While the festival continues at Panormitis, let me show you some photos from the southern side of the Pedi Valley, a place that is not much visited, but which is very historic. These are from last Sunday, of course. I’ve hardly been anywhere else since, apart from up to the top of the village and back down the road on my vague nod towards getting some exercise.

It’s typical. I was sitting on the sofa last night watching something with my mind half on what I might scribble here today, and I came up with a great idea for something fun to talk about, and now, in the not-too-cold light of day, I’ve forgotten what that was, and I didn’t write it down. It wasn’t this day in history, although now I’ve mentioned it, it was 17 years ago today that we were at Machu Picchu and had a blessing by a shaman in the cloud forest at night by a fire, all said in a dialect of Quechuan with phrases we had to repeat and were so bad at, Neil is probably still married to a mountain and I’m permanently hitched to shrubbery.

It’s also the day that, back in 1938, my grandfather was ordained in York Minster. He was an interesting chap, my grandfather. Born in Harlow, Essex in 1905 into a Baptist family, he went to the University of London, got married in a Wesleyan church when he was 26 to a woman ten years older than him, attended theological college in Edgbaston, and was a vicar in Hull, then a naval chaplain in WWII, got blown up in the Thames estuary, and can be found in various war records in Alexandria and the Middle East. I have a coin he found in Palestine at this time, a thingy from 440 to 400 BC Athens. I can’t remember its name. Yes I can, it’s a tetradrachm like this one:

Anyway, he was also a highly talented pianist and one of the top five amateur organists in the UK at some point, and I was told he was asked to appear in Romeo and Juliette after Zeffirelli heard him orate in Canterbury Cathedral or something, but he couldn’t go and do the film (as Friar Lawrence) because of his, by then, CofE work. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that he shares a birthday with Neil.

There you go, random thoughts to do with November 8th. Perhaps I should write a biography about him like my biography of Uncle Bob which you can find in this currently running promotion of non-fiction books…

Or which you can find right here, add to your Kindle collection and read over the weekend.

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