Of musicals and fresh produce
It looks like this cold north wind is set to stay with us through the week, though it’s calming down. A bit like us after the birthday weekend. Sunday descended into a great afternoon at the Rainbow Bar with one too many glasses of something – Yiannis eventually left us to get on with it and went home for his lunch. That was followed by an evening at home watching musicals.
I had recently ordered a copy of Chess in concert at the Albert Hall and, though I’d seen it on YouTube before, this was the first viewing in high quality. It’s still a great show with some good numbers in it and some great performances from this concert cast. The cast included Marti Pellow from Wet Wet Wet, and David Bedella who I had seen before in ‘Jerry Springer, The Opera.’ (Much parental guidance advised.) This treat was followed by the arena performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. Well, it was Easter in many countries, though it’s not Easter here until May 1st.
I actually felt surprisingly alive on Monday morning, thanks to the many bottles of water consumed during the day. We usually get through up to three litres each day each as a matter of course, even in the winter. There’s always a plastic beaker (courtesy of Jumbo) on the desk or by the sofa, and I am always topping that up with water and sipping away. It’s helping with the dreaded post-Christmas diet (five kilos down since February) and is also good for you, of course. We have four packs at a time delivered from the supermarket and that lot lasts us less than a week. Luckily bottled water is much cheaper here in Greece than I’ve found it elsewhere. I remember being on a strange detox-yourself diet years ago in the UK and mineral water was a big part of that too, three litres a day. But it was so expensive.
So, the lesson from this morning’s ramble from Symi is that you should always drink lots of water and it’s not expensive to do so when you are here. The other thing that is easy to do is buy fresh produce and eat well. Mind you, when the boats are messed up by the weather, as they were last week, fresh can mean frozen, but that’s okay. You also can’t help but eat organic, if you want to, with a lot of produce coming from local farms and nearby islands. We regularly have fresh eggs with bright yellow yokes courtesy of Sotiris’ farm. Michaelis’ supermarket, and many others, also sell their own produce. In fact, apart from the (very) odd Pot Noodle, it’s quite hard to buy convenience food. There are tins of Greek specialities, dolmathes and meatballs spring invitingly to mind, but it’s so much healthier and cheaper to buy your own ingredients and cook. It’s fun too.
This reminds me of an incident of 2008. I remember this as it was the year Neil was laid up with his broken foot. He was on both feet by then and we were celebrating something at the Jean & Tonic bar, chatting to Miss DJ about stuff when we started trying to remember lyrics from the musical Chicago, specifically ‘The cell block tango’ where six ‘merry murderesses’ each tell their story. They have a specific word each, Pop!, Squish, Uh-uh, Cicero, Lipschitz and… But we couldn’t remember the sixth one. Naturally this meant we had to race home, put on the DVD and watch the show, just what you do at two in the morning in winter. While Miss DJ and I sang our way through various numbers, Neil disappeared into the kitchen to, we thought, make himself a sandwich. But no. Such is the way of things here that, twenty minutes later, he reappeared with a plate of homemade kolokithokeftethes. Try saying that when you’ve had a few. We did, it was fab. So were they. (You may also know them as courgette fritters or balls.) That was all lovely and they went down well. The next morning, it might have been more like afternoon actually, I went to the kitchen to discover the aftermath of an explosion in a kolokithokeftethes factory with courgette dripping from the cupboards, blocking up the sink and just about every pan in the house in need of washing up. But still, they were fresh and tasted great.
Oh, and the sixth word from the lyrics that we could not remember? The word was, naturally, ‘Six.’
