The photo above was taken on Sunday morning March 10th at around 9.22am. It’s a view along part of Ierapetra sea front from beneath the marble dolphin sculpture that stands at one end of this section of the waterfront. I particularly liked the cloud formation on the mountains in the background. It’s like the mountain is belching out white smoke in a keen breeze, don’t you think?

I called this post ‘Tractors and Teams’ because, after observing the majority of agricultural tractors that are in use in this area (and indeed back on Rhodes whilst we lived there) I was moved to reflect on the fact that just about all farmers here are still living in the distant past when it comes to the safety regulations. I haven’t taken any photos myself of the machinery that I’m referring to, but anyone who spends any time at all in rural areas here will notice the problem pretty quickly. You won’t see a tractor anywhere with even a simple roll bar, not to mention an actual enclosed cab. It’s been European law for getting on for ten years now, if not longer, I believe.

I was brought up in a part of the UK called the ‘West Country,’ and from the age of 18 months up until I was eleven, we lived in a small village about six miles outside of the city of Bath. I grew up mainly in the fifties and into the early sixties and, back then, everyone in the village knew everyone else. It was very much like it still is in villages like the one we now live in here on Crete. In that part of the UK nowadays (and almost every other part too I’d guess) no one leaves their doors on the latch any more. Our back door while I was growing up only had the one latch on it, and it was that lever type that was so common back then, in which one lever passes through a small hole cut through the wood of the door and it’s lifted by compressing a thumb lever on the outside, which is hinged so the the inside section rises, lifting the metal bar from the ‘cradle set into the door frame. This was how it looked from the outside…

There were no bolts, deadlocks or alarm systems. Your nearest neighbours were the alarm system, and they were seldom needed in that capacity anyway. I’m getting sidetracked, I know. I’ll get to the point. There wasn’t a single family in the village whose name we didn’t know, whose kids we didn’t play with or, if they were older than us, look up to and aspire to imitating. One such was Robert Millan, who lived a few doors up from our house and was already in his late teens while I was yet to reach double figures. Robert Millan worked on a farm and drove a Massey Ferguson tractor, and it was the same as all tractors back then in that the driver’s seat was open to the environment. The highest point on all tractors in those days was the chest, neck and head of the driver. They all looked something like this one…

One day Robert Millan got a mention in the local news. He’d turned his tractor over in a ditch and been crushed beneath it. He died instantly. A tractor weighs a few tons, imagine having that dropping down on top of you. It was accidents like this one that eventually drove the powers that be to specify that all tractors had to henceforth be manufactured with cabs, and those cabs had to be strong enough to protect the driver, should the machine ever turn over.

The foregoing is why I’m sorry but I worry myself silly when I see all these local Greek villagers tootling around on tractors that not only don’t have cabs, but they’re also more often than not as old as the bloke who’s driving them too. There you go, just an observation, but one born of worry and concern. Some of our neighbours in the village here drive their tractors down across some impossibly steep-looking hillsides, and it seems to me that a disaster is only a hair’s breadth away for most of the time. Every time I walk through the village in the hours of darkness doing my power walk around the village perimeter, I heave a sigh of relief when I pass Manoli’s tractor, he it is who was recently elected as the new village ‘mayor.’ He drives a cabless tractor on a daily basis while going about his day-job. If it’s parked up outside his house as I walk past, then I know he’s got through another day unscathed.

Regarding unlockable back doors though, a slightly more positive thought: at least here it’s still like it was sixty and more years ago in rural Somerset, in that no one locks their doors and very few even lock their cars or pickups, which are dotted around the village’s larger thoroughfares (and not a few of the narrower ones too) all through the night hours. It would be foolish to assert that crime doesn’t exist, but it has to be said that in villages like ours it’s still a very rare commodity.

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On the thought of ‘teams,’ I have always been amused and amazed to hear how quiz show hosts greet their contestants here on Greek TV. In the UK you would surely never hear a TV game show host getting to know a ‘guest’ by asking them “what team are you?” Here, invariably, once they’ve asked the player’s name, maybe too where they come from, the next question (and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a male or female either) is just that – “What team are you?” It’s a measure of just how fanatical Greeks are about their football. Maybe once in ten years I’ve heard a contestant reply that they don’t have a ‘team’ that they follow, owing to not being particularly interested in football, whereupon the host looks at the contestant ‘gone off’ as it were. ‘How can someone not be interested, nay fanatical, about football?’ their facial expression asks. I’m not having you on here either. It’s such a given that everyone loves football that the question isn’t about whether they do or not, but simply which team they’re fanatical about. They all give a team as their reply too, even the women. It’s usually one of the top five Greek teams, which are AEK, Olympiakos, PAOK or Panathinaikos, but it’s not unusual for someone to reply ‘Manchester United’ or ‘Arsenal.’

It’s a funny old world indeed. Here’s a batch of photos that I hope you’ll like…

Above: The first two were taken on a country walk we did on March 8th. These were around 11.15am and it was a route we hadn’t trodden before. The next two, taken at the L’Angolo Restaurant, were all taken at about 9.15am last Sunday, March 10th, and the rest on the seafront further south on Tuesday evening March 12th at around 6.00pm. The next few were taken at Pachia Ammos on Thursday March 14th at 11.30-12.00pm…

That one in the above gallery showing a new building under construction very near to the modest little harbour wall at one end of Pachia Ammos beach rang an alarm bell or two. As far as I could tell, that ‘cave’ went well under the outer wall of that new house, when I scrambled down to take a peek at how far in it went. I don’t think that if we were in the market for a new house we’d be putting an offer in for that one.

One more little gallery below, and these were taken this very afternoon on a walk we have just returned from around ‘Dingly Dell.’ They were all taken between 4.00 and 4.30pm.

The Asphodel plants are looking radiant at the moment, as are the Euphorbia, as hopefully you can see. Plus the first one is of a Rosemary plant dangling over the wall from a garden at the last house we pass on our way out of the village and up the stony path. Even if you were never to use Rosemary in your cooking, she’s a majestic plant to have in the garden, isn’t she? If you’re only ever on Crete during the summer for your holidays, you’ve probably never seen how wonderful the countryside looks during the winter months. Pretty green, eh?

That last shot I really love. You only get that light when the sun’s at a certain angle, and it lasts for maybe ten minutes, that’s all. When it looks like this though, I can’t help thinking of the old phrase from Tolkien, ‘the road goes ever on,’ and I half expect to see the fellowship of the ring come trundling around the bend. I know, there’s no hope for me, is there?

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