Of flames and phones
One of the things about living in a small community such as this is that you get to see and hear things at both ends of the joy spectrum. Over the weekend, I saw several very different sights, two of which were at opposing ends of that scale of pleasantness. (There must be a better way to say that, but it is early on Sunday morning and we did have a couple of glasses at the Rainbow last night and, despite the two duvets and the quilt, I did wake a few times during the night trying to get warm, so there are my excuses.)
There was a house fire over the weekend, Saturday morning actually, and it was fully visible from all over the village and harbour, as you can see from my couple of photos. No one was hurt; the owner, I have been told, was away, and the house was not occupied at the time. I haven’t heard how it started but, as it was empty, I can only assume an electrical problem of some sort, perhaps rodents chewing through a cable. The building went up very quickly once the flames took hold, there was a certain amount of grey and then black smoke and even from where we are we could hear the glass breaking, the roof tiles cracking and eventually the roof falling in. A horrible thing for the owner to come back to and it does make you wonder, what if? The words house insurance comes to mind. I expect there are plenty of properties around here that are not insured, and it’s not just your possessions and un-replaceables that you would have to replace, there’s the building too. We’re just glad that no one was hurt and there was no wind so it didn’t spread to neighbouring houses.
But, on a happier note, also over the weekend (Friday actually). We were at Mandeio’s café for a couple of drinks, keeping an eye on godson number one who was playing with his friends after his English lesson and after spending the day with us. We had pizza and he invited his friends to come and share his with him. A little later a group of six thirteen-year-olds came and set up camp at the table next to us. I know their ages as they were with godson number two. I watched as they arrived, one by one, some greeting the others with hugs, and took up their places, and took out their mobile phones. ‘Uh hu,’ I thought, ‘it’s going to be a case of spending an hour reading Facebook and ignoring each other, just like we were doing at home earlier on.’ (Though I was actually reading on my Kindle ap.)
But no. I mean yes, they were checking things out on their phones and then comparing notes, showing each other photos, laughing about selfies and catching up with news from friends who weren’t there. The conversation was fast and fun-filled, there was a mix of English, Greek and Russian going on and they all switched between Greek and English with amazing alacrity.
I imagined… Myself at that age with my friends meeting up with our phones at our favourite meeting pace. The phones would, of course, have to have had very long leads to reach from the house to wherever we were, but we’d meet, wires trailing and sit around comparing phones. We’d have to sit staring at dials and handsets, the more up to date among us would have had push-buttons to show off, someone may have had a novelty number, a Snoopy perhaps, or a racing car, some would have a straight lead, some a curly one, the traditionalists might have had a black number, others a grey-green or ivory, we’d coo and ah over the latest ring tone (bell or trim) and possibly take a photo of it, rather than on it, using our Polaroid Instamatics for instant results.
But I am sure we would not have been so well behaved and certainly not so multi lingual as the group we saw on Friday. They eventually shared a couple of pizzas between them and we left them in their merry circle enjoining their evening. No great shakes maybe, but I just thought it was so good to see: a group of well-behaved teenagers having fun and, most of all, interacting about their phones, rather than wasting an evening being on them.
Ah well, a bit of a ramble there but it is Sunday morning and I am trying to put myself in the writing mood, so I shall cut along now and start putting other random thoughts to virtual paper in advance of a new book of stories and random thoughts. Hope you have a good week!
