How can you make “it's raining cats and dogs” sound much, much more interesting than it really is?
Some of the villagers are thinking that it is about time that we all start building an Ark! The waterfall in the back yard has started up again which keeps us awake and our gum boots are earning their keep. The up side to this is that the temperature is not too cold – if it was, we would be under several feet of snow.
In spite of all this, we had an interesting diversion this week on the arrival of our French friends from Marseilles who we met last Easter. At the time, they were organising for their plot of land to be blessed by the village Papa prior to laying the foundations for their new house. We were able to supply cold water and cups of English tea from time to time after they had worn themselves out pruning their olive trees and getting the necessary permits and documents to start work. Since that time, we passed the shell of their new house most days on the road out of the village and were wondering why we had not seen them again for the next stage of the work. On Monday, Kimon had a dream about them and was telling me about it, saying how strange it was because he was dreaming in French, which was odd, but we pressed on with Monday jobs and had forgot about it by the evening. You can guess how surprised we were to open the door and find them back in the village again when the weather was cold, wet, miserable and we had been huddled in front of the log burner keeping toasty warm. We hauled them in out of the cold as it was definitely not building weather and welcomed them back after such a long time away!
Jean-Luc and France had booked an apartment in the village and planned to see the Architect, organise tiles, windows and doors and spend a week catching up with all the backlog which had accumulated because France had broken her ankle in the summer and they had not been able to get back to Crete all last year. After a bit of a late night where we toasted the New Year, the success of their building project and many other things, I was still abed when they turned up first thing the next morning. Their rented apartment had no heating, no hot water, a faulty loo and a fridge which did not work so they asked if they could come and stay with us! HELP! I hastily leapt upstairs to clear away towels, plastic sheeting and so on which had been arranged under the leaky bits of roof and looked for clean bedding, towels and hot water bottles. All the while I was manically chasing about, I was praying that the rain would stop and the roof would stay watertight for however long their stay lasted.
AND … magically, in spite of days and days of rain, our peculiar old roof did just that. They left after several days of intensive discussions about the European economy, the Armenian Church, their re-evaluation of what they would need to make their house cosy and warm in a Cretan winter, discussions about books, metaphysical ideas, intrinsic good of certain foodstuffs and an amused observation on our part about how long it takes two people to hog a bathroom in the morning!!! However, they left us with an enormous round cheese from the local dairy and we were able to procure 10 k of lemons which they wanted to take back to France with them along with a couple of bottles of raki and local wine which is good stuff and not at all expensive. I don't think that K and I will ever make a living as hoteliers but it did do a lot for 'entente cordiale'. They drove off in a heavy downpour which lasted all night and the roof only began to leak again the following morning when they were safely on the ferry – so we are hoping for some strong wind and sunshine to dry us out again before the arrival of our next winter visitor! Prayer works!
We were able to commiserate over learning Greek which is not at all easy. It had been good to laugh at our collective observation that the Greek alphabet is most unfairly NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER, missing out the letter B (beta = V, whilst B is made up of a combination of M+P [written as pi]) and the letter C does not exist but (using kappa, K) is listed somewhere further on. Z comes after E and the alphabet incorporates a nasty collection of epsilons, upsilons, mi, ni, xi, fi, chi, psi – surely surplus to requirements along with big O's and little o's (omega and omicron)... can't resist lapsing into the four candles sketch… got any 0's ? Jean-Luc kindly left a French Tutorial book entitled 'le grec sans peine' which inexplicably made the whole brain cudgelling issue a bit less like hitting our heads against a brick wall. So now we seem to be learning Greek and French at the same time and have our work cut out! We just hope J.-L. and F. don't give us a test when they return to Crete in March.
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