Up, up and [possibly being given] away?

After more years than I can remember, we’ve recently been back in touch with one of my cousins, and it’s been a pleasure catching up. My mother, born in Bath, UK, was one of ten surviving children. Her mother actually gave birth to thirteen, but three were either stillborn or died shortly after birth. It was like that back in the 1920’s. Of the surviving ten, in which my mother was somewhere around the fifth or sixth to be born, only three now remain, and they are the three youngest, all of which are brothers. One, my uncle Bob, lives in Cyprus and has done so for many decades now. The next one up age-wise is the now-widowed Michael, and he still lives in Keynsham, near Bristol, but is in the early stages of dementia, which has led to one of his two daughters, Sarah, moving in to live with him, along with her husband Stephen. The other is my uncle Pete, who still lives in Bath.

An occasion that both Yvonne and I remember well was back in the late nineties, when we took a couple or three holidays on Skiathos, and – talk about coincidences – we were waiting at a bus stop at the back of the town to catch the bus down the coast to the idyllic beach (well, it still was back then) Vromolimnos when, who should be waiting at the same stop but my uncle Mike, his wife Aileen, and Helen, one of their two daughters. Even back then we only saw my mum’s siblings rarely, so it was an amazing coincidence to bump into them out there on a Greek island. Getting into conversation, we soon learned that Mike and Aileen were addicts of Greece and it was their favourite holiday destination. Sadly we weren’t able to spend a lot of time together as it was their last day before flying back to the UK. It was such a shame that we hadn’t bumped into them earlier.

Fast forward to this past few weeks, and the other daughter, Sarah has been exchanging loads of WhatsApp messages with me, during which I discovered that her mum and dad had decided that their favourite island was Crete, would you believe. She also says that hubby Stephen maintains that he even prefers the laid-back life on Crete to his experience of travelling across California when he was a younger man.

Now, when someone tells me that they love Crete, it’s no exaggeration to say that they usually then go on about Chania, Rethymnon, or those rather frenetic resorts on the north coast just east of Heraklion. OK, so there are those too who centre their Cretan experience around Agios Nikolaos and Elounda, but mostly, they’ve never heard of Ierapetra, or, if they have, they still haven’t been down this way (not a few think it begins with an ‘L’ too!). Mike and his family, however, have indeed been here, and Sarah even told me something about this area that I didn’t yet know, and it’s that there is a butterfly gorge up near Orino, a remote village that we’ve visited on a couple of occasions, because we have friends whose roots are there. Our Greek friends haven’t even mentioned it to us. Orino is an amazingly remote place. It’s not all that far from the coast road between Ierapetra and Makry Gialos, but the climb is twisty-turny in the extreme, and the road passes through some pretty spectacular scenery during the ascent. Orino is so high that the climate is totally different from that of the coastal strip only about ten km below. Anyway, suffice it to say that we now have added an excursion to our list of things to do, and that’s to investigate Butterfly Gorge before the hotter months of the summer are upon us.

Sarah told me a rather amusing, if not altogether unsurprising, experience that she and her family had while dining out with a couple of Cretans whom they’d met while staying on the island when the girls were both teenagers. She still remembers their names, which were Nikos and Stelios. The latter was actually the mayor of the village where they were staying, and it seems that they’d passed a rather boozy lunch (well, boozy as regards her dad and the two Greeks I assume, since she and Helen were as yet still in their mid-teens at the time, and mum Aileen probably abstained in the hope of keeping a mental note of how to get them all back to their accommodation). As the meal came toward its ending and the only thing left to do was to finish off the Retsina and Ouzo (probably Metaxa too I’d imagine), Mayor Stelios took quite a shine to Sarah and offered to take her off of her parents’ hands, since he was in need of a wife at the time.

Sarah says he put a fairly serious proposal of marriage to her father, and that, owing to his rather woozy mental condition at the time, she thought he might even take the man up on it. Fortunately (or otherwise, she says the jury’s still out on that one) Michael declined and she eventually flew home with her mum and dad at the end of the holiday.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘Oh yes, we’ve all been there. They don’t mean these things to be taken seriously, they’re just mucking about.’ Well, I hear where you’re coming from but, if you have any knowledge of Greek rural and island customs from ancient times, this was often how men found their wives in local communities. The match was very often made between families, with little input from the couple themselves, and the first discussions frequently took place over a shared lunch. You may be surprised to hear that we have many friends both here and on Rhodes, who were married back in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and their marriages were made with just such an arrangement, the bride very often still being in her mid-teens. More often than not the bridegroom is quite a lot older than the bride, and he’s been around a bit, done his military service, maybe travelled the world in the merchant navy, before coming back to his home village and wanting to marry a nice fecund young filly, fact. So I’d not be at all surprised if Stelios were deadly serious. Probably thought it was worth a try in the very least. I explored this scenario in my novel ‘Eve of Deco nstruction,’ by the way.

Cousin Sarah closed her WhatsApp message to me with the words, “Dad, who was nevertheless rather inebriated, found the good sense to politely decline, otherwise I may well have been a neighbour of yours.”

Photo time… No, wait, just one more little ‘aside’ first. We were supping coffee in Likoudies with my long-time ‘coffee friend’ Taki today, when the discussion came around to the farmers and their ‘tractor’ protests. You’ve probably seen that the French farmers are protesting by blocking the motorways (again) with their farm machinery, and, guess what, the Greek farmers are at it too. Takis mentioned that he’d also watched a TV news report where tomato growers threw tons of fresh tomatoes all over the road, making a mess too thick for ordinary cars to pass through. Apparently, pepper farmers took a leaf from the tomato growers’ book and did the same. Takis said, face as straight as he could keep it, “Let me know when the Banks’ employees do something similar, and I’ll be there to help with the clean-up.”

OK, now to this post’s batch of photos…

Above: Just a few ‘moody’ shots from around the village, both in daylight and after dark.

Above: A few more from walks around the hills near home.

Above: Oranges that are still not quite ready to pick. But don’t they look inviting? Plus, an aeonium in our upper garden is flowering, isn’t it grand? Finally, some shots below taken by my young friend Giannis Tzavas in Kato Horio last Sunday…