When my nieces were small  Mr T and I took them to the zoo for the day.  Our youngest niece was about five-years-old and she loved seeing all the animals.  Each animal we saw was the best and her conversation went like this: I love the bears they’re the best.  Oh no, I really love the penguins, they’re the best.  Oh I loooove the lions and they’re the best.  It’s a leopard.  It’s the best I really love the leopard.  Oh hang on, there’s seals.  No, they’re the best, I really love the seals.  I feel like that every time I visit another Greek island and it’s the best and I love it more than the rest, but I really think I love Spetses the best.  But, I’ve not been to Andros yet and there’s still Paros and so many others to come.  But for now Spetses is the best.

Spetses put on its best clothes  for us with sunshine, blue skies and enough visitors to ensure an adequate number of tavernas were open but quiet enough to feel, once we’d wandered off the main drag, that we may have the island to ourselves.   We’d decided that we were going to try to find the Villa Bourani and thanks to the internet we didn’t have to do any difficult workings out as to where it was.  I knew it was on the other side of the island to the main town but that would still have left about 12kms of coast line to search so I was grateful to Tim Lott for describing where the Villa is.

But good as his description is, the maps we had for Spetses were the equivalent of something scrawled drunkenly on a napkin and they included only the main road going around the island and a couple of tentative lines that appeared to end abruptly.  The bus that would have taken us around to a good starting point for walking won’t be in service until people want to use the beaches later in the year.  We decided that we’d at least start off by trying to find some tracks out of Spetses town and get to to the top of the hills.

 

 

It was purely by chance that we followed a road that ended in a rough track that continued all the way to the top without any walls or gullies that would mean us turning around.   Once we left the town behind we were passing small, ramshackle farms, seemingly put together from remains of older buildings.  Corrugated iron roofs were now being used as walls and pieces of plaster board were tied together with chicken wire to make pens for sheep and goats.  As we passed each of these farms several dogs would bark and then more dogs from further up the track would bark in response.

 

Eventually we left the farms behind and the only noise came from the gulls circling overhead but they must have found something else to interest them and flew away.  Finally, it was just the two of  us walking when we passed through a line of trees to the top of the island.

And there was nothing other than trees, sea and the snow-capped mountains far into the distance.  We walked along the top of the island for several kilometers looking for tracks that would lead down but we had no idea where we were.  From time to time we got views from the main track to the town side of the island so we had a vague idea of where we were on the island but we couldn’t get anything to match up to the feeble map we had.  Now and again we could hear a church bell and our one Magus moment was when some bouzouki music drifted up from one of the hidden houses on the hillside.  Finally we decided that some things are all the better for only knowing about and don’t have to be seen to be believed so we could turn around and go back to watch the carnival in town.  Maybe it is better to stumble across something than to look for it.  For today there would be no tea table waiting for us on the balcony, no overturned music stand or magical tableaux being played out to confuse us.  Or would there?

 

This weekend I’m finally going to visit Spetses and I’m surprised it’s taken me so long because it’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go,  mainly on account of having read The Magus.   I wanted to go when it was cool enough to walk and perhaps find the Villa Bourani and that mystical waiting room that Nicholas was warned about.  Yes, I know it’s fiction but that’s not the point.  I visited Berlin through the eyes of Deighton and Isherwood and if I want to view Spetses through Fowles’ lens then I shall.

Whether or not I can bring myself to read the novel in its entirety is a whole other thing.  It’s the sort of thing that’s best read as an adolescent, searching for the meaning of life and imagining that it’s something that can be found in a novel.  Fowles himself struggled with the novel so much that he wrote it twice although having read both versions (yes, I’m a fan and I was a very perturbed adolescent) he didn’t seem to over-exert himself on the rewrite.   I have a vague memory of picking it up about ten years ago and having the same sort of feelings I would have had if I’d found my teenage poetry.  Not to suggest that The Magus is anything quite as bad as my teenage poetry but there are some nice angsty bits.

It’s been a couple of weeks of revisiting the 1970s because Tinker Tailor was finally released here in Greece.  Flicking through The Magus now embarrasses me slightly whereas Le Carre’s novel seems as valid as ever despite it being dated in every way.  I had some reservations about the film but I always do have problems with films from books because I’m not able to separate the two.  I felt that some of the characters who should have been developed more were ignored at the expense of shots of George Smiley swimming in Hampstead Ponds.  But that said I think the last few scenes of the film are the best thing I’ve seen in a long time despite none of them occurring in the novel .  Anyone who hasn’t yet seen the film and cares about this shouldn’t click on the link.

 

 

 

 

I have no idea what the answer is to the problems here; in fact I don’t think I even know what the question is but I know that one of the answers is not to reduce the minimum wage to less than 600 Euros per month (gross).  The people who took the money aren’t here any more and some of them were never here in the first place. People gambled on Greece defaulting/not defaulting and made more money off the back of a country that was on its knees.  The banking equivalent of ambulance chasing.  Making poor people poorer is not the answer and anyone who thinks that doing that is going to sort out the deficit is bat-shit crazy.

 

I pretend that I don’t make new year resolutions but deep down I do.  At the end of the old year I imagine the time when I’m going to be a better person, I’m not going to waste time, I’m going to update my blog regularly and I’m probably going to learn how to play the piano.  Oh, and I’m definitely going to read Possession by AS Byatt.  And then it’s the 6th of January, I’ve huffed at the man who pushed in front of me at the airport and my reading is mostly from a recipe book and my writing is confined to a shopping list.  Maybe I should go for a weekly resolution or even a daily resolution.  I know!  How about an hour?  Anyone can be a better person and not waste time for an hour.  Can’t they? Hey? Hello?

a recipe for some traditional Greek baking:

Mix a lot of sugar with even more honey and then add some syrup.  Stir in some more sugar and adjust sweetness with honey.  Add sugar or syrup to taste.

Yield: More than you could ever think anyone could eat but it probably won’t be enough

Calories: Don’t even go there.

This is particularly good when accompanied by a comprehensive dental plan and some shares in drugs for diabetes.

Well that was November and I have reinforced that if I say I’m going to do something, then I do it; or perhaps we could call it flogging a dead horse.  For me the best thing about blogging was when I was doing it relatively anonymously and I didn’t know any of the people who were reading it.  Of course, I need to remember that back in that day I was blogging on a platform that had a fantastic group of people using it and we fired each other up and the community element of it made blogging much more fun.  I’ve made some great friends out of that but I don’t want all of them reading all of my stuff all of the time. Perhaps Google + will become something useful although I don’t know.

And I’m not as angry as I was then.  I think some of the best blogging comes out of the worst things.  That’s certainly true for me and I would say that my Swiss blog and one other that I wrote while I was there are probably the best things that I will ever do.

Although I don’t advertise this blog neither do I hide it and anyone who finds it can read it.  That, I think, makes for pretty dull blogging.  I can’t tell you about all the different relationships, the petty feuds, the interesting people and the utter lunatics that I meet.  That for me is the stuff that interests me and I think it’s what interests other people.  I don’t want to write a holiday/travel blog about Greece because I don’t have those talents:  Azure, turquoise, blue, green, deep, shallow sea.  Islands, beaches, tavernas and more pretty views.  Look there’s a white church over there.  Blah and more blah.

Far more interesting, I think, is writing  about the guy  (Russian, I think) who got so fed up of waiting for his souvlaki in our local cafe that he stood around shouting I fucking wait one hour for fucking food, they fucking here and they fucking eating fucking food.  Fucking wrong.  And he kept walking out and the waiters were being reasonable and he was fucking this and fucking that and I couldn’t see because I had my back to it and Mr T and our friend were doing the running commentary.  Although I could hear that he wasn’t happy and that he’d got a more than solid grasp of varieties of using fucking.  How proud his teacher must be.

 

 

Masses of public sector workers going on strike means that huge delays will be suffered at aiports. Schools will be closed and emergency cover only in hospitals.  The courts will shut along with other government offices.  People are planning major demonstrations to protest against the austerity measures and consequent cut in pensions.  That’s the UK by the way but don’t worry, it’s strikes  business as usual in Greece tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Apart from not being very tall, skinny or possessing overly-developed cheekbones, the other thing that prevented me from making a career as a catwalk model is that I’m quite clumsy.  I drop things, trip over my own feet, bump into doorways and I have bruised hips from a lifetime of bumping into tables.  I also have poor hand-eye coordination so I was never good at ball games.  I’ve never worried too much about any of this and have just got on with being a bit less than elegant.

Yesterday I was at my Pilates class at the gym and my instructor was getting really frustrated by my inability to perform a simple maneuver without falling over and losing my balance.  I thought it was hilarious because I really don’t have good balance and I wasn’t too worried if I couldn’t do the exercise and we’d move onto something else.  At the end of the session he asked me if I thought I could be dyspraxic.  No.  I couldn’t be, I’m just clumsy.  I was about to go into a rant about applying labels to people who just do normal things not as well as other people might do them but I couldn’t be bothered because I needed a shower.

(Something that annoys me beyond what is reasonable is when people who aren’t very good at spelling have persuaded themselves that they’re dyslexic.)

 

 

I love the Daily Mail and how it manages to get 1 ounce of truth into a ten ton article.

In case anyone is wondering my carefree weekends haven’t been spent sipping champagne on 65 ft yachts and don’t mention the Maserati and the Volvo.

 

When I was six-years-old I had a teacher called Miss Benzie and she was a saintly both in her love of children and what appeared to be a great love of explaining things to children and encouraging us to continue our own investigations.   I clearly remember her explaining the concept of a collective noun after we had had a story which included a flock of sheep.  Over the following weeks we added more to the list that she kept on the back wall of the classroom along with the lists of shades of colour and names of mountains.   Since then I’ve always enjoyed the idea of collective nouns and was led to this article and then in turn to this. 

I have vague memories of someone doing something with collective nouns back in the 20six days.  There’s quite a collection for bloggers and I quite like an ‘outrage’ of bloggers but, truthfully, I think a ‘yawn’ might be more appropriate.