Crete seems to be a place of extremes, on one hand you have magnificent beauty and humbling kindness, and on the other extreme there’s greed, ugliness and unbelievable cruelty. So now I’m going to tell you about the week my builder has had, and the week we have had.

I now had to eat humble pie and phone up the English electrician, fully prepared for him to tell me to fuck off. ‘Ah, you got a Greek quote,’ said he, then came up, looked at the work, and delivered a quote more in the range I expected – neither too high nor too low. I said he’d got the job and paid over part of the price so he could buy the materials. He drove to Ierapetra to buy the required wiring, plugs, fuse box etc. We knew this because he phoned to ask about leaving the stuff at our house. However, he got us on Caroline’s mobile because we were in Sitia that day, shopping.

This was also a day that Mikalis and his workers did not turn up, which was odd – he was normally here at 7.30 punctually every morning six days a week. I assumed he’d got a hangover and left it at that. Then, whilst we were in Sitia, I checked my phone and noted a missed call from Mikalis. I phoned him and, upon hearing that he’d had a bad day, jokily asked if he’d had too much raki the night before. No, his wife was in Agios Nikolias hospital and he was there with her. He then went on to inform me that I must stop my English electrician coming because if he does the Greek electrician along with other Greek electricians is going to cause big problems. I wasn’t sure whether these problems were tax related or whether they were going to come here and beat up my guy.

Not wanting any problems, and unable to talk face-to-face with Mikalis because, quite obviously, he wouldn’t be coming for a while, we decided on a course of action. We drove over to see the English electrician, paid him for the materials he’d bought and gave him an extra 50 Euros because he’d been pissed about. He seemed to accept that and agree that avoiding problems was the best course, though whether privately he thinks I’m a prat I don’t know.

That was Tuesday. On Thursday Mikalis arrived and I managed to talk to him. His wife was now back at their house with people looking after her. The Greek electrician was now nothing to Mikalis and, because it was through him that this problem arose, he was getting another electrician in who he would help, and he would pay the difference in price to the English electrician’s quote. Okay, fair enough.

Anyway, whilst I was learning all this, I noticed a little black and white puppy following one of the builders up and down the ramp to the ruin whilst he was pushing a wheelbarrow. I thought a stray had arrived (there’s too many of them here). Yes and no. Mikalis has a couple of dogs and apparently his mother wanted one. He saw this puppy abandoned at the side of the road and picked it up that day. Lovely little thing, all waggy tail and licking your hands, and it would sit on command, which was surprising.

Okay, some of you might like to stop reading now, especially those who turn away from RSPCA adverts or find Animal Hospital too traumatic. You’ve been warned.

Now, whilst Mikalis and crew were working, the puppy was happily wandering around with them until it wandered off a little way. Caroline and I were inside the house, mostly. Next thing we knew there was an uproar outside. I saw Mikalis charging down the path to a nearby house, hammering on the door and shouting. He managed to switch to his broken English to say to us, ‘Find dog!’ My immediate assumption was that one of the kids nearby had thrown a rock at it and it had run off, injured. It’s a pastime they enjoy with the village cats.

No, it was much worse than that.

A septic little cunt in this village had, allegedly, decided it might be fun to soak the puppy with something like petrol and set fire to it. I have to say allegedly even though there was only this shit and his little brother in the relevant part of the village, and puppies don’t spontaneously combust.

We found the dog, hiding in another nearby building. Mikalis wasn’t sure what to do, maybe some Betadine on the burns. I told him it needed to go into water, now. I used a bottle of cold water from the fridge and also filled up a bucket with a hose pipe and we dunked the puppy in that. It screamed, of course. We finally wrapped it in a wet cloth and brought it to our terrace. It got up and ran into our house, hiding in some bags under our spare bed. Terrified, in agony, stinking of burnt fur. Mikalis called the vet in Sitia, but he wasn’t there. Caroline called our nearby English neighbours – just outside the village – and Terry, the wife of the couple, immediately came over. She was very good. She managed to get the puppy out from under the bed – I didn’t want to grab it for fear of hurting it – sat it on her lap and put Lanocane on the burns. We then put the puppy in a box with towels and cloths for it to bury itself in. Terry then gave us directions to the vet in Ierapetra.

This was an hour-and-a-half drive. We first drove down to Makrigialos where we saw Jacko, a Dutch guy we know, walking down the road for his carafe of wine. We stopped and told him, mainly because he has dogs and almost certainly knew the location of the Ierapetra vet, which we were vague about. He got in the car and directed us there.

The vet used some sort of antibiotic powder on the burns, injected both antibiotics and a pain killer, then provided us with antibiotic pills, painkillers and cream. We brought the puppy back here to look after it for as long as necessary – if it survived – before Mikalis took it to his mother. Terry returned to find out how things were and, at that time, the subhuman village child, who had been in hiding all the while, showed his face out of the door to his house. Mikalis immediately began shouting at him, then rushed down to catch him and … well, it was most satisfying, but nowhere near enough. That evening Caroline and I also had a go at the little cunt. The parents of this monster finally turned up at about 8 or 9 in the evening, and we told them what their little darling had done. Whether they are doing anything about it I don’t know. My guess is that they’re keeping their heads down until this all blows over, and that the child his planning his next animal torture session.

Friday Morning, Early.

The puppy is sleeping now, mostly, when not whimpering. She’s drunk water and drunk evaporated milk. This morning we haven’t had a chance to give her any pills because she hasn’t eaten anything. Mikalis is here and he will be going to have a word with the parents. I decided, last night, that if this puppy dies I will grab that village child, drag him up here, rub his face in the corpse whilst asking him if he likes it, in Greek, then I’ll make him carry it down to his parent’s garden and bury it. That’s if he doesn’t have some unfortunate accident on the way, you know, like falling into that large prickly pear cactus beside the path.

Monday Morning.

A traumatic weekend, of course. It’s very difficult to put on the cream the vet provided but now we’re there – I dribble it onto the burns whilst she is asleep. I also put aloe vera cream on the less serious burns. After some initial problems getting the pills down her I now wrap them in a piece of soft cheese, then hold her mouth open while Caroline inserts cheese and pill to the back of her tongue, then I hold it closed until she swallows. She’s now eating solid food – sardines in oil were the first success – and has managed to walk about a bit. She’s also well enough to complain about her pain. She also often wags her tail when she sees us, which is amazing, considering the pain we keep causing her whilst treating her. I still don’t know if she’ll survive – one infection and that’ll be it – nor do I know if she’ll ever see out of her right eye.

Okay, more now from your correspondent in Crete. We are still occasionally getting clouds in the sky here, but 19 is the lowest the temperature has dropped in the last couple of weeks, and that in the middle of the night. Oddly, up here in the mountains the temperature has often been higher than down in Makrigialos, which is a first for us. Only yesterday we went to Sitia for shopping, came back pouring with sweat to then provide drinks for the workers who were likewise boiling. After they went, at about 3.00, we decided to go to Makrigialos for a swim, since the temperature up here was 30 in the shade. We didn’t swim, we sat in a bar shivering 23 degrees centigrade. Crazy.

With the change in the weather (and the lack of wind) the plants are really taking off. Here’s a picture of our datura tree grown from a cutting about eight inches high last year.

The aforementioned lack of wind has also enabled us to spend more time outside (though of course it is impossible to use a laptop there). Here then is a picture of a writer hard at work on our front terrace…

The ruin proceeds apace. Here’s a picture of the garden walls that have gone in, and a distant shot of ruin and house. Some stuff you can’t see, like the plastic tank that’s been buried beside the building, and the connecting pipework. Next is the ‘apothiche’ (garden shed), all the internal pipework, all the internal electrics, the concrete floor, the concrete path covered with ‘karistoo’ (lovely shiny stone from one particular Greek island), digging the ‘vothros’ (cess pit), the internal rendering and new walls, the windows and doors and then, of course, little essentials of life like a toilet, shower, sink … oh, and tiles.

Damn but I need to work harder!

The first work I was aiming to have done was to raise the height of the windows and door, put in another window, raise the height of all the walls, and seal the underground portion of wall at the back. The next job, which I thought would be silly money, was the roof. This would require new roof beams, a wooden ceiling, a fenizol layer (waterproof foam insulation), nylon and then a layer of reinforced concrete. The prices I got for both of these jobs were very good, so I told Mikalis to go ahead with them. He asked me when so I told him to get to work as soon as he wanted. He also did not require any money up front, and subsequently he, and two workers, turned up not the following day but the day after. The photographs here (dated) show the results thus far.

At this point I have to make it clear how good, how unusual this is. We spent the first two years here forever waiting for the Greek worker who never arrived. We’ve been ripped off on price, which both Greek and Albanian builders do a lot of here because, well, if you’re British the assumption is that you’re probably a millionaire. We’ve also heard nightmare stories about what some people have paid and, really, the builders often get away with it because the various ex-pats here are accustomed to British, German and Dutch building prices.

However, there are new circumstances to take into account. Greece is seriously in debt and the recent 95 billion loan the country received has come with some stringent conditions. The problem is exacerbated by Pasok having won the election last year. The Pasok government’s solution to a cash flow problem, like socialists across the world, is to tighten the screw on the rapidly diminishing number of those who earn the stuff. The result of course being that even less cash tends to flow.

Mikalis hasn’t worked in four months because, due to the taxes being imposed, people here are tightening their belts and putting off that roof repair or extension that seemed so essential a few years back. In Sitia, the largest town at this end of the island, only two building jobs are in progress. Here’s an example of one of the taxes: unleaded petrol is now 1.60 Euros a litre. Great way to generate wealth, don’t you think? Is it any wonder to learn, as I did in another conversation with Mikalis, that something like 80% of Sitia’s population is on some form of anti-depressant?

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Just a little to report this time round. My back is a lot better, possibly after stretching it a bit in the sea; I’ve sunk a water barrel in the front garden to take water from the shower and sinks which we now transport by bucket for irrigation; we’ve eaten our first radishes, lettuce, rocket and oriental red mustard; we are no longer using the stove – the temperature generally holding at about 22 in the house all night and outside during the day rising to above 25 – and things are gradually getting tidier. The main thing on my mind at the moment is the ruin around the back of our house (picture from 2 or more years ago).

We went to a ‘bring and buy’ sale at someone’s house in Makrigialos and a lady there mentioned she had a fairly new window for sale. I asked about the size and she told me it was 0.8 by1.0 metres, which to my recollection was about the size of one of the window gaps in our ruin. Enquiring further I found out it was a box frame with two opening windows and two shutters – precisely the same design as the ones in our house. At a price of 10 Euros I couldn’t really go wrong, so I said we’d have it. We collected it and it is fine – a perfect fit.

This then got me to thinking that I should talk to Mikalis, a Greek guy who did some excellent work on our house last year, about rebuilding the ruin. During the week, after our Internet session on Wednesday, we came back to the house to find a litre and a half bottle of raki on the doorstep. I thought Mikalis might have left it so gave him a call. It turned out that he didn’t leave the raki (just the carrier bag full of lemons the week before), but I did take the opportunity to ask him to come and measure up and give me some prices.

Mikalis visited during the day to check things out, then he and his wife came in the evening with raki, olives and artichokes (aginara, eaten raw with lots of lemon juice and salt). Not to outdone on the gift front he left us the raki we hadn’t drunk, which was about three quarters of a gallon of the stuff. Subsequently, this Sunday, he came for a further measure up of the ruin and discussion of the work.

The height of the windows and door needs to be raised, another window needs to be put in, the walls need to be pointed on the outside and raised to support a new roof. This is all before we even think about electrics, plumbing and everything else inside. For example, if we wanted to connect up a shower and toilet to the waste water and cess pit of the present house, that would require boring through metres of stone and concrete and probably wrecking the bathroom we already have. Better to install a tank beside the ruin and from that pump everything to a soak-away pit in the back garden since the plumbing there will only be used for a few weeks of the year.

I anxiously await those prices, which always scare the living daylights out of me.

News from the Cretan front. Damnit, I put my back out and have been walking about like an 80-year-old for the last three days … hang on, my apologies to 80-year-olds, my Mother is 83 and gets about a damned sight faster than I have been lately. And no I didn’t do it while digging a hole, nor did I do it while lifting something heavy. As always with this sort of thing I turned at just precisely the wrong angle at the wrong speed in the wrong direction at the wrong phase of the Moon. Or something. Caroline did the same thing last year just sneezing.

I have, therefore, not achieved a great deal of work on the house. I did come up with an idea for getting across our garden, which at present is always in one of two states: dust bowl or mud bath. Here attached is a picture of slabs I’m making from beach stones cast in concrete, in a mould carved from insulating foam. About three-quarters of a bucket of mix goes into each – the remainder I use to cement some more stones on our garden wall around the back.

What else? Still cloudy and cool on some days up in the mountains, though mostly it’s bright sunshine and a temperature above 20. Down in Makrigialos, as ever, the temperature is always a minimum of 4 degrees higher. Did we move to the wrong area? No, later on those living down there will be in mosquito hell and will need the air conditioning on so they can sleep at night. Interesting thing about the mosquitoes: their population explodes with the influx of tourists then, when the tourists go, a huge hungry population of the buggers remains to compete for a much reduced food supply.

Everything is growing madly, the only seeds I’ve planted yet to germinate being chilli and aquilegia seeds. We’ve got radishes, lettuce, rocket, onions and carrots coming up in a raised bed, and in pots and elsewhere: coriander, basils, cherry tomatoes, sweet peas, snapdragons, coleus, lupins, some local succulents (don’t know the name) and various cottage garden mixes (and other stuff I can’t remember right now). I’ve attached pictures of these, along with a picture of one of our garden visitors. You get no sense of scale with that last picture – the little monster is only a centimetre long.