I was reading a post just yesterday from someone who lives on Crete and he was saying how dreary January was and how it seems to go on forever and oh, how he longed for the spring to come. I can only assume that he lives in the Chania area, because they get a lot worse weather during the wintertime than we do here in Southern Lasithi. Now, I don’t want to start arguments or take issue with anyone, but in the almost twenty years (this coming August will be our 20th anniversary of moving to Greece) that we’ve now lived in the Southern Aegean, we’ve consistently said that a Rhodean/Cretan winter well resembles a UK summer, and I still stick by that comparison by and large.

The post to which I’m referring also bemoaned the fact that the kafeneia were sparsely patronised and the streets were devoid of people, presumably because they were sheltering from the weather, I don’t know. Back in the south of Rhodes, where we spent 14 years, and here on our hillside above Ierapetra, nothing could be further from the truth. On the ‘promenade’ in Ierapetra at around midday on Sundays in January, owing to the fact that the locals are all out for a leisurely stroll along the front, you’re hard-put to find a table to sit down at the Plaz Café, where we frequently find ourselves, along with a couple of friends, late on Sunday mornings, in order to enjoy the winter sunshine, the twinkling surface of the sea and some good people-watching.

Right from the get-go, during our first ever winter in Greece, which was the winter of 2005-6, we’ve fallen in love with this time of the year. You can do some serious DIY, because it’s not so hot that you simply melt and have to take refuge indoors from the fierce sun, which is how things are in June through September here. You can take long rural walks, because it’s not so oppressive out in the sun that three steps along the veranda would send you gasping for a cold beer and the dark shade of the house interior, with the shutters closed. You can sit out on your terrace or veranda at 11.30am and enjoy your morning coffee, whilst studying the Griffon Vultures soaring hundreds of feet right above you. There’s just so much you can do during the winter months here that it makes life a joy, pure and simple. I would never want to wish my life away anyway, but for us January is sublime and the summer months will come soon enough.

Also, the garden at this time of year seems to be much happier. The plants can endure the midday sun without wanting to shrivel up, and many of them are in bloom now, whilst during July they just about cling on to life if watered regularly. So, with that thought, I scooted out into the garden yesterday to take the photos below. All of the photos here were taken late morning yesterday, January 28th…

And, yes, we can scarcely believe it ourselves, but our strawberries (See also photo at top of this post) are fattening up nicely and ripening fast, and thus will be gracing our breakfast muesli with effect from tomorrow morning and onwards!

Also, we have a few lettuce that we shoved into the ground among the pelargoniums recently, and we’re now pulling leaves to make the basis of our lunchtime salads. It’s the first time we’ve had anything edible in the garden since we arrived here in September 2019, when we made futile attempts with lettuce, courgettes and onions, only to give it up as a bad job. Oh, and what about THAT for a poinsettia eh? –

I should add that the poinsettia isn’t ours, I snapped it in someone’s garden down in the town the other day. Can’t claim credit for that one. I did, however take these below, the next batch from the archive…

Above: What about that then? It’s our old garden back on Rhodes, all of which, house and all, was totally destroyed in the fires of ’23.

Above: At To Tsipouradiko Mas restaurant, Patmos, in May 2019. And, finally, below, Santorini, April 2019…

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I’m sure that there will be many ex-pat UK citizens reading this who’ll already know what I’m about to tell you, but for the sake of those who perhaps don’t, I’m going to anyway, because things just got a little easier when it comes to UK government bureaucracy. Yes, I did say UK Government, and not Greek.

We’re now in our twentieth year of living full-time in Greece and, to coin the old chestnut, ‘where have all those years gone? I really don’t know where the time goes.’ Well, I do actually, it goes the same way as all the time that preceded it, and so on.

A UK passport lasts for ten years of course, and thus (I know, you’re probably already ahead of me) we’ve just had to apply for new ones for the second time since becoming permanent residents of Greece. The last time we renewed our UK passports from here was in 2015, and I did it ‘online,’ although I have to say that the expression ‘online’ was pretty misleading when you consider the process that we had to go through back then. Yes, you had to log into the gov.uk website and follow the procedure outlined there for renewing passports while living abroad, but the process was very soon a physical paper chase rather than a completely online experience.

I remember very clearly that one reached a web page where one had to download the application form, print it out, then fill it all in, plus get a passport photo taken, which had to comply with very strict parameters as regards facial expression, background and size of the physical print that had to be submitted along with the form. The form was several pages long, as it had to serve various purposes, only one of which was applying for a renewal of an existing passport. I’d taken a few passport photos myself for friends while living on Rhodes back then, and the photos had been accepted as valid in every case except one. In that particular case our friend had sent off the application (registered mail, of course) to the UK Passport Office, and a week or two later heard back with the comment that the photo was for some reason not acceptable and another one needed to be submitted instead. Fortunately, there was no hurry, or it may have been a tad difficult, not to say embarrassing, for me, since I’d assured our friend that I knew what I was doing, oops.

Anyway, the form needed countersigning by a trustworthy witness, plus the photo needed signing on the back by a professional person of some kind, so we’d got our local doctor down the road in Gennadi to do that for us. After that photographic failure, we’d decided to go to a local photographer’s studio in Arhangelos to get ours done, so as to be doubly sure that the process wouldn’t be de-railed by my having transgressed against the guidelines in some obscure way.

We’d had to send the forms off, along with our old expiring passports and a couple of photos, in an A4 jiffy bag, via registered post. Oh, and as regards payment, I’d had to do that online as soon as I started the process and downloaded the forms. Talk about paying up-front.

So, here we are ten years later, and we needed to go through the whole process all over again, except, we didn’t. Last week I went on to the gov.uk website, fully expecting to have to go get our photos taken (payment involved there too, of course) down in the town, plus I fully expected that we’d then need to make an appointment to see our doctor here in order to get her to sign the photos and countersign the forms etc etc.

Well slap me in the face with a wet fish if things haven’t significantly improved over there in Blighty, me hearties! Now, if you’re an expat living overseas and you are facing the prospect of having to renew your UK passport, take heart, because I’m here to tell you that it’s a damn sight easier now than it was ten years ago. If you’ve already done it recently, OK, take that smug look off your face and go do some gardening or something, because this post is for those who are just coming up to the time when they need to do what we’ve just done and don’t yet know how much easier it’s going to be.

Logging on to the website (gov.uk passport renewals) I just followed the instructions, and the whole form can now be filled out on the website. When you reach the part about submitting your photo, they give you lots of guidelines about how to do it yourself if you want to, although you’re free to get a local studio to do it if you prefer. If you do get a studio to do it, they have instructions too about a code number that they use to submit the photo digitally without printing it out. If you do it yourself, gone are the parameters about size, you simply have to make sure that you get the pose right, the background right, and the facial expression right, then they tell you that you needn’t worry about cropping the shot, because they’ll do it for you. Plus, once you upload your shot, they have an ‘acceptometer‘ dial that shows you the degree of likelihood that your shot will be acceptable. If it falls into the red, then simply try again with another shot. If it’s in the green, you’re good to go.

My own photo (which I succeeded in taking myself using my mobile phone), was OK first time, whereas the one I took of my wife looked a bit iffy, being in the doubtful zone on the meter. So I simply opened the photo in Pixelmator Pro (if you expected me to say Photoshop there, do yourself a favour and check out Pixelmator [also available on the Apple App Store], because it’s a whole lot cheaper and does everything that Photoshop does, and I’m not kidding you either), did some retouching and re-submitted it. Bingo! It was well into the green.

Still expecting to maybe have to print the whole thing out, I got to the final declaration page, where it also stipulates what other documents you may need to supply to make sure that your application is accepted. Guess what, if you’re a resident of Greece then you should by now have your shiny credit-card-sized biometric Residency Permit, right? All that is required, assuming you have that permit, is a colour photocopy of it, popped into a small jiffy bag along with your old passport, sent off registered post, and you’re done. I scanned our permits on my Epson scanner using my laptop. To be doubly sure, I scanned both sides, then printed them out and popped the prints into the envelope with our old passports (separate envelopes BTW, as each application is unique and should not be submitted two [or more] at a time).

Once my documents arrived at the UK Passport Office I received a prompt email informing me of their safe arrival. A couple of days later I received another email telling me that my application had been accepted and that my passport was going to print, and then a day later yet another email arrived telling me that it was now being printed and would be coming back to me via secure courier within the next couple of weeks. They also said that they’d inform me once it had been despatched.

Whatever you say about UK government inefficiency, I have to say that having completed both of our passport renewals with minimum fuss within an hour or so, and having done so from home, and the only minor inconvenience was queueing up at the Elta office to send them off, I’m well impressed with the service. If it’s something you’re contemplating doing some time soon, take heart, it’s a cinch, it really is.

The photo at the top of this post was taken almost ten years ago, when my Dad (bless him) was still with us and he used to worship the ground that Yvonne walked on. Here we were teaching him to say words like ‘parakalo‘ and ‘euharisto.’ Plus, he’d already become a huge fan of iced coffee. The ones below, however, are only just over two years old. I took them in December of 2022 in Agios Nikolaos, after having come across that heron completely by accident…

And, finally, here’s one of my favourites from the beautiful island of Patmos, taken in May of 2019…

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Recently we’ve been hearing sonic booms quite often in the skies above us. I don’t know whether it has anything to do with the conflicts going on further east in the Mediterranean, maybe the Turkish government rattling its sabres again, or whether it’s simply the Greek military conducting exercises way above us, but it’s tended to send my mind back around 50 years. A few times this past couple of weeks our windows have rattled with the ‘boom.’

When I was a much younger man, living in Bath in the West of England, we used to not only hear Concorde conducting test flights above us, but we also would quite often get a pretty good bird’s eye view of her as she passed overhead. I have to say that the memory of seeing that exquisitely beautiful (if not particularly environmentally friendly) passenger aircraft conducting test flights out of Filton and Fairford over West Country skies was always a thrill. When she first began commercial flights we’d hear sonic booms quite often as the aircraft broke the sound barrier whilst heading out across the Atlantic, and we got quite used to it, even though eventually Concorde was banned from cresting the sound barrier whilst still over land to avoid disturbing the residents far below.

Anyway, because of that rather sweet memory, the recent sonic booms haven’t really disturbed me so much as sent me into frequent reflective reveries. Ah, the complex workings of the human mind, eh?

As I mentioned in the previous post, we’ve had a new fence built behind the sun terrace in our ‘lower’ garden, and we asked the guys who did the work to take the old wood from the rotting fence away with them, with the exception of all the ‘slats,’ as I would call them. Although the upright posts were full of dry rot, the horizontal slats were in fairly good shape and we thought that they’d be good fuel for our neighbours’ ‘tzaki,’ or fireplace. Once the carpenters had finished the work and left, I trotted down to Maria and Dimitri’s and knocked the door. Maria answered and I told her about the slats. They were piled up just inside the gate in the lower garden, so if Dimitris was able when he had a moment to peek over the fence and take a look, if he decided that they could use the wood, we’d be only too happy to let them have it. A couple of days later, as we were sipping our coffees on the terrace, enjoying the warm January sunshine (just to rub it in, sorry. See photos below, the first of which shows what the old fence used to look like), we heard Dimitri’s squeaky voice calling as he’d arrive at our front door. 

We called him around to the terrace, and he appeared carrying a large plastic bag full to bursting (as per usual) with fruit and vegetables from their fields. “No,” he told us, “we can’t use the wood, sorry. It’s been treated, and the stain, or varnish [whatever you call it] would make the house smell and, anyway, to be honest we’ve piles of wood from the olive harvest this year, but thanks anyway for the offer.”

It was no problem, we told him, we’d get shot of it ourselves. Now, this was where the fruit and vegetables came in. You only have to offer your neighbours something and, whether they can use it or not, they respond with a return act of kindness, or gratitude if you like. So, as he waved us a cheery goodbye and headed off back to his sheep and goats, we took a peek inside the bag to discover beef tomatoes, Cretan cucumbers, peppers, carrots and some mandarins that were as big as regular oranges. Once again we were overwhelmed with produce. Mental note: Find things to do for the neighbours a little more often…

Above: A selection of photos from our walk down to the reservoir [Bramiana lake] on Friday morning. That sign about no swimming shows just how low the level still is, despite the recent rains.

Mavkos has done a bunk yet again, after making us think he was back for good and getting all affectionate and everything. Haven’t seen him in weeks, but looks like Ginge is getting his feet well under the table now in his stead. In fact Ginge is even more affectionate than Mavkos was, although it’s probably only cupboard love…

The photo at the top of this post was taken yesterday (Sunday 19th) at around 1.05pm as we were walking to the newly reopened taverna just at the end of that building you can see on the right. It’s just beyond the southern end of the fishing harbour and it’s called the Μεζενελο (pronounced ‘Mezenelo’) and it sits just a little back from the beach, but with a superb view of the snowy peaks to the west. Must admit, it’ll very likely be added to our list of favourites, since the staff were lovely, the food excellent and we both ate a good lunch (washed down with a bottle of Retsina, as per usual) for the princely sum of €25. No contest. Oh, and they played traditional (Laika) music, so the beloved was well pleased, even though it was all I could do to stop her getting up to dance (although, she did shimmy her way to the toilets and back again). When we got there the place was still quite empty. By the time we left, it was packed…

Just one from the archive this time; this one’s from May of 2019, and it’s Taverna Ta Kavourakia on Kampos Beach, Patmos…

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I recently read a very good blog post about Crete during the winter time (click here to see for yourself). The only thing that surprised me was the temperatures that Mr. Kretaner (not sure if that’s his real name) says he experiences during the winter months, as they seemed to be regularly 4-5ºC below what we experience here in the Ierapetra area. Mind you, on close re-reading I seem to have missed this comment first time around, which probably accounts for it; he says, and I quote: “Are there any regions of Crete that remain relatively warm throughout the winter? The southern coast tends to be warmer in winter. I’m particularly fond of spots like Plakias or Ierapetra. They’re sheltered from northern winds and get more sunshine.” That will account for it then, I see on further research that he lives in Elounda, towards the north of the island.

It’s all been happening this past week or so. Stelios, the master carpenter, was here for two days with his trusty helper Niko, and they were constructing a new section of fence behind our sun terrace. The previous fencing was becoming riddled with dry rot and the way it had been constructed allowed people from above and behind (where there’s a sort of ‘mound’ of ground that’s not used for very much) to peep through the slats at us. Not that there’s anyone up there very often, but it has been known and, since that’s the area where we have our outdoor shower and we tend to use it several times a day in high summer, it wasn’t all that ideal really. So now we have a brand new fence, this time white rather than stained wood, and it’s made that area totally private. We’re well chuffed with the result…

We’ve been trying to get a few walks in but, up until about a week ago the weather had been very changeable and you could risk getting a kilometre or so from home only to get rained on pretty heavily, which kind of thwarted our attempts at getting some good, healthy, brisk walking done. For the past few days though, it’s been ruddy marvellous, with temperatures cresting the 20-21ºC mark a few times, ideal weather, too, for a spot of outdoor work, which was why Stelios was able to schedule in the construction of the fence. It’s heartrending to watch the fires in L.A. and almost as distressing to see the cold temperatures being experience in the UK and much of Northern Europe, where the minus temperatures have meant that travel has been severely affected, according to the TV news. I continue to wonder at why the majority of houses in the US seem to be made of wood though.

The other day, when we were managing to do a short walk, we came home passing Manoli’s house, he who is close enough to ninety years of age as to be able to feel its breath. Well, there he was, stood outside his front door, small mirror hanging on the house wall, having a shave with one of those cut throat razors. You know the type, they must have been the ones used by Sweeney Todd I suppose, and one slip with one of those blades and it would be curtains, know what I mean?

Manolis was stood with his back to us, walking frame between himself and the wall, dragging the blade cross his wizened cheeks. The mirror was so badly stained as to resemble a map of the local rural area, but he was getting on with the job anyway. We didn’t hail him, even though it went against the grain, because we both had visions of being responsible for our elderly neighbour having slit his own throat in surprise. We wouldn’t want that on our conscience, so we’ll hopefully catch up with him, and his smooth-as-silk cheeks, when we drop into Angla’i’a and Giorgo’s for coffee in the next few days. Manolis has an uncanny knack of being able to drop by at the same time, and then manoeuvring himself into one of Angla’i’a’s patio chairs.

The snow on the mountain peaks is truly magnificent now, and we’ve been expressing our awe as we’ve walked around the village, from the top of which we can see some of them, way across twenty kilometres of undulating valley floor to the perimeter mountains of the Lasithi plateau way above Kalamafka.

Photos coming up, some of which are from the archive, some bang up to date…

Above: The local village sign that was erected a couple of years ago when Angla’i’a was still village mayor. Only this past few months, though, has it been painted like this, and we reckon it’s a pretty good job all in all.

Above: This little lot were all taken in the village this past week or so, at varying times of the day.

Above: Taken at 11.45am last Tuesday at Kougioumoutzakis bakery/café, although we always call it ‘Elenis’ for obvious reasons! The cat was curled up on the chair next to me, so I absentmindedly began to stroke its head. It didn’t take long for him to decide that he wanted more of this, so he climbed across on to my lap and demanded I pamper him some more, so I, always the softy when it comes to friendly puddytats, duly obliged and made a new friend for life. Sitting just out of shot was Yakobos, Eleni’s son (we think) who serves behind the counter and at table too. He said the cat wasn’t theirs, but lived over the way (across a fairly busy road junction) and he was in the habit of arriving at the café most mornings in the hope of getting a spot of pampering, so he came up trumps on Tuesday. He didn’t do so well in the titbits stakes though, because we were eating kourabiedies, which I don’t think appeal to cats all that much. After an enjoyable 15 minutes chat with Yakobo, we went to settle the bill (two freddos for €5, can’t knock that) and found that Eleni hadn’t put the kourabiedes on the tab. When I pointed this out, she said that Yakobos had treated us to those. He must have taken to us when he learned that we lived in the same village that his mum and grandparents came from. It’s not what you know, eh?

Incidentally, the photo at the top of this post was taken on Patmos during April 2018, when we spent three weeks there. I really shouldn’t be sooo naughty when it comes to what I eat, but a slice of strawberry cheesecake was simply begging me to eat it that particular day, and I couldn’t deny it the privilege. Finally, this one below was taken the other day at the Plaz café here in Ierapetra…

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I suppose it was always going to happen sooner or later. You know how I’ve often mentioned that it’s a constant source of amusement to me that in every Greek kitchen cupboard or drawer somewhere in a Greek home you’ll find a blood pressure monitor, right? And I’ve often banged on about how in the UK I don’t think I ever knew anyone who had one in their home, whereas just about everyone over here does. I’ve talked before about the fact that, in just about every Greek kitchen that I’ve ever visited, there’s at least one drawer stacked so full of drugs that you could open a pharmacy, yeah? I’ve observed that I’ve known groups of Greek women who get together for coffee in someone’s home, and for a topic of discussion, they get out the blood pressure monitor and all take their blood pressure as something that’s kind of accepted as normal. It’s frequently done as though it were the most natural thing in the world over coffee and kourabiedes or melomakarona, maybe even croissants (Incidentally, the Greeks seem to be mad for croissants, as one of their major TV ads – fronted by a top flight basketball player trying to assert that your life just wouldn’t be complete without a chocolate croissant from a major confectionary/bakery brand pre-packed in colourful foil in your sports bag or school tuck box, I kid you not, will confirm).

Well, it’s rather embarrassing to have to admit that we bought ourselves a blood pressure monitor this week. In our defence though, it was on the advice of a doctor in the local hospital. Yvonne’s had a few weird things going on lately (no need to go into the details) and it prompted us to drop by the hospital in town a few days ago, just to get it checked out. Even though we’re both very ‘alternative’ when it comes to treating ailments and general health maintenance, there’s no substitute for at the very least getting whatever is ailing you diagnosed by the medical profession, now, is there? Anyway, she ended up spending 6 hours in the outpatients’ department and they gave her a full roadworthiness test.

At this point I must spring aggressively to the defence of the Greek system. I’ve read comments by a lot of expats, who were either here on vacation or had moved over here, to the effect that the Greek medical care system wasn’t up to much. Well I must strongly disagree. On two previous occasions since moving here to the Ierapetra area we’ve had cause to take my wife to the hospital after she’d either felt something odd was going on inside, or had fallen and cracked her shoulder blade. On each occasion the local medical team has been so thorough as to check out every part of her with great diligence. They do scans, take x-rays, blood tests, and all kinds of examinations that I’m sure would not have been done were she in the UK. By the time they’ve finished with you, you walk out of there with a huge white envelope containing all kinds of reports, together with your x-rays, and, as long as you’re insured (which residents here ought to be, and that involves having what’s called an AMKA [Αριθμός Μητρώου Κοινωνικής Ασφάλισης] number) you don’t shell out a bean, not a penny. In the UK we’d say ‘she’s had a thorough MOT’ [Ministry of Transport vehicle roadworthiness test).

This visit, as I said, involved her staying for 6 hours, during which they actually took her blood three times, sent her along a couple of corridors to the lab to get it tested and then, after she’d returned, learnt the results through their internal computer system. She told me that, apart from one doctor (whom we shall just call ‘Mr. Grumpy’) all the staff were kindness itself, and were working their flaming socks off, the place was that busy, and this during Christmas week too. Critics, leave off, OK?

When I eventually returned to pick her up (owing to how much time she was there, I’d had to go out and get on with some errands we needed doing in the town area) she told me that the diagnosis was nothing to worry about other than that her blood pressure was a bit high. The female doctor who kind of ‘signed her off,’ as it were, said that she ought to take her blood pressure twice a day for a while, record the readings and see it if came down at all, since they understood that part of the reason for her high reading whilst she was in there were down to her anxiety at having to be in the hospital in the first place. She said that this doctor expressed surprise that we didn’t already have a blood pressure monitor in the house, ‘Odd these foreigners, aren’t they,’ she probably thought.

And thus, my friends, however the process played out, we became even more like the locals this past few days, since we’ve now got a blood pressure monitor in the home. Tell you what, however else we become even more assimilated, we’re definitely not going down the ‘lace doily on top of every piece of furniture’ route, all right? Good, I’m glad we’ve established that.

Here are some photos; some recent, some from my archive. Oh, firstly, the one at the top of this post was taken during our very enjoyable Boxing Day walk along the length of Pachi Ammos Bay. The rest of the shots I took then are in this first gallery below…

If you study the first one in that series above carefully, you’ll see that behind that rather unattractive see-through curtain fence, there’s an archaeological site of an ancient villa. There are a couple of major sites a little further away from the village, the most notable of which is Gournia, but this one here doesn’t even get a mention anywhere that I can find on line. That’s the thing about Greece in general, there is just so much archaeology, that they have an embarrassment of riches here.

Above: from April 2016, during a visit to Paros.

Above: Peeping through the doorway of the renovated fortress at the harbour end of Ierapetra seafront. It’s still not reopened to the public after more that 5 years of working on it. I’m dying to get inside again, since the last time we were able to do so was when we visited Ierapetra from Rhodes during November 2015, four years before we moved here.

Above: Traditional kafeneio in the square on Patmos, May 2019.

Both of the above: During a walk up the lane towards Meseleri yesterday afternoon at around 3.50pm. Above Yvonne’s left hand is the village of Kalamafka. Above her right, and the photo on the right as well, was the first view we got this winter of the mountain we call the ‘kourabieda’ with its first dusting of snow. It’ll look like that for a few months now, if things go as normal. It’s one of the peaks that surround the Lasithi Plateau.

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