Sunday lunch

I enjoy long and leisurely Sunday Lunches; they have always been rather special to me.  For all the years during which I lived at home with my parents Sunday was the only day of the week on which we ate the main meal of the day together and at lunchtime.  It was always a feast, invariably of roast meat and vegetables preceded by soup and  followed by a 'pudding' which may have been anything from apple pie with cream to treacle pudding with custard but which always was good.  Later, when I had a young family of my own I enjoyed, when possible, Sunday lunches amongst friends and their families at one of the excellent county hostelries that nestled in that pleasantly bucolic triangle of Kent, marked by Canterbury, Sandwich and Hythe, in which I lived at that time.  These days, on summer Sundays I can usually be found at Maria's Taverna, Zapi.  I have been going there for many years now and although through the years there have been many changes, Maria's is still very much what it was when I first discovered the place; a simple, very informal, family run taverna directly on the beach.  In those early days of my acquaintance with the place there would be as many, if not more, boats pulled up on the beach or bobbing in shallow water as there were vehicles in what passed as a car park.  Venturing down the narrow, deeply rutted un-mettled mountain track that served as Zapi's road access was not for the faint-hearted.  The wise walked (Indeed, the very wise still walk!), rode down on their donkeys or came by sea.  The route has not altered but the road is now mettled; the final few kilometres were asphalted during last winter.  The first stretch of the road to be mettled, that nearest to the main road from which it branches, was competed several years ago and is now showing signs of deterioration; in all, and including that of last winter, there were four further sessions, over half a dozen or more years, of extending the tarmac surface!  This is quite normal here.  At sometime during the road improvements Zapi was, for the first time, linked to the national electricity grid.  The economics of supplying a hamlet of but few dwellings  with mains electricity and seven kilometres of good road  escape me but maybe these infrastructural improvements may eventually encourage the more self-interested among the well-heeled to do what they have elsewhere; to clear the beautiful wild scrub and grub up olive groves to make way for their palatial, tasteless 'holiday homes', thereby rewarding the state with their singularly material return for which its financial advisors must hope.

During the German occupation, not the present civilian one, the 1940s military occupation, Zapi served as an entry and exit gate for allied military personnel who either had business in Greece, organising and advising terrorist bands,  or who had become accidentally trapped here.  Many years ago I met an old man at a party who had been a Zapi resident during the war and who had hidden four British airmen in his house for an entire year before they were eventually taken by submarine to Alexandria.  The submarines could get in close enough to rendezvous with one of the small inshore fishing boats.  My informant has since died as must have most, if not all, of his contemporaries; sadly their potentially fascinating stories will have gone with them.

What did he want of me?

As I strolled home after lunch yesterday I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was being followed.  I turned to check and there he was; tall and dark and close enough to be touching me.  I asked him what he wanted of me but got no reply so continued on.  With silent step the fellow remained with me all afternoon, sometimes venturing from behind to stroll beside me , oddly, only to my right, never to my left.  Occasionally, after rounding a sharp bend in the road, he would suddenly appear directly in front of me, menacing, as if trying to block my path.  When that happened I did my best to stamp on him but he always seemed to manage to be one step ahead of me.  Eventually, as the sun sank below the mountain, I managed to shake him off.  It was an altogether most unsettling experience.

Material disquietude

I have here a 'Sony Walkman' radio and a 'Sony Walkman' compact disc
player. These I link to a pair of powerful 12v speakers to
satisfactorily serve my want of audio-entertainment. Last week the
jack-plug that connects these elements, and is necessarily frequently
transferred from radio to player and vice-versa, revolted; internal
wires within the tiny factory-sealed unit became fractured. A major
disaster; no music, no news!
'Wind', an internet service provider, provide my a slow but generally
adequate internet connection. Last week it failed. When I tried to
connect I could get no more than an error message. I telephoned 'Wind'
to report my problem and was told that the service had been suspended
because the last two monthly accounts had not been paid. I argued that
because I had set up a direct debit to settle my accounts as the fell
due this could not be so. The voice on the other end of the phone
confirmed that was indeed correct but, nonetheless, no money had
transferred from my bank; perhaps I ought to phone them to find out why.
My bank is not easy to telephone. Almost entirely automated, disembodied
voices offer seemingly endless choices of 'options' which do not include
'difficulties with Greek internet service providers'. Eventually I
managed to speak to a barely less robotic 'Customer Advisor' who advised
me that he could not help me; I would have to speak to 'Wind'! Next week
I shall travel to the nearest 'Wind' office at Kalamata to endeavour to
pay my outstanding accounts and to have my service restored. Practically
all cafés in the resort villages near to my home offer free wi-fi
internet connection but the nearest of these is a half-hour drive away.
I have become used, and to a degree dependent, on having a connection at
all times; another major disaster!
Last Thursday evening, as I was driving home, the rear nearside spring
of my trusty machine, a venerable Susuki jeep, suddenly and with a
dead-waking bang, snapped. I drove at walking speed to my garage where
Yanni, who for ten years now has looked after my machine, told me that
he could probably effect a repair by Tuesday. Normally I would have been
happy to walk anywhere I needed to go, far from being a hardship,
walking hereabouts in our usually benign climate is a great pleasure,
but I had staying with me a daughter and three grand-children who are
not used to having to walk a couple of hours or so to reach a beach and
another similar time to return home. I hired a car. A new spring and
four days car-hire; a major economic disaster!
Reflecting on my difficult week I realise that the stress and
disquietude caused by my major disasters all resulted from my
materialism. I was stressed and irritated because I have all these
material trappings. I am sure that there is a wonderful life to be
enjoyed without a personal vehicle, a computer (I have three here!),
cell-phone (I have many here!), camera (Three!), private internet
connection, radio (Four plus others built into in telephones and MP3
players!), GPS and so on and on and on. All of these things are
wonderfully clever gadgets but their life-enhancing qualities are
shallow and quite out of proportion to their capacity to induce stress
when, having become dependent upon them, they cease to function as they
are expected. To read Francis Chichester on astro-navigation and dead
reckoning or Frankl on Gothic architecture or Synge on the wheel-less
Aran Isles is to understand the extent of what can, and has been,
achieved by human beings with only the simplest of tools. Knowledge,
surely, is the foundation of a good life; knowledge including that of
how to live a contented life with only a minimum of material clutter.
Perhaps my difficult week has set me on that road but somehow I rather
doubt it.

It's all over for another year

Here in Greece the last weekend of August marks the end of summer. On
the following Monday car parks in seaside resorts which had
for weeks past been packed with visitors' cars quite suddenly revert to dusty patches of land and and harbours where elegant yachts, had moored cheek by jowl with local fishing boats, revert to being sheltered sweeps of deep blue sea, their purpose marked in
the case of the car parks by just a few locals' vehicles and in the
harbours by a handful of fishing boats.
As if responding to this exodus the weather has changed, equally
suddenly; a week ago a few clouds appeared in the sky and temperatures
dropped a degree or two but the clouds soon evaporated and the
temperature returned to blood-heat or above for much of the day; night
temperatures were, as is usual in the summer, around ten degrees less
than those of the day.
On the last evening of August, I drove my visiting daughter and her
children home from the beach at Methoni under gathering towers of cloud;
cumulus, some dark, portending rain. At home we dined outside under the
canopy of the generations-old Carob tree that is our summer dining room
but as the evening wore on the breeze strengthened to make the evening
unusually chilly. I was surprised to wake the following morning to a
cloudless dawn and to realise that the night had remained dry but it was
into a different morning that I moved from the house, a morning that
even after sunrise felt fresh and clear and through which blew a strong
and blustery breeze; for the first time since it was installed in June
the marble of the work-surface on which I prepare my early morning
coffee felt cold to my touch.
On the forth of September I am typing in a café‚ adjacent to the beach.
My grand-son is sleeping in a push-chair at my side, his mother and
sisters are swimming. It is a fine, clear, summery afternoon but I know
that summer, sizzling summer, is over. Through something less than the
past twenty-four hours, edges, distinctions between solid, liquid and
gas; sea and sky, sea and land, land and sky have become razor sharp.
During high summer there is little colour here, little to distinguish
the shadowless pale pastel blue of sea and sky from the of the pale
grey-greens of foliated land and the buff and dun fawn of bare rock.
Today's colours are clean, clearly defined, intense; there is nothing
remotely pastel toned about the sea, it is strong turquoise blue close
by darkening to ultramarine towards a very positive horizon which
separates it clearly from a clean pale blue sky.
Beyond the shelter of the headland the wind, occasional strong gusts of
which are making the sun shade awning above me rumble like thunder,
flecks the dark (some might have said 'wine dark') sea with myriad
'white-horses' or 'sheep' as they call them here.
It is very pleasantly comfortable, temperatures are already settled at
ten degrees or so lower than they were a week or so back and soon,
perhaps within a day or two, it will rain; short-lived but violent and
extremely dramatic end-of-summer storms will come to clean and refresh
the parched and dusty land. A few remaining holiday makers, particularly
those from Northern Europe, will be disappointed but those of us who
have been here and seen no rain for months will be rejoicing at the
prospect of some refreshing downpours and a comfortably cool verdant
autumn.

To any pejorative, rather than constructive, critics who may choose to read my ramblings.

Consider this:
"I am self contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with indifference."
Dickens, Little Dorrit

On Chesil Beach

Arnold Bockin: Isle of the Dead *

My grand-daughter, who had been staying here with me, left last Monday abandoning on the table a copy of  'On Chesil Beach', by Ian McEwan.  Finding it there on Tuesday morning I picked it up and, over my morning coffee, I began to read it.  Before I rose from the table I had finished reading all of its 166 pages.  It is a tragic tale beautifully written.  In less able, or more salacious hands several passages essential to the story could easily have been narrated sensationally but McEwan handles his story to invoke emotions of tenderness and understanding rather than eroticism.  I enjoyed reading 'On Chesil Beach'.  In a way it left me feeling much as I did when I had finished reading William Trevor's,  'The Story of Lucy Gault'.
*Oh yes, despite the principal protagonists surviving to the end of the story, there is a connection!

Summer's Passing

Things are changing; until this morning I had seen no clouds here for months; erratic zephyrs of cool breeze have been springing, quite suddenly, from every direction rattling bone-dry leaves on hot stone terraces; early mornings glisten now with sparkling dews; ripening fruits - wild pear, pomegranate and luscious prickly pear glow in shades of deep yellow, orange and mahogany red; grapes cut and laid in thick, deep-purple carpets turn the late summer sun into currants (or is it the sun that turns grapes into currants?); dessert grapes no longer able to contain the pressure of the over-sweet juices within their skins split and are gorged upon by wasps.

All these are portents of summer passing into autumn, harbinger of dark winter.

Cue for a poem!   How about this from Yahia Lababidi who sounds as though he might have done more than a little cloud watching?

Clouds

to find the origin,
trace back the manifestations.
Tao

Between being and non-being
barely there
these sails of water, ice, air -

Indifferent drifters, wandering
high on freedom
of the homeless

Restlessly swithering
like ghosts, slithering through substance
in puffs and wisps

 















Lending an enchanting or ominous air
luminous or casting shadows,
ambivalent filters of reality

Bequeathing wreaths, or
modesty veils to great natural beauties
like mountain peaks

Sometimes simply hanging there
airborne abstract art
in open air

Suspended animation
continually contorting:
great sky whales, now, horse drawn carriages

unpinpointable thought forms,
punctuating the endless sentence of the sky.