More entries in the diary

Friday Feb 2nd, 3.30am.

Another of those nights when I don’t sleep so good, so I get up, throw on some rough old togs, and set out to do a circuit of the village. I don’t like not sleeping but, having said that, I rather like having the whole village to myself at such an hour. Usually, the only other creatures I encounter on my power-walk circuit are cats and bats. I may occasionally hear dogs barking, but never see them. Tonight, however, with a very bright waning moon bathing everything in a silvery light, I don’t have too much use for my little pocket LED torch.

As I reach the last few minutes of the circuit, I climb the lane from the road, pass the house to my right where Dimitri lives with his mother Maria and, when I get almost directly opposite the blind lane to my left leading past Evangelia’s front door (and also, in the interests of accuracy, her lounge and bathroom doors, since the layout of her ancient village house necessitates going outside in order to pass from one room to another), I turn right up the even steeper access drive up to our house. It’s now when I need the torch, because all of our veranda lights are switched off after we retire to bed, and there’s a fairly substantial olive tree keeping the moonlight at bay at the lower end of the thirty metres or so of the drive.

As I almost reach the top of the drive, and next door’s trellis, bordering on their front patio and French Windows, is directly ahead, with a gap of around 30 inches between the panels where one day they intend to fit a so-far non-existent gate, I see two small glowing circles. It’s a creature staring at me, and its eyes are reflecting the torchlight, exactly as cat’s eyes on the road are designed to do. So I decide at first that it’s one of the neighbourhood cats, but I’m wrong. As I get closer, all the while ascending the steep drive, but now at a very slow pace in the hope of not startling the animal too much, I see that the eyes are a little too large for a cat and not the right shape anyway. I can also begin to make out a white area around the face, with a distinctive patch of black, somewhat like a pair of sunglasses, as it covers the area of the eyes and between.

It’s a polecat, an adult, and it’s still allowing me to approach it. In my excitement I completely forget that I have my phone in my jacket pocket, and it takes pretty good nighttime shots. I get to within eight feet of the animal before it decides to turn around and face the other way, affording me a good look at its body, thus confirming my verdict that it’s an adult polecat. It turns its head back to give me one last dismissing glance, then trots off along the terrace, not hurrying at all, and is lost to my sight. ‘Flippin’ Heneroonies,’ I think to myself, ‘have we seen some wildlife lately!’ Twice I’ve encountered a badger at close quarters, and now a polecat strolls through ours and next door’s verandas. We’ve also seen hares, hedgehogs and voles, not to mention the colony of Griffon Vultures that inhabits the impressive crag that stands sentinel behind the village, frequently protecting us from the North winds and enabling us to sit outside for our morning coffee even on cold winter days, if the sun’s out.

Friday February 2nd. 10.30am

It’s the first truly beautiful day in almost a week. From Sunday 28th January through to Thursday 1st Feb, we’ve experience arguably the coldest, wettest spell of weather that we’ve seen in well over 18 years in the southern Aegean. Walking around the village, when the rains permitted it that is, there were no possibilities of chats or invitations to sit for an Elliniko simply because everyone’s doors have been tightly closed against the cold and the wet. For four or five days our daytime temperatures struggled to reach double figures, plus it’s either been raining steadily or showering unpredictably, thus making any idea of a country walk an extremely risky business too. Every flue has been belching smoke from the fires or stoves within, and the idea of keeping a window open for more than a few minutes has not been a good one.

Usually, here in this part of Greece during the winter months (and I’d include Rhodes and the southern Dodecanese in this summation) you get average temperatures in the upper teens most days. When the sun shines without interruption, you can often see the thermometer creeping over 20 by a degree or two. It’s lovely, and ideal for gardening or taking long country walks. If it rains it usually follows a three-day cycle: Day 1: clouds build up, Day 2: it rains, or showers several times and then, Day 3: the clouds clear. For four or five days this time though, it stayed very cold and the rains just kept coming. Today, true to the TV forecasts, a warm air mass has finally reached us and the weather’s returning to what we’d call ‘normal.’ We’re strapping on our hiking boots and heading for the hills that we can see from our veranda. The summit where we’re planning to sup coffee from our flasks and eat a little dark chocolate to go with it is somewhere we realise that we haven’t reached on foot for three years, yikes! From there, looking east-north east, we can see the peaks surrounding the Lasithi Plateau, and they’re all snowcapped. They remind us very much of the views we had when visiting friends in Snowmass, near Aspen Colorado a couple of decades ago. Hope you like the photos…