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| View from the roof top |
Saturday morning has
come around again. It is the time of the week for showing our best
face to the world at large and I busied myself with brooms, brushes,
mops and buckets to make sure that our front door step was clean and
respectable enough to show to the local neighbourhood. The houses of
the village are quite rustic and in our corner of the village look
exactly as houses would have looked in biblical times. Flat roofs,
whitewashed, very small windows, very thick walls. However, the
cleanliness of the front door steps cannot be neglected. We have our
pride!
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| The old part of the village |
The leaves are dropping
fast now from the mulberry tree which shades our porch and I had
barely finished sweeping up the two or three piles of leaves and
hosing away the dust from the front path when more were dropping
minute by minute to keep me hard at it. The Cretan winds seem to
disperse masses of dust and debris in every nook and cranny, behind
flower pots and under gratings and it takes a fair while to gather it
all up. As I turn on the hose to wash rivulets of dust away down the
hill, I hear Angeliki at the Kafeneon with her brooms and buckets and
again another neighbour sets too in our effort to clean our little
areas … so all of us - Mrs Mops - are hard at it … a bit like a
Mexican wave of water power.
The swallows who nested
in various spots down the street seem to have left; this means that
we have no protection against flying insects and mosquitoes now
except for citronella candles and mosquito coils. Our evening
sorties to water the garden always gift us with a fresh crop of midge
bites! Ants are still on the prowl and we have been hard put to keep
them outside the house this year. However, we have banished any
explorers we find in the kitchen or bathroom, squeezed clouds of ant
power into likely trails and hope that we can keep the numbers down,
come the winter season.
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| Bali |
Now that schools are
back, the tourists have changed appearance and there are more older
and retired people coming to holiday instead of the families of the
high season. It is slightly, but only slightly less busy in the
local resort, but the roads have been really clogged this year with
more cars and many more lorries bringing supplies for the
hoards. Trucks and Coaches block the village on a daily basis. We
are guessing that the local business have had a spectacularly good
season. We know that they all need the business, but we have been
getting increasingly crabby as the days move on. Driving, parking
the car and trying to get out and about has been no fun at all. For
some obscure reason, our favourite beach lost its sunbed and umbrella
licence this year, so now there are sunbeds to be borrowed on the
beach and tourists are buying their own umbrellas. The beach has a
much more free and easy appearance without the regimented rows of
beds and it makes getting into the water much easier .. so we feel
for the poor lady who paid for the licence and then lost the business
so early in the season. Hopefully she got her money back, but we
have our doubts. On balance, we like the beach better now. Rumour
has it that another jealous business owner stitched her up, but
everyone is characteristically tight lipped about it.
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| Panormo |
Sleep is hard to come
by in this heatwave summer and the summer weekend weddings have tried
my patience. K and I have always enjoyed cheerful and upbeat Greek
music, but the traditional Cretan songs are long, mournful,
repetitive and, to be honest, torture! The heat, the flies, the
native drums, the Greek weddings …..!
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| Grape harvest earlier in the year |
Crete has still managed
to produce wonderful food, in spite of it all. Large quantities of
wonderful fruit and vegetables are around and so I began my autumn chutney making this week. I usually wait until the weather is cooler,
but needed to use the produce while it was in good shape and stood in
blistering heat stirring the bubbling brew and bottling up yesterday.
K will approve as he now has a stock to last him through the coming
year.
I hope that this has
not been too much of a moan about the Summer heat, but we are over it
now and waiting for some Autumn coolth, a few showers, the lovely
smell of damp earth and a bit more energy in the mornings!
Sto kallo! Go well!
