Greetings

A couple of days ago – last Thursday to be precise – the Agnanti restaurant closed.

The Agnanti is the oldest, most famous and most upmarket of our Glossa restaurants and every year in early or mid-October, it winds up for the season.

It is something of a tradition here to support the first and last days of any of the seasonal businesses. Indeed, some hold an open house on the first day of their trading summer, where everyone can wish them ‘kalo kalokairi’ – 'good summer' and have a free drink or two to help the sentiment along.

On Thursday the wishes were for a good winter – ‘kalo himonas’ and there was a good deal of helping the sentiment along.

Greek people are very good at good wishes of many kinds. We, who are used to a restricted diet of ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Goodnight’, find ourselves showered with time-specific blessings. In addition to ‘kalimera’ – ‘good morning’ or literally ‘good day’ we are wished ‘kalo misimeri’ – which can only be translated, rather inadequately, as ‘good midday’.

Then there is afternoon, not to be confused here with after noon. Early afternoon might mean ‘soon after twelve’ to a northern European, but on Skopelos it is more likely to mean six or so. You see, here it is morning until the end of the morning work session at 2 p.m. Work resumes in the afternoon – after 5 p.m. usually. 

In between is a special time set aside for lunch, a siesta in hot weather, or for the family to get together and talk. It is strictly not done to call on someone or even to telephone them between 2 and 5 p.m. If our phone rings at this time, we know it is not a Greek at the other end.

This time has its own good wish – ‘kalo apoyevma’ a sort of ‘good afternoon’. Then, at sometime after 6, the saying is ‘kalispera’ – ‘good evening’. Context is important too. If our neighbours see us on our way to dinner, they are just as likely to say ‘kali orexi’ – literally good appetite, instead of ‘kalispera’.

Similarly, an elderly villager heading off home for the night at 7 p.m. will be wished ‘kalinichta’ – 'goodnight'. Whereas, if you see some friends at 11 p.m. and you know they are on their way out and not home, you would wish them ‘kalo vradi’ – another sort of good evening.

On the first of the month you will wish your friends and colleagues ‘kalo mina’ and on their saints’ days, ‘chronia polla’ – literally ‘many years’.

In Greece, people celebrate their name day – the feast day of the saint with whom they share their name – rather than their actual birthday (although the celebration of birthdays is becoming increasingly common for children).

The naming of children is quite structured on the island – generally, they are named after grandparents and then aunts and uncles. The result is that 90% of the population of Glossa share perhaps a couple of dozen names and on the feast of Georgos, Iannis, Maria or Eleni, the streets will be continuously ringing with cries of ‘chronia polla’. 

Perhaps all these friendly greetings, accompanied by a willing smile, can give the impression that this easy-going island paradise runs along entirely without effort.

It is fashionable at the moment for the press to give Greek people a good verbal kicking and brand them as lazy and workshy. I would like to invite some of those journalists to try our local working hours. In the summer work starts as early as six to exploit the cool of the day. By 2 p.m. a full eight hours work has been done and then there may be the chance to top up some sleep for an hour or two. Work resumes at 5 p.m. and may continue until one or two the following morning.

In each 24 hours a full 16 hours of work is done. And this frequently goes on for seven days a week and for 16 weeks in the summer season. A single working week of 112 days without a break.

This is the equivalent of 51 weeks of work for those who have a 35 hour week.

So, when summer comes to an end, it is good to all pile into the Agnanti – or whoever is having a last night and wish each other ‘kalo himonas’.

Let’s talk.

Swallows

The swallows have arrived!

Which is a little confusing.

A week or so ago, I became aware that I had not seen any swallows for a few days and realised that they had left for their long trip to sub-Saharan Africa. Mentally, I wished them ‘kalo taxidi’ and looked forward to seeing them next year when a pair or two might actually nest on the little shelves we have provided.

And then, yesterday, a flock of swallows came swooping around the house.

Clearly, these were not the birds that had spent the summer here, but had nested further north perhaps in Denmark, Sweden, Belarus or Estonia - where the barn swallow is the national bird, curiously enough.

I wondered what they had seen as they skimmed their way south and what other sights they would encounter on their long journey to South Africa.

Which got me thinking about our other ‘swallows’. In the village of Glossa where we live, there are quite a few houses which are only occupied in the summer. Mostly these belong to people who grew up here but moved to the mainland for work, marriage and to raise a family.

There is still a strong tradition that when a girl from Glossa marries, her parents give her a house. Sometimes it is auntie’s or granny’s old house passed down through the family and renovated for its new owners. Occasionally it is newly built on one of the remaining tiny plots of village land sandwiched between two older houses – land which may have been the subject of years of on-off negotiation.

Every summer, these houses spring back to life. The parents, cousins or grandparents left behind and permanently resident here, start preparing for the annual return of the exiles. First you notice the cleaning and airing going on. It is a time to be nimble as balconies are cleaned with seemingly dozens of buckets of water slooshed down to cascade on the unwary pedestrian below.

Those of us who live here all year round – ‘summer-winter’ – as they say, attract a certain kudos and there is a mutual respect among those who remain in the quietest time of the year. Of course this apparent toughness of the marooned is all a false construct.

Certainly there are storms which sometimes cut off the electricity for a few hours at a time – so we have plenty of gas lamps and stoves and a good stock of firewood. It is true that travel plans can be disrupted if the Flying Dolphin finds the sea too rough to handle – but modern weather forecasting allows us to leave earlier or later for our shopping trip to Volos or concert trip to Thessaloniki. And if that load of bricks and cement is delayed, there is always ‘avrio’ – tomorrow.

‘Avrio’ is a frequently heard word here and it has some similarity to the Spanish ‘mañana’ although without the burning sense of urgency of its Spanish counterpart.

No, we summer-winter Glossa residents enjoy a short and mild winter and all the joys of the  blossoms and wild flowers in early spring. We also enjoy catching up with all our friends who were busy in the summer. And it is true that we enjoy being thought of as the tough summer-winter island folk – just don’t tell anyone that we have the best end of the bargain.

So, once the houses are cleaned for the summer visitors, they start to arrive – a few at a time to begin with and then a flood. The streets ring with the sound of “kalos ilthate” – welcome. In Greek this literally means, ‘good that you came’ and the traditional reply is, ‘good that I found you’.

We have nicknamed these annual returners ‘swallows’ like their feathered counterparts and they are anticipated and welcomed in the same way. Now we have been here six years, we recognise individuals and families – and they way they have changed. Of course, it is mainly the children you notice. 

Hair ruffled, cheeks pinched, picked up and passed around they are re-assimilated into the collective consciousness of the village.

The toddlers have become kids (ough, too big to pick up now), the babies have become toddlers (arms aloft to join the ritual) and here and there is a baby starting its first summer in Glossa.

The noisy cat-chasing lad with the skinned knees has become quieter, more watchful and slightly self-conscious of his breaking voice – but handsome and so tall, says grandma! The girl, only so recently proudly showing off her new holiday dolly to the village children, is gaggling and sharing secrets with the other girls – each with a phone in hand – whilst glancing sideways at the boys.

And so the world turns. Like the heights inked on the back of our pantry door when I was a boy myself, this annual tide leaves its mark. Piles of pebbles lovingly gathered from the beach and reluctantly left behind, the lilo that won’t be going home to Larissa and the memory of a summer when your nose just reached the balcony rail. Here and gone.

Back to the mainland to their real lives they go. And I find myself wondering which of these lives are their real one? The summer or the winter? For the swallow of the bird variety, is the real life the summer of laying eggs and raising young or the other summer of building strength for the next big migration? Or is it all part of a perfect whole?

Today the flying swallows have gone again, refuelled and on their way via Syria or Egypt and other places I will never visit, to cross the desert and head home to the lush grassland. Living a life entirely without winter, these summer-summer birds.

Let’s talk.

One for Sorrow

Our crows have got it wrong.

When I was a boy I was told – as everyone was then – if you see a rook on its own it’s a crow and if you see a group of crows together, they’re rooks.

This teaching by negatives or opposites was common then: “when gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of season.” It is a deal punchier and more memorable than: “at almost any time of the year it is possible to find gorse in flower.” I can remember as a small child recognising the truth of the statement, long before my own kissing season had started.

On Skopelos, we have ‘hoodies’ - hooded crows - which, as a child growing up in the south of England, I only saw on visits to Scotland and Ireland because we had the all black carrion crow. According to the bird book, they are the same in size and behaviour, differing only in plumage. Apparently they interbreed where their ranges overlap, which may be something to do with all the flowering gorse I saw in Scotland as a boy.

But our crows don’t know the saying about rooks and crows. The crows that live at the bottom of our garden are colonial. They live together all year round in close proximity, squabbling with each other whenever they feel like it and especially when the wind drives up the hill and offers the perfect medium for aerial manouvres.

When we first lived in Glossa, I nicknamed the flock ‘Biggles and Co.’ from their habit of scrambling like a squadron of fighters to drive off the enemy. (Biggles was the hero of a series of boys stories about brave RAF pilots and crew spanning the first and second World Wars). Up they would come as soon as Baron von Buzzard or one of the other baddies came into view.

Our crows are very touchy about who comes into their airspace. They will launch themselves in numbers and with aggressive cries of kraa, kraa, harass the offender – buzzard, kestrel, sparrowhawk or Eleanora’s falcon as the case may be.

Now, the crow is a large bird – its wingspan can reach a metre – but birds of prey are better flyers. Sometimes a young and inexperienced buzzard will get in a flap, but generally, a slight twist of a wing is enough to ensure that the crow’s attack only finds fresh air. No retaliation is necessary. Usually.

One of our resident hunters is a sparrowhawk. A tight, fast bundle of aggression who smashes into the tops of trees, if necessary, to pin down her prey. A little while ago, I was watching her hunt over our garden when, true to form Biggles and Co scrambled. Six kraaking crows on to one serene sparrowhawk. Even though she is only three-quarters of the size of a crow, she took very little notice. For a while she amused herself by making the tiniest adjustments to send the attackers off target until one of the younger hoodies clearly overstepped the mark with a louder and more than usually determined attack.

With an Immelmann turn she transformed the aggressor into the target and sped straight at young Ginger or whoever. The crow tactically lightened his body weight and panicked earthwards like a broken umbrella. At the last second, our sparrowhawk relented and swooped upwards – into a sky curiously empty of crows. I could almost hear the excuses fading into the empty air: “gosh, is that the time”, “I’m on me break, me”, “… the old paperwork getting on top of me …”, “don’t feel well” and so on.

The only other member of the crow family permanently resident on Skopelos is the raven. Most of the time we see them flying in dead straight lines, as if on wires, steadily going “kronk, kronk” or, in the cause of variety, “kronk, kronk, kronk”, or even occasionally – well you can probably guess.

At certain times of the year, these large black flying animals produce wonderful tumbling and whirling displays accompanied by a range of calls and chunterings not normally heard. The effect is startlingly like seeing a staid frocked priest on his parish rounds suddenly start break dancing in the street. In March these birds - who pair for life - display dramatically to re-establish their bond, in response to what my bird book rather coyly calls ‘spring feelings’.

Sadly we do not have magpies here. Or rather – sorrowfully – we have one.

There are Magpies a-plenty on the mainland, but they are not strong fliers and the one that lives here is probably the result of a stormy wind and a wrong turn. We sometimes imagine our lonely magpie waking up the next morning and wondering where everyone else was, like Gary Larson’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’.

Our feisty crows – defying what I was taught as a child – have each other and the squadron, our long-lived ravens have lifetime mates, but our magpie is all alone.

One for sorrow indeed.

Let’s talk.

Running into me

I have been thinking about shoes. Not in an Imelda Marcos sort of way – I don’t collect shoes, although I do sometimes neglect to throw them away until kindly prompted.

No, I have been thinking about shoes. As distinct from trainers – or what my North American friends call sneakers. Every since I had the operation on my knee, I have been wearing trainers. Just because they offer the best grip in a village where almost everything is either up or down but almost never on the level. So my two pairs of trainers – one for best you understand – have become a symbol of my lameness.

It never used to be like that. At one time I had trainers because I went running, usually early in the morning, through the dark and empty streets and into the park – sometimes across the river under its duvet of morning mist and sometimes up the hard hill in preparation for the race.

I ran my first organised 10k at the age of 52 and two years later ran my one and only half marathon. I am pleased to note that my time was less than seven minutes slower than the world record time Patrick Makau set last Sunday in Berlin. Granted he ran a marathon in roughly the time that I ran a half marathon, but he is young and probably trained harder than I did.

My trainers then were shoes for going, not halting.

When I was young, we also had shoes for going, running faster than the wind. But these were sandals. Every summer there was a new pair of sandals with unsullied white crepe soles and a cut out pattern of holes over the toes that the sun would tattoo on your feet like henna, by the end of the holidays. I can clearly remember the pure joy of running so fast that my heels hit my buttocks in my new wonder shoes, winged like the sandals of Hermes, at the start of an apparently endless summer. Over the next few weeks, the once stiff and new leather became like a second skin - a moulded three dimensional representation of my ever-running feet.

Of course, autumn eventually came and it was time to put away these miraculous shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe, wings folded as they prepared to hibernate. 

There was little time to mourn the passing of summer as it was now time for New Shoes for the new school year. These were usually bought half a size or so larger than the fluorescing green outline of my foot in the pedoscope indicated, sometimes with consequences.

Early one March in the first year of my first school, I was running around the playground with that inexhaustible perpetual motion of a five year old and my feet had not entirely grown into the extra space allowed. I crashed to earth and skidded – on my knees as was the norm – collecting a good portion of schoolyard gravel on the way. There was impressive grazing soon followed by an appropriate amount of blood.

“Miss” was on playground duty that day. Of course all the teachers were called ‘Miss’, but you should understand that this was “Miss”. Our “Miss”, my teacher from my class. THE “Miss”. The fount of all knowledge and kindness. In memory she was always dressed in sunny summer frocks and always smiling. Of course, I was totally in love with her. She swooped across the playground and lifted me to my feet. One glance was enough for her. She held my hand and led me to the first aid room.

Now, here was a problem. I was a proud boy and even though my shoes were big enough to take the blame, I was determined not to cry in the presence – the exclusive presence – of my adored “Miss”. My plan was simple. If I held my breath, I would not be able to cry.

With my breath firmly clenched I suffered in silence as the stinging Dettol was dabbed on with handfuls of cotton wool. Then lint and plaster – the badge of a wounded playground warrior – and finally she was done. My breath still held – despite the stinging in my knees and the ringing in my ears.

“Miss” looked at me with that smile: “you are a brave boy, how old are you?”

Nothing for it. Let the air out fast and grab a quick breath in, “six next Wednesday, Miss”. And I turned and fled before my eyes let me down as badly as the shoes had done.

Well, spring turned to summer following a pattern I was beginning to see as normal. By now, the school shoes were a perfect fit, if not a touch tight. The first hot day, I went to find my sandals.

I remembered them as my great co-conspirators of the last summer. But something was wrong. They looked older and more worn, tired perhaps and smaller than I remembered them. 

It was a sad feeling and one I was to encounter again many years later when I dropped in unexpectedly to visit my parents.

I dusted off the sandals – regretting that I had not done as I had been told and polished them properly last September – trying to recapture the spirit of our mad Summer dashes. But to no avail. 

They would not be young again. I held them, but the betrayal was complete: I had outgrown them.

Let’s talk.

The heart of the matters

One of the great things about the souvlaki bar in Glossa is that you can drop everything and go out to eat or drink with a clear conscience. Never mind that your to do list is overflowing with unmade phone calls and arrangements not yet concluded, just go. I’ll explain in a moment.

In case you don’t know the place, let me tell you a little about it. It sits at the junction of five streets, three of them composed largely of steps and the other two being the in and out of what is, arguably, Glossa’s main street. And it literally sits in the junction. The tables are on both sides of the street and life flows through the middle.

As does the rain in the wet season. This place is called the ‘louki’ which means a water spout, gutter or groove – take your choice – and in the days before the impressive storm drain was built, rainwater would cascade down from the surrounding steep streets and rush across the little road in a torrent that was often 20 centimetres deep or more.

Bikes, cars, small trucks, taxis and occasionally donkeys pass through from time to time. It is never all that busy and many of the motor vehicles will turn round and return having completed their errands nearby. Beyond the louki, the road becomes narrower with one particularly harsh double right angled bend and almost nowhere to pass. So from here on it is mainly bikes, people and donkeys who pass, with the odd motorist who is particularly experienced, intrepid or lost.

As well as our famous souvlaki bar, the louki is home to the town hall, the KEP and the doctor’s surgery.

The KEP is a wonderful Greek institution. It is a sort of state sponsored hands-on Citizens’ Advice Bureau. The KEP computer is linked to many government bodies and utility companies but the heart of the KEP is an ancient rolodex containing hundreds of the most useful phone numbers for a resident of Glossa in need of help.

Some years ago, we went to Volos to buy a cheap wood-burning stove. We were told that the stove would arrive “with Stephanos”, but “when?” was only answered with a smile and a shrug and a Volos phone number scribbled on a corner torn from a piece of brown paper. 

A couple of days later I phoned the number. First, my Greek failed the test. Then, “Milate Anglika?” (do you speak English?) I asked. The answer was a terse “ochi!” and the phone was put down. This was not only memorable for the rareness of that experience, but for the helplessness I was now drowning in. Not only did I not know when or where Stephanos and his enormous articulated lorry would bring the stove, but I also had no way of arranging for a small truck to bring it safe home to our house.

In desperation, I sought help from the KEP where I poured out my story like an eight year old whose kite is stuck in a tree. Courteously and in perfect English, my mountain was reduced to a very small molehill and then brushed quietly away.

The rolodex held Stephanos' mobile number. The efficient young woman discovered he would arrive on Thursday – or possibly Friday and she had also taken the precaution of arranging for a local driver for the last leg. She would telephone me an hour or two before it would arrive at our house. Now, was there anything else she could help with?

So, putting together the KEP, the town hall and the doctor’s and with the Agnanti restaurant providing a dash of exotic foreigners hard by, you can see that a great deal of interesting human traffic will pass through the beating heart of the louki and a person sitting in the souvlaki bar will be able to infer, guess or invent the business of those coming and going with enormous fun and sometimes reasonable accuracy.

It also means that you can sit at your table with a cold beer or a hot loukaniko sausage as you choose and sooner or later almost everyone you need to see will pass by. Of course, those who you would perhaps not wish to see until tomorrow will also find you. Never mind. It all makes for a very dynamic meal with people sitting down and joining you for a few minutes or a couple of drinks. You may not discover everything you were seeking, but you will certainly find out something you didn’t know.

And it beats, by some considerable distance, a solitary sandwich eaten at your office desk.

Let’s talk.

Hooray for Buggins!

Great news!

Former Russian President Vladimir Buggins is to run for president again to replace the current incumbent, former Prime Minister Dmitry Buggins who will once more become prime minister.

At last, the result that everyone was expecting – except apparently the most weary and cynical of political commentators who tried to whip up some suspense.

The move follows the well known precedent of the UK former Prime Minister Tony Buggins' 2007 handover to his next door neighbour and former best chum Gordon Buggins.

Keen observers will note that this type of orderly succession was in fact prequeled by the famous Bilbo Buggins who left his ring and his hole in the ground to his nephew Frodo Buggins and disappeared in a puff of smoke. This sparked a great epic journey and a lot more fun than either of these recent imitators.

In fact, they are even now making a film about Bilbo Buggins in the beautiful, mountainous and elf-ridden country called New Zealand, which is somewhere down there.

You couldn’t make it up.

Let’s talk.

Open and shut

I am a member of ACOG – the Association of Crusty Old Gits. I didn’t choose to join, but somehow I just started paying the subscription and now I’m in.

And I do pay the subscription in various ways. I used to think it was funny when my grandmother remarked – and she really did – that the police were looking very young, that newspapers were using smaller and smaller print and that everyone had started to mumble.

I was first aware of making a payment when I first heard myself tell a friend that our bank manager was now a boy of 12.

Coming across another change for the worse in the world I thought I knew, I am known to sigh, expostulate or mildly bemoan the event. Curiously, Jo calls this “having a rant”. Perhaps she is right.

Language is a great source of subscription payments.

You can differ from and compare to or compare with. “Different to” is correct usage only in North America as far as I am concerned. But I accept that language moves on and there are probably only three people in the world who agree with my position – and one of them still believes that ‘a hotel’ should be said as ‘an otel’.

‘Owing to’ and ‘due to’ are now used interchangeably, which seems a shame. Is it pedantic to want to differentiate between ‘because of’ and ‘caused by’? Probably yes. Get over it. You have to keep up.

As a rule of thumb, once the BBC adopts a usage, I accept that the language has changed and I try to limit the number of times I mildly complain / rant about it.

And I like language. I enjoyed learning in the USA in the early 80s that ‘wicked’ now meant good. In the sixties I was ‘cool’ – or tried to be – and then had to remember not to use the expression in front of my kids. Now my grandchildren sometimes approve my actions with the same ‘cool, Grandad’ – how cool is that?

For a while ‘safe’ was the new wicked and top of the range was ‘state of the art’ (not sad to see that become square). And I have always liked the fact that a ‘dog’s breakfast’ is a complete horlicks, but the crème de la crème is ‘the dog’s bollocks’. Even so, I was a little surprised to hear one of our guests last week describe a local restaurant as ‘the cat’s ass’. Alls well, he just meant it was wicked.

So I’m open to new expressions and not too sniffy about old ones changing their once cherished meanings.

There is, of course, one that remains like concealed sand on a beach towel and scrapes me the wrong way every time: alternative. 

‘Alternative’ does not just mean choice, option, selection or possibility and there are demonstrably plenty of words that do. No, the whole point of the word alternative is that it means a choice between only two things. It is a binary choice: one or zero, black or white, heads or tails, fish or cut bait if you like, but it is a choice of this or that without the possibility of the other. All or nothing.

Many of the most important decisions in life are like that. Stay or go.

When we came back to Glossa in 2003 to look at property, we had plenty of options. We also had a carefully researched checklist: village house, good view, not too much work needed – perhaps a little light painting – a place for holidays for the next ten years with the possibility of retiring to Glossa one day.

We didn’t even intend to buy on that trip – just research the market – not realising we were using the modified Solomon Grundy real estate method.

On Sunday we found an agent,

on Monday we went to see properties,

on Tuesday we tore up the checklist,

on Wednesday we returned to the wreck on the hill we had fallen for,

on Thursday we agreed the price with the owners,

on Friday we appointed a lawyer and transferred the deposit and

on Saturday we scrapped our ten year plan.

Soon we were faced the alternatives: jump or stay put?

As so often happens we asked ourselves, “if not this, what – if not now, when?”

We jumped.

Sometimes it felt as though we were falling in slow motion, screaming. But once you have jumped, you have jumped.

Since then we have seen others do the same. And others who would like to but can’t – or won’t. “You are so brave”, they tell us.

Are we? Perhaps we had so much fun at the beach barbeque fuelled by our burning boats that we did not see the perils ahead.

But for us there was no alternative.

Let’s talk.

The dog ate my homework

Yesterday’s attempt to publish my daily musings were thwarted by elemental forces. Honest.

When I first came to live permanently in this wonderful village of Glossa, I was surprised to be told by my elderly neighbour to unplug everything – including the television, the fridge and the phone – whenever there was a rumble of thunder. I, foolishly and somewhat arrogantly, considered this to be rather an outdated precaution.

It reminded me of the stories of my great-grandmother who, being used to gas lighting in her house and distrustful of the new-fangled electricity, was terrified one day by the sight of a light fitting without its bulb. She knew an electric shock could kill and reasoned that deadly electricity was pouring out of the unstoppered lamp.

It turned out, as you will have guessed, that they were both right in their own ways.

Six years ago to the day, on the evening of 22^nd September 2005, there were faint rumbles of thunder over the mainland as I went to bed. I did not have a fridge or a TV to unplug and anyway, it was not part of my belief system any more than covering the mirrors at night as some of the oldest ladies in the village do.

Just before dawn, I was woken by a huge explosion and that particular electrical smell of an appliance dying expensively.

I realised that a split second earlier, there had been a simultaneous lighting/thunder flash/bang. The power was off, but that quite often happens during bad storms and my supply was anyway a little precarious.

Let me explain that.

The house we bought had been built in the traditional way. A reinforced concrete skeleton of columns and beams was filled in with that type of brick which is mainly holes. Although it had been started in 1964, it had never been finished. There were windows – without any glass in them - and shutters, which had been left unpainted for forty years . There was cold water only and a toilet that probably emptied out into the suspiciously green patch in the garden.

We had the rendering done, put glass in the windows, painted the shutters and dug a septic tank. So far so good.

Attached to the side of our one story house with its traditional dusty concrete floor, was a breeze block (cinder block) room which had a chimney. So with the addition of a cheap wood-burning stove, it become my bedroom and office until the time we could build a new storey and have proper tiles on the floor.

Which required a building permit.

Which took time.

And without the building permit, it was not possible to take the electricity, as they say here. Now, I could live with oil lamps for a few months if necessary, but part of my job as the advanced guard - Jo was in Cardiff earning the money - was to set up our website. Which meant we had to take the phone and take the internet in the leaky shack which housed me and my laptop. 

The phone line eventually arrived, tied off to a couple of convenient trees and I had a real telephone sitting on the plastic bedside table that was also my desk and the nerve centre of our little empire.

A generator was tried and found unable to provide a clean enough current for my fussy laptop and printer. My white-haired neighbour – the one you met in paragraph two – came to my rescue and let me run a long cable to the house he owns above ours. He did not live there but came daily to tend the garden, as indeed, he still does and long may he enjoy it.

The only problem I ever had with this arrangement was getting him to let me pay the bill. Remember, he didn’t live at the house and was never there after dark. He used no electricity at all and yet, every two months, I had to force him to take money.

So, back to that bleak dawn in September 2005. Lightning had struck a neighbour’s chimney and spread its deadly charge through the nearby ground.

I had not unplugged the telephone: it had unplugged itself. The socket had blown across the room with enough force to drag the handset onto the floor. Our cold water supply arrived in the kitchen by way of an iron pipe buried in the wall. It was no longer buried. The charge threw all the mortar and plaster above the pipe to the other side of the kitchen where some of the sharper shards were still embedded.

I had not unplugged the laptop either and as it was connected to the printer, both were toast. (It is a shame that I didn’t have a toaster, or I could have made a little more of that).

Yesterday, as I started to write the Wednesday chapter, there were rumblings of thunder over the mainland. Which swiftly came closer. You will, I believe, not be unduly amazed to learn that I unplugged my laptop and the telephone with great alacrity.

The storm came and went several times and I never got to write my blog.

That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Let’s talk.

Survival strategies

The very first of the first autumn flowers have made their appearance. The ivy-leaved cyclamen have tiny, apparently fragile pink flowers with backswept petals and they recklessly emerge into the harsh, dry landscape of late summer here on Skopelos.

But they are tougher and smarter than they look. They have a specially thickened underground stem which acts as a food store. This tuber looks a bit like a potato and the fact that pigs love to grub them up and eat them leads to one of the common names for this cyclamen – sowbread.

Now, the autumn rains bring out lots of wild flowers, which is why early October is such a popular time for walkers here. Up the mountains with the smell of the pines and the pungent herbs they go, with the weather cool enough to stride out and the sea warm enough for a bathe at the end of the trail.

But, let’s go back for a moment to our cyclamen. It draws on the stocks of food in its tuber and puts out the flowers, no leaves yet, giving itself the best chance to attract the bees. Once pollinated, each flower stem, with its single seed, curls up like a coiled spring. Then the rains come.

Two things happen.

First, all the other autumn flowers start to get moving and second, the ants move to winter quarters, driven to find safer places than their careless summer nests. The ants need energy for this and our cyclamen is ready. All those carefully protected seeds are coated with sugar – a present for the ants who take them into their carefully dug winter larders. Once the sugar is used up, the cyclamen seeds are safe underground in ideal conditions to germinate.

Meanwhile, the cyclamen puts out its marbled ivy-shaped leaves, harvests the sunshine and tops up the tuber ready for next time. Flowering will end in October, that job done ahead of the competition, but the leaves keep going well into the winter.

Two hours ago, we had a short and very gentle shower – a mere murmuring in a corner of the string section of the orchestra, if you like. Tonight we are expecting a big thunderstorm and all day, just on the edge of earshot, there have been muted rumbles – the tiniest of hints of what the percussionists have in store for tonight’s event.

The air is heavy with expectation. Then, sudden bursts of impatient wind flash up the silvery undersides of the olive leaves. Around dinner time we expect to hear the wind kick off the action for real, roughing up the sea with punching squalls and spiraling away, for all the world like the opening bars of the Ride of the Valkyrie.

We have been round shutting widows and latching shutters in preparation.

But, like the cyclamen, the first rain of autumn reminds us of the other preparations we must make over the next few weeks. Jo is busy stocking the cellar with home made jam and sensible reserves of rice, lentils, flour and olive oil.

This year we are stocking up just a little more than usual. With the unstable financial situation in Greece and unpopular austerity biting hard, there may be transport problems or power cuts over and above those the weather will bring anyway. It is prudent to have a few extra packets, tins and gas bottles in store when you live on an island.

Like the cyclamen, we invest in our tubers. Twenty kilos or so of sweet potatoes are happily growing down the garden and once lifted in early November, they’ll see us through.

Today and tomorrow will feel almost autumnal. But it is a false alarm. By Friday the weather will be settled and warm again with highs of 27 degrees clear through to the end of the month.

Time enough to enjoy our late summer paradise. And when autumn comes, we have our survival strategy in place.

Let’s talk.

And on the other hand ...

With the second cup of coffee of a Monday morning, comes the checking of the diary for the week.

Wednesday is the 21^st of September, which is when our friends arrive to stay - and later to celebrate their anniversary. The 21^st is also the autumn equinox. Or so I thought. It seemed logical. Midsummer’s Day is the 21^st June, the shortest day is the 21^st December, so the equinox ought to be on the 21^st of September and March.

These are the days of equal day and night – even my Latin can get that out of equi-nox.  Wrong again. It is the day when the sun is exactly over the equator at noon, at the start of the process of the days getting shorter in the northern hemisphere than they are in the south. And this year it happens on 23^rd September at 0904 UTC. (UTC is Greenwich Mean Time in old money). 

I don’t know why I felt unsettled by the new information. Maybe because I have had it wrong all those years and I have a sneaking suspicion that I have been spotted on numerous occasions by people too kind or too scornful to point out my error.

Even our precious Midsummer Day is not always on the 21^st June as it turns out, although it usually is.

I say “our” precious Midsummer Day, because Jo and I became an item on that day nineteen years ago. And we always celebrate our anniversary on the 21^st of June.

When we made the jump to live in Glossa in 2005, we celebrated our anniversary with a perfect dinner in the Agnanti restaurant overlooking the wine dark sea. At exactly the correct moment – probably halfway through the second bottle – the full moon rose over Mount Delphi. I get goose pimples just thinking about it. If there is a God, I thought, he is certainly a stage manager with a big bunch of keys jangling on his belt and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.

So the numbers matter.

We humans count in what mathematicians call base 10. In other words, we count up to nine and then, when we run out of fingers, we put down a figure one and start again, as if we had a new pair of hands.

If we had evolved with four digits on each hand, like many famous cartoon characters, we would count in base 8 and we would be living in the year 3733.

The Smurfs, Wallace and Gromit, Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons and Snow White’s dwarves all have four digits per hand. Walt Disney’s Pinnochio has four fingers as a puppet but five as a boy. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as you know, have three digits per hand and it is now the year 13151.

So, as I was saying, the numbers matter.

On Thursday we will join our friends for dinner to celebrate their anniversary. It is not a special one, they say. It is their thirty second, I think. Pretty impressive, but not one of the special ones.

Round numbers are the important ones: 10, 20, 25, 40, 50. Next year Jo and I will have been together for twenty years so it will be a special celebration.

Except that if we were Marge and Homer Simpson, counting in base 8, we would have reached the number 20 after sixteen years human years and on Thursday our friends would be celebrating a big 40.

It is all a little confusing, but it got me thinking that maybe we give too much significance to the numbers. How many, how much and how long are all a lot less important than how well, how useful and how fulfilling.

It also got me thinking that I should have paid more attention to my maths teachers at school. Alas.

Let’s talk.

The product or the process?

We had a wine festival yesterday in Glossa village. It may have been the first Glossa Wine Festival. Or maybe not. Nobody was quite sure at the start and by the end no-one was quite sure of anything at all.

There was, apparently, a row at some point. One account – which is no more likely to have any truth in it than any other – has it that the mayor provided money for the festival on the understanding that there would be good Greek wine and live music to encourage dancing in the square. The organisers (allegedly) decided that the most important thing about a wine festival was the wine and that the measure of a good wine was the amount you could buy per euro. 

Who knows? But I can report that there was only one wine on offer – a white wine of dubious provenance. It was distributed free and, personally, even at that price it was too expensive. But then I’m not a great lover of white wine – even at a euro per litre, or kilo as they say here.

The festival started at four in the afternoon and by the time we swung by at 8.30, half of the village was enjoying themselves mightily. The music was provided by somebody’s collection of Greek dance music, roughly ripped and compiled on to a precarious stack of CDs on the end of the improvised bar. A song would suddenly stop in the middle to be succeeded, just as suddenly, by another. Which sometimes confused the dancer.

But what the music lacked in presentation, it more than made up for in volume and those present were enthusiastic consumers of the wine and the occasional souvlaki on offer.

Oh, yes, the dancer.

There is a certain point in any local celebration – and this was certainly that – that an old boy (and to be counted old in Glossa you have to be well past 80) will take to the floor with one of those slow, gyratory, men-only Greek dances. One of the features of this genre is occasional great hops from one leg to the other, which is hard enough to do aged thirty and sober and which draw admiring “oopahs” from the assembled company. There is truly something death-defying about this dance.

If there is any truth in the story about the row, I am not surprised.

The other day a friend of mine was talking about the process of putting the boats back in the water after the winter. She is not Greek, although she has lived here for many years. “Why can they not organise themselves”, she asked, “it is always the same chaos every year – all the boats go in the sea at the same time, it is crazy!”

They could, of course, ‘organise themselves’ but my friend is missing the point. These are more than competent sailors – the Aegean can be unforgiving. Many men from Skopelos serve thirty or forty years at sea, some have had command of great vessels. My neighbour is now on the bridge of a huge oil tanker running the gauntlet of pirate alley off the Horn of Africa.  They come home to Glossa to retire. To be addressed as Captain here is a mark of respect.

The whole point of doing it all together is just that. It is a celebration of the end of winter, a headcount of those who made it through, a time to make formal recognition that a son has succeeded his father as skipper of the family boat, it ensures that there are plenty of hands to help out and it provides a lot of fun for the harbourside spectators.

The end result is that the boats get put back in the water, but that is not the objective. The objective is the celebration.

Our wine festival may become an annual event with dancers in traditional costume, live music, decorations of grapes and vine leaves and a choice of good local wines. I hope it does. But I can understand the point of view that you just need to provide as much free wine as you can afford and Glossa will celebrate the beginning of the end of summer in fine style.

Let’s talk.

Faster higher stronger

What, I wonder, will we think of the London Olympics this time next year?

Beijing’s extraordinary Birds Nest stadium stands out alongside Sydney’s wonderful sense of party and the most amazing fireworks ever. The memory of the Athens closing ceremony still brings tears to my eyes. A young Greek girl in a simple white dress collected the light from the flame, walked confidently down the longest staircase in the world and, touching her lamp to others, spread the light to the world in a conscious evocation of the Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday. 

So what will we remember about London 2012? One thing we won’t remember is lacrosse. The previous London Olympics in 1908 and 1948 featured lacrosse (the second time as a demonstration sport), but sadly, not in 2012.

Lacrosse did not come about as an early experiment in mating a hockey stick with a shrimping net during a game of hurling. It goes back four hundred years and its roots are in games perfected by Native American communities under various names including ‘men hit a rounded object’ and ‘little war’. French missionaries tried to ban it which ensured its future survival.

It is interesting to consider why certain sports are in and others out.

The only summer sports that have never been absent from the Olympic program are athletics, swimming, fencing, and artistic gymnastics. The rest are there because of fashion and politics.

In 1904 at the summer Olympics held in St Louis, USA, roque made its first and last appearance. A sort of hard court croquet, the roque contest attracted entries from only one country – the USA, which won all three medals. Interestingly roque had replace croquet, which was in the 1900 Olympics when nine of the ten competitors were from France, which won all the medals then.

The marathon, as you would expect, was one of the original sports in the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896. One of the legends has it that Pheidippides ran non-stop to Athens to report the victory over the Persians at the  battle of Marathon - a distance of approximately 40 kilometres. 

For the London Olympics this was taken to be 25 miles (40.234 kilometres) but this was changed to 26 miles so that the race could start from Windsor Castle. It was then changed again at the request of Princess Mary so that the start could be outside the nursery window. It was finally changed a third time to end the race in front of the royal box at the White City stadium to give a distance of 26 miles 385 yards (42.195 km), which became the standard length starting with the 1924 Summer Olympics.

In Britain, I read, they are proposing to abandon sell-by dates on food packaging.

Wouldn’t it be good, I was thinking, if the 2012 Olympics recognised, in a small way, the achievements of those who are getting a little closer to their sell-by date. A few events for the over sixties would be nice - something appropriate to our age and ability.

What about a new triathlon?

1. Getting up from a deep sofa in one go without grunting,

2. a stroll of 500 metres followed by sitting down on a comfy chair without saying “aaah” and finally

3. a brisk walk up two flights of stairs where the gold medal would go to whoever could remember all three things they came up for.

(“three things!?”, I hear you cry – well it has to be tough, it is the Olympics after all).

There would be no danger of a doping scandal – unless ‘a nice cup of tea’ and ‘a glass of decent red’ make it on to the banned substances list.

In 314 days, the London Olympics 2012 will open; sixteen days later, after 302 events in nineteen sports it will all be over.

There will be no tug-of-war, ballooning or lacrosse, of course and no rugby sevens or golf, although these two will be included in 2016, so once more we shall have an Olympic sport where ‘men hit a rounded object’. And women too of course, although we may have to wait a little longer for the unisex ‘brisk walk up two flights of stairs’.

Right, time to put the kettle on.

Let’s talk. 

What day is it today?

The shoemakers of old Northampton were notorious for taking an extra day off on Monday to get over the carousing of the weekend. They were traditionally allowed a day off on the feast of the patron saint of shoemakers, so they called every Monday Crispin’s Day.

But for me, there has always been something special about Fridays – long before TGIF became a common expression, much less a brand.

Friday was the boundary between one form of life and another. As a pre-school child, I saw little of my father during the week – my mother believed in very early bedtimes. Dad was a daily traveller to that strange country called ‘work’ – which my grandmother called ‘business’ in recognition of the fact that he had a white collar occupation. Going to bed on Friday night, I was aware that I would emerge next morning into the wonderful country of the weekend, where Mum and Dad lived together with us kids.

So Friday was a day for happy anticipation and my mother would talk about the things which would happen at the weekend – swimming at Epsom Baths, shopping in Bentalls in Kingston, a walk on the Downs and lots of other things that meant a ride on the bus, or even a train.

I adored my early years of school and fell hopelessly in love with my teacher when I was almost six. Fridays were still full of anticipation, although by then we were all having dinner together and Dad was part of the family on weekdays too.

It all changed when my mother, as part of her lifelong quest to become middle class, decided I should go to a proper preparatory school with its own uniform a daily bus journey away. Kindness and carefree learning was replaced by sadism and fear. It was many years before I realised that some of these teachers waged careful campaigns to manoeuvre the boy of their choice to a position where he could be slippered or caned to their heart’s delight.

Friday was Escape Day. When the last bell went, I would walk with my fellow POWs down the hated corridors, into the playground and out of the gate - never talking, running, eating sweets or anything else that might risk a last minute punishment.

Over thirty years later when I became a white collar worker, Friday became Poet’s Day. (Push Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, in case you didn’t know). Much as I enjoyed my job and despite the fact I might be going to do more work over the weekend, Friday was a turning point.

Jo and I got into the habit of marking this weekly punctuation by having a pizza in Zio Piero’s in Canton. The same pizza and the same wine every week – and we even sat the same table. The great fulcrum on which the lever of time turned. We even had a name for it: Flat Food Day.

Now we are in the tourist industry (we are?) Friday is Changover Day. Our guests leave, tanned, refreshed  and gently unwound. Then we set about welcoming today’s intake. Tired and tense from early morning airport check-ins, fear of delays and a wait for the late ferry, it is our happy task to ease them into the healing hands of Glossa village. No glass of wine for us until all are safely gathered in, but tonight I am making pizza for old time’s sake.

Let’s talk.

Do you have a motto?

I’m thinking of changing my motto which got me considering – and googling, of course. Mottos are everywhere. Many of them have become part of our everyday background noise, particularly the corporate variety – a mission statement in five words or less. “We try harder”, “Just do it”, “Every little helps”, “Don’t be evil” to mention only a few (Avis, Nike, Tesco and Google, as if you didn’t know).

We have all heard of “Be prepared”, “Who Dares Wins” and “to Protect and to Serve”, (The Scouting Movement, the SAS and LAPD) and many people would know that “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is the motto of Liverpool Football Club (although you might be surprised that “Victory through Harmony” is the motto of Arsenal FC).

Countries (and regions and supra-national entities) have mottos too. Unity, God, Progress and monarchy figure quite frequently. They range from the strident to the peaceful, but I wonder how much they reflect the nation, the population or the reality on the ground. The motto of Gadaffi’s Libya was "Freedom, Socialism and Unity”. The National Transitional Council has adopted “Freedom, Justice, Democracy”.

Compare these two: “One Nation One Culture” and “United in diversity”, Armenia and the EU respectively, but my favourite contrasting mottos are these: the militant “Rather death than dishonour” of Brittany and the gloriously laid back “Wherever the fates carry us” from Bermuda. And whilst we are on the letter B, I enjoyed the motto of the British Virgin Islands – “Be Watchful!” (Oil, lamps, wise, foolish anyone?)

Towns, cities and local authorities all have mottos, inherited from ancient days or carefully negotiated by working parties and committees. Some, like the City of Liverpool have an international feel: “Not For Ourselves, But For The Whole World” whilst on the other coast in Lincolnshire Mablethorpe has a more local feeling: “Amoeniora Litora Nostra” (Our shores are more delightful). Bless.

Dublin affirms, “Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas” (The citizens' obedience is the city's happiness). Hmmm … I wonder how many people in Davy Byrne’s or O'Sullivan’s of an evening have this as their guiding maxim.

My personal favourite town motto belongs to Austin Texas – “Keep Austin Weird”. (I believe this was coined by the Austin Independent Business Alliance).

A personal motto is like a new year’s resolution that you can live with beyond the end of January.

Does it help? Does having this aiming mark on your personal horizon actually more likely that you will get where you want to go? Or that your journey will be better? Is a personal motto for life like the little stabilizer wheels on your first fairy cycle?

Probably, yes.

When I was younger – and possibly more consciously ambitious – my guiding motto was “it is not enough”. It was a combination of ‘try harder’ and ‘you can always do better’, I suppose, with a healthy dash of ‘never rest on your laurels’.

At some point it changed, almost without asking. Now I guide myself with “leave it better than you find it”. Not exactly original or world-changing. But as a personal mission statement, it has served me well and I hope I’ve managed to stick to it most of the time.

Just recently, I have felt that it may be a bit too easy. Our wilderness is becoming a garden, every year our buildings and our business improve. Perhaps I need something with more rigour.

My research has turned up some candidates. “Deeds not words” – the motto of the WSPU founded in 1903 by Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst. Emily Davison exemplified the motto as she threw herself under the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby. I’m not in that league and anyway is it an appropriate motto for a blogger?

“Think different” maybe, but that’s been taken.

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing well”. Too vague.

“It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees”. Too aggressive.

And there is so much out there that is truly wet – “The most important thing you wear is the smile on your face”. Please.

Well for now, I’m going to keep on leaving it better than I found it until I find something better.

Let's Talk. 

What does autumn mean to you?

 My friend Karen, who lives in Cardiff, posted to her fb a very particular appreciation. 

“Love Autumn, went for a wonderful walk last night, love the wind blowing the colourful leaves off the trees, fluttering down to the ground, the smell of earth in the air, wrapping up warm, gorgeous red skies and the smell of cinnamon baked apples in the oven.”

Not bad. If you had an air you could sing it. It is how I remember autumn as a child in England. That smell of the earth as if it was mouldering productively away at the task of turning the remains of summer into a springboard for spring to leap off after we have all gone: quiet, heads down, get through the winter, God is it still only February? type of way.

The first hint of autumn, that slight shiver in the evening and the dew on the fields often came as a surprise. Our family hols were frequently left to the last breath of the school holidays, so that our last days of summer overlapped with the first probings of autumn’s advance guard. I have often wondered why we left it so late, but now there is no one to ask.

Autumn, when you think about it is a PR job. The hedgerows bright with hips and haws – even if we are relentless city folk with no idea which is which – exist somewhere in our collective sense of rightness. We may know at an intellectual level that the reason the leaves turn red and gold is because the parent trees have robbed back all the useful nutrients, but emotionally we are thrilled by the autumn spectacle.

That first tang of chimney smoke in the air triggers in us a response both of welcome and nostalgia. Each of us recognises with satisfaction our own tribal smoke scent: wood, coal or turf (peat, if you like).

We love the fields and parks overlaid with gossamer webs heavy with dew, footmarks on grass, scuffling wellies in the rustling leaves, conker fights and home to a warm cup of cocoa in front of an open fire.

It is an irresistible construct designed to suck us into welcoming the traitor. The camouflage uniform of autumn’s soldiers disguise the horrible truth. Summer is gone – and it wasn’t that good – nihilistic winter is about to grip us for the next, let’s be honest, six months.

Rain, greyness, cold, snow, slush and transport problems, how to get the washing dry and “shut that door” – all about to become a long reality. But we blindly welcome this creature from the wilderness who brings a revenger, not a redeemer because he wears a cloak on which is written, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …” 

Or perhaps not. Many people love the winter in the UK.

And my reality is different again. Here in Glossa summer gently declines into October and November. Gradually the days get shorter and cooler. The first rains come – tentative at first and the olives are harvested.

Released from the demands of a Greek island summer, people get together again. “How was your summer?”

In late September the autumn flowers will soften the rattle of bleached summer stems and sometime in November we’ll light our first fire. A call to Vangelis-the-Truck and a load of seasoned olive and almond logs will appear. Now that’s a blaze to enjoy.

It is not until after Christmas that winter begins throwing its weight around and two months later it starts to give up in the face of almond blossom, plum blossom and thousands of wild flowers carpeting the olive groves.

So, friend Karen, enjoy your autumn and I will enjoy another four weeks of warm sea swimming and looking forward to needing a proper cover on the bed. The swallows have gone but the summer will be here for a while longer.

Let's talk. 

Lost and Found

Will Greece default? Will we go back to the drachma? On Skopelos there are still people who never quite left it. Some of the older people who want to sell their land tell me, “I need 25 million for it.” This translates as a bit over 73,000 euro – a reasonable price for a good piece of land with a road, electricity nearby and – above all – a stunning sea view. 

(Why do we call views “stunning”? Does anyone actually fall down as if blackjacked? Stupendous is no better – it is just the latin version of stunning. Breathtaking, anyone? But we have to say something and “quite nice” just doesn’t hack it.)

So if we re-adopt the drachma, does that mean that the great-grandmothers of Glossa will be in great demand as black-clad calculators. “Yiaya, my phonecard costs 2,400 drachmas, what is that in euros?”

Probably not. There would be a whole new type of drachma floating (or perhaps sinking) against the euro.

If you lose a your familiar currency, how do you measure value? At some basic level we all know that two loaves of bread are worth a tin of tomatoes, so perhaps we are pre-programmed for a barter system. A piece of land that has a monetary value of 25 million drachma is the equivalent of the old village house we need to buy for our soon-to-be-married daughter, rather than 14 quite nice secondhand cars.

There is value in the land as there is value in the tradition of giving our daughter a house on her wedding.

A few days ago some visitors came to stay in an old village house which belongs to some friends of ours. They went out to explore Glossa village, to do a little shopping and call in to the kafeneion for a quick drink. Somewhere along the way, a purse was lost which contained a lot of euros for the holiday, a passport and some credit cards.

Jo went to scour the streets and ask the local shopkeepers to look out for the purse. But this is Glossa. Someone (there is always someone watching) had seen our visitors in the kafeneion and when the purse was picked up on the street, it was simply put on the table where they had been sitting to wait for its owner to come and claim it.

The purse was never lost. It was in the safekeeping of the people of Glossa. Because in this village, there are things worth more than euros.

Let’s talk.

Hope is a must

Apparently, it will not a good year for local wine. Some combination of a late spring and a hot July has limited the crop of grapes.

Now, you have to understand that the concept of vintage is tightly focused here: a good year is when there are lots of grapes and vice versa. There are plenty of local winemakers, or rather lots of the locals make wine. Most of the output is a rosé, perhaps most kindly described as gluggable.

It was not always so. Skopelos Island was once famous for its wine. Under its former name of Peparethos it exported wine not only to Athens and Ilion, but also to Black Sea ports and as far as Alexandria.

There are many references to the island’s trade in wine going back to classical times and the remains of workshops for the production of amphoras for wine export. These amphoras have been found in cities on the north side of the Black Sea.

“… sailing as a shipmaster, not with a numerous fleet, from Ilion to my home at Peparethos, rich in grapes …”  (Sophocles, Philoktete, v. 547 – 549, 409 B.C.)

References suggest that the wine was a strong, dark red (black) wine. It clearly travelled well, although the grape variety is not known. One possibility is Agiorghitiko, another is Limnio (or Lemnio), which is widely grown on the island today.

Until relatively recent times, the island had many thousands of productive vines. The outbreak of phylloxera on Skopelos destroyed most of the vineyards and the farmers re-planted with almonds, olives and other crops.

A few vineyards have been planted here in recent years. I suspect that this is not all destined for personal consumption although an incipient garagiste movement is nowhere in sight.

We have a vinyard. Well, a mini, bijou vinyardette would be nearer the mark with its 36 vines. There are 4 Shiraz, 8 Merlot, 8 Limnio and 16 Agiorghitiko. It was planted over three years between 2007 to 2009 and before I take a bow for creating a great blend in the vineyard, it must be admitted that the choice of what to plant owed a great deal to what Nikos had in stock that year.

In  few years, I hope to make a half decent heavy red wine, but this year for the first time there were enough grapes to be worth trying to ferment.

So, this morning Jo and I picked the entire crop in about half an hour, stripped and squashed the grapes and we have a must murmuring away in an old plastic bucket.

There may be only a couple of kilos at the end of the process but it is none the less an exciting moment.

Of course, it is not a good year here for wine, but hope is a must. 

Let's talk. 

Quality Tourism

We have been hearing a lot about "quality tourism" in Greece in recent months. I want to muse on what that means. In terms of the small island of Skopelos and particularly the low- key village of Glossa where we live, it bears little relation to the grandiose visions of policy-makers. Attracting the uber-rich to spend as much as possible may seem like a sensible strategy, but in the micro-business world which underpins tourism in Greece, it makes little sense.

Anyway, it is starting from the wrong end. What we want out of the wealthiest 2% of our visitors may be loads of money, but it makes more sense from here to talk about what the other 98% want out of their Greek holiday. In other words the “Q” word. Taking quality to mean fitness for purpose, then high quality means meeting expectations to as near to 100% as possible.

We rent three properties of our own and act as letting agents for other owners, both Greek and foreign.

Our three properties have been nearly full from early May and are booked through until early October.

Why is this? We are not superheroes of tourism, but we work hard and professionally at what we do and I suggest that we are getting some things right that other owners may overlook. Evidence for this is that approximately 40% of our customers are returners or have booked on recommendation of a friend.

I believe there are five main issues.

Knowing the market

The market changes all the time. When I first stayed in hotels as a young adult in Europe and the UK, it was common to have a shared bathroom down the hall. Today this would be inconceivable. Thirty years ago, the package tour was the most usual way for northern Europeans to holiday in other countries. “Cheap and cheerful” was the mantra.

Today visitors still want good value for money, but they no longer accept the standards of those days. The uncritical, “it is good enough for a holiday letting” no longer holds good, except at the very cheapest end of the market. People expect the same level of comfort, equipment and security that they have at home. And we must equip to the standards of ALL our customers – brikkis for Greeks, cheese slicers for Scandinavians.

In Glossa and Loutraki, our port, we have seen the number of Greek tourists decline. This trend is likely to continue while the austerity measures work their way through the Greek economy. To replace these with non-Greek visitors, we must meet expectations.

Responding to the market

This leads us to the obvious conclusion that we must adapt our product if we wish to be successful. One small example of this: cheap airlines and charter flights have increasingly restricted the baggage allowance (now commonly 15 or 20 kilos per person) and expensively penalised excess weight. So, we now provide beach towels, snorkels and masks and advertise the fact, so our customers can pack a greater choice of clothes within their baggage allowance.

The best customer is a returning customer. Many rooms and apartments have built up a group of returners. But the danger is resting on this base and taking it for granted. Returning customers know what is on offer and will accept the old standard more readily than new customers. As these regulars drift away – because they are older or have more (or less) to spend - the next generation will not take up the places because tastes and expectations have moved on. And we must move on too.

Inventory

We are often surprised at the poor level of equipment on offer. There are still apartments for rent where there is no electric kettle. This will not do in 2011 – or more importantly in 2012. We cannot expect our guests to boil water in a saucepan, even though it is the norm for many Greek studios.  And you must provide a proper set of pans – frying pan and two proper saucepans with lids as a minimum. Three years ago, most of our visitors ate out almost every night. Now they have less money and they expect to have the equipment to be able to make a proper dinner in their accommodation.

It goes without saying that cups, plates and glasses must be matching sets. And there must be enough of the right kind: water glasses, wine glasses and spirit glasses – full sets for the number of tenants, at least.

A toaster is a standard piece of equipment and there must be at least one sharp kitchen knife. The list is long – colanders, chopping boards, cheese graters and if there is an oven there must be roasting and baking dishes.

This is not an exhaustive list, but a suggestion of what meets modern expectations. After all, we want them to come back next year and to tell all their friends to come too.

Marketing

This leads us naturally to marketing – and I don’t mean advertising.

We are competing for customers in a very different way from five years ago. The market is global and the choice is no longer “shall we go to France, Spain or Greece this year” the whole world is a destination and it is all in the same shop window as us – the internet.

But Skopelos does not have a place in this shop window. Instead the island has several mini-market websites. We need the ONE Skopelos website which lists and signposts all accommodation, all real estate companies in fact all businesses and all available in good English as well as Greek? The Skopelos.eu domain name is owned by a company in Austria and for sale at 1,420 euro.

Of course, we all need our individual websites, which must be updated regularly and which must allow for online booking and enquiries. It is important to make it easy for customers to pay securely online. An internationally recognised system such as e.g. PayPal makes this simple for micro businesses.

And enquiries by email must be responded to within two hours. We often receive email enquiries from people who are looking online at that moment at several holiday options and sending a number of enquiries to different owners. The first one to respond is likely to get the business.

There is much more to an internet presence than a website. Nowadays businesses need to be on FaceBook and Twitter and if you can manage to get some content on YouTube, so much the better. This blog is our (tardy) addition to our toolbox.

The way people use the internet is changing. Recommendation / rating sites are becoming the most powerful influence on spending choice. Our potential customers are now likely to search “highest rated accommodation in Greece” on Google. We need to have our feedback online and a proper Skopelos website could do that too. Trip Advisor for hotels and FlipKey for rooms and apartments are where people find their next holiday, particularly in the North American market. We have to be there.

People will say, “we don’t have time to do all this online stuff” but that is the equivalent of having a shop, never changing the window display and leaving it closed at random times.

Planning

Let me end with planning. It is – for us – three quarters of the way through the season. We are becoming tired from long hours and the heat of summer. We look forward to calmer and cooler days. But now is the time to plan the next campaign. For example, how will we encourage bird-watchers and walkers next spring to extend the season? How can unheated rooms and apartments be winterised at reasonable cost? These are Skopelos wide issues and they need to be tackled by the island and the region as a whole with help from the national tourism ministry.

Here’s another: next year is the Olympic Games in London. Lots of our visitors come from the UK and we want to attract more. Many sports fans (mainly men I suspect) will be reluctant to be too far from their TV sets. We have seen this resistance in World Cup years. How about Skopelos doing a deal with Nova, for example, to allow a full satellite sports coverage to be installed in as many rooms, apartments and villas as possible? Then we can say: “have your holiday in Skopelos AND watch the Olympics”.

Hello from Glossa

Jo and I have lived and worked in Glossa on Skopelos for the last six years. During that time we have built our houses and built a business.

Of course we have had a website all that time, which works pretty well and gets a good amount of traffic. Later we added fb and twitter.

And now this. Here I hope we can expand on our life in a Greek village, thoughts about the business we are in - real estate, new-build, renovation and tourist rentals. But also a place to think aloud about what delights us and what doesn't.

In my next post, I will air some thoughts about what "quality tourism" actually means for a small business.

But now I am thinking about phoning my granddaughter, Tess, who is 18 years old today.
In the year I was 18, we were still four years away from the first moon landing, the Beatles sang Help, Gerry and the Pacemakers took a Ferry Cross the Mersey, Tom Jones asked What's New Pussycat and The Rolling Stones gave us Satisfaction - one of the greatest dance tunes of all time and one that is still guaranteed to get people who ought to know better up on their feet to embarrass the hell out of their grandchildren.

I only know what was in the charts in 1965 because I googled it. Most of our detailed memories are now verified online. All known facts reside in that vast electronic library. This is the world that Tess and I both live in, although I am the one who remembers when it was not so. I am the one who remembers the Berlin Wall going up more vividly than when it came down.

So, I will phone her and post something nice on her fb, but I will not be at her party tonight because she lives in the UK and I live in Greece. Which is a mercy if anyone were to be foolhardy enough to play "Satisfaction" tonight.

Let's talk.