June has come in with a bang. We’re being hit with a heatwave that is bringing us August temperature in the first week of June. As I type this the shutters are all closed and we’re only venturing outside when absolutely necessary. I hope it’s not a harbinger of the entire summer before us. The thermometer in the shade on the veranda reads 40ºC and, since there’s virtually no wind, it feels like you’re stepping into the oven when you go out the front door. I can only imagine with a large degree of horror what those people in India must be going through right now, where the reports are that temperatures are nearer to 50ºC than they are to 40.

Since we’re not even taking our iced coffees out on the terrace at the moment, any social intercourse with our neighbours is currently severely limited. Mind you, we always know that Evangelia, who’s (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before) nearer to 90 than she is to 80 these days, is OK. See, she has a very distinctive sneeze. When we first heard it a few years ago we thought that it was either some species of bird that we weren’t familiar with, or maybe a small child being chastised in a corporal manner by its parent. Most days she sneezes at least once or twice and, if we don’t have any radio or music playing, we hear it over here. When it happens we look at each other with a knowing glance and without words communicate the fact that she’s OK, she’s ‘about’ as it were. Only a few days ago, when we actually had a slight breeze and the heatwave hadn’t yet hit us, she’d reminded us that we would always be welcome to go over to her house for a Greek coffee at around 5.00pm any day. Her daily programme never changes, and ours doesn’t a great deal either. The only problem is, we usually sleep from around 4.00pm until 5.30, or even later, and she goes for her siesta at 12 midday. She’s up and about again while we’re sipping our Earl Grey after lunch and thinking about going to bed.

Still, one day it’ll all come together. We’d like to sit with her again, since its been probably a couple of years since the last time, and whenever we’re in the lower garden, just across the steep lane from her tiny alleyway, she tends to have the knack of appearing in order to exchange a few neighbourly words.

I was trudging around Dingly Dell the other day, since I’d failed to drop off to sleep during the afternoon, and I came across one of the local goat herds. You don’t have to see them to know that they’re in the vicinity, because the clanging of their bells (I wonder if they ever get driven mad by those things hanging permanently around their necks) signals that they’re approaching, or that you’re approaching them. On this particular occasion, as they came into view, I also heard the telltale sound of the goatherd whistling and calling to them, usually to get them to go in a specific direction. I stopped in order to ascertain where the goatherd was, because, if he wanted the goats to pass anywhere near my position, I might well have proven to be a nuisance. Goats here will generally avoid any humans with whom they’re not familiar, and so, if I come into their field of vision, they’ll change direction so as not to allow me to get within about ten metres of them. I stood stock still as a couple of goats emerged from the undergrowth onto the lane a little way ahead of me, and scanning the hillside I could see the goatherd a couple of hundred metres across the valley.

I decided to retrace my steps a couple of hundred metres or so, so as to not impede the goatherd’s work. Within minutes the bells had receded to a distant tinkle and the sound of a moped could be heard approaching along the very uneven and occasionally steep path that I was following. Soon, rounding the corner in front of me came the Honda 90 in question, and riding it was none other than Manolis, our new village mayor. On seeing me he skidded to a halt in order to exchange a few neighbourly words, but I couldn’t help noticing that both of his hands were heavily bandaged up, with only the tips of his fingers showing. After both of us had discerned that the other was OK, I couldn’t help but point to his hands and ask what had happened to them.

“Oh, nothing,” he told me.

“Nothing?” I replied.

“Well, I had a little accident with some revma.”

Now, in case you’re not familiar with the Greek word ‘revma‘ it literally means ‘flow,’ but is invariably a reference to mains electricity. The voltage here in Greece is similar to that in the UK, it’s about 220v, whereas in the UK it’s 240. It’s so similar that, as long as you have the correct adapter, any device bought in the UK will work just fine over here, and vice versa. If we have a power cut, or – to use the current in vogue expression – outage (See my dystopian short story of the same name, which I rather neatly chose to call ‘Outage.’ Oh yes, I know how to keep in with the trendy youth), people will simply say, “We’ve lost revma.” or “We don’t have any revma.”

So, for Manolis to dismiss the cause of his injuries as ‘nothing’ was to minimise the fact that he’d evidently been tinkering around with some mains electricity and gone and got his hands burnt in the process. Ouch. I asked him if it still hurt, and received a vigorous nod of the head to affirm that it did. The nod was accompanied by a knowing smile too, bless him. Now, my Dad (and here’s another pretext for using the term ‘bless him‘) had been an electrical engineer and knew all too well about the dangers of fiddling around with live cables and fuse boxes and the like. So, armed with the knowledge that my Dad had imparted to me when I was a lad, I knew what could well have happened in Manoli’s case. Judging by the bandages (which he still sports a week or so later) he had a close brush with death, to be honest.

Nevertheless, he restarted the machine, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘I’ve experienced worse,’ gave me a wave and was off down the track in a cloud of yellow dust. They’re a tough breed these Greek villagers.

Just before I post some recent photos of the garden and village, I am so excited to report that we’ve now had two sightings of barn owls within fifty metres or so of the house this past week or so. Barn owls are unmistakable, as they look almost completely white and somewhat ghostly from underneath while flying and they also don’t make a sound. They fly ‘silent,’ which is one way in which they can catch their prey unprepared. One was perched on an electricity post and took off as we got near to it while doing one of our hikes around the village on a sleepless night during the small hours. The other was sitting on the veranda wall of our neighbour’s house, surveying the olive grove below, and took off as I came within a few metres of it, not actually aware of its presence until it took flight. We hear Scops Owls every night here these days, but they tend to nest in tree cavities, of which there’s an abundant supply on these olive tree clad slopes. Barn owls have the propensity to make use of derelict structures too, and will prefer an open window or roof space on a disused building more often than not. This was why we never saw them in the valley where we used to live on Rhodes, even though we’d often seen them in and around nearby villages.

Here in the village there is an abundant supply of disused buildings, which is sad in one way, but rather fortuitous when it comes to barn owls. It’s not very likely that I’ll ever get the chance to photograph one, but if I do, it’ll sure as eggs is eggs get posted on the blog here. Here are some photos. Mainly the garden, but also in the village…

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