I once read a book by Paulo Coelho. Actually, I have read three: The Valkyries, The Alchemist and… No, it was only two (I was thinking of something else). In one of them, the Valkyries, I think, he, or one of his characters, is giving a chat about… Buddhism, was it? Something like that, and I think a desert was involved. It was a while ago, and as you can tell, I don’t remember much else, but anyway… There was this thing about keeping your head up and looking at the horizon when walking. It’ was something philosophical to do with life, I don’t know, but it came back to be when I saw this photo in my collection. *

To see this kind of thing on Symi, you need to look down, and if you do, you will find patterns in the stones all over the place. Some are there by design, and there is a good example of stone engraving in the churchyard floor in the courtyard of the Kastro church (the blue and white one). There are others that are similar, but there are many more put there by bored children or teens, or even older folk, sitting on the steps, whiling away the days. You might call these ones graffiti, because they were not planned, but they are still interesting to see. For example, I remember one drawing that had a date on it from the 1980s. That’s like coming across a moment in time, because the etching in the rock could only have been made by someone sitting in that exact spot, on that date. If you close your eyes (while standing still), you could imagine the scene, and there you are in the same place, only in a different time.

This picture has nothing to do with what I’m talking about (except it’s the church I mentioned).

I guess the point is, to take time while wandering the village and look at the ground. (I’ve not seen so many etchings in Yialos, but I expect they are there.) Well, it’s safer to do that around here anyway. If you followed Mr Coelho’s advice and walked around with your eyes fixed on the horizon so your head is always held high and your spirit open to the teachings of whoever, you’d soon end up, in bandages, treading in animal leftovers, or at the very least, missing a step and hurtling down the Kali Strata at full tilt. So, look out for such details, read such books, and take time when here, to stand and stare as sheep or cows, as WH Davies suggests in his poem. You never know what you might discover.

Of course, if you also look up, you will see other interesting details you might otherwise miss, such as:

* In Buddhist walking meditation, the practice of looking ahead toward the horizon—often described as “gazing at distant mountains” or keeping the eyes open and unfocused—is a technique designed to cultivate awareness and balance. This method helps to maintain a state of relaxed alertness and prevents the mind from falling into a dull, sleepy state.

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Well, that’s ironic. I’m about to spend a small fortune each on Dodec Seaways tickets to Rhodes next Sunday, and a hotel for the night, so we can avoid getting up at 03.00 on Monday to get the 05.00 boat and hanging around Rhodes until 09.00 when we have our first MOT appointment, all without eating or drinking anything but water since the night before, and what do I notice yesterday? A barge of free doctors is visiting Symi over the weekend. I didn’t see the full list, it might have been someone’s Facebook memory, and the clinic wouldn’t have been able to run the full set of blood tests, and we like to see the same doctors year on year (I have my urologist on What’sApp), but still… That’s that, and this is a photo of Jack and the Beanstalk’s house in Upper Horio.

In more local news… There’s nothing to report, except we are starting to put dates on the calendar. Who’s arriving when, kind of dates, and that reminds me… I must thank Collette for the birthday card, which I opened early without thinking, and I’m glad I did. I was just about to open my box of ‘Sensations’ tea, and my mind, therefore, was on the incredibly bland experience I was about to have with a cup of hot water with a splash of milk, when Neil returned from foraging in Yialos and brought with him an envelope. He also brought news that there was no tea other than Lipton’s to be found in the harbour, not even for cash. Horror. I was trying not to be triggered by this blow when, distracted, I opened the card and lo! There was a message from the wild north of a far-flung land, which, among other things, said, ‘Have a drink on me,’ and attached was a single, proper teabag. It’s still going, even after ten reuses… No, it’s not, but it was a perfect gift at the perfect time. My sights are now set on the far left aisle of Pappou supermarket in Kanadas Street, where I can usually manage to find a box of Tetley. Meanwhile, while the foraging continues, we’ve found that if you put two bags of ‘Sensations’ together for one mug, you get slightly more flavour than the taste of desalinated water. Two sugars and a healthy snifter of whisky also helps.

Joking about that, but not about this. I have given myself a tight deadline for the latest MS to be ready for proofing, and as that’s Sunday morning, I need to knuckle down. Here’s the harbour as seen the other day.

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We almost weren’t, but now, we are.

I did that ‘pressing the button’ thing over the weekend, expecting all kinds of nasty when I did so, and I transferred my websites to a new host. That part of the process went suspiciously smoothly and took a couple of hours. Then came something to do with domain name servers, and having to find this ‘DNS’ and replace it with that DNS, which can take up to 48 hours, but seems to have happened overnight. Yay! Success, I thought, until I switched on this morning and couldn’t find the admin area to the blog, and then, couldn’t even find the website.

I had to use the hosts’ chatbot, a string of inputted numbers and symbols called ‘Codee.’ Right, so I am conversing with a headache tablet, as we are forced to do more and more these days because humans have become a fad of the past. I told it my issue. I have to say, it not only found the problem within a minute, but with my permission, it then went and solved the problem, and here I am!

And here’s a photo so you can say, what’s that?

It’s last night’s sky, and it looked a lot better on a small screen in the dark. There was another one of those maintenance power cuts yesterday, but not in our area. I assume that at the end of the working day, someone forgot to switch on the lights, because the streetlights were all out along our lane, and it was glorious! Orion was looming above us in the south, striding warrior-like over the Vigla, and Cassiopea was up there advertising McDonald’s to Australia (we used to call it the Big W), I could see Ursa Minor, and there, my knowledge of the stars runs out. Anyway, the night sky is spectacular in winter when someone forgets to turn on the lights. If you’re here and want to see for yourself, then either drive out into the forest or somewhere else remote, and have a look. You can get a good idea by walking up to or down from the Constantinos View kantina that overlooks the village. If you do that and stop in one of the folds of the road where the trees block the light from Pedi, and you’re in shadow, you can stand and gawp until you get run down by Manolis on his 50cc. Here’s one of the moon which also turned up in my folder. The photo, not the moon. This wasn’t last night, but another time. And I’ll be back with you another time too, like tomorrow, all being well.

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There’s an end-of-the-week gallery of some of Neil’s older photos of the island. This time, I tried to find ones that are of the hinterland, or of places most day trippers don’t see. They were taken a couple of years ago now, mostly in the winter or autumn, by the looks. There’s a feeling of ‘end of term’ about them. I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a boarding school the afternoon after all the kids have gone for the holidays, or in a holiday complex during a changeover weekend? Perhaps an empty cruise ship after the cruise, or any other place that’s one day filled with activity and noise, and the next, empty, peaceful and slightly spooky, like Hastings out of season. Such places take on a different personality once everyone goes home, and Symi certainly does too.

Before the gallery, though, a word of warning.

This is the weekend I am finally going to try to ‘migrate’ my websites to a new host. Symi Dream has sat on the same server since 2004, and although I’ve been able to host as many sites as I want there, and have paid the same price for 22 years, I am now dealing with my third company, and they seem to have put security restrictions in place, which mean I can’t easily use my old email addresses. Something to do with being on a much-shared server and having to pay more to move to a dedicated one… I don’t know, but I looked around for some other places, found some sites, got bamboozled about STPs and PVLs (which I thought had something to do with the clap and visible panties, but what do I know?), and looked at much cheaper prices, and have been swayed by the hosting company that says they will do all the work for me, and only charge me half of what I was being charged, and for 10 times the GB, and I can translate my domain name too, as that’s with another company, and they, too, are costly, and all I have to do is commit to a free month where I bed everything in, and then stay signed up for at least a year. Cheaper if you commit for longer. The usual stuff. But this Company kept coming up in searches and discussions as being a reliable one, so, tomorrow morning, I shall begin.

Phew – that’s how much I am looking forward to the weekend. I know what’ll happen. I will fill out the simple bits like my name, set up my account, and be all ready to start on Saturday morning. Perfect. Then, trepidatiously, I will hit the button that I have to hit to start the ball rolling, and off we go… Into a series of instructions. It’ll be things like:

Navigate to Settings, enter your BSL Code (found in System/ Readers/Digest/Code/SBL), and open the All-in-one-Optimum-Migration Service found under More on the second Appearance menu, and toggle off ‘When C4 is sellected’ (you may have to log out and log in again at this point), first ensuring you have entered the SOC code sent by message to phone number +33 ending in 01019 into the marked box, and shout “Where the **** do I find ‘Settings?’”

So, if you call back here on Monday and things look different, wrong, or are not there, you will know I am having trouble translating my migration from one power-guzzling black box in Arizona to another. Alternatively, it may all go smoothly, or you may find exactly the same as you are looking at right now, and nothing will have changed.

Tempus omnia revelat. ‘Time Reveals All.’ (The motto was found scratched inside a pocketwatch researchers thought once belonged to Jack the Ripper. Hm.) We shall see…

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I wasn’t sure what to talk about this morning, so I sat down at the typowriter and thought for a while… Ah, yes! That.

Before setting fingertips to plastic, though, I went online to check a fact as best you can these days, and there, I became distracted. First, by arriving emails, and then by the fact my Thunderbird email program (sorry, ‘App’) doesn’t have autocorrect like Word does, so my entire reply was underlined in red. Never mind, there is always a solution, and I went to find an add-on for that, and found one, which I then couldn’t get to work, so I tried another way, and 15 minutes later, I’m still none the wiser.

So, I went to my photos folder, which is really Neil’s because it’s currently full of only his photos, and selected a few suitable for today’s blog. Then I remembered what I was going to write about, and went to make a cup of tea…

Back at the desk, I slipped gracefully in to ‘Before I start, I must change the email address associated with my websites’ mode, and went to both sites’ admin panels to sort out that little job that’s been waiting for three weeks and will take one minute to fix, and discovered that the WordPress confirmation email was not getting through to my Gmail account, and I needed to install this plugin or fiddle with that extension, so I used another email address to see if that would work (the home one supplied by Greece’s national phone system) and lo and behold, no.

By which time, I’d forgotten what I came in for, and the calming music on Spotify, which had been playing some of Ravel’s less enthusiastic experiments, was now playing ‘Your 100 Best Songs from Shows You’ve Never Heard of’ or something, so I had to deal with that. Took all of two seconds, and then I remembered I’d not lit any incense. (It’s not part of an ancient rite, sadly, but is a thing I’ve been getting into this winter, and one a day sets a pleasant background scent for the office.) So, I had to see to that… Before making another cup of tea.

And returning to the desk to start again on this blog… After I’ve checked book sales a Kindle Unlimited reads for the month so far… Eek! Much more work is needed in the publicity department if we are to eat in June, and I’m so glad I don’t buy petrol or have travel plans. Except, that is, for our health MOTs in a couple of weeks, which reminded me I had to sort something out there, which I did, before returning to my original search (the one for whatever it was I was looking for at the top of this page), and finding I had somehow opened my BookFunnel author dashboard and joined a free promotion for June. Ah, right. That needs noting and passing to the admin department because it’s a good promo to join, and there are only a few places left, so I must get that form done now.

Sorted, and back to this post, by way of the kitchen to collect a full bottle of water, and the bathroom to unplug the pump because I’d left it on and it was kicking in every ten minutes, and finally back to the desk.

Now, what, 50 minutes ago, was I going to write about?

I couldn’t remember, so I wrote this.

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