CHURCH CRAWL

View to the sea from the first Chapel

The summer heat is here, the tourists are here, cars are cramming into small roadways designed for donkeys and we are trying to stay off grid for the hottest part of the summer season when everything is geared up for holiday makers enjoying their well earned summer break.

On Sundays, all the beaches are really crowded and, avoiding resorts, we tried a newly opened restaurant near the village and had a simple lunch cooked on the outside grill with salad and french fries cooked in olive oil … wonderful. Followed by the sweetest water melon ever – just like eating ice lolly. Very nice and nothing too fancy.

View to the East

On Monday morning two lots of builders arrived to work on houses in the immediate vicinity causing maximum chaos. A large lorry promptly parked on the bad corner spot and delivery vans were slowed in their tracks with megaphones blaring. Then our friend Rik arrived early to mend a side wall to our house which has remained untouched since we bought the house and was looking very dilapidated. Rik dropped off a scaffolding tower, bags of cement and all his tools and decided to park the car elsewhere! Since then he has been sweating in the hot sun as he painstakingly puts the wall back to rights.

A place for healing prayers/memories?  Clothes tied to the tree

By Tuesday, I was ready to escape for a spell, so my pal Caron and I jumped in the car and set off to take a look at one or two little chapels in the vicinity, to walk a bit and get some exercise. The first stop was the little chapel of Agios Phanourios is on the top of a hill overlooking Perama in one direction and a little way outside the village of Achlade. With my heart in my mouth and praying that we didn't meet a big 4x4 truck coming down the hill, we put the car in first gear and climbed up to the top of the track, parking under a large shady tree. The church gate was stiff, but opened and so did the door of the church, which was lovely. There were icons to look at, and all along the front of the carved and painted screen hung small silver metal medallions in the shape of arms, legs, eyes, babies and so on. We think that people may visit this place to pray for healing. Outside in the bright sunshine, we looked round from our vantage point and could see a long way in all directions. Perama in its river valley with the mountains beyond in one direction and the sea between steep headlands in the other. Along the path, in the little walled yard, it looked is if clothes and other fabric items had been tied around an old tree which seemed to be growing amongst even older remains of habitation. To one side, a fenced off area contained huge piles of stones. We wondered whether a previous town or village had been here in ancient times.

Fred Flintstone's picnic table

Today, it was a beautiful deserted spot with only the buzz of insects and the song of birds and may be the hope for a miracle or two. We photographed a stone age picnic table and chairs at the foot of the tree and set off for the next little chapel.

This was O Drapanos. This seemed to be a much more modern building and the door was locked with wrought iron grills over all the windows. However, the gardens were lovely and we admired daisies still blooming (when all their cousins had long since dried and withered out in the open) because of the shady trees of the churchyard. A few hibiscus bushes bloomed prolifically and my foraging companion gathered a handful of past flowers to take home for her tea!

We took a little side road up and around passing a lovely old house and garden, admiring the old well, whilst the road it was on curved around and led us back to where the car was parked. All these morning walks give a great opportunity to talk, to admire the wild life, to forage and to sometimes just stand in awe. We earmarked a lovely plot of fig trees - to return to when the fruit have ripened - as they do not seem to be in anybody's garden. A brief discussion ensued about a recipe for fig rolls, K's favourite biscuit.

Budleia Avenue

The third chapel was Agios Paraskevi, which we have visited before in our perambulations but we approached it by car this time and parked under another lovely shady tree. Churches seem to be well provided for in terms of shade! From here we explored a new track which led us through a dreamlike avenue of budleia bushes and we were processing along accompanied by a brilliant array of butterflies. Small blue ones, magical swallowtails and the air was humming with insect life. We had a beautiful morning; it was glorious!

Post foraging, we unpacked the car: One big bouquet of rosemary, two scrumped pears (not quite ripe yet), a handful of hibiscus flowers, one discarded clothes dryer (for recycling … gate material for straying kittens) and two pairs of very hot, sore feet. It was well worth it!

OFFICE WARFARE

 How did we ever find time to go to work? People imagine that the life of ex pats is one long idyll where we lounge around on sunny beaches and shady bars all day, every day. Sadly, this is not the case. House maintenance and cleaning duties take up a great deal of our time but bureaucracy is the biggest timewaster.

We spent several weeks jogging backwards and forwards to the IKA office in Rethymno to get Kimon's IKA Health Insurance book renewed and changed. Previously it had been issued resting on the premise that his wife was a pensioner and pensioners' husbands or wives can also get medical health insurance equivalent to pensioners' entitlements in Greece. This is until and unless the dreaded Brexit changes everything … but enough of Brexit. The madness is out of our hands now and anyway, we have enough comic daftness of our own to contend with. Each visit to the IKA office is initiated by a depressingly long queue in a boiling hot office. Kimon had duly presented all his ID documents to the lady in the office who said that he needed a form from the Accountant to say that he had paid all his taxes and a form from the UK. K phoned up the UK and they sent him the appropriate form in duplicate. K made another journey to Rethymnon to present the forms as well as everything else but they said this was the wrong form and he needed an E108. K returned home and telephoned England again. Form 108 does not exist any more and form S1 replaces it. They refused to accept it a second time of asking. Time was running out and the book was becoming invalid and the man in England did not dare to send whatever other form it was, for reasons best known to the mysteries of all these agencies even though there was no doubt that K was entitled to medical care either in the UK or in Crete but the two bureaucracies were in complete deadlock . We were flummoxed.

At this point I contacted the British Embassy to ask for help. I tried to work out the different processes required by the British office and the Greek office. Typed them all out, google translated it all and Emailed it to DWP in England asking them to fax it to the office in Rethymno. Then we collapsed in a heap for a week or two trying not to worry about cancer care without health cover - scary stuff! After a couple of weeks we had a gentle voiced telephone call from the lady who had kept sending us away saying that if we came to the office again at 8 o'clock in the morning, she would sort out the book and we wouldn't have to queue. K and I couldn't believe we were dealing with the same lady, but we smiled, spoke Greek and K charmed her as much as possible while I chased up and down the stairs with pieces of paper from one office with a man inscribing a huge record book and another office where another man with a biro and a rubber stamp squiggled something.  I finally chased downstairs with my prize sheet for the completion process. DONE! It had taken about five weeks of travelling, queuing and worrying but such a relief even if you have to do everybody else's work for them.  Everyone celebrates with such a feeling of achievement.

Then we needed to make sure that our tax return had been completed by the Accountant. We paid a visit and handed over some money. Several days later, we had a phone call requiring our marriage certificate. K dropped it in. Then the Accountant wanted a translation of the marriage certificate – so google translate came to the rescue again. Then they decided that the marriage certificate was not sufficient and that I should have had another document from the Church with a signature and a rubber stamp on it. K and I were beginning to lose the plot at this point and wondered why on earth they needed our marriage certificate? The Accountant thought she would reassure us by saying that she would send it somewhere to some other office so that they could put a rubber stamp on it and the technical language was a bit beyond our powers of translation..

They were surprised at my strong negative reaction to putting any marks on our document!

The accountant wondered could we get a certified copy from the Central Register every year? Of course not, there is only one, we got married once and this is it! I jokingly asked whether we should get married again in Crete, so that the documentation lined up? The argument continues and I have made contact with my parish church in Farnham and the Surrey Records Office because life just isn't busy enough.

It has given me lots of time to meditate upon the intrinsic value of a rubber stamp! What is it about a print impression made out of rubber that gives a document such power and authenticity? Suddenly, I realised that seals and stamps have been used in Cretan prehistory since Minoan times and obviously have much greater significance within the Greek official hierarchies than we are used to. A maker's mark or stamp must lurk within the psyche of all our Greek and Cretan officer folk as a symbol of supreme authority and reverence!

Anyway, enough of all this stuff. Crete is in the middle of a heatwave. Scorching days and nights with the air conditioning keeping us from sizzling up. The plants need lots of tender loving care, a nest of swallows have hatched and flown the nest in the porch leaving a great deal of unwanted guano behind and we are keeping under cover as much as we can during peak holiday season with loads of tourist traffic. The car is baking hot and we need oven mitts to use the steering wheel. It seems much nicer and cooler at home than venturing out too much.

Wish us luck with officialdom, it is keeping us very busy indeed!