What do you think of that then, peeps? Good job, eh? On the left the original wooden stairs leading up to our upper garden, which, by some months ago, had become riddled with dry rot and quite dangerous to walk up and down. Plus they were always slightly tricky because they were built slightly too steep and the steps ran one under the other, meaning you had to kind of adopt a sideways attitude with your feet to get down safely. On the right, the brand new stairway built by our good friend Taki, who’s a dab hand at both woodwork and metalwork, both skills of which he employed to create the new work of art on the right.

The whole job of dismantling and chainsawing up the old stairs and the construction of the new ones took around five days, mainly because Taki could only work about three or four hours each day, for two reasons. One, it was simply too flaming hot in the sun, and secondly, he would insist on turning up here with some take-out freddo espressos for us and we’d all have to sit around for a natter while we consumed them before he got to work. It’s no good getting frustrated, after all he’s a Greek, what do you expect?

It was during one of those pre-work-session chats that we got to talking about the Greeks and their smoking habits. It’s not all that long ago that just about everyone in Greece smoked like the proverbial chimney, as anyone who’s had any association with the country for any length of time will know. Takis is only a couple of years younger than me, and so we asked him, since he’s a non-smoker, if he ever was a smoker in the past. In the UK a lot of us who were born in the fifties dabbled with the dreaded fags at a fairly tender age. I remember one of the village ‘big boys’ in the country village where I grew up (around 6 miles outside of Bath, UK) handing me a burning cigarette while we were out in the fields one summer’s day and suggesting I take a drag. I must have been around nine. One puff and I was coughing for Britain. In a way that boy did me a big favour, because I never acquired the habit, and hence the addiction to tobacco after that.

Takis, on the other hand, told us that, as he was growing up in Athens, his dad was a dedicated roll-your own man, and he’d be in the habit of rolling about twenty at a time, many of which he’d leave lined up on a shelf in the house. Takis would then nick a few, shove them in his pocket and make off to the nearest street corner, where he and his fellow nine-year olds would puff away in the earnest desire to appear to be ‘grown-up.’ In fact, so soon was he addicted that he told us he used to make roll-ups out of the pages in his school exercise book. “You’ve never seen such long cigarettes in your life!” he said, chuckling. “We’d tear out the back page of the exercise book, studiously spread our loose tobacco along near one edge of it, then roll the whole thing up. They took an age to smoke, I can tell you, and they were a lot beefier than any cigarettes rolled with actual ciggy papers. But of course, even in the Greece of the late fifties and early sixties, when kids would regularly be sent to the shop for cigarettes by their parents, Takis said that the guy in his local periptero would send him packing if he went there trying to buy cigarette papers when he was of an age when he could barely see over the counter.

Fortunately, when he was in his late teens he managed to gather the motivation to pack the whole addiction in, much to the benefit of his health. I have to say that I’m very glad for him as I really hate the habit, but his way of telling us about his life as a nine-year-old baccy addict did have us in stitches.

His energy when he’s actually at work knows no bounds however, and only rarely during the construction process did I hear a “Gianni!! Can you give me a hand a minute please!” He got most of it done all on his own. The only thing we did was give the final completed job a coat of paint, and the hand rail a coat of woodstain. So now we can ascend and descend to and from our upper garden in complete safety, yay! On the subject of the upper garden, I may have posted a photo of this before, but I haven’t got time to go back and check right now, so here’s a shot of the modest mural of a Grecian urn with a little grapevine to complement it that I painted on the wall above our garden and below our neighbour Gianni’s veranda…

And here are a few other recent photos which I hope you’ll like…

Last night, while out with a couple of old friends from the UK whom we hadn’t seen in a couple of decades, we were just sauntering along the street behind the town beach when we heard some music playing. There, at the taverna Noe (Noah, I kid you not) they had a live band and the evening was going with quite a swing. There was a girl dancing on the table tops and my better half, on hearing the seductive rhythm of the tsifteteli, couldn’t help herself…

Here’s the damning video evidence, and even I make a cameo appearance toward the end…

Nowadays it’s such a rare occurrence to see this going on ‘impromptu‘ in a taverna, whereas forty years ago you could find such evenings much more readily, and sadly, we’d already eaten and anyway the place was packed to the gills, but that never stopped my beloved from letting her hair down. It’s in her blood you see, she has no choice! She grew up in a house where her mother played Laika music incessantly. I asked the taverna owner if they’d be doing it again the following Saturday and he told me it all depended… We may just have to mosey down there and take a look.

Have to admit though, that place was smokin’!

•

My official website about my writing: https://johnphilipmanuel.wixsite.com/works

My Amazon Author page too. Thanks for your interest, it’s much appreciated, truly.