This was the town beach on Tuesday, another truly beautiful January day, so beautiful that Yvonne got her cozzie on and not only had a sunbathe on the beach, but went for a swim too. The sea temperature right now is around 17ºC which I swear had no bearing on my decision to sit on the wall and watch her, rather than go in as well. She got to the beach before me, as I was in the iLab store busy negotiating a deal on my new iPad. When I got there, this was the first I saw of her (below)…

On Saturday we finally got around to dropping in on Angla’i’a and Giorgo in the village for the first time in months, it seems. As per usual her door was wide open and we called through the fly screen to see if she was about, safe in the knowledge that she’d be in the kitchen as sure as gravity exists. Her voice called out, “Ellate, na piete ena kafé,” so we eased open the screen and stepped inside, asking her, “Is this a good time?” to which she replied, “No, but then it never is. Sit down, you’re making the place look untidy.” So we sat at her welcoming kitchen table while she dug out the gas burner to make us both a Greek coffee.

We had quite a lot of catching up to do, since it was probably November when we’d last cadged a coffee from her. Giorgos was over the horafi tending his vegetable patch when we first arrived, so at least temporarily, it was just the three of us. It’s never that way for long, though, since apart from eternally cooking Angla’i’a is ever badgering the council for some need or other that the village has, since she’s the village ‘Pro-e’dros’ or Mayor, after all. We hadn’t been at the table for long, while she’d placed a dish of home-made biscuits, some peanuts and that odd honey-wafer stuff that they seem to like over here before us in case we were peckish, when the phone rang and she was talking to the deputy mayor of Ierapetra. He’d called to update her about something she’d been campaigning to get done, like maybe some street-lamp bulb replacements or a new pump for the village water treatment plant or something.

The other hot potato at the moment is the extremely unpopular decision to close the hospital in Ierapetra and reduce the building to a simple ‘health centre.’ On February 2nd there’s a huge demonstration planned for the centre of town, in which just about everyone will be out waving black flags (we’re told that every vehicle will sport one, and even the delivery men/boys on their scooters/mopeds running all over town with coffee consignments for stores and offices will have black flags flying from their top-boxes). It seems that the main reason for the closure of many of the hospitals on the island (maybe all over the country, I don’t know) is that there is a serious brain-drain going on of qualified hospital staff. Surgeons, anesthetists, radiographers, in fact you name it, they’re leaving the country in their droves because they can earn significantly bigger salaries in other countries. The result is that the Greek health service can’t replace them and thus medical facilities are emptying of staff to care for the patients. The Government seems to have decided that to close hospitals all over the place is the best way of solving the problem. Angla’i’a, like most people around here, is up in arms about it and cited to us at least one case where someone was rushed to hospital in the last few days, who was saved, but would definitely have died had their carers been compelled to take them half an hour up the road to the hospital at Agios Nikolaos. The hospital in Ierapetra is a good one, up until now, and the only one serving a pretty large population along the South East coast.

There are, it seems, no easy answers to the problem, but it’s making local people see red and they’re determined to fight the decision all the way.

Apart from her frequent phone conversations, people are perpetually turning up at her door with paperwork, or questions for her to answer, or requests for help in some way or another. By the time she’d placed our coffees in front of us she’d already dealt with three visitors and two phone calls. In fact, I jokingly suggested that she needed a P.A. with a desk just inside her kitchen door. Just when we thought that yet another person seeking help or advice was dropping by, we were relieved to see that it was her hubby Giorgos, hobbling back from the field. We’ve been in the village for over three years now and we’ve seen a decline in his mobility, sadly. He never gives up though, that’s the good thing and no doubt a major factor in his still being around in his late eighties. As he eased himself into a chair at the table beside us, he expressed surprise to see us, since it had been so long. I replied that the ‘Xenoi’ had come to call, trying to imply that since we hadn’t been by for a while, we’d become almost strangers.

Giorgos, however, misunderstood my meaning and, thinking I was referring to the fact that we’re foreigners and still very new residents in the village, he replied with a warm reassurance that we were most certainly not ‘xenoi’ now, but rather Makryliots, the highest compliment that anyone can be paid, in my book. It’s a reassuring sign of acceptance that we were deeply touched to hear. This led us on to the subject of his contemporary and near neighbour Manoli, whom we hadn’t seen climbing the hill outside our garden gate lately. Angla’i’a informed us that he’d got some trouble with his back and was having to spend a few days on his bed to rest it. As it turns out, this drawback Manolis is experiencing has a connection to the fact that our cat Mavkos has been AWOL rather a lot lately. Just when we were thinking that we’d lost him to some other village residents who may have found him much more affectionate than the feral cats around the place and thus tempted him away with tasty puddy-tat treats, a theory that we propounded to Angla’i’a, she replied that she’d seen him every day at Manoli’s, keeping him company it seems. Much though we’d missed him awaiting our emergence in the morning while curled up on one of our veranda chairs, we were happy to hear that Manolis had been feeding him and that Mavkos seems to have detected that the old guy would benefit from a little sympathetic company.

It’s OK, as long as the cat’s happy. He’s certainly got at least three food-calls now, we believe, so if we were to go away for a few days we wouldn’t have to worry about him, so that’s good. And he has been back on our veranda chairs this past three mornings, ready for his breakfast and looking at us like butter wouldn’t melt… Manolis must be getting up and about.

Someone who used to live in the village and wasn’t very popular was mentioned over the kitchen table too. This person had lived abroad for a few years and come back with high ideas about who he thought he was, allegedly. Anyway, the local olive-pit processing plant, which serves the entire island of Crete, is hassling to clear an area among the olive groves a little further down the valley from us to dump some of the waste from the process. Angla’i’a has already canvassed the entire village for signatures on a petition opposing this, because it brings the possibility of further such developments closer to the village, which up until now is not really affected by the plant. She is angry, and understandably so, because she feels that the ‘townies’ who own the plant think they can ride roughshod over the villagers as they’re all just simply a bunch of ‘Voskoi,‘ or ‘shepherds.’ It implies that they look down on such people as being yokels, if you like. This was where the former village resident was mentioned, because it seems that his unpopularity was in part due to his having a similar view of his neighbours after coming home from America some years ago.

When Angla’i’a used the term ‘voskoi,’ (or ‘voskous‘ when not the subject of the verb) she looked at me to see if I understood the word. I replied that I most definitely did, and she went on to say, with a degree of righteous indignation in her voice, that ‘voskoi‘ or not, we were people deserving of the same consideration and dignity as anyone else – a point which we were only too keen to agree on.

Well, as the above shows, there was most certainly some catching up to be done, eh? Time for a few photos I think. The first group below are all from a late afternoon walk a few days ago. I posted one photo from this walk on the Facebook page recently too…

Here are a few from the house and village. I just love the colors of the citrus fruits on the trees at this time of the year. The middle one is me during our morning coffee break on the sun terrace. Sorry about the knees…

The next one’s from a square in Heraklion, where we recently went for a shopping expedition (and to stock up on M&S Earl Grey tea!) –

That about wraps this one up. Talk soon. By the way, I’ve tentatively begun work on a new book; it’s called “Moving Islands” and traces the story of how we came to move here to Crete from Rhodes back in 2019. It’s at a very early stage yet though.

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