Above: That’s the lower olive tree in our lower garden, and the gate giving access to the lane

I think this must be a particularly good year for cicadas. Not only are they a deafening cacophony that makes my wife shout at them to ‘shut up’ while we’re having our morning coffee, much to my amusement, but they’re everywhere, it seems. All along our veranda they’re sitting on the wooden framework. When I’ve got the sail rolled up owing to the Meltemi (well, it’s not actually a sail, because it’s a 3m square rectangle), that can blow pretty strongly at this time of the year, there are usually a few cicadas hanging from the underside, the part that’s in the shade. Plus, during the night, if I walk down to the lower olive tree in our lower garden, sometimes it’s like a shower of kamikaze cicadas, as they seem to fly ‘drunk,’ as it were in the night, and often can be heard hitting the stoney ground like little missiles. I don’t mind them, because, even though they can be as big as your thumb, they’re completely harmless. I find them quite cute, to be honest, and when Yvonne tells them to ‘SHUT UP, I CAN’T hear myself THINK!’, I remark that the sound of the cicadas is one of those background noises that remind us that we’re in Greece and we ought to be grateful.

She often has the last laugh, though, because if you’ve ever walked along a shady lane in Greece during the cicada season, you’ll have noticed that they have an uncanny knack of detecting your approach. All the cicadas within about ten feet of you stop their chirping as you go by. Then, once you’ve reached a safe distance, they start up again. Of, course, when we’re on the veranda lazing on our loungers sipping our freddo espressos, they are fooled because we’re not actually moving, and thus the ones in the nearest olive tree, which is so close that it adds shade to that which we already enjoy from the ‘sail,’ just carry on regardless, and they can be really loud. That’s with the emphasis on the word ‘really.’ So Yvonne’s exclamation, amazingly enough, sometimes works, and the ones in our immediate vicinity obey her and shut up for a while. Or do you think that maybe she’s just got dark powers and communes with nature or something? The jury’s out.

We hadn’t seen our good neighbours Angla’i’a and Giorgo for quite a few months. I don’t know where the time goes, I really don’t. Anyway, as it happens we’d only just mentioned to each other that it was time we dropped into Angla’i’a’s kitchen to catch up, plus cadge an elliniko and hopefully get a couple of homemade pastries along with it, when she called me on the mobile. She was up at the house just above ours on the other side of the lane. It’s usually empty, as the current owners live in Athens but, as it’s the home they inherited down through the family, they usually decamp here to the village for a couple of weeks during August, when we‘re probably enjoying temperatures in the refreshing mid thirties here, whilst in the city it’ll touch 40 or more. 

Angla’i’a was in the house cleaning up in preparation for the owners’ arrival on Sunday, when she found that the electricity wouldn’t switch on. As you may or may not know, here in Greece all domestic homes are powered by what my electrical engineer Dad used to call ‘three-phase,’ whereas in the UK domestic electricity is on a ‘single-phase,’ system. Every home has a fuse box set into the wall somewhere in the house, and the door to that box is usually glass-fronted, so you can see the little red lights glowing during the evening. If you peer into the box you’ll see a row (or several rows) of fuses, all of which have a trip switch. The main fuse for the whole house also has a trip, which is often slightly bigger and can be red (although not always) instead of black, which all the lesser ones are. Next to the main trip is a safety fuse with its own trip too, and it also has a little black button for resetting, because, owing to the tendency that the electricity supply here in Greece often has to experience current surges, that safety trip can indeed flip off without warning. One press of the reset button, and you can flip it back into the ‘on’ position, no harm done. 

So, Angla’i’a had entered the house and thrown the main switch, which resulted in the safety trip immediately flipping to the ‘off’ position, thus disabling the power to the whole house. At a loss as to what to do, she’d decided to call me (Why me I’ve no idea. Maybe I give the impression that I’m good at this kind of thing, a false impression it would be then). I ran over there to see if it was anything obvious, although what might be ‘obvious’ about a line or two of trip switches that all look basically the same was in serious doubt. I flipped the mains switch to the ‘off’ position, then pressed the reset on the main safety fuse, flipped its lever to the ‘on’ position, then threw the mains switch back to ‘on.’ Bonk! The safety trip immediately flipped to ‘off.’ We had a good look around the place to see if they was any wiring that looked like it had shorted, or if any appliances may have been left plugged in that had seen better days and might need replacing, but there was nothing obvious. In fact the place is generally in very good repair.

The best I could do was to offer to call a friend from town who’s qualified electrician. It was a Friday lunchtime too, so we stood a fighting chance that he’d be able to come over and fix the problem. I called Panteli. Who said that yes, he could come up, so I sent him Angla’i’a’s number and left them to communicate with each other over when he might be able to come.

It was the next morning when we fulfilled our promise to drop by at Angla’i’a and Giorgo’s for a coffee. Once we were comfortably seated at their kitchen table, I asked her if Panteli had been able to fix the problem. “Oh yes,” she replied, “It was only a fuse needed. He fixed it in five minutes flat.” I’d kind of suspected that this would be the case, but the kind of fuse we’re talking about here wasn’t the type that your average bloke carries in his back pocket, but rather the kind that all professional ‘sparks’ would definitely have in their van.

What made us smile, though, was the fact that once Panteli had turned up, Angla’i’a had realised that she knew him, as he was the grandson of her cousin. She was soon explaining all the family connections involved, and which 90+ year old ya-yas or pappous were related to whom, that kind of stuff. If you’ve ever talked to a village resident in Greece about the complicated network of family connections that exists everywhere here, then you also know that we soon lost all hope of following the threads of who was related to whom. It didn’t matter, all’s well that ends well, eh?

As per usual, photo time…

Above: Some late afternoon photos I took in the village this past few days. They were actually shot at around 6.00pm. I don’t think Juliet would have stood much chance of survival if she’d had to rely on that balustrade on that balcony in the last photo, eh?

Above: Umm, I wonder if you can guess what time of the year it is then…

Above: A small corner kafeneio on the edge of the town. The locals are masters of exploiting every piece of usable space, aren’t’ they.

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