A bit of an up-and-down day yesterday. I was halfway through writing a tricky funeral scene for a book when I was distracted by a parakeet causing a stir over the courtyard wall. I’ve never seen one in the wild here before, but apparently, they are quite common everywhere these days. I got the scene drafted in the end and then turned my attention to some banking matter, only to find out I couldn’t access an account and had to phone the helpline to discover why. Me and phones don’t get on, and I get more stressed about having to make a call than I do about why an account should have become blocked. I’ve emailed, but if I don’t hear anything that way, I’ll have to see if my phone lets me call out of the country, because I’m not sure my contract covers that. Failing that, I’ll either try via the internet phone call method or, worst-case scenario, I’ll have to charge up the landline and plug that in after X number of years. I hate to think how many sales reps are queuing up on the other side, ready to start pitching me all sorts of rubbish as soon as the landline shows up as in use. Whatever, I’m not looking forward to trying to get that sorted out.
But I am looking forward to another day bashing out words and looking at the view, and maybe wandering up the lane so I see some outside world for a change. I’m not sure. I had one of those decent eight-hour sleeps last night, the kind that leaves you so rested, you don’t want to stop resting. However, there was none of that TV advert behaviour for me: Throwing back a perfect white sheet as you rise on a perfectly sunny day, with a smile, and a skip in your step as you welcome the best day ever, and swing about the house popping in something healthy for breakfast, packing the kids off to school, doing 101 jobs all before eight thirty when you leave the house on a cloud of happiness all because you took a laxative the night before. Oh no. More like prising your eyes open at the bathroom sink with a ‘Blurgh’, and yawning my way into a cup of tea.
On which note: Janice, I don’t know if you read this, but thank you! So kind of you. I’m surprised you had room for luggage, but I am now saved. (Tea bags.) I hope I’ll see you around to say thank you in person.
There we are. Off into another day, during which I must devise an evil plot that will take place on June 30th, 1894. Why that date? Because something special happened on that day in history, but what was it? (I’ll give you one clue. It happened in England.) And, with that, it’s back to the research.
Welcome to June. And welcome also to any other reader named after a month of the year.
Let’s get started with something guaranteed to ruffle feathers.
The Greek Foreign Ministry has confirmed that UK passport holders will be subject to the same Entry/Exit System (EES) procedures as all other non-EU visitors, ending earlier assurances that Britons would be fast-tracked through border controls. [Greek City Times]
If you want it from ETIAS itself: Greece has scrapped its promise to spare British travellers from the European Union’s new biometric border checks. Brits will now face the same Entry/Exit System (EES) registration as every other non-EU visitor this summer. [ETIAS.com]
One of our roses to brighten the gloomy news.
You can read the full stories by following those links, but it looks like it’s off again. This means there will be queues to get in and out of the country at peak times, which is basically from now until whenever. That is, unless you have a European passport or a biometric Greek residency card (which will only work in Greece, and not in other European countries). I’ve heard tell of travellers with UK passports and Greek biometric residency cards sailing through the EU channel at Greek airports and coming across thankful customs officers; thankful because it means there’s one less person in the swelling throng waiting in sweaty anticipation of missing their hotel pickup.
Good luck with that.
It’s put me in mind of the worst airports I have encountered in my limited travel career. I think I have a top three, starting, in third place, with Skiathos back in the 1980s. I remember the landing because it’s hard to forget at that airport, the runway being the length of the 100-yard dash. I think we were asked to put our feet through the floor and dig our heels in as the plane headed for the sea at the other end of the landing strip, and as we turned, I looked down, and I’m sure I could see fish. Getting off, we walked across the tarmac and followed a set of railings through an open-fronted tin hut where there were a couple of men at desks, and that was it. Free to be ‘at leisure’ for the rest of the holiday. Returning involved a three-hour wait in a building from where we could watch a new terminal being built, and another hour out in the baking heat, on the tarmac, repeating the tin-hut process and waiting at the crash barriers before finally boarding, flying for a few minutes and then enduring a refuelling wait for over an hour at Athens. Not doing that again.
In second place must come Southend International Airport in the 1990s. I was supposed to be flying from City Airport to Dublin with Virgin, but the City was fogbound, so we were driven out to Southend. Well, to a field nearby that might have once been used for bombing raids in WWII, and which had been used for growing mangelwurzels ever since. It was downhill, which helped with picking up speed over the tufts of grass and (possibly) small animals, and it was all so antique, it was almost charming. (It’s a lot better now. Toilets and everything.)
But in first place, I give you the palace of delights which was Abu Simbel Airshack, circa 1987. We’d flown down from Luxor on an Air Sinai rust bucket that was leaking something from underneath as we climbed the ladder to board. ‘Breakfast’ for the 45-minute trip was two pieces of bread glued together with some kind of indiscernible spread, and a glass of water no-one risked. Again, arriving was easy enough, but waiting for the trip back later… It was around midday by then, the sun was a relentless 45° outside, so we had to wait inside where there was no air conditioning, and there enjoy the non-negotiable sauna. When we were finally sent to board into the searing heat of the desert, the release came as a relief. I just had a look, and the airport is also now much improved, I am pleased to say. Anyway, I thought I’d start the month off with that cheery news and some cheery pictures of the courtyard as an antidote. There’s nothing you can do about the queues when you arrive except prepare for them, allow for them in your planning, and stay calm. You’ll get here in the end.
There was a hull of a hellabaloo outside the house yesterday. There I was ‘stood sitting there’ as Hilda Baker might have said, reading my book about the life of John Steinbeck when it all started kicking off up on the telegraph wire. There was this little chap chirping its beak off, loudly, and non-stop, apparently for no other reason than a good chat. There were more of his kind in and around the pomegranate tree, though they were all too small to catch on my phone’s camera to any decent extent. I’m not sure what bird they are. I think they might be a kind of warbler, or a chiffchaff. Noisy things when they get chatting. You might need to turn the sound up on this short video I took, but believe me, it was a lot louder in real life.
I carried on reading about America’s most successful author of the 40s (that’s as far as I’ve got so far), and the racket in the trees got worse. A blackbird came to join in, and sat up on the wire clacking like that old Remington typewriter I mentioned yesterday. Flitting back and forth, having a good old go about the price of a sunbed, or ‘boat people’ or something, and I put my reading aside to do some detective work. It didn’t take long to find the cause of the Great Matter playing out in front of me, and there it was:
It (its preferred pronoun) was sitting so still and was so camouflaged by the background, I’d not noticed it. It was a little like the spider in the kitchen this morning. I’d made a cup of tea, and was just leaving the room when I saw one rappelling down the cutlery drawer. It must have been right next to me as I pottered about, but I’d not seen it despite its size. ‘Ooh, one of the biggest I’ve seen,’ the husband enthuses as he wraps it in a towel and takes it for a walk down the lane to rehome it (making sure, this time, it doesn’t leap onto his head). Back a scene: I wasn’t able to get a good shot of the cause of the disturbance from that angle, as you might be able to see, so I went next door to my office and managed to get one with the sea behind it.
The owl just sat there, only occasionally turning its head, and did nothing for a whole chapter, by which time, I was growing tired of the noise. I was just about to go inside when the owl, after a couple of good scratches, flew to the building opposite, and perched directly above where the chiffchaffs (or whoever) have nested in the tree. Well, the blackbird wasn’t having that, so it tried to scare the owl away by dive bombing it, flying past so close, the owl was obliged to ruffle its feathers, but refused to budge.
I had to leave them to it in the end, but when I came back to the scene a while later, it was all very quiet. The owl had gone, either with or without its afternoon tea, and calm of some sort had been restored. Until the next time. Anyway, have a good weekend, and yes, I did mean to say ‘hull of a hellabaloo’ because it sounds like a line from a Disney song that way.
I was just doing that waking up thing — blundering about the necessities of the early morning, kettle on, find mug, turn on laptop, open windows, make sure we still have sky, collect tea, stare at blank page and wonder what to write — when my eyes strayed to a post on some social platform, and I noticed someone had asked a question I have been asked many times in the past. Why are the churches on Symi locked? And the answers given…?
As Frances Fisher says in ‘Titanic’, “My dear! Let me tell you what an odyssey that was.” Some people remember a time when the churches were all open to the public, and maybe they were, but in my experience, that was in the last century. The only time I’ve been able to wander into a church and have a gander is when there has been someone there to unlock it for me, when a service has been taking place, or on the day of a special event. (Although, in his retirement, Petros used to open Haritomeni Church for passers-by, and then try and sell them oddments he’d found lying around on the street, but that was when he was alive.) It’s possible to find the courtyards open, though sometimes you have to slip your hand through the gate and pull the latch, but I’ve never known any chapels or churches to be left open all day. (Except for one.) Maybe some were, back in the day, but they are not now, and the reasons given on the ‘social’ post were sometimes so presumptuous as to sound uneducated – no offence if you hold the same belief. One reason given was that ‘I had heard there were a lot of boat people and maybe it was to keep them out.’ Now, if you want to know what’s wrong with the yUK right now, then the term ‘boat people’ is a good place to start. I assume Mr or Mrs Armitage-Shanks was referring to the refugee crisis in 2015/16, where we and many other islands hosted upwards of 500 refugees in one weekend – and cared for them. ‘Boat people’ are what the newspapers called refugees from Saigon back in 1975, but these days, in some yUK papers, it means ‘People who are coming to take your jobs and steal your benefits.’ But let’s not get started on that. Let’s just agree that, no, the churches were not locked up because of refugees coming across. That wasn’t the reason then, and it isn’t now.
‘They have visitors from Turkey,’ was another out of the left filed of what sounded like the right wing. What the hell has that got to do with anything? Are Turkish (by which, I assume them meant to say ‘Muslim’ with a twist of their lips) visitors coming over to ransack and steal, to burn and pillage as though this was 15th Century Romania? Unlikely. There were other wrong guesses too, but to my mind, the main reason the churches are locked is the same reason as every other unmanned place of worship in any country is probably unlocked; because we’re living in the 20th century. Leave your chapel unlocked; someone wanders in, slips over, and sues the Church because they have had their holiday ruined (by their own foolishness). Theft, of course, but thieves are just as likely to be Christian, atheist, or anything else as they are to be Turkish or Muslim. I think what some people were trying to say without realising it is that we now have a small Muslim population living on the island, and those commentators are afraid of them for some bad-journalism-instilled reason. I can tell you, Mr Armitage-Shanks, more pleasant, helpful, respectful and law-abiding citizens I have yet to meet. Like them, I am a guest who has found sanctuary in this country, and one thing guaranteed to have me kicked out of it would be to rob a church. No, in my experience, it is hard to find one of the large parish churches open just so the tourist can wander around. We don’t have the resources to put staff on the door all day, as you may have in Little Whinge-on-Sea, we don’t have guides poised in every narthex as they had in Transylvania (and excellent they were too), and the churches have no reason to be left abandoned all day. Well, you just wouldn’t, would you? Not anywhere.
I think it was the blindfolded dart playing by commentators that had me rushing for my Remington Monarch, aiming their accusations without foundation, and guessing from a non-charitable direction. I think the simple fact is that these days, is that no-one can afford to leave anything unlocked, whether it’s a church or a museum (and many churches are living museums), or a whatever, you simply can’t risk vandalism and theft, misuse or whatever in any place from any quarter. When visitors (northern Europeans from Christian countries), feel they can wander into private courtyards and onto private terraces because they have a sense of entitlement after paying €50.00 for a day trip, what hope is there for the churches? You can imagine: ‘Over here, Maureen, we can have our sandwiches in this pew.’ ‘Sandara… Ooh, get a photo of me with this picture of a bloke with a beard. It’s got gold on it.’ How about a selfie inside the Holy of Holies, botoxed lips kissing the chalice? ‘No-one’s going to mind if you take one of them, Bert. It’ll be a souvenir…’
The number of times someone’s asked me how to get to ‘the church’ (as if there were only one), and I’ve told them directions knowing full well it will be locked, well, that’s another odyssey, and I’ve been doing it for at least 23 years. There is only one chapel I know of that is permanently unlocked. It’s small, a delightful place to go for contemplation and to light a candle, leave a few euros for doing so, and, of course, I always close the door after me and bolt it, though anyone can slip that bolt. And I am not telling you where it is, in case ‘Boat people’ get to hear, and Saladin invades so he can claim it as his. Blimey. That was more than I intended to write. Sorry about that. I’m off.
Well, I’m up far earlier than I intended today, and with not much on my mind apart from what chapter 36 is to be about. I had a scroll through some social media groups ‘n’ stuff to see if I could find you anything relevant or of interest, and I can tell you that Nanou beach is now open. In the days when I used to spend time on beaches, this was one of my favourites. I’ve not been there for years, but I hope it remains the same; unspoiled, with an almost prehistoric atmosphere and landscape, peaceful, and with a traditional taverna. A fair number of wasps too, I remember, but that was to do with the position of the bins, and was 100 years ago now, so I expect it’s changed for the better. Sadly, I can’t find the only photo I have of the place, from 1996, but if it ever turns up, I’ll share it.
One of the boat rental services is open for business too [Symi Blue Water]. The Poseidon around the island yacht is running more regularly, as long as it has the numbers, and the bus has put on more hours, though I can’t remember exactly what they are, so that’s not very helpful. It’s still not always possible to get a taxi at night (always has been, though things have improved a little in recent years), so if you’re staying in the village and heading to the harbour for the night, you might need to check the time of the last bus. Symi Fishing Trips have started up (that link takes you to their Facebook page), and I reckon, just about every other business is now up and running (though maybe not all the beaches just yet). With temperatures forecast to hit the high 40s this year, remember the basic rule of staying hydrated: Beer is not water. Nor is coffee, tea, G&T, wine, etc.
Turtle dove in the village square.
In the summer, we get through a six-pack of water a day between the two of us, so at least 4.5 litres a day of pure water each, and around 2.00 litres a day in the winter. I have a glass beside me on the desk and am constantly sipping away without realising it. The same by my end of the sofa. That’s probably why I have to wake up at 03.30 in the morning, which is why I am here doing this in the middle of the night.
