Postcards and Springs
Let’s get this week off to cheery start (and keep it that way). The season is calming, the temperature is cooling, but the weather remains calm for now. Some businesses are starting to wind down, and I must remember to buy a beach towel for a Christmas present before the more touristy shops close; a job for this week.
Meanwhile, I received a postcard from Patmos last week. Not only was it from Patmos, but it was from a reader of this blog who had just finished and enjoyed Jason and the Sargonauts, a comedy adventure set on Symi, and one of my earlier novels. So, thank you for the card, Anschi! It’s lovely to receive feedback and even better to receive good wishes. Makes it all worthwhile, and I hope you enjoyed Patmos. We were last there in 2000, and I wonder if it has changed much.
This week I will be mainly doing the same thing as I do every other week, but now with the added diversion of a three-mile walk for at least five days out of seven. On Saturday, I unchained myself from the typewriter and took myself off up to To Vrisi, which, by the road from the village square, is a neat three-mile round trip, the first half all uphill. This time I thought to take two empty water bottles and filled them up from the spring, carried them home and I am drinking one right now. Yannis at Rainbow later asked me if the water was running which made me wonder if it ever wasn’t. There was then a discussion about how underground springs work on an island with little rainfall in the summer. I assumed there was a big cave full of water somewhere under the rocks higher up and this was permanently emptying via the only escape route it could find, but I realised I had no idea how it all happens. I’ll have to look it up.
There are other underground springs on the island, and I’ve seen and drunk from the one at Ag Konstantinos, below the Vigla on the way to Panormitis. I have also used the one on Tilos at the monastery of Agios Panteleimonas which was, at that time, gushing out of the hillside like a small waterfall. The owner of the hotel where I was staying drove me other there, taking a mass of empty bottles with him which he filled up while I enjoyed the grounds.
Here we go into another week, and I hope it’s going to be a good one for you, for all of us actually. Keep reading!
