One of the things you need to consider, when considering a move to Symi, is how much of a rush you might be in. We go on a lot about the weather and boats around here and there is a very good reason for that.
Imagine if you lived in Middle-Marsh, twenty miles from the nearest town, with only two buses per week, no car, no taxi service and no way of getting to or from your idyllic village if the bus didn’t run. And imagine if the bus didn’t run when it was raining. Well, that’s a bit like being here on Symi, except it’s a boat not a bus, and it’s wind not rain. And that’s what we’ve been suffering from this week in particular: high winds.
And not just us (at least we didn’t have snow as they did on other islands). The weather was so bad it stopped the boat from docking at several places on its way down from Piraeus, including Rhodes. And that meant that some people, going from Athens to Rhodes, were stuck on the ship from Tuesday morning until sometimes on Thursday afternoon, in rough seas. Similarly, some people who popped over to Rhodes for a day or two ended up staying a week as, if I remember correctly, the last boat into – or out of – Symi was last Tuesday. (I’m writing this on Friday and the Blue Star is due back tonight.)
At least I am hoping it comes in to night as there are people who have already missed flights and who were due to leave on Wednesday to get back to the UK. Which is what I meant about being in a hurry. Sometimes you can’t be. It was one of the things we discussed when deciding to live here permanently: if there’s an emergency in the UK, we may not be able to get there straight away. When going on a holiday, where a flight from Rhodes is involved, we always go at least one, if not two, days early and add two days in Rhodes onto our break, just to be sure of catching the plane. Expensive, yes, but that’s the choice we made.
So, enough of this, the wind has dropped slightly and I am able to open my office shutters and share the view for the first time. After getting this post ready I am going to find a long ladder and something to fill in a hole in the ox eye window in the sitting room. With a curtain up, shutters closed and heaters blasting, it was still only around five degrees in there last night thanks to a break in the ox eye glass.
Oh, and then I am going to see if Jack has found his litter tray yet. He has been in the house since Wednesday afternoon and has not yet ‘been.’ He’s shouted at everything, of course, he’s had a look around the roof, he’s been shown his litter tray (but after 12 years of never using one I am not surprised he has no idea what I am showing him) and he has met the pregnant female cat who sits outside our door each day. So, hopefully, by the end of the weekend, he would have settled down and ‘been’ and in the right place too!
