PRICKLY PEARS!

We were so pleased that our long delayed celebration of being 60 and retirement by inviting friends to stay happened this week and the party – most of whom we have known for 40ish years arrived at the beginning of the week after furious moppings and sweepings to get the house ready. It was a reprise of “Five go Mad in Dorset” from recent years when the round of 60^th birthday celebrations began. 

Jane and The Prickly Pear

 J (the food stylist) pronounced that she was going to spend her time food foraging and supplies of unripe olives and rock hard pomegranates are now on the front walls waiting for the sun to do its job along with a bright pink hat which was similarly foraged from a nearby beach and awaited a new owner. Fortunately we did have some marvellous tomatoes and a deliciously sweet melon given us by our kindly friend Niko to await their arrival. Our friends arrived from Blighty laden with gifts – just the sort we love – 2 x sachets of fresh ground coffee for a filter machine, a large hunk of cheese, biscuits and a brilliant tee shirt for Kimon, whose lotus-eater wardrobe was in dire need of a makeover.

There were lots of activities to herald their arrival like a Renaissance Festival in Rethymnon with all sorts of activities staged over a week – traditional Cretan dancing, classical music and jazz to name a few – so we set off for the bright lights of Rethymnon on Tuesday evening to see what was happening and made a return visit on Wednesday to take in Jazz and renaissance music.

They were delighted by the charming lanes and alley ways of the old Venetian quarter which have recently been repaved and combine the lovely antique street lights with eco-friendly light bulbs. We spent a little time at the Pottery Cafe which has a beautiful back garden and had a meal at one of our favourite ports of call. I chose a dish called Imam Baldi (which translated means the Imam fell down in delight over the beautiful flavour of the dish) and it had the same effect on me except I was ill for two days following. We wondered whether it was food poisoning until all the party began to drop like ninepins a day or two apart from each other. … So much food has been bought and/or foraged but little eaten since then!

Fortunately, the British crew have recovered fairly quickly and have taken off to Bali for a swim today while we catch up with sleeping and laundry. We hope to be more in the swing of things after the weekend – and we had been invited to take part in a Greeks v the Rest of the World Cricket Match which sadly none of us felt well enough to tackle. This would have been worth attending for all sorts of reasons but especially to find out where there was a large enough expanse of soft, flat ground for a cricket pitch – this is not Corfu after all! If there is an expanse big enough for a Cricket pitch hereabouts, we know of a very interested person who would like to bring a team out to Crete so it was the kind of information we needed to follow up. However, bugs stopped play.

We learned earlier in the blog that there is no such thing as a free lunch when our complimentary lunch courtesy of Minoan Lines meant (but was not stated) that a meal for two was free for everything on the menu except fish – when we had just chosen fish.    Soooo the foraging of prickly pears had a similar end result with much use of tweezers, magnifying glasses, savlon and the ruination of washing up sponges, gardening gloves and a shoulder bag (all of which were infiltrated by almost invisible spines) to produce a fruit salad which was not nearly as tasty as all this botheration warranted. No wonder the Cretans treat these monster cacti with the respect they deserve! Any suggestions for the removal of prickly pear spines from clothing gratefully received (patent pending - we did google it .. and ended up boiling affected articles in a preserving pan rather than transferring said problem to the washing machine and causing even more hassle .......)  However, at such an auspicious stage of our lives,  it seemed important to taste this delicacy once at least so we can tick it off our bucket list. EVIVA!

Five Go Mad in Bali (Crete) - Liz, Kimon, Jane, Steve 

They were all watching The Calypso!