Getting all reflective/Do I have to spell it out?

Friday November 8th, 5.07pm just below the village.

The first story below is from a couple of weeks ago, as I was musing about life here in the village:

It’s early evening, and only the softest of breezes is caressing our faces as our neighbour Maria sits across the way on her balcony, head bent towards her sewing. She’s evidently repairing some garment or other and her concentration on what she’s doing is complete. Her mother, Evangelia, is feeding the chickens in their pen just across the metre or so of pathway from her kitchen door. Just a few days ago we were passing the time of day with Maria and asking how Evangelia was doing, since we hadn’t seen her pottering about lately as much as she used to.

Maria is worried about her mother. Maria is about sixty, but still works every season, doing long hard days at a hotel up in Elounda, where she stays overnight for days on end sometimes, owing to the shifts that she works and the fact that it’s a 25 minute drive to get home. Evangelia is in her late eighties and convinced that she has something serious wrong with her. She’s beginning to face up to her mortality, truth be told, and it’s not a welcome thought to entertain. Maria tells us that they’ve taken her for some examinations and the doctors say that there’s nothing of concern to worry about, but Evangelia thinks otherwise. She thinks she may have brain cancer or something. Is this what happens to you when you get to that age? I don’t know, but Maria’s at a loss as to how to comfort her mother. The chickens clucked in the background as we talked, and Maria asked if their sounds bother us at all.

Bother us? A few chickens? We live in a village of only around 100 inhabitants, most of the time the only sounds we hear are of the Griffon Vultures circling the crag, or the buzzards in the valley below, the occasional squawk of a crow. We hear the goat and sheep bells from way across the valley, and the only appreciable noise pollution we experience here is when one or two of the youths who live close by come hairing up the valley on their 50cc mopeds, baffles having been removed from their exhausts in an attempt to make their rides sound more sporty than they really are. I can hardly criticise. Those boys are full of respect whenever they see us, and when I was sixteen, about their age, I had a Lambretta Li150 and I’d done exactly the same with my exhaust pipe too. I thought that the throaty roar would make it go faster and that other youths would look to me with more respect, but all I was probably doing was irritating people of slightly more mature years.

Actually, I assured Maria that I love hearing her mother’s chickens, because when I was growing up, between the ages of around 18 months and ten years of age, my family had lived in a small village around six miles outside of Bath, and our next-door neighbours, the Biggs’, used to keep chickens too. When I sit on our terrace here in our modest little house on Crete sipping coffee of a morning, if I close my eyes when those chickens cluck and scratch around, I can be transported back to the Tunley of the 1950’s with consummate ease.

We sympathised with Maria as she expressed her worries about her beloved mum, who, despite having spent her entire life without having gone more than 10 kilometres from the village, still wanted to live, still wanted to carry on her daily routine, even though it was becoming tougher of late to keep it up, what with sweeping the path outside her door, cooking every day, often for her daughter upstairs, plus for one of her other children, Adonis, one of two sons (both now in their sixties) whom she dotes on, and washing, preparing vegetables, and even slaughtering and plucking a chicken now and then when it’s deemed necessary.

The other Maria, she who lives below us along with her son Dimitri, has recently given up full-time work, and is now working full-time at home. Every time we pass her door and stop for a few words of neighbourly chat, she expresses a feeling of guilt over not having asked us down for a coffee, yet she’s always on the go. She, like our mutual neighbour Evangelia, cooks every day for Dimitri and often her other sons or nephews who all work together running their farm, flocks and herds. She’s always washing clothes or mopping down her veranda, while her laundry flaps in the breeze from the balcony above. She has a daughter who works and has a toddler, so she is to be seen most days pulling up outside her mother’s house to leave the child with its delighted grandmother for a few hours.

Sometimes Dimitri’s brother or cousin will leave their pickup outside Maria’s house and, although we can’t actually see it from our veranda, we can hear when maybe they have a tiny lamb in the back for some reason or other. The bleating prompts us to wander down and take a look, and usually we’re rewarded with that ‘aah bless’ moment when we see the tiny creature, slightly anxious and evidently wondering what’s going on. They seldom leave any animal there for long, but while there, we usually like to go down and take a peek if we’re at home.

There’s something deeply calming about living in a place like this. We never, ever let a day go by without expressing our appreciation for just how life has turned out for us. I’ve probably said this before, but if anyone had told me just a few decades ago that my life would turn out like this I’d have said they needed some serious therapy. Yet here we are, Next year marks our 20th anniversary of living on a Greek island, and we’ve lived on two in that time.

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The Greeks can be amazingly creative when it comes to transliterating English words into the Greek alphabet. Recently, on ‘Trocho tis tychis‘ (Wheel of Fortune) there have been two separate rounds when the clue was “in the same band.” Now, what amused me was the fact that both bands in question were British and hailed from 50 years ago, when the contestants were still a couple of decades away from even being born yet, so how they were supposed to know these names was a bit of a mystery to start with. Anyway, I thought I’d show you the two rounds in question and see if you can work out who the musicians are and consequently what bands we’re talking about here. If you can’t work it out, to put you out of your misery I’ll be placing the answer on my Facebook page once this post has gone live.

Have a look. The first shot shows three members of a rock band and the second shows four:

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This bloke Minas has a lot to answer for. He’s apparently the patron saint of Heraklion. Now, we live around an hour and a quarter from Heraklion and tend to go there two or three times a year, when we need to buy stuff that it’s simply not possible to get in Ierapetra. Sometimes you can get stuff in Ierapetra that you’ll find in Heraklion, but there’s a much larger choice if you go to the city, plus they have a branch of Praktiker, which is a bit like B&Q Depot in the UK. Praktiker sells just about everything, like the Wallmart stores in the USA. The trip from our house to Heraklion takes about an hour and a quarter, so, since we were in the city on Sunday for something else, we decided this time to find a modest little AirBnB to stay in, so that we could hit the stores early on Monday morning.

So far, so good. Now, when we used to live in Rhodes we got caught out a couple of times in the early years when we’d driven all the way to town (which also took us a good hour) only to find that unbeknown to us, there was some kind of bank holiday or religious observance going on and all the flaming stores were closed. Talk about frustrating. Anyway, as a result of this I decided reluctantly to allow the calendar on my laptop to display all the Greek bank holidays (and there are plenty of ’em!), so that we could avoid making the journey, again for nothing. So, this past weekend, OK, it was Remembrance weekend and Monday was the actual day, November 11th. Yes we knew that, but here in Greece it’s not a holiday when all the businesses and stores are closed. So we were fairly confident that, when we got into the town on Monday morning, we’d be able to accomplish some serious retail therapy.

We spent a really cosy night in a lovely compact and bijou little studio about fifteen minutes walk out of the town centre, and it was a snip at €37 for the night. Parking was easy and we knew that we’d be able to leave the car there while going into the town in the morning. The apartment was one of three called the Cocomelo. On Monday morning we got up, checked out and the sun was shining brightly and only a light breeze was blowing as we began walking into the town. The first ten minutes was fine, until we passed a large supermarket that was, for some inexplicable reason, closed and its car park empty. We looked at each other perplexed. Why would a supermarket (one of a large chain in Crete) be closed on a normal Monday morning? After that we began noticing more and more premises that ought to be open and yet weren’t. The only businesses that were all open and doing a brisk trade were the coffee shops.

Of course the beloved’s first reaction was to suggest that I had in some way been mistaken about the date of some Greek festival or bank holiday or other. I had to stress in no uncertain terms that I’d double checked the calendar on my MacBook Pro several times (can one double check something several times?) and there was categorically no national holiday on Monday November 11th. The last one had been Ochi Day on October 28th and the next would be Polytechneio on the 17th. The Greek calendar is peppered with observances where everything closes and there’ll be marches in the streets, religious folk carrying icons this way and that, even soot being thrown around (at least it was in Arhangelos on Rhodes during Tsiknopempti in March) and so on. Most of these involve the stores being closed for the day and very often they’ll do what they do in the UK and attach the celebration to a Monday, so as to extend the weekend a little.

The odd thing was, as we finally got into town, it was to our immense dismay to find that all the stores were closed. Apart from the coffee shops, nothing was open for business. Talk about irritating. And it’s all down to this bloke Minas. It seems that this particular ‘holiday’ is unique to Heraklion. That’s why it didn’t figure on the calendar, since it doesn’t apply to anywhere else in Greece, not even to other towns on Crete. Grrrr. So, apart from a coffee and a bite, we couldn’t do anything else but drive home. I’ll tell you something, never again are we going to plan a visit to Heraklion on a flippin’ Monday.

I think I’ll cheer myself up with some recent photos…