Our last lunch party of the season, planned for May 6th, happened eventually. After a pleasant Sunday morning at home in the sunshine, listening to the liturgy and bells from the church nearby, we prepared to head down to Marj’s house for a good old nosh to celebrate the end of the winter season. We and others were starting to get ready for the summer and my afternoons would soon become property of the Rainbow Bar and not my desk at home. Ian rang and asked if we could help put his boat in the water, an annual tradition for all small boat owners who have spent the past few weeks scraping their bottoms and doing something with ‘anti-fouling’, exactly what I have no idea and why anyone should want to put themselves through this ritual is quite beyond me, but then I’m not a water person.

So, with our visiting dignitary, Rudyard, in tow we headed on down to Pedi to assist with said boat. There were seven of us in attendance and everyone did something to help get the boat (imaginatively called ‘Boat’ by it’s owners,) from the builders yard where it had spent the winter and into the sea. Brian, Ian and I hooked up the trailer, I drove a jeep of my own free will for the first time in many years, Rudyard helped with the launching and Neil stood around taking photographs. All of us tried to ignore the three and half burned out boats that had suffered an accident in Pedi a few nights previously and Boat was successfully launched. Beers to celebrate followed, finally, by a late lunch.

The usual ‘end of the war and handing over the Dodecanese’ parade of May 8th happened, surprisingly, on May 8th with visiting dignitaries and the school children, army, scouts and so on parading in their uniforms. This year it started only three hours behind schedule.

A few days after this the whisper went around the village that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were abroad and, hearing the news one Sunday afternoon while having a beer at the bar, I felt like I was back in England again. They were soon followed by the peddlers selling all things from rugs, through handy tools you didn’t know you couldn’t live without, to dancing plastic beer bottles or some such nonsense.

One morning while sifting through my several hundred spam e-mails I came across a funny one. Well it amused me. Apparently my membership to a site (I hadn’t joined) was about to expire (before it had even started) and I was invited to click a link to re-active my account (that I didn’t have, no thank you.) Beneath this polite request was written “On May 18th we will require a letter from a certified Physician/Urologist…" Well, I’ve never been asked to give a sample in order to join a website before, particularly not one that didn’t know I wasn’t already yet a member of in the first place.

I started work back at the Rainbow Bar, doing my two hours each afternoon. George from the Taverna comes and sits and we chat for, oh, two seconds, before falling into the male Greek silence that is so popular at the kafeneion. One day the ‘chat’ was livened up by the appearance of a squid in a plastic bag that George was going to be cooking up for his supper. It was clearly a thrilling prospect for him, though obviously not for the squid. As he listed the various recopies he had in mind the dead sea creature lay there, its smell somehow escaping the bag and hanging around. Lovely. But I didn’t mind, it was Christmas after all. Well, it was in the toilets where the loo roll was decorated with Christmas bells and snowflakes for some reason. You’ve got to love it.

I’ve already seen a few other interesting things while sitting outside the bar. I’ve been watching the sparrows get ever bolder. They take the crisps out of the trays on the table these days and no matter how many times I tell them they are barred they still fly inside. A young guy drove his moped across the square with an interesting looking shoulder bag swinging from his shoulder. ‘I wonder where he got that?’ I mused before realising it was a dead sheep.

The Town Hall have started running free Greek lessons for non-Greek speakers again. Sadly the lessons are at a time when many of us can’t attend because of work so I pick up the occasional and often unrepeatable word from Yiannis and the ‘usual suspects’ who take their lunchtime whisky at the bar.

We cleaned up Symi on 20th. Yes, I mean it. A whole troupe of volunteers, Greek and non alike, went out with brooms and bags and picked up all the trash the we, and the strong winds of the previous days, had dropped on the Kali Strata, the village, the road, the harbour and anywhere else that Wendy and Jean instructed us to tidy up. The island looks fab now, let’s hope it lasts. The small party in the square afterwards afforded some free wine and dance lessons from Panormitis and some ballet ones from Terri as an added bonus and the following day required a long lie in an a couple of Aspirin.

Finally other news: Neil’s Symi Dream calendar 2008 is on order for the shop but available already on www.lulu.com and I have had to order more copies of Symi 85600 as the first batch has almost sold out. Evenings are spent saying ‘I’m going home to tidy the house’ but actually consist of sitting outside the shop, chatting to visitors and sipping too much ouzo. Ah, it’s summer again.

And finally finally here’s another reason why you should learn Greek when you live in Greece. The Town Hall just made an announcement over the island’s loud speaker system, first in Greek and then in English. The English version obviously contained an unpronounceable word and the important message was thus: “We inform you… we inform you that… we must inform you that… will not be… will not be… (clears throat, rustles paper,) we must inform you that…will not be running until Saturday. Thank you.”

And yes I did understand the Greek announcement and no, I’m not going to spoil it for you by telling you what the missing words were.