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The village is quite quiet right now, owing to the weather. It’s OK, it’s good, but this past couple of days its been ‘staying indoors’ weather, rather than the ‘tarrying outside’ kind. The local radio station and the local newspapers (we follow them on Facebook, as you do) are all saying the same, and with some degree of rejoicing, and it is that “winter is finally upon us, and it is welcome.”

Why, for a couple of nights it’s even dropped below 10ºC overnight, which is positively chilly. There has now been a period of several days when the weather has been, as the forecasters on TV call it, ‘astatos,’ meaning basically, ‘unsettled’ (literally, ‘fickle’). There has been cloud, rain and sunshine in equal measure. Those with crops, and the farmers in general, plus anyone who has olive trees as well, these are all much happier now that we’ve seen some rain, as December was virtually a drought in these parts. Fortunately, we haven’t seen any of that damaging torrential rain that we had a year ago last October, and which many parts of the world have experienced this past couple of months. No, our rain, thankfully, has so far been good solid ground-replenishing rain that the plants have enjoyed feeling on their foliage.

The local authority was only saying a week ago that if we didn’t get some decent rains soon, there would be a serious problem with the water supply in Ierapetra. I’m no expert, and I could probably be shot down in flames about this, but when I look at the ‘development’ that’s going on everywhere, not just here, but wherever you look in the so-called ‘developed’ countries, there never seems to me to be sufficient thought given to how all the new homes, factories, agricultural installations, hotels etc are going to be supplied with water. We hear that desalination plants are simply not efficient enough and too expensive, and this is why very few are being built. Yet, the forward-thinking people of the tiny island of Halki, accessible mainly from Rhodes, installed one a few years ago and have never looked back (see this post on my previous Rhodes blog).

Anyway, for now at least, it seems that the locals are happy and many have smiles on their faces, because the need for food production and drinking water far exceeds the enjoyment of perpetuel clear blue skies, which we always know are coming in the not too distant future to be with us for several months yet again.

And here’s the latest batch of photos…