I was going to call this month’s ramble ‘It wouldn’t happen in England’ mainly because of one thing that happened early in the month and struck me as something that, well… wouldn’t happen in England. But then I couldn’t think of any other things to go along with it and so changed my mind.

Instead it’s imaginatively entitled, Village view March 2007 – because that’s exactly what it is.

So what was it that made me think ‘it wouldn’t happen in England’? It was this:

I was on my way home from a Greek lesson and called in to the supermarket for some shopping. We tend to use Nufris’ shop as it is on our way home, never too crowded and Nufris and his wife Vassilia are very patient when we speak Greek. I bought a frozen chicken as a roast was planned for the following Sunday and then, in a flash of uncharacteristic culinary inspiration, decided to make home-made stuffing. I had the onions but where was the sage…?

A quick hunt through the boxes of dried herbs led to disappointment and I was just wondering what oregano and onion would taste like when I remembered a walk to Stavros Tou Polemou a couple of years before. We walked up there with a Greek friend called Michaelis and en route he had taught me the word for sage – the herb not the wise person – but could I remember it?

I asked Vassilia if she had any ‘sage’ but she didn’t know the English word I was using so I started to describe it… “it’s like oregano but different…” After a quick round of something approaching charades I had another flash of inspiration and remembered the word Michaelis had taught me, “Faskomilio”.

And that was understood. Vassilia then took her turn in rummaging through the herb boxes and finally decided that no, there wasn’t any. “But,” she said reaching for the phone, “Noufri is up in the mountains I will ask him to get you some.”

I did a bit of that English bumbling that I am trying so hard not to do these days: “Oh no, really, don’t trouble him… sorry… are you sure? If it’s no trouble… I don’t mind…” and so on but she was already calling him up on his mobile. A brief conversation followed and hey presto! Noufris was picking us some fresh sage as we spoke and would deliver it to the house later.

That’s’ when I thought, ‘it wouldn’t happen in England’. I mean you wouldn’t get Mr Sainsbury on the line offering to go out on a February night, up a mountain, and pick you some fresh would you?

As it turned out it didn’t arrive at the house that night but instead was delivered to the Glaros bar where it waited, perfuming the air, until it was collected the following day but the roast chicken was something of a triumph nevertheless.

Another current quirk of the island:

You currently have to take a boat to pay your phone bill – the OTE office is closed for a month. You can pay the bills at the post office but only if you get them before their due date, which we don’t. As I write Ian is in Rhodes with a sack full of Ex-pat bills and I mean phone and currency.

And if you’re wondering why we don’t get our phone bill on time the only explanation I can think off is this: the address on our bill is ‘Neil Gosling, Lefteris’ village house, Chorio’. Sometimes Ilias the postman takes it to the shop, sometimes he leaves it at the Rainbow bar, on other occasions he gives it to anyone he knows called Lefteris who then gives it to Yianni at the Rainbow bar who then gives it to our landlord Lefteris who puts it back in the post office. Sometimes, like this month, it arrives in our post office box but it’s anyone’s guess where it has travelled in the ten days since it was due.