This past few days I’ve taken a few photos that I rather like. You know what happens, I’m sure, you snap away at random with the phone and then transfer them to your laptop and some of them delight you with just how good they look, while others disappoint and you reach for the ‘delete’ button. The photos below are the ones that have survived the process. I’ll place a brief description under each where necessary.

Above: At 9.40am on Sunday we were just leaving the village when Yvonne almost gave me the impression that she was choking on something. I slowed the car and asked if she was OK, and she replied, “Look, LOOK!” Stopping the car and looking right, past her head and through her window, I saw what had amazed her so much. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rainbow that hugs a hillside like this (OK, I’m sure someone out there has just whispered, “You should get out more”). The night had been one of quite heavy showers and the sky was in the process of clearing to give us a gloriously sunny, if slightly cool for the season, day. The white patch high on the mountainside just above the ‘bow’ and towards the left-hand end is the village of Kalamafka by the way.

Above: The distant mountain that we can see due west from just above or below the village here, and the one we often call the ‘Kourabietha‘ during the winter months, was dusted with a fresh coating of snow yesterday morning at around 10.00am. Its peak just sneaks itself above the nearer ridge and most winters remains white for months. This winter, owing to the milder weather that we’ve had, it’s very often been devoid of snow, or at the most streaked with a few white lines in the hollows. Owing to the three or four day spell of unusually cool weather for March that has just passed, during which we here saw a little rain, it obviously fell as snow up there and the Kourabietha once again lived up to its name.

Above: On our way up to Meseleri yesterday morning to help some friends clean a village house there, we had a little time to kill while waiting for them to catch us up, since they were travelling up from the town to meet us. So we pulled the car up a few hundred metres before the village and strolled a few metres down the lane towards the beautifully dramatic gorge that sits just below the road up there. It’s where I filmed Griffon vultures flying below us a couple of years back. What’s nice about this photo is the fact that it’s still early in the day and the so the shadow of the crag on the left is still deep due to the sun still being low in the west.

Above: These five were the best of the bunch that I took as a kind of ‘study of a Meseleri backstreet‘ at around midday yesterday, Monday March 20th 2023. Although the derelict buildings are sad, it’s also nice when you see one that’s been renovated and now has residents again. Having said that it’s sad seeing those empty houses, it also allows your imagination to run wild when you contemplate the history of such places. It seems to me that many of us particularly like old doors and doorways. Maybe it’s because a door is the eye to the building, through which so many people must have passed over the centuries that such buildings have existed. Or am I just getting soppy in my old age?

Last of all, once we got home from the ‘house-clean,’ we took coffee in the upper garden with the part-time third member of our household, Mavkos the cat. We’re now calling him the ‘part-time third member’ because he’s evidently got his feet firmly under the table elsewhere in the village too, and can be absent from our house for days on end. Just when we think he’s slung his hook, as it were, he’ll waltz up to the French windows, or curl up on a patio chair in the expectation that we’ll still love him and feed him. Of course, drat him, he’s right.

Oh, and even ‘laster’ of all, look how the wild gladioli we scavenged from a country lane not long after we first moved here and planted in the lower garden have prospered. Every spring they’re just that little bit bigger as a bunch and it thrills us to look at those exquisite, if delicate and small, magenta flowers…

The weather’s really warming up from yesterday, and there’s a definite hint in the air of the hot summer days to come. Every time we reach this time of the year we find ourselves saying, “bring on those stifling hot summer days.” We say that equally as often as, come November, we find ourselves saying, “Bring on those fresher, cooler winter days when we can actually go for country walks and do some gardening in comfort.”

Fickle blighters we are, aren’t we?

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And here’s the link to the new short story “Outage.”