The photo above was taken almost one year ago, on December 20th (the eve of the shortest day) 2023. Our house is just visible as one of those with the terracotta roofs lower left of centre. This was around 11.00am. These next few below were taken during an afternoon walk we did on November 27th this year, between 3.00pm and 3.30pm. Thus the one above and those below are separated by around 11 months.

This more recent group was taken from a different perspective and a little farther from the village, so that we could show the frequent weather phenomenon that we get around here. Those heavy threatening-looking clouds in the distance are hanging over the Lasithi Plateau, which is just behind those mountains. It doesn’t look all that far away, but to get there by road would take about an hour, owing to the convoluted route that you’d have to take. The common denominator in all of them is that they include the village in-shot somewhere. That phenomenon that I refer to is in fact something similar to what we used to witness when we lived in Kiotari on Rhodes. It’s brought about by the fact that a little further inland from us the land rises sharply to a much higher altitude (and it’s higher here than it was on Rhodes), thus making the water in the atmosphere condense and produce those clouds. Often when the wind’s in the North, those clouds will hang heavily over the mountains behind us and to the West and, as they get blown downward towards the village, they break up, and we can watch them dispersing to nothing before they ever get far enough South to block out the sun.

The photos well illustrate that the Lasithi Plateau has its very own micro-climate, and it usually means that in the winter months they’re often immersed in fog, which is actually a low blanket of cloud, and often experience snow, whilst we here are enjoying sunshine and temperatures around the 20ºC mark.

We had a run of around ten days at the end of November into December when we had quite a lot of showers, some of them heavy. The farmers and villagers were delighted, of course, but it’s still nowhere near enough. But then, you could have a deluge that lasts a week and still some would say, “Oh I don’t know. We need a lot more than this really” (as I reach for my snorkel). Still, the garden’s looking a lot better for it and we haven’t needed to water for a while. This past few days, though, have actually been truly lovely, the kinds of days that would grace any self-respecting British summer, I’d say. The strawberries that we planted in the new bed that I constructed out of bricks with a cement render are actually flowering!

The smell of woodsmoke drifts across the village as the evenings draw upon us now. People (as I’ve banged on about often enough before) in traditionally-built houses, whose walls are single skin brick, with cement render outside and a layer of plaster added on the inside, need some form of heating in the evenings, even though so far this winter the temperature in the village hasn’t dropped below about 10 and is usually somewhere between 12 and 15 overnight. We usually put on a little heating, in the form of thermostatically controlled convector heaters, some time around 7.00pm, as there’s no need for heating during the daylight hours at all. These past few days we have been blessed with some really lovely warm sunshine and, as we enjoyed our coffee, we watched today, fascinated, as the mousmoula [loquat] tree below our veranda was alive with an assortment of wildlife. I’m only sorry I don’t have the equipment for taking zoomed photos to show you, but we used our mini-binoculars to study Painted Lady and Red Admiral butterflies gorging on the nectar in the myriad white flowers that are now adorning the tree, even while much of last year’s fruit is also still hanging there, all shrivelled and rotting.

That old, rotting fruit is nevertheless good for a host of insects, which in turn attracts some beautiful and dainty warblers into the tree’s foliage, and we watch as they busily flit from branch to branch, enjoying their local fast-food joint with relish. I’m pretty sure that they are warblers, but as to which type I confess I don’t have much of a clue. There are Leaf Warblers, Willow Warblers, Greenish Warblers and Wood Warblers for starters, and they all look pretty similar to me. Who cares anyway? They’re a delight to watch, that’s what counts.

Here are a few more recent photos, with comments underneath where appropriate…

Above: The town beach at 11.30am on November 29th. We both had a swim, but I have to admit that you do need to stay in the water a while in order to get over the initial shock of coldness. The water’s not actually that cold, but it can feel pretty chilly when you first get in. If you swim around a while though, it soon begins to feel a lot more comfortable. The sea temperature is around 19ºC apparently. When you consider that a couple of months ago it was 26ºC, then it’s understandable that it feels a mite cooler now.

Above: The back of the beach viewed through the ‘pergola’ belonging to the Island Café/bar.

Above: There’s a new café that’s opened in the square in Ierapetra. We’re pretty sure that it’s the same folks who used to run the ‘Pickup’ in Dimokratias, because this one opened the same week that the other one closed, plus we know the young guy who shoots all over town delivering coffees on his electric scooter, and we’ve seen him in there a few times. Two freddo espressos and two bottles of water for €5, very impressive!

Actually, in that photo too you can see some of the Christmas decorations that are now festooning the town. That store with the massive baubles has really pushed the boat out, and they look much more imposing when you see them up close. I do get a bit tired of so-called experts among the ex-pat community who comment on social media when someone posts a question about Christmas in Greece, saying that the Greeks don’t go much on Christmas, as they make much, much more of Greek Easter. I beg to differ. OK, probably a few decades ago that may have been true, and, yes, Easter is still top of the list for excesses, but the voracious appetite that the commercial world has for ever more profit has seen to it that Christmas has grown exponentially in Greece this past few decades, fact.

If you watch Greek TV these days, you’d see that from some time in late October the commercials become ever more tuned to the Christmas indulgences. They’re all there, the perfume ads, the ads for alcoholic drinks (primarily expensive spirits of course, after all, Christmas is for the kids, right?), the brown goods ads (your partner surely needs a brand new coffee machine or maybe an air-fryer, right?). There’s one particular chain of stores in Greece, it’s called Jumbo, that runs a particularly expensive and extravagant daily ad campaign on the telly right up until Dec 25th and beyond. The Jumbo ads count down the days one by one, and they go on for an age. They’re testament to all that’s wrong with the celebration really. They stress the materialistic theme of this winter extravaganza to the extreme, and they well demonstrate, as do the inflatable Santas you can see suspended from people’s balconies around the villages and towns, that Christmas is well and truly well observed in modern Greece all right.

Just returning to Jumbo for a moment, if you’ve ever been in one of their stores, you can’t fail to have noticed that probably half of the store is kind of Habitat with tat, whilst the other half is given over to indulging children to the enth degree. There are aisles twice as high as a man stacked up with plastic and packaging fit to give an environmentalist a nervous breakdown, believe me. I can’t walk along those ‘corridors’ without marvelling at where all that plastic and cellophane is going to go once it leaves the store. How many kids these days don’t get fed up with their new plastic toy in pretty short order? Where’s all that plastic going to be in a few weeks time? You’ll be seeing it piled up beside the dumpsters in the streets, cluttering up ditches beside rural roads, no doubt too becoming a large percentage of the landfill that still goes on apace, sadly, here to quite a large extent.

I know, I sound very negative, don’t I? Sorry about that, but there it is. I have to admit to finding Jumbo quite useful for some home products too, so here’s Mr. Hypocrisy talking I suppose.

Oh, I nearly forgot. We went to the mill to pick up our ‘huge’ harvest of olive oil. Like I said, they told us it would be a couple of days, but the very next day called to say that it was ready. We drove back to the mill, wondering all the while how much our little tree in the upper garden would have netted us in oil. Of course, we were under no illusions about how our 33kg of olives had been processed. They’d very likely have been shoved through the process by being included with a much larger haul. It made complete sense, and that was even how our five sacks had been processed back on Rhodes all those years ago. We reckoned on around 7 or 8 kilos, and we were soon to find out.

As I walked back into the building, and saw great drums and metal cans stacked head high, all awaiting collection, I looked around for the modest stainless steel vat that we’d left here for the purpose of having our oil poured straight into it. It’s got a tap in the bottom, so that we can draw oil as and when we need back home in the kitchen. I couldn’t see it right away, so I went to the office, knocked and went inside. My friend the big tall grey haired gruff chap who’d helped us the previous day saw me and waved for me to wait while he finished a phone conversation that he was having. Once he’d shoved his mobile on to the desk, among a wad of disorganised (well, that’s how it looked, but he probably knew where everything was I suppose) paperwork, he got up and said, “OK, come with me.”

So, following, I went with him a full twenty feet from the office door and there, looking incredibly small amongst all the piled up massive receptacles all full of freshly pressed oil, was our little stainless steel ‘bin,’ sitting on the floor and how it hadn’t been kicked over by this time I’ll never know. Nevertheless, he signalled for me to pick it up and go, and made as if to return to the office.

Now, in normal circumstances, when people take pallet loads of olives to the mill in sacks, the usual deal is that they allow the mill to keep, say 3%, of their yield in oil as payment for the job. The mill then sells that oil on directly to its regular customers, thus making the money they need in order to function. For the mill to keep a percentage of our little haul would have been a bit difficult, but I felt the need to suggest I pay them for turning our olives into oil at any rate, so I tapped him on the sleeve as he was starting to walk away.

“Hold on,” I said, “How much do I owe you?“

That same bemused smile appeared on his bristly chin as I’d seen the previous day when he’d first clapped eyes on our mammoth harvest. Through his grin, he said to me, “Forget it. it’s only a piddling amount anyway. You go and enjoy your oil! Bye!” and he was off.

What a gent, eh? We drove home through some drizzling rain well satisfied that our couple of days work of extracting the olives from the branches of our tree had paid us a small dividend. Once we got home I was able to weigh the oil, and we reckon we’ve netted about 7 kilos. It’ll hardly feed the five thousand but, when you consider how much that little lot would cost (and it’s extra, extra virgin, after all) in the local supermarket, it’s paid for a full tank of petrol, or a week and a half’s shopping, so that’s not bad is it. We reckon it’s anywhere between €60-80 worth – for free!

Finally, I went out for a walk around ‘Dingly Dell’ just before sunset this evening. I took these two as I descended the pathway back into the village at around 5.00pm…

•

Click HERE to go to my Amazon Author Page, where you can browse and purchase all of my written works.