The following takes place between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m… Events happen in real time...
Actually you’re lucky to be getting this at all. I have spent the last few weeks doing very little apart from watching 24 on DVD, (that brilliant US drama/adventure series about CTU in Los Angeles that you’ve probably all seen years ago but which has only recently made it to Symi) but here we go:
I am awake, I can hear the new clock in the front room, it’s ticking and I hate ticking clocks when I am trying to sleep. Vow to take the battery out later and try to get back to sleep. But the bells start, new bells I’ve not heard before. We’re coming up to Easter and it seems like several churches have put in new peels (or recordings thereof) in preparation. I can see light around the shutters and it’s cold, the wind is also up as I hear it rumble around the roof. I get up, go to the sitting room and put the fire on. The cat wants in so I let him and he runs straight for the kitchen where he tucks in to dog food; the kettle goes on and by the time I’ve braved a shower it has boiled and coffee is ready.
I sit in front of the fire clutching coffee and the cat sits in front of the TV hiccupping. He’s eaten too quickly but not learned, he heads back to the kitchen for more of the same. He’s sulking because I am paying attention to the early morning TV and not to him. What’s on the box at this time of day?
The STAR channel is showing the weather: rain, storms and snow in the north, it is March after all. MEGA has the usual early morning discussion programme (it’s a singer with a secret today) and on NET we have ‘first words’ with an around the table, heated debate about traffic in Athens. They also have a pile of newspapers to sift through and you can hardly see the presenters behind it. They take a break from congestion discussion to show us the front pages and read the headlines for us, just in case we can’t manage it ourselves; how thoughtful. We start with the most important paper and headline of the day and it’s a sports paper with some football news, so NET has its priorities right then. I flick over…
ET3 is showing a Turkish soap opera, because that’s what we all want to see at 6.30 in the morning. But it really is too early for angst, trauma and subtitles so I move on. ALPHA presents us with ‘good morning’ and what looks like Celebrity Squares. A lot of programmes do this: they have people in to discuss an issue, or ‘feed’ them in from another studio and arrange the screens around the main presenter, so you get five or six people staring out at you from their little boxes. Then a question is asked and everyone talks at once. I have no idea what’s going on today but one lady in Athens is shouting very loudly at another one in Thessalonica who has the ability to deliver The Iliad in its entirety without actually having to draw breath. (I wonder why they need the live studio feeds at all, if these two stood on the studio roofs and carried on they’d still be able to hear each other across the Sporades.) Ah ha! I understood what the debate/discussion/verbal brawling is about: 122 buses are on strike today. Just the buses you understand, the drivers are quite happy to go to work.
Meanwhile on ET1 we have figure skating. Of course.
ALTER has its regular ‘good morning with Terrence’ show. He is also wading through the front pages but this time they are real news stories, well, they are all to do with politics at any rate. ANT1 (is there and ANT2 I wonder?) has more around the table discussions and on this channel we are discussing stolen electricity. I can’t be bothered to wait around for the denouement and discover who ran off with pockets full of something you can’t actually see so I call in on the good old BBC World.
Which as usual is full of doom and gloom and death and destruction in the Middle East. So I move past them to places I don’t usually go on my TV. There are some other channels I tuned in once and never looked. They are in the higher numbers where people don’t normally go…
The Magic Channel isn’t about pulling rabbits out of you underwear but has a variety of shows, today there’s a travel kind of programme and we’re looking at summer in the Cyclades, which is a welcome break from striking busses, stolen power and insurgence. Rai Uno (Italian TV) has a helpful European Weather forecast going on: London 8, Rhodes 18, ha, ha and yippee! I am just about to try the two or sometimes three Turkish channels we have (depending on the weather) when I hear the church clock strike seven.
The cat has settled down for a hard day’s sleeping and I turn my attention to the day ahead: six hours of writing work, a Greek lesson and then an evening with the real 24. Will they ever have a trouble free day in Los Angeles? I wonder. |
