Had to put on a t-shirt this morning. Only 24 degrees in the courtyard. Mind you, there’s a stiff breeze and it it’s 3.30, so that might have something to do with it. As we head into the weekend, I have a day ahead doing what I like to do: writing, eating, playing the piano, and watching films. The weekend promises more of the same, with nothing major planned for a few days.
To see us into the weekend, there are a couple more photos taken when wandering aimlessly around the village. The narrow lanes, a Turkish-looking casing around what I assume was once a courtyard a door, a lane showing the old Vs the renovated, and a shot of a ship. (Make sure you don’t get your vowels mixed up on that one.) There was a barquentine in view yesterday. The Star Clipper from Star Clippers Cruises carries up to 170 passengers and 72 crew, was built in 1992, and looked majestic. My photo doesn’t do it justice, of course. It would be good to one day see one of these tall ships with its sails up, but there’s not much point in them doing that when moored off an island for a day.
It’s strange, talking about a ‘weekend’ because my weeks don’t have ends or beginnings. I suppose I am still of the Monday-to-Friday mindset ingrained over X number of years working back in the yUK, so I still call Saturday and Sunday a weekend. In Greece, the week starts on a Sunday, I am told, so the weekend is really the week beginning. Whatever, every day is the same for me, summer and winter, and that’s just fine. As the dowager says in Downton Abbey, ‘What’s a weekend?’ She says that because, before the growth of the middle classes in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, and a change in working hours/days, there was no such word as weekend. If you went to a country house for a visit, you did a ‘Friday to Monday.’ If you were of any other class, you probably worked seven days a week, perhaps with a Sunday morning off for church, and that was that.
That’s one of the things I’m constantly aware of when writing stories sent in 1892, as I am doing these days. No such word! I have to keep checking, as best I can, when certain words came into general use, and weekend doesn’t appear until after the turn of the century. There are others. I tut greatly when a character in film or writing uses the word ‘okay’ and the piece is set before WWII – I heard it in a Victorian drama recently; they should have known better. There are many others, and some are surprising. ‘Acerbic’, for example, sounds like an old word to me, but apparently, it didn’t come into general use until the 1950s. ‘Paperwork’ is another. It’s a minefield (1908), but being me, it’s a thing I enjoy researching.
On which note, work calls, so I will leave you with one of Neil’s shots from Pedi yesterday and wish you a good Friday to Monday.
