Tag: Bits

Insurance

Posted on by Neal Asher

In my previous post I talked about an earthquake and, when discussing that subject with others, it evinces some surprise when I say that our house is not insured. Why, people wonder. I’ll tell you why. There’s the language barrier of first finding out what you’re paying for and then making a claim. I guarantee that the whole process of the latter would be full of pit traps, would grind along at a snail’s pace and that by the time we got any money all the repairs would have been made and paid for and we’d be on a pension.

Then there’s earthquakes: financially Greece is a seriously fucked-up country and if there was an earthquake here on Crete large enough to collapse our house I’m damned sure that nearly every other house on Crete would be rubble too, and shortly after that the insurance companies would be disappearing in a puff of debt and bullshit. Then there’s fire. The house will not burn down. Concrete and stone and tiled floors are not exactly flammable. It could be damaged inside if the sofa or a bed caught fire, but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take. Flood, of course, is irrelevant – we’re 700 metres up on top of a mountain. I would rather squirrel the money away for that rainy day – a day that might never occur. And finally, insurance companies aren’t out to do anyone any favours. They are casino owners full of overpaid jerks who will squirm like hooked worms to avoid giving any money back.

Let me illustrate that last point. Last year, at the age of 54, my brother Martin was diagnosed with oesaphageal cancer. He told us he would have chemo, then a piece of his oesophagus removed, some further treatment after that, be back on track. He neglected to mention that at best he had five years, and none of us considered checking. Certainly my 83-year-old mother didn’t know about the odds and the survival rates you can find on the Internet. Really, you don’t expect your son to die at that age.

Whilst this was occurring, my mother booked a two week holiday in Thailand, paying out about £3,000 which included the requisite insurance. She wants to get her holidays in whilst she still has a chance. Maybe in another five years she won’t be capable which, when you consider what I just wrote above, is highly relevant.

Before she got to go to Thailand, Martin came out of hospital, but then went straight back. He wasn’t healing up and soon they discovered another cancer in his torso. He hadn’t got long to live. My mother cancelled her holiday and, of course, the holiday company refused to give a refund. She then made a claim on her insurance. Whilst my brother was dying in hospital, the insurance company wriggled and squirmed, threw paperwork at her, refused to pay. Apparently an insurance payment for the cancellation of a holiday didn’t apply if it concerned a family member with cancer. Apparently we all need to be both oncologists and precognitive when buying insurance. She took it to the Ombudsman, but no joy there either – just another bunch of useless bureaucrats feathering their own nests.

Be warned: A family member with cancer, even one with a good prognosis, might have the temerity to start dying, and you won’t be able to claim back the money you paid out for that holiday so you can be at the bedside, or the funeral.

My mother lost a son and £3,000. Obviously the second hardly mattered in the light of the first, which is just the kind of shit insurance companies rely on.

My take on all this, as regards our house, is that I would rather my money went straight to a builder or furniture shop, if needed, rather than to that bunch of besuited fucking parasites.

Tiles & Quakes.

Posted on by Neal Asher

It now being cool enough for us to have become wimpishly Greek about the temperature of the sea and disinclined to head straight down to Makrigialos once my writing is done, we’re spending more time in the house. It has also been cool enough for me to contemplate the idea of shifting maybe a tonne of tiles from where they would be delivered, which in a mountain village on Crete means never by the house and in our case means at the top of fifty metres of sloping track, after which they must be taken up steps and a further twenty metres of upwards sloping path. So last Thursday we went to the tile shop and ordered what we’d already decided we wanted. This was 85 square metres of assorted tiles, a toilet, a sink, taps and shower and a shower cabinet. They acted fast upon receiving the order and most of what we wanted was delivered at about 6.30PM.

First I helped unload the truck, then I took some of the tiles down as far as the steps in a couple of wheelbarrows. Caroline took these – the bathroom tiles – up and round to the ruin, whilst I carried the rest the whole distance. I finished at about 8.00, had to have a shower afterwards because I was pouring with sweat, then had to cool down for a while before eating anything. Two days later I got that familiar ‘who the fuck worked me over with a baseball bat’ feeling that comes after a weight-training session conducted after a long break, but back to Thursday evening…

After a meal of tempura prawns and garlic bread, we sat watching TV, first a silly American series that is growing on me called The Nanny, then an episode on DVD of Foyle’s War. During this we heard a rumble, like some massive blast from the quarry in the mountains opposite, but this rumble seemed to penetrate right through to the bones. Caroline got halfway out of her seat and paused, but it passed, no need to get out into the open. Really, we shouldn’t worry too much about Earthquakes here – our house has been standing for centuries so the chances are that it will stand for further centuries.

Later we found out that the quake was 4.4 on the Richter scale and southwest of Iraklion, which is basically where we are. It wasn’t really of great note, and it’s always a bastard explaining logarithmic scales to someone and that no, a quake of 5 is not half the strength of a 10. We did have a better one two years ago in the middle of June. This was located just off of Ierapetra and weighed in at just over 6 on the Richter scale.

At about 3.00AM I woke up to a terrible racket. It seemed to me that someone angry had got hold of our front door and was slamming it back and forth in an attempt to get in (the door is loose at that time of year – it shrinks about a centimetre). As I really started to wake up it felt like someone had just opened a branch of the London underground directly below our house and now a train was passing through. I could feel it as well as hear it, and seemed to be able to track its progress below. We didn’t know whether we should get outside – apparently some of our neighbours did – and by the time we were coming to a decision about that, it was all over. No real damage. A crack had opened up in a newly painted wall but, over the ensuing week, it closed up again and effectively disappeared. I guess that’s one of the benefits of having a house partially constructed of mud and sitting on zero foundations – it is somewhat elastic.

Chilli Sauce

Posted on by Neal Asher
I finally managed to accumulate just shy of a kilo of assorted chillies and most of them being pretty damned hot I decided to bulk them out with a couple of red peppers. Into the pan I put a cup of vinegar and one of sugar (though part of that sugar was actually honey). I blitzed the chillies, the peppers and a whole bulb of about twenty or so cloves of garlic and bunged them in the pan too. I started heating this, to melt the sugar and render things down a bit, but noted that the whole mix was a bit dense, so added another cup each of sugar and vinegar. I brought it to the boil, let it cool a bit then whisked in a dessert spoonful of plain flower to thicken it. Still not the right consistency so I added another spoonful, then brought the lot up to a rolling boil ready to jar. I heated some jars (burning my finger in the process), scooped the mixture in and popped the lids on. There was just a little left over which went into a small bowl. In the evening we had samozas, bhaijas and spring rolls, dipped in this sauce and lathered with a peanut sauce Caroline had made. Absolutely delicious! 
  

The Cabbiano

Posted on by Neal Asher
The name of the restaurant was Gabbiano on the hanging sign and on the front of the building, but Cabbiano on the knapkins and a few other items inside. The hanging sign is now ‘Cabbiano’ and doubtless the front will be changed too. Maybe this is due to both C and G not existing in the Greek alphabet? 

We bought our house off of Stelios, our parents have stayed in the apartments above the Cabbiano and we’ve eaten in the restaurant for three years. There was one slight hiccup last year when the entire restaurant went non-smoking and I refused to go back. However, I found out that this was because they were worried about being hit by a heavy fine for infringing rules that were unclear to every bar and restaurant owner across Greece.

The Cabbiano is jointly owned (as far as I am aware) by the three brothers: Stelios, Yorgos and Marco. But there are others who have been there for quite a while like Nico (17 years I believe), who every now and again, along with Stelios, entertains the customers with some Greek dancing; the girls labouring in the kitchen; and now we have the new addition of Maria (Marco’s eldest daughter, I think). Here some pictures of them all, starting first with that Makrigialos entrepreur, Stelios:

Here’s Marco who’s raki flavoured with honey and cinnamon is delicious, and who is also an enthusiastic gardener who seems to have started a banana plantation in Makrigialos.
Here’s Yorgos, who works away in the kitchen with the girls (one of whom is his wife) to produce meal upon excellent meal even when twenty Norwegians just popped in for dinner. He also makes a pomegranite and galliano raki that’s good:
Here’s Maria:
Here are the girls who were kind enough to pose even though they were in the midst of cooking on a busy evening:
Here finally is Nico, who it took three attempts (on the final attempt having to force him down into a chair) before I could take a decent picture. First he decided to do some drinks tray spinning, then he decided to walk on his hands between the tables…
Beside the enjoyable food and wine, it’s a pleasure to sit in this restaurant and watch them operate, at great speed, meanwhile exchanging a joke or two with the customers, in their own language, be they Norwegian, Swedish, French, German or English.

Brief Blog.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Today (morning)

We remember the date of the first heavy rain here last year because, well, it’s a date that sticks in many people’s minds: the 11th of September. We were wondering if it would come at the same time this year but no, it came a day late on the 12th. I think ‘rain’ is perhaps too weak a term to describe it, ‘monsoon’ a better one. A bit of a cloud started building up over Papagianades and it started spitting in the morning. This increased to a heavy shower by midday and then by about 2.00 o’clock the garden was under about an inch of water, the water butt was full and streams were running down the paths here. This continued to about 5.00 and then began to peter out. It was a heavy downpour but not in the league of some we had when in our first year we stayed for the winter.

On New Years Eve 2007 we had a monsoon that lasted for 10 hours. To celebrate this date we drove down to Makrigialos at about 6.00, when it was starting, got thoroughly soaked running from the car to the Status Bar, and remained in that bar until about 4.30 in the morning. During the journey home I didn’t go any faster than about 5 miles an hour, carefully negotiating streams that had carried rocks all across the road along with about three car-killer boulders, all in a visibility that ended about five feet in front of the car. The cherry on the top was when we got into the house and Caroline complained about having wet feet. Water was coming in at the base of the bedroom wall and had flooded that room, the hall, and had created a little water feature over the step into the kitchen.

No leaks this year (so far), which I’m quite glad about since it also looks like it’s getting ready to piss down today.

Off to Ziros today to pay the water bill, and I have to muster up my best Greek to try and tell them that we’ve been overcharged for three years. Here, just like in Britain, they have a waste water charge. It comes to 15 Euros every two months for our waste water to go into the big village pipe and away. However, our waste water pipe just opens onto the messy ground opposite our house and isn’t actually attached to the village pipe. Should be fun. I’ll probably get nowhere.

I’ve passed page 300 of The Departure’s 446 pages. Peter Lavery has been quite vicious with his pencil again. I reckon that if there was ever such a thing as the perfect paragraph, he’s of the opinion that it’s something I’ve yet to write. However, I don’t resent this. I’ve learned huge amounts from this old-school editor with his University of Dublin classical education. And I do wonder how things will be for new writers now as editors like him are becoming more of a rarity.

Righto, no success with the water bill. Apparently you have to pay for the waste water pipe even if you’re not connected to it. It seems totally areshole to me, but nowhere near as bad as the £1000+ we have to pay in council tax in Britian each year for, effectively, getting our rubbish taken away.

Smoke from the Ears!

Posted on by Neal Asher

Wednesday 25th

I would say it’s a certainty that I’m going to end up with a sack load of chillies here. Previously I’ve preserved them in olive oil or vinegar, but find they tend to lose their kick that way. This year I’ve decided I’ll dry a load, and turn the rest into something we tend to use quite a lot of: sweet chilli sauce. Has anyone out there done this? After reading various recipes on the Internet I’m inclined to a big saucepan into which will go a pint of vinegar plus a pint of sugar, one whole bulb of garlick then chopped up chillies right to the brim, boiling then bottling…

Monday 30th

Well, a test run using honey instead of sugar (we were given a jar here and simply don’t use it) seems to have worked. Now I have to buy some vinegar and sugar and just wait until I’ve got at least half a bucketload of chillies. At present rates of ripening that should be in about a couple of weeks.

Other projects on the go: I’ve cut from the tobacco plants a collection of leaves that were damaged by the wind and am drying them. The problem is that they dry out rather quickly here and so remain green. Perhaps I need to somehow slow down the drying process. Then again, they’re ‘green’ so they must be good for me.

The beach is now starting to empty. Most of the holidaymakers in the small apartment blocks in Makrigialos are Greeks, usually over from the mainland, with just a scattering of other nationalities. The big hotels at the end of the place, the Micropoli and the Sun Wing, are mostly occupied by Scandinavians – and yes very many of them seem to be blonde. It’s something we are supposed to ignore in this politically correct world, but national traits are much in evidence here. If you see someone running along the beach with one of those strap-on heart monitors around his chest, or cycling vigorously up a hill in temperatures above 30, you can generally guarantee he’s German. Tall women with blonde hair down to their perfectly formed arses are generally Scandinavian whilst the big blonde square-jawed men who look capable of snapping your neck like a twig can be both of the aforementioned. The lugubrious beer-drinkers with big moustaches are often Dutch, whilst the ape-haired men with wives who appear to think that children outside the womb are still attached by an umbilical cord are usually Greek. I haven’t nailed down the few French here, but I’ve been told they are the ones who dislike having to use that international tongue called English. And, unfortunately, Mr fat shaven-headed lobster skin clad in knee-length shorts and a Manchester United shirt, with the gross tattooed wife in tow, is generally British.

Tuesday 31st

Tomorrow Greece is introducing its fourth ban on smoking in indoor public places, and the politically correct wankers who want to force their world-view on everyone else are diligently analysing why the previous bans didn’t work. Apparently they need to be more forceful, they need to make the rules clearer, there’s a need for big fines and it is utterly necessary that smokers be pilloried, racked and beaten with strips of nicotine patches until they die. You see, the barmen and women, and THE CHILDREN must be protected from that lethal, killing secondhand smoke … Wasn’t it Goebbels who said that if you tell a lie forcefully enough and often enough it will be believed?

Well, the reason why the previous bans didn’t work is quite simple. According to Athens News 42% of Greeks smoke, 63% of Greek men smoke, 39% of Greek women smoke, 37% of Greek children aged 12 to 17 smoke and 45% of the 16 to 25 age bracket smoke. What we are seeing here with the undermining of the rules, the twisting of the legislation, the lack of enforcement and the complete disregard for the new laws is something called … now what are the words … oh yeah, what we are seeing here is ‘democracy in action’.

You see, whilst 42% of Greeks smoke and there’ll be some of those who want to be forced to stop, there’s an even larger proportion of the remaining 58% of non-smokers who fall into these categories: ‘children’, ‘it’s got fuck-all to do with the government’, ‘stop telling people how to live their lives’, ‘surely it’s up to the bar owners’ and the huge category called ‘frankly I don’t give a shit’. In our democracies the governments in power would be hugely grateful to get into power on a 42% vote. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the European population would be hugely grateful for governments that did what they were voted into power to do, without corruption, instead of acting as enforcers for the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

In the same paper in which I was reading about the new smoking ban here I also learned that small businesses (ie those employing less than 50 people) make up 98.7% of the Greek economy. So, bearing that in mind, one should also bear in mind that tourism is the country’s second largest income. It would therefore not be too much of a stretch to add that a large proportion of those small businesses are bars, restaurants and nightclubs. Perhaps the Greek government should bear in mind, as it scrabbles for money to cover its huge debts, that in Britain, in 2007, the pub closure rate leapt from 4 a month to 27 a month, and has not dropped below that rate ever since. In fact, the shape of Britain has now been changed forever, with many pubs that were serving beer when Sir Walter Rayleigh was sparking up his pipe, now being gutted and turned into residential homes. And what was different about 2007? Oh yeah, the smoking ban. Occam’s Razor doesn’t lie.

Creepy-crawlies, Moaning Brits, Books etc.

Posted on by Neal Asher
Wednesday 18th

To start us off , here’s a picture of Yorgos, the boss of the Revans Bar, hard at work. He was trying to catch forty winks on a sunbed but, being unable to get comfortable in the heat, decided to cool off. All perfectly understandable when last night he closed the bar at one and the night before at four.
Time for a little rant:
You’ve sold your house in England and gone through all the grief of buying yourself a house on the island of Crete, either in the seaside resort of Makrigialos or up in a mountain village nearby. One would have thought that you would be satisfied, that you’d achieved some sort of goal you’d fixed upon as retirement drew close, but no, here are just a few I’ve heard:
You don’t like the heat, you don’t like olives, you don’t like sunning yourself and you’ll only get into the sea when fishes get out to go to the toilet. There’s no Tescos or Asdas here and it’s difficult to buy your Homepride cook-in sauces. There’s no Chinese or Indian restaurants, and cod, chips and mushy peas are a forgotten dream. You can’t get British TV. You pine for green fields, and for snow at Christmas. You miss your relatives, though after just a few days you want to kill them when they visit. You want to go home where everthing is easy and familiar, wrap yourself in a duvette, eat oven chips and watch Eastenders every day.

Y’know, there are ex-pats here in extreme need of a slap. How well now I understand that Australian appellation for the British: whingeing poms. Many of them are living in a place tens millions of other British would kill to get to, yet all they seem to do is moan.

And when they’re not moaning about Crete they’re bitching about each other. They tend to form up into cliques and chunter on about ‘them in that other clique’. When we first came here we associated with a couple who, so they said, didn’t like the cliquishness of Makrigialos, then got huffy when we didn’t want to go off drinking with them in various mountain villages. We realised then that they were pissed off because we weren’t joining their particular clique. Others here have had rows and fights (hot sun and alcohol, go figure) with the result that so-and-so is no longer talking to so-and-so. Leaving this place for five months every year we tend to to see all this from a perspective that’s lacking in the full-time residents here. It is all rather pathetic to see adults behaving like they haven’t yet found their way out of the playground.

Oh damn, I was bitching and moaning.

Thursday 19th

Perhaps I’m starting to get blasé about these things because I’ve failed to mention until now that The Technician is sitting at the top of the ‘New & Future Releases (science fiction)’ list on Amazon, and has been doing so for three weeks. This happened last year with Orbus, and that book also got to number one in the ‘Bestseller (science fiction)’ list. However, I do wonder if that’ll happen to The Technician since I see that Banks fella has an SF book out, the bugger.

Yesterday we again met a couple who have just returned from Norway to spend a a few months in their house here. Tor and Tova are definitely not a couple of moaners like those I mentioned before – they too get some perspective by leaving this place for a little while. We had a drink with them by the beach, then proceeded to a meal at the Cabbiano where the Greek waiters felt inspired to do one of their dances. Here’s a picture of Niko in mid-leap and Stelios behind him. We bought our house from the latter of these but our problems with it doesn’t keep us from his restaurant, which is always pleasant.

Friday 20th

I’ve been quite remiss this morning, sitting and reading the last few hundred pages of the last book of a trilogy I was particularly enjoying, rather than knuckling down and getting on with some work. But before I tell you about that trilogy, I’ll rewind back through my reading list. After finishing the Karin Slaughter books Skin Privilege, Fractured and Genesis, and enjoying them quite a lot, I felt it was time for me to read something a bit less bloody and traumatic, so I picked up a book Caroline’s parents had brought with them when they came.

Unseen Academicals is the latest Terry Pratchett out in paperback. This was one presumably written with Mr Pratchett’s voice recognition software, now his Alzheimer’s has killed his ability to type, but it was still a thoroughly enjoyable romp. I felt it wasn’t quite as good as a lot of his other books, but it still stands a head and shoulders over the majority of what makes it onto the bookshop shelves and I’ll certainly reread it.

After Pratchett I obviously felt the need for some more murder and mayhem – a need quite adequately catered for my Bait – Nick Brownlee (just read the first paragraph of this book and you’ll see what I mean), and then Evil at Heart – Chelsea Cain. The latter book turns out to be the third in a series, the first two of which I haven’t read. I do wonder if my enjoyment of it might have been spoilt if I actually had read them. Reading references to what has happened in the previous two books I do wonder if this one is a bit of franchise extending.

After these I read The Disappeared by M R Hall. I did like the book prior to this, The Coroner, though the heroine was definitely one that started to irritate. Here we had a fascinating story to follow, which I enjoyed, and a heroine who had moved from the irritating category to thoroughly annoying.

It’s funny, but there’s a thread that connects the trilogy I’ve just read, right back through everything else I’ve read to the Karin Slaughter books: the damaged hero or heroine. It’s starting to get annoying. Do these people always have to be: in the midst of a divorce, recovering from abuse either recently or in childhood, have some sort of problem like alcoholism, drug abuse, depression or in one case dyslexia? Y’know something, a modern police procedural or thriller would be unique if the central protagonist had a happy and relatively uneventful childhood, a happy marriage, good health and complete lack of psychological problems.

Next I read the Steig Larsson trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire & The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Caroline read the first of these before me, as had others I’ve talked to here. All said these were excellent and I would enjoy them. The first third of the first book I found a bit leaden and clunky but by the time I got beyond that I was hooked, mostly by the (damaged) character Salander. There’s not much point in me recommending these books (though there is a point in me saying you must persevere with the first of them) since people only need to take a glance at the bestseller lists over the last year or so. They’re very good. I do however have to comment on one thing that did begin to grate: every bad guy was always a guy, a bigot, always referred to women as ‘whores’ and usually had a penchant for kiddy porn, every woman (except for just one in the first book to whom just a few hundred words were devoted) was strong and on the side of right. Testament to the mind-distorting powers of political correctness.

Monday 23rd

Oh dear, windy and cool on Sunday – I even put on a T-shirt – and cool again this morning. I do hope this doesn’t mark the end of the hot spell and descent into Autumn…

Tuesday 24th

Whenever I casually chuck into conversation that we have scorpions around and sometimes in our house here, this usually raises a shudder only somewhat ameliorated by me telling the listener that they’re never bigger than an inch long. I then relate how, when we first came here and everything seemed to be going wrong, I heard a thud on my pillow in the night , and how it was almost with a feeling of inevitability that I turned the light on to find a scorpion there. I further add the story about the scorpion I found here, some distance from our house in a pile of olive stumps I was cutting up. This one was nearly three inches long and had a nice big fat sting. I’m a story-teller after all.

Talk then usually turns to creepy-crawlies of very stripe. Snakes get a mention, but we don’t see many here. Then there are the beetles that seem to wear hobnail boots and others that fly at you like seeker bullets, the crickets the size of cigars that land with a sound like someone dropping a bag of spoons, the praying mantises that watch you with odd intelligence, the ants that range in size from flecks of dust to an inch long, the black bees as big as strawberries and the hornets that look like they’re made of coloured plastic. ‘Spiders?’ the listeners will enquire. No, not many – they’re bigger in England. I say this with just an element of doubt because I once heard something drop as I opened window shutters and, by the sound, thought it must be a gecko till I noted, just as it scuttled out of sight, far too many striped legs. I recently commented to a couple about this lack of big spiders here and, bloody hell, I walked outside two days later to find this bugger (below) on our geraniums. It measures about two inches from leg tip to leg tip. I comfort myself with the observation that the shrouded corpses in its web seem to be wasps…

Chillies & Stuff.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Wednesday 11th

It’s been hot and humid for a couple of weeks now, not the usual dry heat, and lately the sea has been as warm as bathwater. Now I know that’s a description somewhat undermined by misuse since you don’t tend to walk into the bath wincing as the water level reaches your genitals, but in this case it’s true. The water is the temperature of bathwater that’s been left for a while, lukewarm, but near the shore, where the waves are meeting the hot sand, it often feels like someone has turned on the hot tap. If you swim any distance you can feel yourself starting to sweat. Just floating about in the waves or lying sprawled across a lilo seems the option most people are taking.

Another result of this heat, perhaps in combination with someone cutting a couple of trees down in the land directly in front of our house (pictures above – note the rubbish, which is something you never see in the tourist brochures), is that we’ve had some visitors. Having done my 2,000 words yesterday, then us having gone to wet ourselves first on the outside then on the inside, we returned here. Whilst then heading to water the garden I noticed something black and curly lying on the garden wall and wondered what it was, a twig, bird crap, maybe a crack I hadn’t noticed before? It turned out to be a little snake. To me this was good to see – just an enjoyable bit of wildlife to observe. Caroline’s reaction to these animals is slightly different, being of the mildly spooked ‘I ought to be scared of this’ kind. I tipped it off the wall into the weeds below. Then, this morning, I noted her opening the patio doors rather cautiously. I thought this was about snakes until I saw the scorpion folded up on the floor. It then unfolded, stretched out to about an inch long and made a dash for our sofa. I got the bugger with a teaspoon. Yeah, I like wildlife, but we tend to prefer to share our house with geckos only.

They have chilli plants here on Crete that are quite beautiful, especially near the end of the year when the chilli colours range from green, yellow, orange, red, white and purple. These are mostly used for decoration rather than gustation. It’s weird that here’s an island with a climate in which it is possible to grow every herb and spice under the sun, yet Greek food is bland. Having previously grown chillies from seeds brought from England I decided last year that I would next grow these colourful Cretan chillies. We first gathered some large chillies from a nearby village called Vori, then a Dutch woman called Honi gave us a branch of small chillies torn from a plant in the garden of the property she was renting. I removed seeds from the ripe chillies on all of these, dried them and stored them away. This year I planted them, and ended up with so many plants I supplied them to five other people and also left a box of them in the Gecko Bar for yet others to help themselves to. Anyway, here’s the result:

Above I mentioned the Dutch woman, Honi. She used to run the Status Bar in Makrigialos, but last year she left the keys and buggered off, also leaving, allegedly, numerous debts. The bar is now closed. I also mentioned the Gecko Bar. The proprietor has been trying to sell the lease and now it is closed. She closed it in July to take some time off for her ‘tennis elbow’ to heal a little. It is still closed and now her arm is in plaster – probably the result of trying to single-handedly manage a bar that could stay open for upwards of 12 hours i.e. closing time would be when the last drunk staggered out. Both these bars have struggled in the present financial climate simply because they are not owned but rented and, understand this, the rents are all year, tourists aren’t. There’s a big similarity here with the British pub, in that the breweries make their money more from rents than beer sales, steadily turning over publicans foolish to maybe remortgage a house to finance a refit and pay rents that profits are simply not covering. Turning optimists into cynics. Here it’s Greek owners rather than breweries.

Friday 13th

On Wednesday, after having polished off 3,000, I felt quite justified in visiting what has become our usual haunt this year, the Revens Bar, first for frappes, then for a swim and later for a miso kilo aspro krasi or a half kilo of white wine. As is usual with me I order stuff in Greek no matter what language the one serving me speaks. On this day Yorgos was leaving the running of the bar to Kostis, whose English isn’t great. As he delivered our usual of a miso kilo I then said to him, ‘Sto melon milou ta synithismena parakalo’ which I thought translated as ‘In the future I say to you the usual please’. He looked at me in puzzlement and in broken English said, ‘You want some melon?’ I said no and tried to explain what I thought I had said with, so Caroline tells me, my face turning increasingly red with embarrassment. He came back five minutes later with a plate of water melon and honeydew melon on ice. So much for being a smart arse. In retrospect I realise it’s something like leh-o or lego for ‘say’ and I probably should have stuck a tha in there for ‘will’ or ‘shall’. I’ll ask Yorgos about that, and ask him to explain to Kostis that I wasn’t demanding a perpetual supply of melon with our wine.

Monday 16th

Zero Point is coming along nicely though I have to admit to not achieving my 10,000 words last week. I’ve also learnt from Julie Crisp that the edited typescript of The Departure has been sent, but is still sitting in some DHL store room at this end since the petrol strike. Caroline is keeping her mobile phone on ready for a call from the delivery man, but nothing yet. What else? The temperature here is high. Right now as I write this at 10.30 in the morning it is 30 in the shade and still climbing. Oddly, it has again been hotter up here in the mountains than down in Makrigialos – the sea breeze, even though from the South, makes a big difference. However, down there the sea is still like a bath.

Tuesday 17th

The temperature yesterday down in Makrigialos was 37 in the shade with the sea being whipped up by a constant wind. When I went in I thought it was cold, but that was just the contrast I was feeling because when I did my swim across from Revans Bar to the harbour my body adjusted and it again felt like I was in a bath. This is one of the things I’ve discovered from living in such a hot place; very often it’s not the temperatue on the thermometer that’s important but contrast, whether there is a breeze and humidity. I’ve shivered and wished for a jumper in 26 degrees because we drove down into it from a mountain temperature of 30, I’ve poured sweat in a temperature of 28 yet felt quite fine in a temperature of 32 because it wasn’t so humid and I’ve sat outside to cool off in the breeze even though the thermometer read 27 inside and 28 outside. Then there’s acclimatizing to all this. You certainly know you’re acclimatized when you find yourself, as we did back in May, sitting at a table by the beach wearing jeans and a jumper whilst just a few yards away people are sprawled out in bikinis and swimming trunks. Anyway, the overall temperature for Crete today is predicted to be 40 in the shade, so I think the jeans can stay in a draw for a while yet.

2,000 words done yesterday and Zero Point has now passed the 50,000 mark. I’ll see if I can polish off another 2,000 today before we head down to use the Internet (Tuesdays are Internet day).

Further note: I did.

Cats and Dogs.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Some random thoughts on this subject…

Living in another country, and in a small rural village like Papagianades, really forces you to think about some stuff. With our English soppy-about-pets and disconnected-from-reality attitude to animals, some things come as quite a shock: the casual cruelty, the killing of cats and dogs and the seeming hatred some Greeks have of these animals. But then reality starts to impinge and you start thinking.

Some Greeks keep dogs, or cats, or both and generally can’t afford vet bills, frequent flea treatments and, most importantly, the hundreds of Euros it costs to have these animals neutered. The result of this is boxes of puppies dumped outside supermarkets, or bags of kittens dumped in ditches. It’s a kind of cowardice, it’s not taking responsibility – another result of which is unwanted family pets dumped at the side of the road. Maybe some will find my attitude harsh, but I feel a pet owner has three choices: give it a home, find it a home, or kill it quickly and cleanly.

In our village there are three people who feed the stray cats: one feeds about 21, another feeds 12 whilst yet another feeds about 30. I learnt this from one of our neighbours, Yorgos. He keeps a patch of land in the village on which he grows fruit trees, and I’ve always wondered why the ground underneath is bare. Why not grow melons, cucumbers, tomatoes and, in fact, any of the crops that grow here so readily? He doesn’t grow these things because the seeds, seedlings and adult plants are forever being uprooted by the numerous cats using his land as a litter tray. He understandably is reluctant to eat melons smeared with cat shit or lettuces that have been pissed on.

You have to consider how a gardener feels when one of the constant pleasures of his job is soil smelling of cat piss and fly-blown cat shit on his hands. You also have to consider too how numerous often hungry cats, and dogs, will mix with free-range chickens. How does a Greek who has kept chickens all his life, and lost many of them to stray cats and dogs, regard such animals? He and the gardner will see them as stealing food from their mouths and destroying the product of their labour. They will quite probably come to hate such animals and quite likely pass that attitude on to their children. They will demonize them, calling them dirty, smelly, food stealing flea-ridden disease carriers and, to a certain extent, they will not be wrong.

Consider the attitudes of various city dwellers across the world; those who feed pidgeons, and those who consider them to be flying rats. Consider residents and sometime residents of Britain’s coastal towns; those who view seagulls as beautiful flying creatures and part of the atmosphere, and those who have to clear up the detritus of torn-open bin bags, whose roofs get wrecked by nesting gulls, gutters blocked with stinking detritus and whose cars regularly wear a layer of guano.

In Britain we poison and trap mice and rats because, well, they’re dirty smelly food stealing flea-ridden disease carriers yet, there are those who keep them as pets. The first version are vermin, the second are not. I was once asked by someone what a weed is, to which the reply is that it is a plant growing in the wrong place, not producing what you want or doing what you want it to do. Isn’t it logically the case that the same question posed about vermin should receive a similar answer? How else do we make a distinction? Should certain animals have a get-out clause based on their cuteness and cuddlyness, their asthetic appeal?

Ask yourself: why does a cat have more of a right to live than the substantially more intelligent animal we regularly turn into bacon?

One final thought occurs to me about the situation here. Why do we not have a similar attitude to such animals in Britain? Even fifty or more years ago, though the attitude was closer, it was nowhere near as strong. The answer, maybe, comes in two parts: climate and human population density. We don’t have problems with large breeding populations of strays because there’s very little room, amidst 60 million people, for such populations to grow without being spotted and dealt with and, frankly, most of them end up as road kill. Also, year on year, a lot less of them survive the winter than do here.

Talking to various people about other places across the world I have to wonder if it is a truism that hot poor countries have a bad attitude to cats and dogs because they survive and breed like vermin, and because the people there simply cannot afford them.