SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

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!

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.

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.

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 …..!

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!