Evangelia and her little group of octogenarians are huddled together on their rickety wooden chairs under the vine that’s trained across the short distance between her front door and the gate into her chicken pen. The narrow alley that runs past her front door is scarcely wide enough for the four or five of them, but they’re OK, they’re putting the world to rights with sober nods of the head and copious hand gestures as the temperature hovers in the lower thirties. Yes, finally, after a number of false starts, summer is upon us. Evangelia operates on a different time schedule to most people. The generally accepted time for everyone to be quiet whilst everyone sleeps is from around 3.00pm until 5.00pm or thereabouts. Evangelia (and, it seems, her few close associates as in sister, cousins, second cousins etc), gets up before 6.00am almost every day of the year and thus is usually ready for her ‘afternoon’ sleep at around 12.00 noon. Thus she is again up and about by three, and sets out her few chairs for the expected arrival of her little band of debaters. They too, evidently work to a similar time clock to their regular hostess.

The photo at the top of this post was taken at Taverna Kleio, along the coast a little away to the east of the town. Normally, at this time of the year there are tables all over the courtyard and even a clutch of them out on the beach itself, from where one can usually catch an amazing glimpse of the sun as it sets to the west over the hills above the seaside town of Ierapetra. This past Sunday, which was June 18th, when the summer has normally already been upon us for something like two months, there had been a pretty heavy rainstorm during the daylight hours and all the diners had to eat inside. It’s unheard of for this time of the year. Our friends from the UK (who own the house beside ours in the village) are here at the moment and so we went to Kleio’s for the evening meal together. The fact that it was wet outside though, did nothing to spoil the quality of the food there, which is always top notch. Good food and good company more than compensate for a weird weather pattern, thank goodness.

So many times this past two months or so we’ve woken up to clear skies and thought, ‘Right, summer’s here, the ratchet has turned and we shan’t see much cloud or any rain now at least until October,’ only to find that the nights have turned cool again for the time of year, the clouds have again bubbled up and the weather’s become unsettled for yet a few days more. This past Monday though, I almost hesitate to say, I went outside at 8.30am and the temperature on the veranda was around 25ºC. There was that unmistakable feel in the air that summer is at last here to stay. The prospect of it being too hot in the sun was finally a real one and the need to walk the streets while seeking out the shady side once more a necessity. Every year summer hits us as if the weather were operated by a kind of ratchet, which gets turned up virtually overnight, so that one day it’s spring, the next it’s summer, and normally it stays with us right through until early October, often longer. We’re fast approaching the 18th anniversary of our arrival in Greece as permanent residents and we’ve truly never known a summer to start so late. It’s the hot topic on TV chat shows, and – sadly – unusually heavy torrential rains have created flash floods that have brought a lot of damage to parts of northern Greece this past week or so. In all the café/bars the people talk about it, and the bars along the south-western end of the town beach have never waited so long to put their umbrellas and sun loungers out by the waterside.

This past few days though, the air has had that unmistakable underlying warmth that doesn’t go away for a few months now. We’ve taken a couple of swims in the sea and it’s finally lost its chill. It’s simply gorgeous to go in and the prospect of it remaining so for months is tantalising. The sky is that deep Greek blue that is rarely seen even on sunny days in the UK. As the Greeks say, ‘sto kato kato’ [when you get down to it] it’s ruddy marvellous to be here.

Most of the photos that I’ve taken this past few days have been right here at the house. So, here they are…

The first one in that little gallery is of a plant that we put in not long after we whipped the upper garden into shape, and we thought that it was never going to flower. Now that it has, we’re not only thrilled but surprised, as we never expected the flowers to resemble those of a bottlebrush plant. The thistle (artichoke) is the same one I photographed in the previous post, as it’s come out into even more flowers. Go on, tell me that it’s not a beautiful, blousy plant, eh? The shots of our fast-developing fig tree are also exciting, as it looks like we may be in for quite a crop in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping that those black beetles that you can see in the photo below this paragraph and that I discovered on the tree a couple of weeks ago don’t come back and eat the lot before we can.

Finally, here are a few more of the upper garden (what makes you think we’re chuffed with it then?)

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