The above shot of Ierapetra’s ‘promenade’ was taken after sundown a couple of evenings ago. The atmosphere at that time of the day is lovely, with people strolling along enjoying the cooler temperatures, locals stopping to catch up with each other, some are having an early evening aperitif, it’s lovely, it really is. And with the temperatures we were having last week, a lot of people were only able to go out at this time of the day anyway. For over a week the daytime temperature reached 38 every single day, and one time (see previous post) the car showed 40 as we were driving home from doing the shopping.

Incidentally, and I know I’ve harped on about this several times before, I still can’t believe how many people seem to think that a thermometer placed in full sun will give them an accurate reading. The other evening I was talking to Niko, a Greek friend and father of three, who’s lived here all his life, and I mentioned that we’d endured 40ºC that day, so he showed me a photo that he’d taken with his phone of a thermometer treading 50.5, a look of eminent smugness on his face. I asked him where the thermometer in the photo was situated, and he replied, “outside.'”

“Yes, but where outside?” I asked him, “Was it in full sun, or the shade?” He eventually conceded that it was in full sun. So, trying to be as tactful as I could, and here was where all those Geography lessons I sat through back in school finally came in handy, I suggested he think about any time when he might have sat in a car during the winter months, when the temperature was maybe 18-19ºC outside, and with the windows closed. I well remember when we used to live in the UK, when it may have even been frosty outside, but the sky was totally clear, having sat in the car and having to open the windows because it was getting too hot in the car. Why is it that people are advised not to leave babies or animals in cars with the windows closed? It’s simple physics, the sunlight will heat the interior of a closed glass environment to a temperature that’s way above what it’s reading outside in the air. So, logic would tell us that a glass thermometer placed in full sunlight will experience the same phenomenon, right? The inside of that glass tube will get way hotter than the mean air temperature outside of that sealed tube. The end result? You won’t get a true reading.

I know, I’m sounding like a know-all, and please forgive me for that, but it’s quite important really. I had British friends back on Rhodes many years ago who told me that their garden had experienced over 30ºC during one day in January, when the actual temperature was around 19-20. I do, I must admit, find it amazing that so many people don’t understand this. At my school, when I was between the ages of eleven and sixteen, we used to have a ‘weather station’ in the school grounds and, during Geography, we’d be sent out to take the measurements of rainfall, wind speed and temperature. That weather station was a white louvred box on legs, and the inside was kept dark. It would give us accurate temperature readings all through the school year. I’ve always remembered that principle about true temperature readings ever since. Thank you Mr. Vickery.

I mean, as if 38ºC in the shade isn’t hot enough anyway. We’ve spent the best part of a week with the house all closed up and in darkness, so that we could keep the temperature indoors to a tolerable level, and it works to a degree, although we’ve still had to resort to using the air-con much of the time. The sea temperature now is around 25ºC, so it’s luxurious to take a dip and revel in the relative coolness. Come September the sea gets so warm that it’s almost not refreshing any more to go in for a swim. Mind you, we still do anyway.

Did I ever tell you that Yvonne-Maria, my wife, is rather averse to technology? She purports to not want to use computers and smartphones, saying that life would be so much simpler without them. She’s right, of course, but you can’t go backwards, can you. Anyway, I’ve taken a long time trying to get her to use her quite new phone lately, with very limited success, I have to concede. Mind you, there is one area in which I’ve succeeded handsomely, and that has to do with a certain app called E-Radio that I installed on her phone. When we’re on the beach she likes to listen to her favorite music, which is what can generally be termed as ‘Laika‘, which is predominantly bouzouki music. It’s very different from Cretan traditional music, since that doesn’t use the bouzouki, but rather the lyra, and every song seems to trundle on for about fifteen minutes, barely changing tempo at all from song to song. Incidentally, if you’ve clicked that link and gone to the Wiki page about ‘Laika’ you’ll note that they seem to insist on spelling it ‘Laiko.’ However, in Greece it’s definitely ‘Laika’ with an ‘a’, and if anyone were in any doubt about that they can use E-Radio to track down Yvonne’s favourite station, which is called Dalkas (pronounced ‘Dal-KAS‘ BTW), and you’ll hear the promo ads telling you the station’s name all the time, and, in the process, it regularly says ‘Mono Laika,’ which translates as ‘Only Laika,” since that’s the music genre that the station is dedicated to playing.

Anyway, I digress, as usual. I showed her a few weeks back, when her tiny transistor radio packed in for the last time, that she could use her phone to listen to Dalkas on the beach to her heart’s delight. Guess what, she now never goes to the beach without it. OK, so she’s still not up to speed with all the social media apps and stuff, and rarely makes a phone call, but at least she’s decided that the phone’s indispensable for one very good reason…

Any progress is better than none at all, right? Here are a few more recent photos…

Above: another from the sea front at just after sundown.

Above; Gra Ligia beach at around 1.00pm last Sunday. Just look at those hordes, eh? We can always get the car under the trees in some very much needed shade when we go there too.

Above: This photo is around 80 years old. It’s taken on a beach near Athens in the 1940’s and shows my late parents-in-law before they were married, in company with others from my mother-in-law’s family and some of my late father-in-law’s fellow soldiers. The guy with the cool shades is Kenneth White, my father-in-law, and the young woman to his immediate left, and our right, is my mother-in law Lela. Next to her is her brother and thus my wife’s Uncle Theodorakis, who played the accordion beautifully, and I was privileged to hear him before he died, during a few magical nights at a waterfront taverna in Kalamos, north of Athens in 1977-78. His wife Vaso is the smiling woman with the headscarf and next to her is my wife’s auntie Effie. I never got to meet my father-in-law’s comrades, of course, but my wife’s family members were all still alive and well and living in Athens during my first few visits there in the late seventies. There are some affectionate anecdotes about them in my first book ‘Feta Compli’ by the way.

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