On Symi June is definitely the month for coming back; things come back, people come back and, particularly on a Wednesday, I sit at my desk and hear aeroplanes coming back and forth from Rhodes to wherever…

Old friends from the past have come back to visit the island and have now gone again. We await the arrival of others.

Welcome and unwelcome things have come back… The vine has grown again over the street outside the bar and we’ve had that three week period during which it sheds its seeds aided and abetted by the bees and the wind. The tables, chairs and ground have been carpeted with tiny seeds that I must dust away or sweep up.

The spiders are out of hibernation and one persistent little so and so has wandered into our house a couple of time now. I say little as it was only a baby... about the size of a saucer at a guess. I didn’t get too close to it, Neil does that. He scooped it up and put it outside (receiving a bite for his trouble – luckily this wasn’t one of the poisonous ones, just the big, furry yucky kind) only for it to come back the following night. This time it made a dash for the sofa (where I was sitting) and leapt from ground level to the arm in one mighty bound. Luckily this was directly opposite the front door and a quick backhand stroke from Neil sent the horrid, hairy thing whizzing trough the air and back into the garden.

The ants are back and happily making themselves comfortable in the kitchen walls. Their favourite dish of the day is cat food and we must remember to wrap up every scrap of waste, empty tins, left-overs and put it immediately in the bin outside. If not then there are a thousand sets of legs marching across all parts of the kitchen carrying all kinds of things we didn’t know we’d dropped.

The kitchen also seems to be of interest to cockroaches this year. Again, not my favourite cohabitee but only because they move so fast and you don’t know where they are going to go next. They are another of Symi’s little quirks that has to be endured. Or sprayed mercilessly with something environmentally unfriendly, or whacked with the Cranks Vegan Dinner Party book – at last a use for it!

And don’t get me started on the mosquitoes! Only to say that we’ve got this great thing that looks like a small tennis racket but the strings are metal and when you press the button they become live and, if you swipe the mosquito successfully there’s a little puff of smoke, a blue spark and a satisfyingly dead mosquito. (I am not a Buddhist by the way – the idea appeals but I couldn’t stop killing bugs and I don’t look good in orange.)

As for other things: the Symi Visitor came out in colour to mark its 10th anniversary and to mark the fact that one of my Village Views appeared along side a review of Symi 85600 which, by the way, is selling well – Neil has had to restock at the shop. (Not well enough to enable me to retire to a bug free island though.)

We have had weather you will be pleased to know. Around the 7th and 8th it was windy and almost chilly but warm again by the 14th and come the 24th… You’ve probably heard of our heat wave, While those of you in certain parts of the UK have been swimming to work we’ve been sweating everywhere. The temperature has been up in the 40’s and sleeping has become problematic. (It does seem to keep the spiders away though.)

And as for successes this month… I applied for a new passport, sent my money (€188 thank you very much!) to Athens with the form and photos and got it back within ten days. This happened on the same day as I got the phone bill. I had paid the previous one on line using my Alpha Web Banking – brilliant, I don’t need to go to the harbour so much now. I fact if there was a post office in the village, if my PC came with an ATM machine attached and if the Dodecanese pride pulled into Chorio once a week I’d never have to leave the village!) Where was I…. oh yes the phone bill. My previous, on line payment, didn’t show up and I was worried that it had not been received. I emailed the phone company (OTE) immediately to ask if they had the payment. While waiting for a reply I decided to phone them as well. I explained to a helpful chap that I didn’t speak Greek very well, he explained that he didn’t speak English very well (and why should he?) but together we managed to understand that I had a query with my bill and his computer was down so could I call back later?

I never did though as OTE (e-mail people) rang me and spoke much better English than many English people I know. It transpired that my previous payment had been received but after the new bill was set in motion, so all was well. I only mention this to you because I wanted to point out how happy I was with OTE (and you don’t hear that much around these parts) and I thought you would be interested to know – ‘cos I know how nosey you are.

Nothing else to tell you really: the garden has been cleared, the Apricots are back (the fruit not the family) and daily life consists of work, sweating, eating and trying to sleep at night.