It is quite a day for celebrations today. Most importantly, it’s happy birthday to Neil Day, then it’s happy wedding anniversary, and happy landing on Symi Day. In the wider world, Michelangelo’s ‘David’ was first shown on this day, as was the first episode of Star Trek (not in the same year). We shan’t mention the darker events of the day in history, such as the finding of the second Jack the Ripper victim, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and the first football league matches, but on the other side of the coin, we could mention the birthdays of Richard the Lionheart, Patsy Cline, Peter Sellers and my grandfather. What a dinner party that would make.

Yesterday, 24 years ago, we were enjoying our last day on Antiparos. We’d had some holiday time there, doing that lazing on the beach thing that I am no longer any good at, and we had taken a trip. Eight kilometres outside of Antiparos town is the cave of Agios Ioannis, an 85-meter-deep cave that contains Europe’s oldest stalagmite (45 million years, and being Greek, still working 18-hour days), and, carved into the rock among others, the signature of Lord Byron. We’d also dome some asking around, checking out the prices of any properties to rent for a year, but there weren’t any, and asking about job chances. Again, not many, and mostly to do with teaching English. So, although the island was suitably small and reasonably non-commercial, we decided it was not for us, and that we would go to straight from there to Symi. The holiday fund was wearing down, and we had been mooching around for about 10 days so far, and it was time to move on. This involved nothing more complicated than buying a boat ticket from the local agent.

The boat was called Marina, an inter-island ferry that called at Paros and ended up in Rhodes, and, according to our ticket, it left Paros at exactly 23.59 on September 7th. We thought that timing was somewhat precise, but we packed up, took the small boat back to Paros, and there, in the afternoon, found somewhere to leave our luggage. We were travelling with a large rucksack each, a small rucksack and a laptop bag, and that was it, but it was still a fair amount to carry around. So, that lot dumped, we decided to come back for it at ten that night, and, meanwhile, enjoy a leisurely dinner somewhere along the front.

The place we ended up in was one of those where the taverna is on one side of a busy-ish main road and the outside tables, on the other by the sea, from where we could see the port. We opted for pizzas, and the cheerful chappie waiter/owner/lord high everything else, persuaded us to try his saganaki cheese in brandy. Turned out the pizzas were the size of tractor tyres and the cheese not much smaller, and we had to leave most, else we’d be unable to walk. Still, with plenty of time, we waddled back to pick up our luggage, and found a café opposite the port entrance, and there, dumped the bags and ourselves, ordered an ouzo each, and with well over an hour to wait, watched the world go by.

I’d done some background work before setting off on this adventure, and had taken nine months of Greek lessons with a brilliant young woman in Brighton. German by birth, and Greek by parentage, she was at university studying English law. She had also studied languages (understatement), and was a strict grammarian. Hence, I’d learnt how verbs, adjectives and so on worked, and why there are three genders (because there are), and how to decline an active verb (you politely say, ‘no thank you’), and so on, but there was no way I was ever going to pronounce the letters gamma or chi, and nor did we have time to understand reflexive verbs and sentence construction before we left. I could, though, read the language because it is handily phonetic.

At around 22.20, I noticed a ferry lumbering into port, and happened to read its name. ‘MAPINA.’ The tailgate went down just as we settled into our seats, and a crowd of waiting passengers moved forward to embark.
‘That says Marina,’ I translated, cos, let’s face it, you’ve only got to change the P to an R, so it wasn’t much. ‘I’ll check.’ A quick trot across the road to an officer at the gate, and ‘Is that this boat?’ Showing her the ticket. ‘Yes. Why does your ticket say 23.59?’ Well, I’m sure I don’t know, but that’s our boat. A run back across the road. ‘Grab the bags!’ The waiter arrived with the drinks. ‘Sorry, can’t stop.’ (We left the right money.) Another run back across the road with rucksacks hanging, and a dash to the tailgate just in time to be about the last people on – and off it went. We’d thought 23.59 was precise, but not that, when translated to Greek, it stood for 22.36.

There then followed an overnight to Rhodes, trying to sleep on the floor between the airline seats, with, for me, no luck. The boat was packed, and everyone was sleeping wherever they could find a place, but me being one of those who can’t sleep on the move, I wandered about for most of the night. Just before dawn, we were coming up on Kalymnos, so I went to wake Neil so he could see the sun rise over a Greek island on his birthday, which he did. On returning to our nest beneath the seats, we found someone had nicked our roll mat. Ah well, if they need it more… I vaguely remember the boat arrived into Akandia (I think it must have been), and the hydrofoil to Symi left at around two that afternoon. This gave us plenty of time to find it, get on it, and discover that, yes, it left at the time stated on the ticket.

A new week, a blank page (literally), as I stare at the screen wondering what on earth to tell you about today. It occurs to me that we are now in anniversary season, because this time 24 years ago was our last night of travelling before arriving here on Symi. It also occurred to me how much things have changed in that time. So, although the images here will be of Symi and purely decorative, I thought I might spend the week thinking about these changes, while recalling the journey we took to reach here.

Meanwhile…

We’d flown to Athens on 29th August, got ripped off by a taxi from the airport, and had booked into a hotel near Omonia Square for a couple of nights. Dodgy to say the least. From our crumbling concrete balcony, we were able to watch police officers moving on the homeless with their batons, and we only had to walk ten yards up the road before being offered ladies of the night and/or illegal substances. During the day, the air was thick with fumes and stifling, and breathing was a trial. We managed to visit a couple of sights, walked for hours, and decided we would move on to take a look at Paros. Why not?

When it came time to go, we gleefully checked out of our squalor, battled with a ticket seller because our pronunciation of Piraeus wasn’t perfect, took the train to the port, and searched out our boat. I can’t remember where we booked the tickets. Must have been a travel shop because this was 2002, before online booking, and we had no mobile phones. On the way to the ferry, following a large group of holidaymakers across the port, we were offered various properties to rent nearby, and had some other approaches made about who knew what because we weren’t interested.

I remember the ferry as being busy, but we found a spot up on deck with a bench to ourselves, there to sunbathe, read, watch the sea and coast go by, until we pulled into Paros roughly five or six hours later. There, we were immediately offered rooms by a variety of men and women holding boards (and, we later found out, acting illegally), and settled on a hotel a little way back from the seafront. We gave Paros the benefit of a couple of days during which time we took a look around the main town of Parikia, mainly to find inspiration for where to go next. We had two weeks of holiday fund spending, but by the end of that time, we had to find a place to settle down and live off €600 a month between us.

I can’t remember how we decided on Antiparos, but that was where we headed, and on the way to the ferry, secured accommodation on the tiny island across the water well in advance. The chap who’d found us on the street even put us on the ferry and told us someone would be waiting for us on the other side. A little ominous, but sure enough, there was a cheery chap who took us to his cousin’s father’s cousin’s… you know how it is… accommodation. This was a one-bed apartment in a new purpose-built holiday accommodation complex on the edge of the small town, a stone’s throw from the beach. Very nice, and something like €10.00 a night. There, we settled in for what was to end up being five nights, and it was during that time we decided to move on to Symi.

Changes?

I’ve not been to Athens since a year ago last Christmas, but between our first visit there and now, things have certainly changed. Even Omonia Square has been revamped, and the area has improved. The cost of visiting the Acropolis has more than doubled, but there was no museum to visit back then. The traffic pollution also seemed better, but I’ve not been there in August only in winter. I doubt you can get a room anywhere in Greece for €10.00 a night these days, but you can book ahead online. I see fewer accommodation touts in the ports, but there are more homeless people and, I assume, the same authoritative attitude towards immigrants. What’s for sure is that it is now no longer possible to survive on €600 a month; we have to pay almost that in rent just to have a roof over our heads. The average wage in Greece in 2002 was around €900 a month (not that we have ever earned that much), and I am told it is now around €1,400 a month, and we still don’t earn anywhere near that.

Anyway, more tomorrow…

To end the week, and because I am keen to get straight to work this morning, here’s a gallery of a few photos Neil took while taking a stroll towards Nimborio yesterday morning. There’s a very pleasant walk to be had if you take the road leading off the back of the town square and head up the hill. It’s steep, but not overly long, and brings you out by a large farm. Follow the paved path onwards, and you cross the countryside, where you should make sure you stop to look back. You’ll get a different view of the Castro and village from there. Onwards, and you will come to the church of St George, where the gate is usually unlocked, though the bolt is often across, so you need to unbolt that (and it is on the other side of the gate). You’re able to rest in the yard, but the church will most likely be locked. If you’re going to Nimborio, you carry on down the zigzag caldera and join the road onwards (turn left), or come back around the headland (turn right). As always, if you’re walking, even at dawn, take water, a hat, sensible shoes and care.

Here are some shots. Have a good weekend.

There’s nothing much of use in my head this morning, so I’ve pulled out a photo I took the other day while I was doing that husband thing; hanging around outside a shop waiting for the other half to browse, chat and possibly purchase. I noticed this chap having a sit down and working his sponges while watching the world go by. He’s wearing a scafandros, a mechanical diving suit (also spelt skafandras as far as I can see, or Σκάφανδροs in Greek).

[A disclaimer: I’m pulling this info from various online sources because it would take me too long to find the printed details in my books, so if any of this is wrong, blame ‘progress.’]

According to what I can quickly find: on Symi, before 1863, divers used only a heavy flat stone called a kampanellopetra (weighing 12–15 kilos) to sink quickly to the seabed and harvest sponges on a single breath. You can see some of these stones at the folk museum in Horio. This style of diving was also called ‘naked diving’, but calm down, all the images show the men wore something when they went down, though maybe that’s just for publication propriety.

In 1863, Fotis Mastoridis brought the first surface-supplied diving suit (scafandro) to Symi from his work abroad, and to convince sceptical local sponge fishermen that the airtight suit and air pump were safe, his wife Eugenia Mastoridou put on the heavy metal-helmeted suit and demonstrated it in the sea. This new equipment allowed divers to stay under longer and gather more sponges, though that, in time, led to the decline of the industry through overfishing (and, I read, there was the spread of a sponge disease that killed off a lot of the sponge beds).

I read that info in one of my books; it might have been ‘Bitter Sea’ by Faith Warn, which is about sponge diving on Kalymnos. In that book, she also talks about the dance that developed when divers began to suffer ‘the diver’s sickness’, the bends as we would now say. You can still see this dance performed on Symi and elsewhere. The dance is called the Mihanikos, (or O Choros tou Michanikou, meaning “The Dance of the Mechanic”), and it’s quite a thing to see.

If you want to read more and better on this, take a look at the Visit Symi website article here.

I saw a lovely thing the other afternoon. I was crossing the empty village square; a cicada was doing its thing in one of the trees, there were no motorbikes to be heard, no noise from the bars, and no children playing football. A lady was sitting on the bench on the other side of the square wearing a long, light summer dress and a suitably wide-brimmed hat, and she was reading a book. Had I taken a photograph and zoomed in, the image could have been from the cover of a holiday romance novel, or the final shot of a romantic comedy film. The scene was peaceful and content, and reminded me of what being away from it all used to be about. Time alone, reading a book, in the shade.

It was a world away from what has become the holiday norm. Piling onto a beach, jealously scouring it for a sunbed, paying whatever price that beach is asking, and arranging all the bits and pieces. This means unpacking: the sun lotion, the change of clothes, the spare towel, puzzle book, headphones, phone, snacks, bottle of water, cooler box, plastic inflatables, swimming shoes, goggles, snorkel, first aid kit, anti-this and that cream, sunglasses, spare hat, Kindle, real book (just in case), and then, doing the same with the kids’ bags and adding more plastic inflatables, blow-up surfboards, comics, wet-wipes and a special bag of ‘things’ because you never know when the child will demand to play with that Captain America he’s not played with for five years, but just in case… And after all that (and this is the kicker for me), dragging the wood and plastic mattress sunbed out of the sun and into the shade. Might as well call it a shade bed. Oh, and then to move camp continually through the day to avoid the sun as it moves around.

Fancy that? No? A simple bench in a simple square with a decent book will do.

The sight also reminded me of people’s idea of being a writer living on a Greek island. In the past, I’ve come across other people’s views of this occupation, and it was always wildly different to reality. I think people imagine the author sitting beneath an olive tree on a hillside, with a notebook and a pen, drawing inspiration from the landscape, with the cicada’s chirping out of sight (distant goat bells are part of the underscore too), and everything being perfect with the world while hundreds of words pour forth in exactly the right order to produce another classic, soon to become a Netflix series. That’s the ideal world to which everyone aspires, right?

Hm. More like getting up at four in the morning to find some cooler hours, and some quiet time away from the worries of having not enough water but too many bills, the noise of bikes and other bothersome things, and spending six hours or more each day bashing out words, putting them in a reasonable order, paying to have them checked, set out into a book, and a cover designed, and then arranging for publication, while trying to promote those already out there without spending any money, because you haven’t got much, and then, when that’s done, starting the process again. All before lunch because after that, it’s too hot and stuffy in the house to concentrate.

Ah. Each to his own, of course, but for me, I think I will put on my wide-brimmed hat and spend the afternoon reading on a bench.