Probably every year at this time I say the same thing, but then, life goes in cycles whether we like it or not I suppose. Summer is upon us, and it’s come in as it usually does, with a bang. Every year we wake up on one specific day and realize that we’re not going to be cool for another four months or so. That’s ‘cool’ as in temperature-wise of course, because when it comes to ‘cool’ as in laid back, on trend, super-confident and all that stuff, well, it goes without saying…

Here come the outdoor showers, the regular swims, accompanied by iced coffees on the beach, and the sweaty nights. Gardening now has to be done either at the crack of dawn, or during the evening, when the sun’s getting near the western horizon. Summer always makes a smattering of sneak incursions during May, with a few clear warm days gracing the hours of light, hinting at what’s to come, before there’ll be a small lapse into winter again, with maybe a rainstorm, a cooler air-mass drifting across the country, that sort of thing. In fact, this video below was taken while we supped hot coffee on the veranda just one week ago, May 30th, in fact…

On the other hand, this past week we’ve had three swims and seen the temperature climb irrevocably into the thirties during the day, and mid twenties overnight. The photo at the top of this post was taken on Friday June 6th at around midday, on the town beach. Just one week separates the two, but they may as well be months apart. We woke up a couple of days ago, threw open the curtain on the picture window at the foot of our bed and saw a totally cloudless sky, which is pretty much how it’ll be now until well into September, in all probability. It’s one of the principle reasons why folk decide to move over here from the UK I suppose, You can plan things. You don’t run the risk of arranging to eat out, or maybe having friends round for an al fresco meal, only to find the whole thing’s rained off.

The ‘tachydromos’ is at it again. We only get one visit per week in the village anyway, when the ‘postman’ will leave any mail that we’re expecting in the mailboxes beside the road just along from Angla’i’a’s place. I’ve tippexed on the front of ours the names that we’re happy to have deposited in it, and that’s our nextdoor neighbours’ (who’re only here a few weeks each year) and ours. It’s not rocket science. A couple of months ago, after something we’d been waiting for from the UK had taken an inordinately long time to arrive, I opened the mailbox to find it stuffed with letters along with a couple of packages. See, we have this theory that certainly tends to fit the facts, and it’s this: Down at the ELTA office in town they’ll accumulate mail for the village until they decide that it’s worthwhile the postman actually hopping on to his Honda 90 and tootling up here. If they only have a few letters for Makrylia when Friday morning dawns (the official day when they’re supposed to deliver to us), then they’ll shoot them back into the pigeonhole in the main office and wait another week.

That may make life easier for them, but it means that we’re often waiting weeks longer than we ought to for stuff to reach us from overseas, and some of that stuff, believe it or not, is of an urgent nature. A few times this past year or so I’ve resorted to going into the office in town, steeling myself for a long wait, and silently regretting not having brought the complete works of Dickens along to read while I waited in the queue, or maybe a Wilbur Smith, and finally – on getting to the desk – asking if they had any mail for our name at our village, and then, after waiting another few years while the desk clerk yelled to someone in the sorting office behind the scenes to look in the Makrylia pigeonhole, only to find someone else finally emerging with a couple of Healthspan packages (vitamins and herbal stuff) and some letters that had been lurking in there for a fortnight or so, I swear.

Well, the last time this had happened, I’d carried in my hand a clutch of probably six or seven letters for people with foreign names (could have been German, Dutch or any of the Scandinavian languages for all I knew), that I’d found lying in our mailbox up at the village. We’d opened our box one day and found it full, and then discovered that the postman evidently couldn’t be bothered to check if any of those other property owners (absent ones, of course) had their own boxes or not. He’d just shot all the mail for non-Greek named people into our box, leapt on to his trusty moped, and hightailed it on up to Meseleri and Prina. So I took all the letters that were addressed to people I ‘didn’t know from Antonis’ and thrust them back into the hands of the clerk at the office in town. I explained that, if I HAD maybe known these other people, then maybe I’d have been prepared to do the postman’s job for him, but, since I didn’t, and wasn’t about to walk every narrow alley in the village to find out where they lived, since it wasn’t, amazingly, my job, I’d brought back the mail that had nothing to do with us and asked if the postman could perhaps try and remember to check the names written in bold white letters on the front of our mailbox door, before shooting stuff into it.

And I’d done it with kindness and restraint, honest. It never does to get on the wrong side of the Greeks. If you ‘lose it’ with them, you lose their cooperation for ever, even assuming you had some in the first place.

So, after all the foregoing you can imagine how I felt when two days ago, I’d opened our box to again find it stuffed with letters not for us. I’d been into the office anyway earlier in the week and been handed (yet again) some Healthspan packets and some letters that we’d been exercising the patience of Job while awaiting, and here we were, two or three days later, beyond all probabilities, finding some stuff in our box, and some of it was even for us. Things might have been looking up, were it not for the fact that old Pantelis the postman (not his real name) was at it again.

Like I said, life goes in cycles, eh?

Photo time:

Above: Another batch from this year’s sojourn in Sitia.

Above: A selection from both the garden and the town this past week. The butterfly on the wall is, I think, a Cretan Grayling, latin name Hipparchia cretica. I don’t think we’ve ever had one in the garden before. The flippin’ thing would NOT open its wings though, so I couldn’t get a shot of the top side of them. Mind you, according to this website, they never do while resting, interesting.

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