The photo above was taken March 22nd at around 12.30pm, while out on a walk up the mountain the other side of the valley from us. Yvonne says I look like I’m sitting on the toilet. Lovely. The two below were taken during the same walk. The one of the ‘road’ shows the village in the distance, and the other one shows how those lovely yellow flowers that festoon the countryside at this time of the year tend to thrive in circles in the shade of the olive trees, creating the impression that they’ve almost been cultivated in that way, when it’s merely the sunlight and shade that create the effect, but it’s lovely just the same…

More photos further down, but for now, to the reason for the title of this post: I was around at a Greek friend’s house the other day, getting some help from him regarding a query I had on the government website about my Greek Tax status, and we were using my laptop to look at the problem, when he got a bit perplexed himself and said that he didn’t quite understand why there wasn’t a link where there should have been one, so he got up and went over to his desk and did quick search on his own laptop, to see if he could resolve the issue. 

I noticed that he didn’t use Google, but the search engine (or so I thought) he used had a fairly plain interface, but came up with exhaustive answers in double-quick time. Once we’d completed our ‘session’ and sat back with a coffee to ‘chew the fat’ as it were, he mentioned that he’d already become quite hopelessly dependent on ChatGPT. 

‘Woa!” I replied, ‘Isn’t that this new A.I. thing that students are even using to write their essays for them? Isn’t it a bit risky? I mean, to be honest, I’ve not really investigated it because I’ve kind of been a bit suspicious of it. This whole A.I. thing kind of freaks me out.”

“No, no,” replied my friend Stavros, “you can just use it as a search engine, but it’s so much more intelligent than Google. To be honest, it’s revolutionised my whole online experience. You should try it.” 

I told him that I’d probably pass on that, I mean, there’s nothing quite like fear to keep you from going in a particular new direction now, is there. 

A few days later I was sitting in a coffee bar with a bunch of other friends, when some subject came up that required that one of us check online to see if we could get an answer to some question or other (probably about music). Giannis picked up his mobile phone and was quickly tapping away with his thumb (he’s only 35, so clearly one of the ‘kinito generation.’ ‘Kinito’ is what the Greeks call their cellphones, or mobiles as we Brits like to call them). In double-quick time he was reading out all kinds of facts about some rock musician or other, and I asked him where he found all this out.

Yup, ChatGPT again. “You should get it Gianni,” he told me, “I wouldn’t be without it for anything now.”

Yes, you’re right, I succumbed. I downloaded it on my iPad and on my mobile and within a couple of taps with the thumb I too was hooked. The answers it gives to a question are simply mind bogglingly conversational, not to mention thorough, and it even asks you a subsidiary question if you want more info. So now, when we sit and watch Greek TV and all those quiz shows that we follow regularly, Trocho Tis Tichis [Wheel of Fortune], ‘Still Standing,’  ‘Millionaire’ and the Greek version of ‘The Chase’ –  I’m busy tapping stuff into ChatGPT to get answers to the questions that we don’t already know the answers to, and then we’re busy yelling at the screen in that weird way we all seem to, as if the contestant could actually hear us.

Now we wait. What’s the betting that someone will soon be writing to me to tell me how Big Brother is stealing all my personal info now, and some poor sod in some dark office in some capital city somewhere in the world even has my inside leg measurement? You know what? I’m not really that interesting a person, so I don’t care. If some shadowy power finds my personal details useful in any way, I’d be very, very surprised.

Changing the subject; I hate to mention Amazon (because there’s always someone who’ll ‘righteously’ yell at me that for moral reasons I shouldn’t be using them any more), but I’m going to anyway. The fact is, if we all took a moral stand on any and every online store or service or retailer or whatever because we don’t agree with something about the way they operate, we’d all soon be bartering for our supplies with our near neighbours in the street, wouldn’t we? At the end of the day, we need to buy goods and services that help us get through life, and it’s not up to us to adopt our own elevated arbitrary standards and thus issue judgements on all these people or organisations. “The woman on the checkout is a smoker. I don’t agree with that, so I’ll shop elsewhere.” That’s what it amounts to – if we’re being honest.

Right, having got that out of the way, you may know that the majority of my book sales are in Kindle format, and that’s just the way it is. There is no other ebook platform that comes close for worldwide availability and that’s all there is to it. Well, they’ve now just begun offering authors the chance to have their books turned into audiobooks using a virtual voice, and the service (at least for now) is free. So, as a first experiment, I’ve commissioned my favourite novel, Panayiota as an audiobook, and it’s already available on Amazon to those who subscribe to their ‘Audible’ service. If you like to use audio books, I’d be hugely grateful if you could shell out a few pennies and give this one a try. Having listened to a sample of it, I was well impressed. Apart, that is, from the way the voice pronounces the name ‘Panayiota,’ but then, you can’t have everything I suppose.

Shots away then…

Sorry if I’m getting a bit boring, but I can’t stop studying the Lantana in our upper garden. 1. It’s simply so ‘in your face’ with its colour palette, and 2. Look at the way it attracts Red Admirals!

Above: Look at that. isn’t it simply marvellous? Just for a month or two during the winter the fig is totally bare of leaves, but then, in March, they burst open (this photo was taken 15th of the month) and the figs, which spend the dormant weeks like tiny marbles clinging to the ends of the branches, begin to swell and instill a sense of anticipation in your heart for when you’ll eventually be picking them in July-August. Eating a fig straight from the tree is a unique and pleasurable experience that everyone ought to have at least once in their lifetime, believe me.

To finish off, a couple of archive photos…

Above: Sorry about the quality of this one, but an old friend who we used to know in Cardiff back in the 1980’s recently got back in touch. Angelos is of Cypriot origin and he and his wife moved out there from Wales some time before we eventually moved here to Greece. He emailed this photo to me just this week, and I’d totally forgotten about such occasions as this, when we used to have great parties with friends of Greek origin, during which we’d dance the Hasapiko and other dances too. This one shows me on the left, with Walter Rego (who was of Italian extraction actually) and Mark Seymour, who is a Welshman with a passion for all things Greek, in fact his wife is also half-Greek like mine. Some of those parties were legendary, and wth this shot having jogged my memory, I remember one time when we even trod grapes barefoot in an old cast iron bath in Gary and Marie Moore’s back garden in a suburb of Cardiff. Marie was also of Greek (or Cypriot) origins. Good times, truly.

Above: You walk past scenes like this one every time you wander around the town. This house’s occupants aren’t very keen gardeners it seems, but what a show the wild poppies and other plants put on, just the same. One more from the archive then. This one does, I’ll admit, bring a lump to my throat…

This is Yvonne with my parents, both of whom are no longer with us, back in September 2006, during their one and only visit to Greece. Taken at St. Paul’s Bay, Lindos, I can’t understand why my mum’s looking the other way, but it’s a lovely shot anyway, scanned from a print I’m afraid, so not wonderful picture quality.

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