Tag Archives: Mornings

The Scent of a Holiday

Had a strange moment yesterday. Strange but also pleasant. I went out onto the balcony in the mid-morning to take a break from work and suddenly had the smell of holidays. By which I mean, the smell of the sea and the sun as you might find when going down to the beach knowing you have nothing ahead but time off for several days. Strange because we’re not near the sea, although we can see it, what with the harbour directly in front of us. We can also see it from the roof, as Neil’s photo of yesterday’s sunrise illustrates.

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I was trying to think when I last had a holiday where I sat by the sea and experienced the same feeling off work, and it must have been in 2000 when we last came here on holiday. Since moving here, our holidays have mainly been to cities, and if I ran through a list of them, you’ll think us very well off and well-travelled. We’re neither, really, but we do save up and, when we can, go to places that are perhaps a little bit different and not near the sea. Apart from the Galapagos Islands, but that wasn’t a lying-on-the-beach holiday, more of an exploration, and the five days on the boat there came after two weeks ashore in Peru and the Ecuador mainland. It was also a pretty exhausting time what with three big meals a day, two trips off the boat sandwiched in between, and lectures in the evening.

Earlier this year, I went to Prague with my music student and godson, and no doubt, I will tell you more about that another day. A few years ago, Neil and I visited his brother in Vienna, then took the train to Prague, then Budapest, and then to Belgrade. We’ve also been to visit my brother in Australia, the children in Scotland (we were there in November for a wedding), and have turned up in Athens, Berlin, London, Split, Bucharest and Transylvania. In 2020 we scooted across Canada by train. My one and only trip to Cyprus was for work, and none of the above have been holidays where we sat around doing nothing. We don’t need to – not that we sit around doing nothing here, but if I needed a day on the beach, I can have one any time. I just choose not to. In fact, the last time we tried, I lay on a sunbed at ten, woke up at twelve, went home, had lunch, and went to work.

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Anyway, the breeze must have been blowing in the right direction yesterday to bring the smell of warm sea salt, and I must have been relaxed enough to imagine I was on holiday. It only lasted a moment or two, and then it was back to the desk.

You might like to know that it was 21 years ago today that we left the yUK to live in Greece. If I remember, I’ll fill you in on ‘This day in history’ over the next couple of weeks, because it took us 11 days to get from Luton to Symi.

Thoughts from a Midnight Balcony

Talk about an early morning ramble, this is a very early morning stream of semi-consciousness, and with a pretentious title too! What more could you ask?

I woke up at 2.00 this morning. Actually, it was 1.30 but I managed to go back to sleep and have a lie in. The night before, I’d watched half of Das Boot, but had to give in at 20.45 and go to bed, so at least I had five hours sleep, and there’s about the same amount of time to look forward to with the rest of Das Boot. (Never seen it before. Always meant to. Excellent.)

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I’m not here to whinge about the lack of sleep, because I don’t feel tired at all. In fact, today (which is actually yesterday when you read this) started well. A potential new writing opportunity came in, as did a free book promo opportunity on a thing called BookFunnel, and I reckon my Victorian mystery adventure, ‘Guardians of the Poor’ would be perfect for it. I also sold some books yesterday and my daily stats thing had a spike – we’re talking cents not sensational, so don’t get excited. I now have the whole day to work on the current WIP, save for an hour’s siesta around normal people’s breakfast time, and at least I am not a British TV presenter having my life ruined because some scum of a rag wants to sell more newspapers. Honestly! Don’t get me started… Today is to be a positive day, and I mean yesterday when I am writing this and today or whenever when you are reading it.

Being up and about when most people are asleep or finishing off their night out isn’t always a tranquil experience. Granted, the other morning, I was in the courtyard listening to absolutely nothing at all. No cockerels, no mopeds, no voices and not a breath of wind. Then, standing on the balcony some mornings, I am treated to conversations from the still-open kafeneion in Yialos, and the goodbyes hollered before the mopeds set off to grind up the hill. Other mornings, music is still playing somewhere, occasionally interspersed with ‘Opah!’ and on other days (nights), I hear the fishing boats throatily chugging out way before dawn.

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Then, there are the night animals. The owl that sits on our telegraph pole and pings like a sonar, the one that screeches in the darkness, the cats in heat singing almost as badly as the revellers in the kafeneion, and the insomniac cockerels up the road, in the valley, over the hill, and let’s face it, everywhere. From time to time, you can add to this the discussions of two young men as they ride side by side up the hill on their motorbikes, the lapping of the sea against the quayside, the rumble of a middle-of-the-night ferry, and the solitary half-hour chime of the Ag Triada clock, when it’s working.

Pre-dawn departure
Pre-dawn departure

There are also the sights. There’s an odd light that appears over the Turkish mountains now and then. It rises to a particular height, stays there, glows and fades. There are sometimes flashing pinpricks from aeroplanes too high to hear, and others lower, accompanied by the dull drone of their engines, satellites and the space station gliding silently among the stars, the currently waning moon over to the east, and the rats in the pomegranate tree next door having a good old picnic.

The mind is more alive too. At least mine is, and I do my best writing before ten in the morning. After that, all I am good for on the work front is editing, but that’s also a job I enjoy. That’s how this post started. I was having a cup of tea on the balcony, looking at the harbour lights and, for some reason, a line from Private Lives came to me; ‘It’s extraordinary how potent cheap music is.’ There was no music, so I don’t know how that got in, but I was, like Amanda, standing on a balcony overlooking a harbour at night. I was also reflecting on the days just passed and how the bother-in-law left on the Wednesday evening Blue Star with his delightful daughter, and what a good time we’d all had. Then, my mind turned to what I had planned for the day ahead, I turned on the PC, made another cup of tea, and shuffled the piano stool from one part of the house to another as quietly as possible so as not to wake the volcano rumbling away in the bedroom.

Random shot inside Taverna Zoi, early lunchtime (she's open 12 to 3pm for lunch), Wednesday. I lked the shades of blue, and the food was fab too.
Random shot inside Taverna Zoi, early lunchtime (she’s open from 12 to 3 pm for lunch), Wednesday. I liked the shades of blue, and the food was fab too.

And here I am doing that thoughts-to-page stuff at 3.44 in the morning. I’ve read the ‘news’, checked the admin, had my first breakfast, and will finish this before heading off into fiction-land and setting my mind to chapter nine of book two of series three. This one to be titled ‘Fall from Grace.’

Here’s a reminder before you go. Although I’m not posting here on SD over the weekends, I put a Saturday post on my Jackson blog, and tomorrow, the 14th, it’s a guest post from a fellow author who has written a three-book historical series set in WWII. Take a look at Jackson Marsh tomorrow, and I’ll be back on Monday, probably around the same unearthly time of night.

Waving off te famly on Wednesday evening. Seeing the Blue Star leaving for Athens in eth evening is always a romantic sight.
Waving off the family on Wednesday evening. Seeing the Blue Star leaving for Athens in the evening is always a romantic sight.