We are the Monsters: On the road with Lindsay Kemp

I am going to be pushing some products this week (that’s not a euphemism; I’m talking books and calendars), but first: A few things to do on a rainy day in Symi:

Leave home at ten, walk down to Yialos, have a chat with a few people en route, attend a dentist appointment, pop into the pharmacy for a flu inoculation, and, again, be home within one hour. Thigs didn’t stop there, though. Oh no. Not long after getting back, the phone rang, and as I was expecting a call from my mobile provider, I answered it to find someone from the electricity company. ‘Would you like me to speak in English?’ she asked. ‘It would be safer,’ I replied, and laughter ensued, as did a chat about our program/contract, which had lapsed. The upshot was cheaper rates, but a €2.50 increase in the basic plan (with some going to environmental projects), so as long as we carry on as normal, the overall price should reduce slightly.
That done, another call arrived five minutes later, this time from the mobile company and their rep over in Rhodes. Now, my mobile bill has been half the price of Neil’s for about 10 years because I signed up to an offer. During that time, the bill had only increased by €2.60 a month, whereas his for the same service has gone up substantially more, and I was expecting a price rise. Apparently, my contract ended a while ago, and would I like to renew for the same services, but at €2.00 a month less than I was paying? Er… Yeah, fine. (Ask no questions.) So I came out of the morning only €0.50 down on the start of the day, and with no toothache. Yay!

Another cause for celebration is the release of a friend’s memoir about working with the Lindsay Kemp Company. I was lucky enough to read this before publication, and it’s a fascinating, humorous, poignant and honest telling of life on the road and in the company, and, in particular, with the hypnotic and mesmerising figure of Kemp at the centre of a revolving and now lost world of courageous creation, endless travel and ongoing dreams.

Knowing how you like to support the creative, I thought I’d mention the book and drop in the link. This is to Amazon UK, but the book is available worldwide, and it is already at number one on the Amazon seller list for ballet, classical dance, and opera – as the Kemp productions contained all three.

We are the Monsters (Amazon paperback)

If you were thinking the name rang a bell but… As well as his own creative work, Lindsay appeared in The Wicker Man, Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, and Jubilee, and Todd Hayne’s Velvet Goldmine. He was also a mentor to Kate Bush and David Bowie, among many others.

And for those who think the author’s name rings a bell, Kinny appeared in all four of my musicals, and we created cabarets and revues together. For those who were there, he also sang on the balcony of our Symi Dream shop along with our godson, Harry (who was five at the time). However, I think his work with Lindsay Kemp was of slightly more national importance

In all the excitement of I don’t know what, I forgot to tell you that the Christmas lights are already going up. A friend sent me a message on the eighth to say she’d seen the cherry picker on the main road near her house, and now, the lights are going up on other stretches of the road too. That can only mean Christmas is around the corner, though it is a long, slow curve of a corner that’s going to take another ten weeks to navigate.

There’s plenty to do and note before then, but in immediate ‘news’, the storm of the other day has passed by leaving a chill, and the rough weather wasn’t as rough as it has been in the past. I managed to get to my teeth appointment, and what an hour that was. I’d been looking at the skies, doing that thing that British people do by staring at it and saying, ‘It’ll clear up,’ because it’s bound to at some point, or ‘It could be worse,’ because that’s also true, but at ten, I set off beneath silent storm clouds and a few drops of rain. It’s always advisable to take the Kali Strata and other potential slip hazards with care after it’s been raining as it is when it’s hot. The stone can become slippery no matter the weather, so I took my time. I stopped to say a quick hello to a couple of people in a café, wandered around the back lanes of Yialos because although I like to be early for things, I never want to be that early, and arrived at my destination in time for a quick chat before taking the chair. Fifteen minutes later, I’m out again with the first part of another root canal seen to (no pain but done with the rumblings of a thunderstorm happening dramatically off stage) and a follow up appointment for today, and off I toddled towards the bus stop, receiving a severe weather alert on my phone on the way.

We’ve been getting these for a good couple of years now, usually as the thing the electronic voice is warning about is taking place, or ten seconds after the earthquake, or, in this case, during the rainless thunderstorm. There were no boats going that day, so the harbour was quiet by recent standards. Some locally staying folks were out and about in cagoules and frowns, gathering in the cafés to wait for the world to go by, and some of the tourist businesses were taking a rare day off as they’d not seen one since May. The bus was still running, but a taxi was about, so I shared it with a friend who arrived at the rank at the same time as me, and was home exactly one hour after I’d left.

That reminded me of the time I took the early boat to Rhodes to pick up my biometric residency card. On arrival, I bought breakfast from Gregory’s in Mandraki, before waiting at the front of the queue at the immigration office. There, dead on eight, I went up, got seen, got my golden ticket, left, walked around to the commercial harbour, got on the Sebeco, and was home before lunch. All very odd. I expected the trip to take all day, and I had a ticket for the Blue Star in the afternoon, and was braced for passing the time with unnecessary shopping, and a long afternoon hanging about a café waiting. You see? As proven by the tap replacement of the other day, things can happen at speed around here, though that may often be more by luck than by design.

Cue dodgy segue: My design today is to get some work done before skipping lightly back to Yialos and the chair to have the teeth work checked, pick up a flu jab on the way home, help someone send their self-published book up to Amazon, and then take the rest of the day off. And possibly the entire weekend.

(Grab a cup of tea, Phyllis, it’s a long one.)

Now then, this is an emotive subject, but one that comes up every year at least twenty times in various social media posts, in emails and on the ground, and it’s cats. Not the musical, although I do have a story about that for you one day, but the animals, and in particular the stray cats. Not the American rockabilly band formed in 1979, but the feral cats of Symi. In a way, I don’t want to touch on this subject, because:
A) it’s bound to raise all manner of discussion and, frankly, my dear, I’m not that bothered. (Discussion can be a good thing among those who want to discuss it (not me), but please do it respectfully.
And B) I’m not best placed to offer advice, only my opinion. That opinion, though, is based on 24 years of living here 365 days a year.

When we were on holiday here towards the end of the last century, we were soon adopted by a local stray cat who made so bold it used our accommodation when it felt like it. We put down water and some food, and put up with its constant coughing, temporarily naming it Furball. The reality was, it probably had lungworm or another medical condition we could do nothing about, and the other stark reality was that when we left, it returned to having to survive on its own, and was probably dead by Christmas. Cut forward 29 years, and we’re still surrounded by stray cats living at the bins, nearby farms, in the street, and wherever they can. Being cats, they breed and produce more, and being animals living in the wild, some survive, and some don’t. During the summer months, visitors come, ‘adopt’ them and do what they think is best to look after them. Then they go home — the visitors, I mean, and leave the cats to look after themselves.

This is fine. The cats adapt, even though it must have been quite a shock to the animals to be living off tinned food for a week or two, only to find it taken away once they have come to rely on it. But there you are; they are cats. They adjust. Once the season of misty-eyed visitors and the fruitfulness of their generosity is over, they return to doing what they can to survive, and they either do or they don’t. They have resources available, though, even in the winter. Local residents who feed them and, more importantly, put down water, a regular supply of bins to root through, vermin to catch as their nature demands, and places to find to keep warm – our laundry basket occasionally included. And, being cats, they keep breeding, and as nature arranges, they birth several more at a time, and before you know it, you’ve got far too many to survive, so a man called Megginson kicks in, and those that can ‘adapt and survive’ do so, while those that can’t, don’t. The truth is, as Herbert Spencer concluded back in 1864, it’s a case of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ (Before you put your hand up at the back there, both expressions developed from Darwin, but neither can be directly attributed to him.)

I’ve seen visitors commit some remarkable acts. These range from ordering an extra plate of Symi shrimps at dinner, asking for them as a takeaway, and then feeding them to the strays. (I can’t comment on this because I only ate them once and thought I’d have to be airlifted to hospital.) I’ve seen physically grown men lying on their fronts in the street trying to tempt a kitten to a slice of smoked salmon like the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We’ve seen people adopt a young kitten, arrange for all the necessary matters needed to rip it from its homeland and rehouse it in another corner of the world at great expense to the visitor and great discomfort to the animal (only for it to get mown down by a car not long after coming out of several thousand pounds worth of quarantine). And we’ve put up with tourists demanding that we, personally and municipally, do something about the disgusting condition of Symi strays, and why don’t we adopt every cute little kitten they found during their holiday, and we are all monsters for allowing it to happen, and no-one cares. I’m going straight to the mayor next time (good, do), I couldn’t find the pet shop open, they were on holiday. (How dare they, but, er… weren’t you?) There is no organisation to help them; there is, and there are. Keep asking around, and you will find it/them. (But don’t ask me, I’m so fed up with accusatory emails and remarks on the subject, I now barely reply.)

It’s all about expectations. At least, that’s what I concluded at four this morning when this came dripping from the top of my head. You’ve done well, saved, borrowed, or simply decided to use some of your finances for a never-cheap holiday on Symi, and you’ve brought with you your social norms from some well-off town or city where there’s pest control, and you stumble across a kindle of kittens, and OMG, isn’t that both the cutest and worst thing in the world! They have no USB-heated cushion, no cat house for nighttime, no collar or bowl with their names on them, and they are so adorable and cute, despite their ringworm, fleas and eye infection, and they each deserve a home with heating and care, pampering and fluffiness because that’s what you can afford to do to your pets back at home. Yeah, nice dream, but sadly, that’s your view of cat life, and not the reality of a small island struggling to make it through the rest of the year. Come winter, the animals will be left to get on with it, cared for as best they can by local volunteers, but otherwise left to fate, the occasional rat poisoning (illegal, but then so is driving without a crash helmet – ever done that in Greece?), the eagles (not the rock group), and other natural and unnatural ends. Your two weeks of feeding, fussing, fuming, while trying to make their temporary lives better, worrying, complaining, doing something, and generally being nothing more to them than a source of food, come to an end. You can leave, but just as you can’t leave behind your kindness, you also can’t leave behind your judgement on what comes after you. It’s island life, love. If you can’t do what you want to, then you do the things you can.

Anyway, I didn’t intend to waste an hour on this, but pick it apart (I agree, it is rather muddled, and I would rather tell you the Cats story), think what you will, do what you can, but please, put the brakes on the criticism. When temporary visitors throw down their ‘this is what I would do about it, therefore, this is what you should do’ on us who are permanent, I switch off and say, yes, dear. If you feel that strongly about stray cats, I suggest you sell up, move here, and get on with it. Otherwise, as Napoleon says to Lafayette in The Aristocats, ‘Hush your mouth.’

I woke up in the night, and the time was 0.13. I woke up this morning and the time was 0.13. It was only then I realised I was relying on the microwave, which had been paused at 13 seconds, so I’ve no idea what time I was up the first time, but I know what time it was the second time. However, the first time, I was woken by the overflow from the pitched roof, which the building designer thoughtfully thought to leave as a pipe hanging halfway across the narrow lane right beside the bedroom window. Had I suitable skills and a ladder, I’d stick an extension on the thing and let the runoff land in the ruin over the wall, rather than two feet away from my head, but hey, one day…

There was also thunder and lightning, some water through the roof in the porch and bathroom, but nothing major. We were going to fill the cracks and apply the concrete paint the other day, but the weather turned, and luckily we didn’t get to it; had we, it would have all been washed away overnight. And there is more to come, they say. (I am in danger of becoming a weather channel here, but it gives me something to whittle about). It’s either going to be heavy all day, in which case I might have to change my dentist appointment because the kayak is in the shop, and I’m not attempting the rapids of the Kali Strata without it, or it’s going to be on and off and not too heavy. These days, the weather depends on which forecast app you use, and everyone uses a different one. This, it seems, can lead to all manner of misinformation and entertainment.

You’re sitting in a café listening to other people’s conversations, and hear a game of one-upmanship as people defend their weather apps. Such conversations can easily descend into chaos.
‘We’re going to have rain today.’
‘Nay. Mine shows it as only patchy cloud. We’ll be reet.’
‘Mine’s always accurate. See? There’s a typhoon blowing in from Kalymnos.’
‘Typhoon? In the Med?’
‘That’s what it says, and it’s never wrong.’
‘You only get typhoons in the Northwestern Pacific Basin.’ (This is the ‘me’ of the conversation, the pedant, but the others are so keen to be heard and affirmed, they take no notice of reason.)
‘Aye, well, we’re northwest of somewhere, aren’t we? You can’t go wrong with Sneeze.’
‘Wi’ what?’
‘Sneeze. It’s me new weather app.’
‘Nay, mate. You want Accu-Rabbit. It’s run be A-One.’
‘Be what?’ Looks. ‘That’s AI, you cabbage. Can’t trust that. Wife asked it why I was getting these headaches every night ’round bedtime. It told her I had a tuba on me brain.’
‘But you play the euphonium.’
‘Aye, that’s what I said, but it insisted it were a tuba, then it asked her if she’d like to know more about who invented it, when, and why.’
‘Oh, aye?’
‘Eighteen thirty-five.’
‘Is it? We’ve missed the boat.’
‘Can’t leave now anyroad. It’s raining.’
‘See? Told you. You can’t go wrong with Sneeze.’

And so on. If I want to know what the elements have in store, I look up, make up my own mind, and get on with it. If it’s too dangerous to go out at ten, I’ll change my appointment. If it looks reasonable, I’ll take my brolly and off I’ll go. One thing it does give me, though, is plenty of opportunity to show some of Neil’s dramatic shots of the skies we’re currently, if temporarily, living under.
Have a [<insert > Good ~ Pleasant ~ Wet ~ *random* >end>] day.

PS: It’s now 05.25, and it’s chucking it down.

We’re expecting a wet playtime for the next couple of days, with the worst rain coming on Wednesday. I saw a couple of videos of Rhodes airport yesterday, with the road flooded and heavy downpours generally, and tried to look on the local news this morning for news about how it might have affected travel, but all I could find in one Rhodes newspaper were stories about football teams, and the other I found didn’t mention it, so I assume it was nothing to out of the ordinary. Here, after rumbling but dry skies in the morning, we had a few drops, and that was it.

It was during this that I decided it was time I made enquiries about having the kitchen tap fixed before it got worse. (A small dribble from the wrong place when it was in use.) Then, I thought about the tap in the laundry sink which we hadn’t used for three years because it had blocked up with crud, and added that to the list. I’m very good at saving these jobs for a rainy day, and as it promised to be just that, that’s what I did. I called our friendly handyman to see when he could take a look, and like the genie from the lamp, he was at the gate fifteen minutes later, because he happened to be finishing a job nearby. A quick inspection, a quick quote, and he was back in twenty minutes with two new taps. Half an hour after that, they were both on and working, but as happens, we then found a leak on one of the overflows, so that piece of pipe needed fixing, and off to the other side of the harbour he goes to find the part. A short while later: both taps fixed and working and no drips. Having congratulated myself on a job well done and a very reasonable bill paid, I started thinking about fixing the feed to the spare WC which hasn’t worked for a short while. (A ‘short while’ in this case being about four years.) However, I thought ‘one thing at a time’ and as we don’t use it, decided that could wait until I feel another bout of home maintenance coming on; probably another year or so.

Before all this, I’d done some work on a plot and a chapter, and some research into London in 1904, as you do. Later, we met up with friends we’ve not seen for six or seven years, which was lovely, so that rounded of a successful day in a very pleasant way. All this time, the day boats continued to arrive below, with no let-up despite the grey. I expect people were glad to have missed the deluge taking place in Rhodes, though I doubt many spent their time lazing on a beach. At some point during the day, I booked an appointment with the dentist. (It’s not an addiction, just the time of life.) So that’s an event for tomorrow when we’re supposed to be receiving the deluge. We shall see.