The weather’s been rather typically winter-like this week. We finally had some real rain at last on Sunday, when it rained, occasionally heavily without becoming torrential, from late afternoon until not far short of midnight. Then, we woke up to bright clear skies on Monday and we’ve enjoyed crisp clear vivid days with the temperature just topping 20ºC ever since. The photos I’ll be posting below show just how lovely the light has been since the rains, which brought a smile not only to the farmers’ faces, but also to the plants in our garden.

We had a swim just before the rains came, and it may well be the last one for a while, but we’ll see. Had we been in the town yesterday we may well have gone to the beach, as it was a beautifully warm and calm day, but we spent the day at home, pottering, which is something that brings us immense pleasure these days. The largest and most colourful of our lantana plants, as seen in a couple of photos in the previous post too, seems to be a butterfly magnet. This past few days the painted lady butterflies have still been all over it, and I’ve only just discovered, after doing a spot of research, that they actually migrate from Northern Europe to Africa at this time of the year, and make the return journey in springtime. They’re a bit like the poor relation of the magnificent and truly amazing Monarch of Continental America, in fact. How something so petite and delicate as a butterfly can make such an arduous journey is truly one of the marvels of the natural world. We theorised that these in the garden were taking some well-needed sustenance as they sucked the nectar from the bright scarlet flowers, before setting off across the Libyan Sea southwards.

As we stretched out on our sun loungers yesterday at around 11.30am to drink our coffees in what proved to be scorching hot sunshine ( took my togs off, I was that hot! Sorry ladies, too much information), we again saw the buzzards that live in the valley immediately below the village. OK, so further up the mountainside, in the towering crags above the village, we are fortunate enough to have a thriving colony of Griffon Vultures, which soar hundreds of feet higher than the buzzards, but a buzzard at close quarters is still an impressive bird, and the few that live with us soar on motionless wings above the steep ravine into which drops the hillside on which we sit as you get further down the ever-steepening slope, and they float by only fifty feet from our terrace at eye height or even lower. As they passed and re-passed our vantage point we could make out the individual feathers on their wings and backs as they glinted in the sunlight. Seeing such a big and powerful predator, or raptor, at such close quarters can stop you in your tracks, and I was soon using the bins to get an even closer look.

Last evening we went for a 45 minute walk up the lane towards Meseleri just before sunset. Some of the photos below (and the one at the top of this post) were taken during that walk. After a cloudless day we marvelled at the cumulus gathering over the hills bordering the Lasithi Plateau, which are clearly visible twenty kilometres or so across the valley to the west of us. The late afternoon sun’s rays streamed through them to give us a tableau that would have inspired Turner to put paint to canvas, although no artist could do as good a job as the Great One, really.

That last one’s not very clear, owing to the fact that my phone’s zoom is rubbish, but that’s a buzzard sitting on the post in the middle distance. He looked a lot closer to the naked eye! On our way back we passed Angla’i’a’s door, which was wide open behind her flyscreen. As you pass, it’s difficult to make anything out in the darkness beyond that screen door, and so we didn’t know whether she was about or not. We ought to have known better though, because when is she anywhere other than in her kitchen? 

I called out a “kalispera!” just in case as we passed, and received an immediate response.

From within came the familiar sound of Angla’i’a’s voice as she replied, “And where have you two been, eh? Don’t pass by! Wait there!” We duly obeyed and stopped walking and seconds later she emerged from the screen door, wiping her hands with a dishcloth as she did so. “I thought you two had died, we haven’t seen you for so long. Why haven’t you dropped by, eh?”

“Oh” replied Yvonne, “what with you being Mayor and all, we don’t want to add to your already busy schedule. Anyway, we just seem to drop into a torporific routine at this time of the year, what with…”

“Not any more I’m not. They voted me out,” she replied, with a very distinct air of disappointment in her voice. The elections had taken place a month or more ago, and we’d kind of assumed that she’d be re-elected as a matter of course.  We asked her, “So, who’s mayor now then?”

She replied with a name, and we couldn’t place the man, so she described him and then we knew who she meant. “It’s the fat bloke on the moped from up behind there,” she said as she pointed behind the house to further up in the village. “I’m still in the job until February, but then I step down and he takes over. Won’t get anything done though, you mark my words. Anyway, come on in and I’ll fix you both a coffee.”

On this occasion we declined, as we were due to go out later in the evening, but we promised to pass by sometime soon. As we turned to go, there was her 87 year-old hubby Giorgos crossing the road from his horafi, plastic bag full of freshly picked mandarins in one hand as the other one gripped the metal hand rail so that he could hobble up the stone steps to the level of the house. Once he reached the top, and we greeted him, she told him, “Give the children some of those, Giorgo!” That, in itself, is highly amusing, for she is only a couple of years my senior, and I passed seventy this past month.

Amid our vain protests that Giorgos may be a bit miffed at having laboured beneath the tree to pick them all, she grabbed the bag, opened it and began shoving the bright orange fruit three at a time into our hands. She didn’t stop until we’d filled the pockets of our fleeces too.

There’s absolutely no way you can resist such pressing kindness. As we again bade them good evening, Giorgo’s face seeming to us to bear signs of mixed feelings between his desire also to be kind to us, and the fact that he may have had other plans for his modest little harvest, we turned to see Maria from the house below ours busily sweeping up fallen leaves in the lane. Just then as our little group reached five in number, who should come coasting down the hill past our house on his moped but the newly elected mayor. We all bade him a good evening, and he returned the greeting, I can’t help thinking with a degree of smugness at seeing his predecessor in our company. Yes, we knew him by sight, but not on first-name terms. He is a little gruff by nature, giving insecure people the impression that he doesn’t like them, but I think (hopefully) that it’s just his way.

As I type this, it’s now the crack of dawn on Thursday December 14th, and I’ve just chopped up the fruit that we’ll be eating on top of our muesli for breakfast later, which gave me the opportunity to sample one of those mandarins. A lot of the ones produced in people’s gardens locally, although tasty, are also quite full of ‘pips,’ which can make eating them slightly tiresome. If the one I sampled is anything to go by, these are seedless and as sweet as sweet can be.

Turned out to have been a good idea to take that pre-sunset walk.

Above: How about a nice little round of ‘spot the cat’ then?

Finally, two blasts from the past, the first below was taken on Patmos in May 2019, and the second at the Waikiki Coffee Bar in Ierapetra on 28th September 2020. The person on the right is my sister’s hubby Martin.

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