Let me give you a piece of advice. If you ever find yourself in Crete, in need of food, and a Cretan offers you potatoes from his garden, snatch his damned arm off. In the supermarkets here the potatoes are good, better than those from British supermarket – you’ll have no problems with watery roast spuds or rubbery baked spuds. However, the garden varieties here are how you dream of potatoes, how you remember them from your childhood. When baked the skins are crispy, the interiors fluffy, prepared in any other way they are superb, and they really taste of potatoes! Just saying.
Tag: Bits
Fuel Strike
With the car’s fuel guage registering three-quarters of a tank we took Caroline’s parents to the airport. Over ensuing days we took one trip to Sitia and two trips to Makrigialos, on the last of these my intention being to fill up the petrol tank. There was a queue into the garage we normally use (the cheapest) so I drove on past. No hurry, really. Big mistake. I soon learned why they were queuing.
During a further necessary trip to Sitia (Caroline uses a dentist here to have her teeth cleaned – one hour of teeth cleaning as opposed to the British NHS ten minutes then out the door). The car was getting near to sucking fumes so I thought it might be an idea to stick 10 Euros worth in from one of the more expensive Sitia garages. One I passed was open, but I would go in one of the next two. They were both closed. After the dental visit we headed back home then subsequently to Makrigialos. Our station was closed, little paper signs up on the pumps with the word Telos on them, which means end, ending, close, which in turn means here that the tanker drivers have gone on strike again.
So now we were in Makrigialos and not entirely sure we had enough petrol to get home, or rather, do a round trip to home and to a garage again. I took a walk up to another station there and thankfully found them to be selling something. I got the car and drove up there, putting in €20 worth of Super 100, the high octane stuff for older cars at a cost of €1.75 a litre.
I don’t know why the tanker drivers are on strike – I don’t have enough Greek to follow the news on TV. I’d like to think they’re objecting to the ridiculous business-killing tax on petrol here, but I doubt it. I do know that the the lefties have a lot of power here and that they’ve been kicking up a big stink about the government measures to try and get Greece out of debt. The dockers, who across the world seem controlled by Bolsheviks, have been butt-fucking the Greek tourist industry by stopping tourists getting to their ferries.
Most likely this is about the driver’s pay, the taxes they have to pay on it, their inflated pensions and early retirement. When things get tough the unionists take the opportunity to kick everyone else in the teeth. Here is a chance to strike a blow for the cause and push everyone further along the road to the socialist utopia.
All of this of course raises other spectres. Two days of strike and service stations are empty. How long before the shops start emptying? Which lefties are going to get the knife in next, maybe the power workers, water workers, the post, other truck drivers, water? And will I receive the Peter Lavery edits of The Departure anytime soon, since the typescript is coming via DHL?
Here on Crete, as well demonstrated by Caroline’s recent trip down into the village and subsequent return with a gift of a big bag of potatoes and a melon, people aren’t going to starve in any great hurry, but I have to wonder how similar scenarios would pan-out in Britain, with its 60 million supermarket dependents. I have to think too about things like the Hubbert Peak, all the problems in those areas of the world where most of the oil comes from. Our civilization is like a car: take out the fuel and it ceases to be any use at all.
Update:
I’ve just been apprised of the reason for the strike and it is this: Greece is full of closed shops. The problems we had with the electricians here was due to one such closed shop; the registered electricians in Greece have to pay something in the region of €750 every two months for the privilege. The truck drivers, it turns out, have to pay a ridiculous amount for their life-time license – I’m told its €250,000 – and they are understandably pissed off that under EU rules such closed shops are not allowed, and must themselves be closed down. So, how was the strike ended? Under Greek law the drivers can be conscripted into the army in times of emergency with the result that if they strike they can be imprisoned and have their trucks confiscated. This is what is happening, slowly, because some of the councils that are supposed to issue the paperwork are not complying, and many of the truck drivers are in hiding, so the papers can’t be served on them. I rather think this is going to get ugly.
Jerry Bauer
I recently received an email from one Jonathan Bauer, a relative of Jerry Bauer, who has died. He was the guy who took that first photograph of me you’ll see in older copies of my first books (to the left here). Jonathan asked if I could write a note to be read at Jerry’s funeral. I fear I missed that … deadline, but here it is for you.
It’s been eleven years now since my photograph session with Jerry Bauer, so please forgive some hazy recollection. This was all a bit odd to me since I’d only just been taken on by Pan Macmillan and couldn’t quite accept that readers might want to see a picture of me. Caroline and I met him where instructed at Temple underground station then I believe went off to a cafe where he bought us coffee. I can’t remember if it was at the station or in the cafe where I saw his well-worn cameras, one loaded with colour film and one with black and white. I wondered why he hadn’t gone digital, but obviously these were the tools he was used to. He led us off into the streets around Temple, favoring litter-choked alleys where I could pose as the mean and moody hard-ass SF writer. I felt like a complete tart and slightly embarrassed, folding up the collar of my jacket, dipping my head just so, noting people wandering past and gazing at me in puzzlement as they wondered who I might be. Whilst all this was going on we chatted to Jerry. Caroline was fascinated to hear stories about him photographing Julie Christy and (I think) Dirk Bogart. When he casually mentioned another SF writer he’d photographed, Robert Silverberg, I repeated the name, slightly gobsmacked. He reacted enthusiastically, ‘Do you know Bob?’ he asked me. Erm, not really. The previous names mentioned just sailed by me, but Robert Silverberg was a legend. Later, about the time we parted, he asked if I would like my photographs touched up. I said no — I didn’t want to frighten anyone when they actually met me.
Sorry to hear about your loss. Jerry knew I was nervous and quickly put me at ease. Seemed like a nice guy.
Revans Bar
Just to show you where I’m sending these blogs from, here’s a few pictures of me in the Revans Bar in Makrigialos:
And here’s our genial host Yorgos at the same bar which can be found here at http://www.makrigialos-holidays.gr/ I feel obliged to add that he has two rooms for rent above the bar (what I’ll do for the chance of a free beer).
Happy holidays!
Chair Addiction.
The image here is courtesy of Sue Carpenter, an SFX reader on Crete (who also got a letter in the previous issue). Thanks for this, Sue.
It is nice to see Tor doing a bit of advertising – something I never saw for my first six or so books. I also noted, when in Britain, how small Tor sections were appearing in book shops across the country.
Still not writing much yet. I’ve no real excuse: visitors never put me off on previous occasions, nor did building work or some of the traumas that accompany living here. I guess, because I’m so far ahead, I’m just being lazy, taking a holiday, but be assured that you’ll still be getting your fix every year. Next Monday I knuckle down again to my 2,000 words a day.
So, after rescuing that first chair I seem to have acquired a bit of a chair habit. Caroline told me that she would quite like a few of the traditional kafenion chairs for up around the ruin and, being the skip diver that I am, I saw a couple in a local tip and immediately grabbed them. I completely disassembled them and out of them am making one complete one. Just a little bit more work to do…
Here also are some further random pictures of the garden, Jim of the excellent breakfast at the Lithos on Makrigialos harbour and my father-in-law revealing his inner alien.
The Chair
Well, the dog I couldn’t fix, but the chair here I could. You have to remember that before I became the big famous author (hollow laugh) I worked in numerous jobs and acquired various skills. I’m also the kind of person who finds something broken and has to try repairing it, hence three restored bikes, loads of mowers (for when I was self-employed and running around cutting grass) and numberless other bits and pieces, including furniture. Also, I once had a job as a skip lorry driver, so that gave me access to all sorts of junk to play with.
This chair had been thrown into one of the roadside dumps up here in the mountains – where rubbish is heaped then basically dozered off a cliff (recycling here means getting on your bike again, if you have one). It is precisely the sort of chair we wanted for our terrace here but found to be ridiculously overpriced. I pulled over, took one look at it and decided to have it. This then entailed my three passengers cramming in the back since the only place it would fit was the front passenger seat. Then I drove home with only the three available gears since the edge of the chair was in the way of the gear stick.
Lots of the trim was coming off, but that was just a case of wood glue and clamps. The bottom was broken out, two of the front to back struts snapped and the thick piece of bamboo running crosswise snapped away at one end and all the binding missing. First I replaced those struts, using lengths of a wooden curtain rail I had here – for one of them I necessarily had to drill a hole in through the front to get it in place. I then drilled in through the side to fit a dowel down the centre of the the bamboo (you can see the dowel protruding in the first picture). The next day I replaced all the missing binding. I used lengths of broom (the plant, not the thing you sweep up with, first flattened between thumb and the shaft of a screwdriver, then wrapped round with wood glue and clamped into place. Stain and then varnish followed, then the cushion you see bought from a local supermarket for 10 Euros. I’m very happy with it and it is very comfortable. I just need the previous owner of this chair to dump three more of them!
Bits.
Here’s Owen Roberts take on Orbus: http://unwritable.blogspot.com/2010/06/orbus.html
Not much writing being done here at the moment. Caroline’s parents are staying with us, building work has recommenced, Mikalis having returned from Germany and announcing that he’s now getting divorced from his wife of twenty years (there’s much more to her visit to hospital I mentioned previously, like, a hundred anti-depressants), and I still want to kill the neighbour’s child (who we don’t see because he’s in hiding).
Here’s some more pictures from our garden. If any of you know the names of these succulents then please let me know.
Greek Notes.
30C in Britain and Caroline’s dad, Gerry, texted to say he’s looking forward to coming out to Crete to cool off. Today Caroline texted him to let him know that we were sitting outside at 9.30 in the evening in a temperature of 33C.
Expats here from ‘up North’ express their delight in eating mushy peas and deride our southern (Essex) indifference to the dish. Henceforth I’ll inform them that ‘down South’ we eat fresh peas, whilst ‘up North’ they’ve grown accustomed to sloppy seconds.
A noticeable effect of the feeling of alienation some expats get is how they often become less cosmopolitan, more nationalistic and also more parochial in attitude about a place they left behind. Ah, drinking pink gins on the veranda to dull the pain, crying about the lack of chip shops, Heinz Beans and a Tesco’s down the road. I tell you even the old home country accents seem to get stronger.
‘Siga-siga’ is an expression frequently used here. It doesn’t mean ‘you smoke too much’ or ‘do you want a cigar?’ but ‘slowly-slowly, take it easy, stop your rushing about’. It’s one I often encounter when struggling to say something in Greek, or when sweating to get a job done, or hurrying somewhere. It’s also an attitude that results in that common occupation here of ‘waiting for the Greek worker to turn up’: the carpenter to measure up for furniture, the guy coming to lay tiles, the one coming to repair the roof, and now the one to measure up our ruin for windows and doors. You get it in some restaurants and bars as you wait interminably for a drink or a meal, gritting your teeth and telling yourself it’s just the easier slower lifestyle of the Greeks. And its an expression that now pisses me off.
Hey guys, if you want your mobile phones, your 4x4s, your flat screen TVs and your laptops then I suggest you take your ‘siga-siga’ and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Yes, I know you think that the English, the Germans, the ‘xenos’ here have money trees in their gardens, and so you charge accordingly, but that’s just not the case. The money is the result of a basic incomprehension of the ‘siga-siga’ ethos. You make money out of constant effort, not from the rip-off.
Why is Greece bankrupt? Because the corrupt government either trousers money it hasn’t got, or pisses it up the wall on ‘projects’. It’s not really much different from Britain or any other country in the EU, or America for that matter. It’s just a lot closer to the cliff edge.
House of Suns — Alastair Reynolds.
I finally got round to reading this (I really needed the escape) and enjoyed it immensely. Mr Reynolds also got double royalties from me due to my increasingly disfunctional memory – I bought one copy through either Amazon or The Book Depository, and then picked up another in Waterstones.
It has everything I want from him: huge concepts played out on a vast stage, enjoyable characters, gobsmacking technology (bollocks to nanotech, he goes straight for the jugular with femtotech) and a great story extending across aeons. I particularly liked the way, at one point, that he sneaked around causality. Some might think, with his adherence to the galactic speed limit, that he’s made a rod for his own back as far as story telling goes. It strikes me that a consequence of him limiting himself to sub-FTL travel is that the stage expands to somewhere approaching its true size. What Reynolds does best is give some sense of the true scale of what lies out there. Maybe that’s something difficult to achieve without spending years peering through a telescope and letting the vastness of what you see settle in your bones.
I’m probably speaking to the converted when I say, ‘Highly recommended,’ since most of you reading this blog have probably already read this book.
Footnote.
The character Purslane in this book received a hologram of an emerald beetle. I can’t find that particular section at the moment but it sticks in my mind because this bugger landed in Caroline’s lap only a week before I started reading the book.
The interconnectness of things? Just the inevitability of human brains full of experience and knowledge interfacing with large books full of … experience and knowledge.
More Greek Stuff
We have a guy here who used to be a social worker in Britain and therefore accustomed to dealing with the socially challenged (scum). He expressed some concern about the boy up here in our village, opining that the kind who set fire to puppies as children tend to become even bigger shitbags when they become teenagers. I think it a given that most teenagers are shitbags – they have the total self-regard and lack of empathy of children combined with hormones, pre-adult bodies and, nowadays, a huge sense of entitlement. But I understood what he meant about us not wanting to set ourselves up as targets when this boy turns into the village hoody. I don’t think we need to be too worried.
It goes back somewhat to my previous post. In Britain, if a child was to do something like this, he would have done something completely outside of accepted mores. It would be an act of rebellion and a rejection of ‘society’, and regarded by most as something he should be locked up for. Here, with many adults hating dogs and having grown up in a time when if you hated a dog few people would object if you strung it up from an olive tree; here where many adults find setting fire to a puppy amusing, his biggest crime was not checking to see if the puppy had an owner before torching it.
It is also the case that this child, and his two brothers, are generally just boisterous boys. They play like boys did a number of decades ago in Britain before computer games, and TVs in the bedroom. They take the rubbish down to the bins, collect food from the veg delivery man and collect loads of wood – we often see the youngest labouring up and down the steep paths here with a heavy wheelbarrow. They work in their parent’s large vegetable plot, help with the olive harvest, are polite to us and bugger off when we tell them without any danger of one of them pulling a knife, and they get a belt round the ear when they do something wrong.
The problem here is that the casual cruelty we have seen is not regarded as something terrible. And I fear that the child concerned was just trying to be an adult – using an accepted method to drive off a stray dog and thus protect the family’s chickens.
Incidentally, going back to that dogs ‘strung up from an olive tree’. A recent case in mainland Greece actually resulted in prosecutions. Three dogs were strung up all together with the same rope, or wire, their back paws just touching the ground so as to prolong the entertainment.
Stress Diet:
Over a period of ten days I’ve lost about 8lbs. Stress, anger and lack of sleep certainly burn off the calories. Seeing an animal in pain is an appetite suppressant, and the smell of burnt fur, burnt skin, Betadine antibiotic commingled with with a hint of putrefaction certainly puts you off the meat course. Enjoy your lunch.
Some Greek Learned:
I believe Gamoto kakos apovrasma translates as ‘fucking evil scum’. I was going to go for ‘bastard’ rather than ‘scum’ but whilst my Rough Guide has that word as keratas my dictionary has it as nothos or palianthropos and lists keratas as ‘cuckold’. I tend to feel that it’s the Rough Guide that’s wrong because it contains so many mistakes. Opening it at random I get the standard one: anafero for ‘mention’ when it is ‘I mention’, again totally ignoring the verb endings I’ve mentioned before: anafero, anaferis, anaferoome etc (again the disclaimer: I’m no expert so correct me if I’m wrong).
No Happy Ending.
So, despite all the shit that has hit the fan this week the work on the ruin is looking good. All the ‘sovar’ or rendering has been done inside, the plumbing is in and there’s actually running water up there now, the electrics are also in and the ‘karistoo’ path has been done down the side. Last week, before the puppy incident, we visited a window shop to get some prices and later a guy stopped off to take a look at the work. He was another that Mikalis had put us onto and I warned him that if the price was a piss-take I would be saying, ‘Oshi’. As it turns out we were pleasantly surprised. The price was high, but not rip-off. We had already checked what it might be by looking at wooden windows for sale on the Internet in Britain, then adding extra for the shutters and the fact that these would be made to fit. It seems that very shortly it will be time for tiling, and then going out to buy things like toilets and sinks.
Thursday 17th
So here we are precisely one week after the subhuman child nearby set fire to a puppy. … You know, I write the words but they keep seeming ridiculous to me. They are the kind of words you use metaphorically or in analogy: ‘He looks so pissed off you’d think someone set fire to his puppy’. Anyway, getting back to that child; what is subhuman or, more precisely, subnormal? In Britain, when a child does something like this, the reaction of 99% of people is disbelieving horror. An army of child psychologists and social workers would be on the scene to deal with this problem child and his problem family. But I’m pretty certain that’s not the case here.
In the evening last Thursday, after Mikalis and his crew had gone, the child and his little brother finally ventured out. This was not a good move on their part since, at that time, Caroline was out watering the plants, and she of course went after them and started having a go at them. Shortly after this, three men turned up, possibly relations or friends of the family, at which point I joined in (I was tending to avoid the kids as my reaction would not have been verbal). I explained to the men, ‘Vazi fotia se mikro skilachi’ which is, ‘He set fire to a puppy’. One of the men laughed then stopped when I said, ‘Oshi ha ha ha ha’ and he saw my expression. I also at one point had the little brat concerned by the throat so I guess they figured I wasn’t happy. I thought the laughter due to the man thinking, ‘Ah, the Englishman is no good at Greek and has said something silly’. Now I don’t believe that.
Ever since we arrived here three years ago, when we go shopping in Sitia, we stop for a giros and a frappe in a Greek fast food place. The wife in the family that runs the place likes chatting to her English customers and I’ve learnt some useful words and phrases from her. This week I went shopping whilst Caroline stayed home to look after the puppy. I stopped at the fast food place for takeaway giros and as usual got a cheerful, ‘Ti kanis?’ which means ‘How are you?’ but translates as, ‘What do you do?’ (I’ll figure it out one day). Rather than reply, ‘Ime kala,’ or ‘I am well,’ I replied, ‘Then kalo,’ or ‘Not good’. The woman asked me to explain, which I did, both in Greek and English. There could be no misunderstanding. Her reaction was precisely zero then, when she turned away to work at something on a nearby counter, she looked to me like she was smirking. As he handed over my two giros her husband, however, could not have been clearer. He was laughing, with tears in is eyes. He then asked me, ‘Spirito?’ squirting an imaginary plastic spirit bottle – sold in all the shops here – towards the ground. Perhaps he had misunderstood. ‘Neh,’ I replied, ‘Yes’. ‘I love that,’ he said, obviously carried away by the hilarity of it all. I snatched my order from his hand and left. In retrospect I wished I’d asked him how amusing he’d find it if I shoved his head in his chip fryer.
A little thought later and I realised something. Long straight burns on the puppy’s back had puzzled me. I now realised they were caused by the long thin streams of spirit from the squeezy bottle. Most likely the person using the bottle lights the tip first then uses it as a mini flame-thrower. Something else occurred: there’s a picture of a badly burnt dog in the Gecko Bar – someone collecting funds for its treatment. This, I reckon, is a common occurrence here and, quite probably, the mountains and ruins are littered with the bones of dogs that have died in agony, saturated either with burning spirit or hot oil (Mikalis’s first assumption). And now I see that to these people, a boy doing such a thing is just acting precisely as it has been raised and to his parents is just normal.
I asked Mikalis if the people of our village probably think we are crazy, and he didn’t hesitate when he replied, ‘Yes’. A lot of the old people of the village have known starvation and when dogs are in competition with humans for food they’re going to lose. They keep lots of free-range chickens too and I perfectly understand their dislike of strays wandering into the village, I also think that in these circumstances it is perfectly acceptable for them to shoot any dog that is a danger to livestock. I don’t, however, understand the fear many Greeks have of dogs – a phobic reaction with elements of hatred and disgust in it. And this was a small puppy. It would have run in terror from the massive chickens here. It probably ran up to the boy, wagging its tail, waiting to be petted. It probably followed him about while he went to get his bottle of spirit and light the spout. Plain ugly cruelty; plain joy in seeing an animal in agony.
Back to the puppy, because I guess some of you reading this will want to know. It is eating, drinking and manages to wander about a bit. The rest of the time it is crying in pain when trying to stand up or lie down, or sleeping. It still manages to wag its tail, surprisingly. In retrospect, however, I wish I’d picked up the nearest rock the moment we got hold of her and put her out of her pain, rather than have put her through this last week.
No Happy Ending, Wednesday 23rd.
Too much, in the end. As some of the puppy’s skin started to fall off I hoped this a sign that it was healing. More and more fell off and the creature ended up in much more pain. I knew, as it lost all the skin across its stomach, that the skin on its back would go next. It would probably lose 50% of its skin and even if it grew back it was doubtful there would be any hair on it. A dog with exposed skin on its back on Crete is never going to be able to go outside for long. It also stopped eating and its suffering was such that we knew it could not go on. We said we would take it to the vet in Ierapetra to have it put down – an hour and a half to two hour drive away. Mikalis said no and took it the 15 minute journey to his home to put it out of its misery. He, or a friend of his, had a gun.