Awards, Random Enquiries and Supper
Sunday was an unusual day, or rather, a day with unexpected things in it. We had invited guests for supper in the courtyard, and so shopping was first on the to-do list. That done, Neil set about making his MasterChef inspired desserts, and I checked up on my recipe for vegetarian giovetsi. That’s like a lamb giovetsi without the lamb, but with more of other things in it, and it’s mainly a kritharaki (orzo) dish, and looked pretty straightforward.
With everything planned, we had lunch, Neil went off to work, and I found out I’d won the best screenplay award at the Santorini Film Festival. Well, me and Rebecca who wrote the book on which the screenplay was based. (You can find it here.) One quick siesta later, and I set about the giovetsi, being very organised and arranging everything I needed according to the list of instructions. The dish started off with two tablespoons of olive oil, onions and cinnamon, and continued through ‘set aside, clean skillet and add another two tablespoons of olive oil and gently fry the carrots,’ and onto, ‘meanwhile, take 450 grams of kritharaki and six cups of water…’ I never know how big a cup is, ours vary in size from a polite demitasse to a butch half-pint tea mug, but you know, you do what you can. Seeing how many ingredients were now cooking, semi-cooked or ready to be put together (with yet another two tablespoons of olive oil), I checked the recipe again. I was dealing with a huge mound of stuff, and there was no way it was all going to fit into one ‘large oven dish.’ The recipe was for six people, apparently, more like six families with a craving for olive oil, and I decided to split everything down the middle and bake two. Anyway…
Neil came home and was checking his panna cotta and other inspired desserts, still smartly dressed from work while I was in baggy shorts and nothing else, and sweating like a blacksmith’s bum, when all of a sudden, the doorbell rings. Thinking it would be a quick dispatch, I left my oil heating, the courgettes ready, and dashed to the courtyard to find a very handsome young lady at the door telling me her husband was a film director. That news got around quick, I thought, and a doorstep conversation took place with me half-hiding my toplessness behind the gate. They were looking for someone to speak on a documentary about Covid and faith, or some such, and not seeking a scriptwriter for a million-Euro feature, so I politely declined. I also explained that we had two people coming for a six-family meal in fifty minutes, and agreed to give her my phone number, which I wrote beneath my name.
‘Oh, you’re James?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then who’s Neil? We wanted Neil.’
‘He’s my husband,’ I said, while thinking, Good, he can deal with this, and on cue, he shouted out that my oil was burning. ‘He’s doing something complicated with a pudding,’ I explained and went to fetch him.
Neither of us was willing to be part of a documentary about Symi, Covid and faith, and we politely refused. Apparently, they’d been given his name by a variety of people; one person telling us it was X while another said it was Y, and we don’t mind who. Usually, we’d do what we could to help, but not this time. I’ve had a few enquiries about filming on the island and been asked to take part in TV documentaries before (I was invited to Star News in Athens once for the morning show, to talk about ‘Shocking the Donkeys’, but that was an oxi-oxi from me), but it’s not my thing. My thing was getting that dinner ready, half of which is now to be frozen for a very rainy day, and our supper in the courtyard, which was, I am pleased to say, very pleasant. Neil’s desserts were wonderful and should have won an award. They certainly would have been more interesting in a documentary about pandemics and faith than I would have been, not that they wanted me in the first place.
