Winter’s drawing on, and the smell of woodsmoke is again to be detected across the village as the sun sinks behind the hills far to our west. We’re once again thankful that our house is not of traditional construction and has cavity walls with excellent insulation in the gaps. Greek houses are, by and large, single-skin brick, concrete and render, meaning that, once the evenings become a little chillier, the condensation begins to run down the interior walls, and thus, come the spring, there is often a mass of black mould to be cleaned off, often with the use of quite strong-smelling chemicals. Completely by chance, as it happens, both our rented home back on Rhodes and this one were built using a similar construction method, the interior walls being ‘dry-lining’ and neither house suffers any condensation on the walls at all. Phew, eh?

It’s November 20th as I type this, and we haven’t as yet had any need to use any heating in the evenings. The nights of late have seen temperatures of around 14-16 and the daytime temperatures are a very pleasant 20-24 when the sun’s shining, which it usually is. Houses built the traditional way, however, are already seeing smoke rising from their chimneys and cowls after dark. Outside of most of our neighbours’ homes there are now stockpiles of logs for the winter months.

There has been some rain, and at times it’s been heavy, but it hasn’t lasted for long and the locals, although they’ve begun the olive harvest in earnest, are still complaining that we need a great deal more for the olives to fatten up. Mainland Greece and the Ionian, however, have seen a great deal of rain this past couple of weeks, and I’ve read that the price of olive oil is finally expected to come down before much longer, owing to a better harvest this year in general. The increase in olive oil prices has been eye-wateringly huge this past year or so. A 5 litre can of extra virgin about 18 months ago cost around €20. Right now it’s hovering between around €35 and €75, depending in where you go searching for it. When you consider that it’s a staple of the diet here in Greece, for those who don’t have their own trees to harvest, it’s a major inflationary worry when it comes to the household budget.

Even our source dried up a few months ago. We’re in the habit of getting ours from our neighbours Maria and Dimitri, but they ran out back in September. Dimitri assured me that, once they’d harvested this autumn, I’d be able to get more from him, but in the interim I had to buy some from some people we know down in the town, and unfortunately we paid €7.00 a kilo, gulp. Usually Dimitri lets us have 5 litres for €20. I’ve tried to get him to take more, but he’s been very reluctant to accept it, although I did get him to take €25 from me the last time. After all, he’s a farmer, it’s his living.

A couple of weeks ago the local paper and a couple of Greek language Facebook pages were encouraging folk to resort to prayer in order for it to rain. I must say that I think the almighty has a few more important things on his mind right now (especially when you consider that one of the world’s ‘greatest’ nations has just elected a thick-brained, climate-change denying megalomaniac as their President, and another already has a manic, paranoid dictator at the helm), but such is the simplicity of the faith of many subjective believers. Now that it’s rained a couple of times you can be sure that some of them are nipping off to church to light a candle and thank him upstairs for answering their prayers. I kind of hesitate to ask them, but – if it was simply down to him – why was he so late in the first place, then?

Must say I still think it incredible that the nations of Europe haven’t implemented what they all agreed to quite a few years ago, and that was to call a halt to this outdated idea of putting the clocks back every autumn. I really don’t like it getting dark quite so early, even though over here we have quite a bit more daylight than they do in the UK at this time of the year. The only plus point, as I’ve probably mentioned before, is that we can switch on our mock-‘tsaki’ and watch the pseudo-flames, which I must say are incredibly realistic (see video at the top of this post). Even without switching on the heat function, it just makes the room feel cosier once all the blinds are closed for the night.

Photo time then…

Above: What do you reckon, then? Won’t win any prizes for bricklaying, but I’m rather proud of the new and slightly smaller raised bed I’m constructing to go with the larger one I built during the pandemic. It will, needless to say, be rendered and painted white in due course. Hopefully we’ll get a few herbs to grow in it.

Above: About 1.00pm on the beach on the 19th. Sorry about the bod, folks, don’t get too excited, girls.

Above: Three shots from our evening walk today. The first is yet another old door that would have a few stories to tell if it could talk. The same applies to the middle shot, which I took through a broken door glass. That cottage has been left exactly as it was when the last occupant died a couple of years ago. I find it so melancholic to study the objects in that room and wonder about the lives that were lived there. The surviving relatives, as is so often the case in Greece, have just left the place closed up and haven’t as yet done anything to work towards either renovating or selling the property on. The third shot shows both Whitesock and Groucho, studying us as we arrive back at our rear garden gate after a half-hour walk.

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