of which have branches that (fortunately for us) can be reached from over our fence.

We’re not thieves, though, oh no. It’s now almost the start of our fourth year of living in our own little house on the hillside here in our adopted Greek village, and we’ve been somewhat grieved in previous years when Giannis hasn’t been all that keen on harvesting his almonds. We’ve had to watch as they ripened, their outer casings split and the precious kernels fell into the undergrowth and went to waste.

This year, happily, things are different. On Sunday evening, as I was busy watering the upper bed, Giannis and his ‘partner’ Maria were out there culling one of the almond trees and harvesting with gusto their wonderful ‘fruit.’ Almonds were raining down on our upper bed like green hailstones and I couldn’t let that go unnoticed. I couldn’t see them wasted, and so I went for a basin from the kitchen and returned to start gathering up those that fell on our side of the fence. Giannis and Maria were delighted, I’m glad to be able to say. Oddly enough, although we’d seen Maria a few times over the years, we’d never until last Sunday actually had a proper conversation with her. By the time they were halfway through harvesting the tree, she’d come within a couple of feet of our fence as she collected the fallen almonds from the steeply sloping ground and I was able to properly introduce myself. I asked if she were perhaps Gianni’s sister, since he’d told us not long after we moved in that he was long divorced from his wife and given us the distinct impression that he lived alone. When we’d caught sight of Maria on the veranda now and then, we’d wrongly concluded that she was maybe a woman who ‘did’ for him. You know, cleaned and tidied, maybe cooked a little, that sort of thing.

So, when I was silly enough to ask if she was Gianni’s sister, rather than simply asking her to introduce herself, she corrected me (with a benevolent smile, I might add) and said, “Oh no, we live together.” We remarked then that both they and us could be called “Giannis and Maria,” although she quipped that neither were exactly rare names, now were they?

I said that they were delighted when I began gathering up the almonds that fell in our garden and placing them in a bowl, and truly they were. Giannis said from further up the slope, woodsaw in hand where he was lopping some of the more slender branches, “Excellent! yes, Gianni, any that fall on your side, you must gather up, with our compliments!” Not that I needed much encouragement.

Photos above: I was actually able to gather up two of those bowls full of almonds, which is no small saving when you consider how much they costs in the stores, even though they’re a local product, as is honey, of course. In fact, there are two more trees to go yet, too, yippee. That evening I was to be found, beer in glass on the veranda table beside me, happily cracking almond shells and placing the liberated almonds into a storage jar. My mind was quickly transported back to my childhood, when for some inexplicable reason, every Christmas my dad would ensure that there was a large bowl of nuts in their shells on the coffee table, and as we sat and enjoyed the Morecambe and Wise Show, or maybe Billy Smart’s Circus, on the TV, dad would get the nutcracker out and get to it, cracking hazelnuts, walnuts, brazils and almonds for hours, sharing the results out between our mum and us (my sister Jane and I) as he went.

As I sat there, my pile of empty shells growing while the bowl-full of almonds in their outer casings gradually reduced, I wondered if one of the reasons why almonds are quite expensive to buy is the fact that the procedure for extracting them from their outer casings is laborious, and perhaps difficult to mechanise. Maybe someone who reads this will enlighten me.

I don’t know if it has anything to do with age, I wouldn’t think so, but I find that so many of the things that we’re experiencing on a daily basis here in our modest little Greek house with a sea view tend to get me reflecting thankfully on just how much I love my life here, how much I appreciate the things that are now our daily/weekly routine. If someone had said to me thirty years ago that one day I’d be living on Crete, in our own house, with a lifestyle that includes regular weekly visits to the beach, swimming all season long in the crystal clear waters of the Mediterranean, going out to eat at waterfront restaurants on a regular basis and never more having to be saddened at the prospect of packing our suitcases and trudging back to the airport to be whisked away from all of this until who-knew-when would be the next time, I’d have happily told them they were mad.

As my dad sat there cracking almonds, I’d never have believed that some day I’d be eating them straight from the tree. The same goes for grapes, figs, wild thyme honey, oranges, peaches, it becomes quite a list, and everything on that list drives home to me just how much I have to be grateful for. You don’t need to be rich to do what we’ve done, but you do have to know how to handle money, I suppose, and how to – to use the modern parlance – ‘roll with it‘ when you come up against the bureaucracy in the country that you’ve chosen to make your permanent home. As I swam in the flat calm sea yesterday morning, I was so thrilled, still, after having lived in Greece for 17 years now, at the thought that in times past I’d have been doing that on the very last day of a holiday and becoming quite depressed at the thought of having to pack our cases and being torn away from it all by an aeroplane and a life-course that wasn’t really bringing true satisfaction or happiness.

Who’d have thought that I could be so whimsical eh? Here are a few more recent photos…

Above: Most mornings we have our chopped fruit piled up on top of our muesli, but when we opt for porridge we place the fruit on a plate like this. I took this photo because I got the distinct impression that my wife had been thinking back to that movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” You get it [think: Devils Tower]? The figs, BTW, are from our own little fig tree. The grapes too, we picked ourselves.

Above: I can’t remember the last time I actually drew anything, because computers long took over my methods of working as a graphic designer years ago. If I wanted to create a freehand illustration, I’d use Adobe Illustrator on my Apple Mac, for example. But last week Yvonne [Maria] suggested that we needed something on that rather roughly rendered wall behind our upper garden, on top of which sits Gianni’s veranda. Painting the entire wall was not a practical option, so a Grecian urn in a kind of painted frame was the obvious choice, so I set about drawing that picture above in pencil, then I scanned it into the MacBook Pro, and printed it out to the desired size in ’tiles’ that I then stuck together. I cut out various sections of the illustration, taped it to the wall and then stencilled the paint on to the wall through the gaps in the paper. All I then had to do was to remove the template, and fill in between the gaps with a paint brush, with the original pencil illustration on hand as a guide. Self praise is no praise at all, I realise, but it didn’t turn out half bad, did it? OK, maybe don’t send me your opinion…

Above: If you walk around Ierapetra town, there is an endless variety of different gloriously coloured plants hanging off of people’s houses to be admired. I certainly appreciated this one that someone had graced their suburban street with. You walk directly underneath those vibrant blossoms as you pass along the pavement outside the house.

I began this post by talking about nuts. You know what’s truly nuts? It’s the fact that the so-called experts tell us that almonds are not actually a nut. Nutty, or what?

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