Far be it from me to disagree that there is such a thing as climate change. You only have to look back at the excesses of heat, cold, violent storms and droughts, raging seas and massive forest fires of the past couple of years to see that something’s going awry, and we’re primarily to blame. Yet, for all of that, there is still, thankfully, a measure of dependability to the weather here in the southern Aegean. I’ve mentioned a number of times, both in the memoir books and on my previous Rhodean blog, about the fact that Greek locals would often give us not simply a month during which it would be good to plant some vegetable or other in the garden, but they’d more often than not give us specific days.

On Rhodes, our friend Mihalis, who had what we in the UK would have called a small-holding (no double entendres, please!), would give us onion sets, or French bean seeds, often courgette and beetroot seeds, and tell us when to put them in. If I missed a week and later bumped into him, then the first thing he’d ask me would be “Have you got them in yet Gianni?” If my reply was to the effect that I hadn’t, but had every intention of doing so in the coming week, then he’d turn deadly serious and declare that I’d missed the spot and that, even if I were now to get those seeds planted, they wouldn’t do well, no, they wouldn’t do very well at all.

What was even more annoying was the fact that he was always proved right.

Notwithstanding the fact that last winter was the wettest and dullest for almost half a century here on Crete, and indeed in much of Greece, plus the fact that this summer has been markedly cooler than normal (The UK stole our maximum temperatures your honour), the rains came right on time. My wife Yvonne (Maria, she’ll answer to almost anything) has been studiously recording in her MacBook’s calendar every day on which it either rained, or simply showered for most of the seventeen years that we’ve lived in the south of the Aegean Sea, and this year has been true to form. We had one minor heatwave back in June during which the temperatures reached what we’d normally get in August, ie. the upper thirties, even forty here and there. Apart from that, though, the daytime temperatures this summer have been much more tolerable at around the 31-33ºC level for most of the time. I would say that the overnight temperatures here have still been a deal higher than in Northern Europe, but that the midday temperatures for much of the high summer were higher in Reading than Rethymnon, sweatier in Southampton than on Symi – fact.

Once the rains die out, usually some time during May (a month when rain is rare anyway, but still possible here and there) we don’t generally expect any until September 21st and, yes, we can be that specific, it seems. Yvonne told me, as we were watching the superlative forecaster Sakis Arnaoutoglou during the week of September 12th-18th, that he’d surely be telling us that the following Tuesday, which would be September 20th, it was sure to be getting gloomy and the first rainclouds would arrive over us after the long, dry summer. Sure enough, not only Sakis, but all the other forecasters on Greek TV too, were soon agreeing about it.

Now, when I talk about the date of September 21st, I’m being region-specific, because mainland Greece gets much more unsettled weather during the summer than the islands in the south and east of the Aegean, and this has proved true this year, much as any other. But here, Yvonne tells me, nay shows me on her Mac’s screen, that the first rains at the tail end of the summer invariably arrive on September 21st, and guess what, this year they came right on time. Well, actually, most of the proper rain fell on Thursday the 22nd, but we’ll allow it 24 hours either way, OK? Plus it had grown gloomy on the 21st in preparation.

If you’re reading this while looking forward to your later September break on Crete, or maybe Rhodes, or any of the smaller islands in the area, don’t be discouraged, OK? When the first rains fall, they don’t usually signal a general breakdown in the weather, no. The ‘blip’ in the normal wall-to-wall sunshine is just that, a blip. Yesterday, Friday September 23rd, we woke up once again to clear blue skies, and temperatures, although low for the time of year today, are set to rise to the lower-to-mid thirties again by the middle of next week, so there is still much settled, dry and cloudless weather left in this summer, rest assured. In fact, we can usually look forward to primarily bright sunny weather well into November, and, maybe with the odd storm here and there, December too. Last year we swam in the sea on a bright, warm sunny day in December, in fact it was Boxing Day and here’s the proof, that’s my wife enjoying the quiet waters of the town beach at 1.00pm, December 26th 2021…

Since I’ve started with the photos, here are a few more from this past week…

Above: The village fountain, just outside of Makrylia on the way up to Meseleri, taken 4.00pm a few days ago. That water is very drinkable, since it’s the same water that is piped into the village. It comes from the ‘snowmelt’ on the mountains above us and is naturally filtered through the rocks inside them. Many locals turn up here with plastic drums and they fill them up for household use. Usually people from just outside the area that is fed by our spring come to use it. Thankfully, at least until now, there has been no indication of this source drying up.

Above: The picturesque tiny bay just north of Agios Nikolaos, which we visited for the first time (the bay, of course, not Ag. Nik.) while going to spend some time with some friends from the UK who were staying at the top end of that bay for a ten-day holiday earlier in the month.

Above: Another corner on the edge of Ierapetra town, taken Saturday Sept. 24th at around 10.30am.

Above: Walking through the Old Town on our way to the beach at Chocolicious for a coffee and a swim, we saw this ‘designer cat’ whose colour so matched the mat on which he was sitting that we almost missed him. Handsome fellow, isn’t he?

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