We’ve been perched on the wall around the lower garden painting our picket fence. I know, ‘picket fence,’ sounds all very ‘Anne of Green Gables’ doesn’t it, or maybe ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ It’s true though, around the lower garden we have a wooden picket fence and, in the four and a half years since moving in, we’ve only painted it once, and so it’s in need of another protective coat, after first receiving a good sanding, that is. We’re both very familiar with the regular sounds of the village and surrounding area now, and in general we like what we hear. What our ears are assailed with is predominantly natural in origin, although the occasional rotavator or chainsaw must be added into the mix. As a rule though, when we’re outside pottering, the main components of the audible recipe that we listen to are Evangelia’s chickens, the squabbles of the local feral cat population, birdsong (particularly impressive in the spring, and year-round featuring Griffon Vultures and Buzzards with their eerie plaintive cries), and the local shepherd’s large flock of sheep. Oh, and the occasional dog’s bark.

I’ve mentioned before, I’m sure, that we’re well familiar with the daily goings and comings at Maria and Dimitri’s house, just below ours. Dimitri rises around 5.00am most days and the tiny square bathroom window, the only window in the rear wall of their house, as it sits a few metres lower than our veranda and twenty metres away, lights up at around 6.00am as he prepares for another day’s tending the animals and crops that are his lot in life. His cousins and brothers all farm with him and they drive a selection of pickup trucks in various states of repair. Usually one of them turns up at around 7.00am and, if I’m prowling around outside, which I do tend to do a couple of times a week when I’ve woken up too early for decency, I’ll hear the rattle of the diesel engine as it arrives in the steep lane outside the house, whereupon Dimitri will usually emerge, they’ll talk about what their tasks are for the morning, before Dimitri mounts his quad bike and trundles off to some hillside in the near vicinity, and his brother/cousin (I hate to admit this, but they all look the same to me) does the same in the pickup.

At between 10.30am and 10.45am, never varies, one pickup and Dimitri’s quad will return and again pull up in the lane right outside Maria’s modest little veranda, and either Dimitri or his brother/cousin (whoever arrives first) will simply shout ‘Mama!!!’ from the driver’s seat. The idea of actually dismounting the vehicle and going in through the front door, which is all of ten feet away, never seems to cross their minds. We believe it’s the signal for Maria to get the coffee on and the boys will then hang around for twenty minutes or so, usually finally having gone indoors, before starting part two of their working day. The pickup is often then hosed down with a hosepipe that’s permanently coiled up on the veranda, before the driver and pickup set off again. Sometimes they’ve been shifting compost in it, sometimes feed, occasionally they’ll have a small lamb in the back, which they’ll leave there while they take their coffee, the tiny mite bleating all the while for motherly attention. 

The next time that a pickup (one of the three in the team) arrives it’ll be the cousin who’s addicted to Cretan music. His pickup is the smartest of the three and sports a pretty impressive set of alloy wheels. He charges up the lane, both windows open fully, Cretan music blasting out from the cab. He turns it around at the bottom of our drive, then parks it up beside the wall at Maria’s, when he’ll then jump out and start cleaning any filth from the day’s activities off of his baby. 

Are you familiar with Cretan folk music? They actually invented what DJ’s nowadays refer to as the ’12-inch mix,’ I’m sure of it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song that doesn’t last for a quarter of an hour or more, seriously. The band is usually composed of a lyra, then a kind of triangular lute that sounds like an acoustic guitar when strummed, a drum that’s hit with both sides of the hand or with the use of a small stick (startlingly in common with some Irish traditional drums, in fact) and a wind instrument, sometimes like a small clarinet, and sometimes made of an animal’s stomach lining (this one’s got a fair bit in common with the bagpipes of both Ireland and Scotland). The rhythm’s usually a kind of tum tum, tee-tum, tum tum, teetum and the tempo can vary slightly, it’s true, but to the untrained ear an hour’s music could sound like it was all the same song (often is). The singer will often resort to simply shouting the words, or when he does sing them, they sound like he’s making them up as he goes along. After every ‘verse’ there will be instrumental burst, and these passages can be extended for as long as the band deems necessary. It’s during the instrumental breaks that the singer (and others I suppose) will add the occasional ‘Oooaaahh!’ or perhaps an ‘Ela!’

It seems to me, too, that the majority of the recordings we hear of Cretan bands in full swing are done live at some event or other, and in the villages perched on the hillsides of Lasithi there’s no shortage of such live events all year round. Walk through Ierapetra any time of the year and you’ll see fly posters on walls, electricity posts and dedicated noticeboards advertising the next shindig, and telling you in which village it’ll be taking place. Don’t expect a bouzouki, that’s all I’m saying.

So, there we are, rhythmically ‘feathering’ with our brushes as the fence gradually turns whiter than white, and one of the hens in Evangelia’s yard across the lane lets out a particularly loud ‘Aaaaaw, puk puk!’ – causing Yvonne to shout, addressing herself to the offending fowl, ‘Shut up!’ Noticing the surprise with which I stare at her, she says, addressing herself to me this time, ‘Well, they never shut up, do they?’

‘No,’ I reply, ‘but I’d say they’re mildly less irritating that Saturday night drunks calling out in their foul-mouthed way as they trek home through our housing estate in the small hours on a Sunday morning, or the constant background drone of a busy road, where trucks, buses and cars are constantly passing this way and that, aircraft noise from a busy airport or trains on a nearby mainline, the couple next door making a particularly ‘loud’ job of whatever it is they’re doing, maybe…’

‘All right, point made!’ She says, no doubt recalling as I do that at various points in our long married life when we’d lived back in the UK, those sounds had indeed been our daily soundscape. Add to that neighbours who’d ‘f and blind’ with their kitchen door open while we were sat in the garden with some guests too, and you more than get why our current village soundscape can scarce be described as ‘noise pollution.’

We’ve scarcely been anywhere this past week, because I’ve had a rather virulent version of ‘the flu’ that’s been laying a lot of people here low recently. So I’ll just start by sharing a couple of photos from before the pandemic, taken in February 2020 when we’d only been here a few months, and a bunch of us went up into the mountains above Viannou to a beautiful plateau where there’s a lake called Omalou. That picnic was memorable, not least because the forest track that we negotiated to get up there and back almost destroyed my car…

The photo below was taken on Spinalonga, with my sister Jane and her hubby of over fifty years Martin. This was October 2nd 2020. Last week Martin died after a valiant and protracted battle with the big C. My sister has a lot to deal with right now, and we’ll be heading over to the UK just a little later this summer to help her with a lot of the practicalities of sorting her life out.

The one below is of us with Martin when he and Jane were here in Ierapetra with us in October 2020. Despite being a very accomplished photographer himself, Martin was never all that comfortable in front of a camera and found it hard to smile when having his picture taken. So I especially like this one, because he does indeed exhibit the traces of a grin in it…

Last of all, a couple taken at what is surely one of our favourite locations for a taverna, the ever lovely Hiona Restaurant at Palekastro…

You may recognise that one on the left, since it served as the front cover image for my book ‘A Slightly Larger Motley Collection of Greek Oddities,’ published in 2022.

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