I once read a book by Paulo Coelho in which one character told another to always walk looking at the horizon, not at your feet. I expect there was some spiritual message behind that, or a good reason, and I tried it to see if it changed my outlook on life. It made me change my attitude towards people with dogs, and councils who didn’t fix their paving slabs. However, standing there scraping my shoes against a broken paving stone to get the dogdo off, I did have the chance to look up and admire what I could see of the horizon. Since then, I’ve always told people to stop now and then and look up, as I mentioned on the blog the other day. We tend to walk looking down, and in some places, that’s a necessity. I rounded a corner on my walk through the village yesterday and nearly trod in a stack of cat sh*t, and I mean a good three-inch high pile some animal had swept into one place. In other parts of the village, I found myself stepping over the remains of some dog’s yesterday’s dinner its owner had charitably left there for a small child to pick up, play with and eat. In other places, I was permanently looking down to avoid falling down steps or tripping over water pipes. The lesson here is to stop now and then and look around. Look up to see what’s above the standard Boots shopfront and you might see a Tudor building, or don’t gawp at the unaffordable price of houses in the estate agent’s window, but look to its second and third floors and you might see a stunning piece of Gothic revival architecture.
The point of all that was to say the opposite. Also, look down, especially when you’re on Symi. I was standing outside the taverna last night, waiting for Neil to join me, and I noticed a carving on the stone I was standing on.
There are many instances of this kind of historic graffiti dotted around the island, just as there’s a growing number of post-modern depictions of penises and some fundamental instructions on what to do with one’s fundament; people, it seems, will always want to leave their mark, just like dogs and lampposts. Some of these engravings depict boats, some are names in that classic “carve your initials in a tree” kind of thing, and others are patterns. What interests me are the dates that sometimes appear with them. In today’s case, not only did ΝΠΚ leave his/her initials, but he also left the date, 1939.
I’ve darkened the photo to try and bring out the letters and date more, and it’s not that easy to see, but you get the picture…?
I’ll keep my eye out for more of these when I remember and post them here. You can find this one at the top of the Kali Strata opposite the arched door into Georgio’s.
That’s me for the week. Off to Rhodes for the day tomorrow, so I’ll be back here on Monday.
