Further Update

And now an update on some other stuff. I’m still struggling to take an interest in writing and reading. The most I’ve been doing is a few interviews. I get occasions when I’ll do a bit of fiction and then my interest wanes. I suspect this is not only a result of what happened in January last year – I guess getting your nose rubbed in horrible reality can create an indifference to the fictional kind –  and everything that led up to it, but depression throughout this January and February – probably very much SAD related. As I do, I’ve been fighting this with exercise.

Previously I did this by taking a 7-mile walk every day. Now my routine is 50 press-ups and 50 sit-ups in the morning, that walk at about midday, then going on into the evening weight-training sets while working my way through box sets of DVDs (oddly my appreciation of fiction has returned here). This interspersed with any other writing related work I need to get out of the way, like those interviews. I’ve also cut most of the carbs out of my diet with the result that my weight is down to just over 12 stone. Yesterday I went over the top with 2 lots of weight training plus another 50 sit-ups. One session is two sets each of 15 repetitions of curls, upright rowing, prone rowing, stomach press, and standing presses from chest and then from behind the head, all with a curling bar weighing about 25 kilos. This all keeps depression at bay with the added benefit of making me the fittest I’ve been in many year.

I’ve not been on the internet much – for various reasons I’ve grown sick of it. In fact I feel relieved about heading off to Crete to a house without internet. There I hope to be a bit better mentally and be able to knuckle down to some writing. First on the agenda will be a short story or two … well, that’s what I think right now.
In other news, the second book of the Transformation trilogy will be called War Factory. The original title (after just a working title of Penny Royal II) was Factory Station Room 101. Those at Macmillan didn’t like that much because all the present associations with Room 101 would tell the new reader nothing. I’m happy with War Factory.   

Snowy Crete

It was 7 years ago Caroline and I stayed in Crete over a winter – our first and last winter there. The joys of that time were struggling to heat the house with the stove and perpetually having to take the pipes down to unblock them, a roof that simply would not stop leaking – many a night was spent with the sound of water dripping into buckets. On New Year’s Eve it rained for 10 hours solid, and I am not talking about gentle rain but a monsoon. We went to a party and didn’t come back till 5 in the morning. I drove back through pebbled streams across the road and had to circumvent about four car-killing boulders that had tumbled down from the mountains. When we got back it was to find the house flooded. The builders had not properly sealed a back wall that is buried about 6 feet into the ground since the house is set in a mountain. In fact they’d dug out a trench to do a crappy job and refilled that with rubbish. With the rain it also filled with water which then came through the back wall. I remember mopping up to the wall and then just watching more water pour out.
That year it snowed. I don’t remember if that was before or after Christmas. The temperature went down to 2C and the snow didn’t last very long. Since then it hasn’t snowed there in the winter until this year.

Of course the house is well sealed now. The roofs don’t leak (fingers crossed). And my thanks to Anna Lexaki for these pictures.   

Kazani 2014 in Papagiannades

At the end of my stay in Crete this year, as on numerous occasions before, it was raki time. This is signalled two or three weeks beforehand by knackered old trucks loaded down with big brown barrels or monolithically stacked up crates of grapes. They make the raki at the end of October and start of November. Unlike what a lot of people seem to think, it is not made out of grape waste – out of what’s left over after the grapes have been pressed for wine – but whole grapes.

Fermentation is a few weeks. As every wine maker knows that’s when the yeast works hardest and produces the most alcohol. All this stuff with demijohns is just about a little extra alcohol and flavour. The yeast in this case is simply the bloom on the grapes. When you wipe a dull soft fruit and it then becomes shiny what you are wiping off is natural yeast. After this fermentation is complete it is Kazani time. The still is brought out and set up, the fire lit, and the fermented mess poured into the cauldron. 
In fact ‘kazani’ is the Greek word for cauldron, but it is also used to name the place where stilling is done and the lengthy boozy barbecues that ensue.

This year Cretans have had trouble getting all the paperwork sorted to start their kazanis as the Greek government, ever greedy for revenue, is moving in on them. Enjoy this video clip of one cycle of the process because it might be something you won’t see in years to come.

As the raki is made and transferred to barrels, hot coals are scooped from the fire for a barbecue. Large quantities of barbecued pork are consumed, along with rabbit, fish, mushrooms, sausage and potatoes baked in the hot coals and so tasty they only need a sprinkle of sea salt. Also consumed is toasted garlic break with oregano on it, raw cabbage with lemon juice and salt, pomegranates, sweetcorn and, here, at the kazani just a staggering distance from my front gate… 
…plenty of my homemade chilli sauce which many of the Greeks attending here have come to enjoy.   

I am Batman Today!

It’s getting colder and wetter here on Crete and I’ve been doing less of the Kayaking or swimming that kept me occupied in previous months. I know, of course, that many reading this will say, ‘Well get fucking writing then!’ I will, but I simply cannot engage with it yet. As I’ve mentioned before, you have to care.

 
So anyway, Kostis, the barman at Revans who wears a T-shirt for which he should be beheaded on the front steps of the nearest library, seems to have a love of the superheroes.

 
Often he’ll wear another T-shirt with the logo of one of these guys and declare, ‘I am Batman today,’ or ‘I am Spiderman and I will collect the empty glasses with my web!’ Mad as a box of frogs. Anyway, I’ve taken a liking to freddo cappuccinos of late and these will often have decorations in cinnamon on top of the frothy milk. In Revans the decoration is simply a heart. Only later did I learn this is because that is the stencil they have in the barrista device they use to put on the cinnamon.

At one point I said to Kostis, ‘You really need to have the Batman bat as a decoration.’ A week or so back, perhaps a little reluctant to go out on the kayak because of the lack of blazing sun, I got a picture of that bat up on my Ipad, drew it on a piece of cardboard and made a cut-out. This sort of worked, but not very well.

 
Next I was shown the stencil for the heart and the sprinkler device it fitted in. I took my cardboard cut-out home and used this as the basis of a stencil made out of the lid of a face cream pot. This Kostis and Yorgos tried out, but the holes clogged almost at once. I realised that the plastic was too thick and thought about some stainless steel I had at home. I took the plastic stencil home, redrew the bat from that on graph paper so I could get the proportions equal, then tried to make the stencil out of stainless steel. Failure. The stainless was too hard and the Dremel drill I was using was blunt after about four holes. I threw everything in the bin then went down to the sea.

 
In Makrigialos the sea was too rough for kayaking, or swimming and, after one beer, I was bored. I came back to the house thinking about other materials I might use, took a look in my shed and immediately found a nice thin piece of aluminium, made the bat stencil out of that and took it down a few hours later. One way round the stencil clogged, but the other way round it didn’t. I think this had something to do with the countersinking.

 
So now, in Revans Bar, you can get a Batman freddo cappuccino. It may be the only one on Crete, or even the whole world!

 
Really, I’ve got to get a life.  

Nightmares and No Escape

What to waffle on about today? Well, even before with my disrupted sleep patterns, I haven’t been dreaming, or haven’t remembered dreaming much at all. Now, for no apparent reason, I’ve started dreaming in Technicolor again. I’ll get the shitty ones out of the way first. I dreamed I’d gone on holiday with Caroline and while we were away she died of a horrible illness. It was a nightmare really. Towards the end of this nightmare, I had to sort out all her clothing and the moment I began doing that I started bawling. Then I started to wake up. Often, when I have nightmares, as I surface to consciousness I start to realise that what I was experiencing wasn’t real. There’s a feeling of relief. This time of course there was no feeling of relief at all because the nightmare was little different from the reality. I woke up more connected to that reality and well down in the pits. Serially, after this, I’ve had dreams about Caroline and I doing stuff, then woken up to the nightmare reality.

 

Then there’s the weird one I had where the old creative process kicked in. I was sitting with a group of people and a woman amongst them was a stalker … of me. I asked her how she had managed to find me. She said, ‘Google,’ then added in a slightly crazy tone, ‘I’m a googlebeast!’ I immediately replied to this (somewhat paraphrasing The Jabberwock), ‘Beware the googlebeast my son, with claws that scratch and teeth that bite your bum.’ I think I must have been channelling Spike Milligan at that moment. After reciting this, in the dream, I laughed so hard I fell off my chair. No one else was laughing. I think the dream me was as drunk as the real me that went to bed that night.

Flowers and Memorials

Since my camera developed a severe case of bashfulness (the lens will come out when I turn it on but shortly afterwards shoots back inside as if it doesn’t like what it sees out here) I haven’t been taking many photos when out walking. However, since I’ve been walking to Voila the damp has increased up in the mountains and this has made a nice change to the burnt-out wilderness they became back in June/July.

 
These, so my Plants of Crete book tell me (thanks Jean-Pierre) are Common Sternbergia. Of course this is the kind of thing you would expect to see in spring in England, but here the season when all the kinds of plants you see in England are knackered is the summer. In fact the Cretans are now planting all sorts of veg.

 
My walk to Voila now takes me along a slightly different route to the one I initially used. This is a winding track down past a memorial to that point on the tarmac road where I first saw those words ‘Never Stop Writing’ scribed onto the white line.

 
When I first looked at the memorial I guessed, with my yet limited understanding of Greek, that it was to some town official or, as is so often the case here, to some local priest. However, I memorized the name and asked about it next time I was in the kafenion. Yiannis, the patron, made a gun shape with his hand and said something about WWII and the Germans. He also told me that this guy was a ‘thaskalos’ – teacher.

 
Yesterday, after I had taken the pictures you see here, I showed them to Anna (my Greek teacher neighbour), who then showed them to her mother who, having been a resident of the nearest village to that memorial, recognised it at once.

 
Again, some limited understanding of Greek was involved, but I understood some of it and certainly understood the hand gestures. Right, they ripped his fingernails out. There was more. I still don’t know what this guy did but I’m guessing it was something to do with the Cretan resistance. Anyway, he certainly pissed off the Nazis because they ripped his fingernails out – this doubtless accompanied by other tortures – then finished the job by burying him alive.     

Ain’t humans wonderful.  

Walking to Voila

Tuesday 7th October

For five days now I’ve remained up in the mountains, every day walking to Voila. I was going to write a long post, or even an essay with ‘Walking to Voila’ as the title. To me the phrase somehow relates to Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill throughout eternity, only to have it roll back down every time. An eternal cycle; repetitive labour rewarded only by ending up back where you started. It’s a bit like grief really. When I think I’m getting somewhere, recovering, starting to feel better, something comes along and tips me over the edge and I seem to end up back where I started. When someone asks, ‘Where have you been?’ my reply is often just, ‘Crashed and burned again’. But it does get better. The boulder doesn’t roll all the way down every time. And my coping measure now is to take the 9 mile walk to Voila every day.

 
In this post, or essay, I was going to write about some of the things that have happened to Caroline. But as, in my mind, I got past the stuff about boulders, with maybe a little bit about Prometheus chained to a mountain top having his liver eaten out, I got into the nitty-gritty. I realised then that I could not do this. I cannot talk analytically about Caroline going, ‘Oh no,’ and then dying as I tried to make her more comfortable, or the light going out in her eyes, which it did – that is no cliché. I cannot detail the daily awfulness of an ileostomy bag or the litres of vomited emerald green bile flushed down the toilet. Just a few examples there, and I have not yet inspected too closely the definite holes in my memory.

The Late Post

I’ve been remiss in posting here yet again…

Saturday 27th September

It’s kakos keros today (bad weather) and, as I mooch about the house gradually getting a few jobs done (like wiping the three week’s accumulation of dust off the coffee table), I realise that this is probably a good thing.

 
A moment ago, I was gazing at one item in a list of things I must look up while next on the internet: physical exhaustion. In retrospect, walking 8 to 9 miles then kayaking twice that on Thursday, fuelled by just a bowl of cornflakes, coffee, tea, 2 beers, 2 glasses of wine and a pomegranate, wasn’t clever. On the Friday I felt drained, so didn’t walk in the morning as intended. When down in Makrigialos I did kayak, once, and afterwards felt quite ill so went home. Today, after a typically crappy night’s sleep I ate a bowl of cornflakes. Then, still feeling like I’d been tapped out by a vampire during the small hours, I realised I needed more fuel than that so ate a bowl of chilli. The usual then followed as my body used remaining resources to digest that and knocked me out on the sofa. Now, after a further bowl of chilli at midday, I’m starting to feel like I might be able to do some stuff. Luckily, it’s pissing down and, even I, nuts as I am, think that kayaking 10 or 15 miles in the pouring rain might not be the smartest move.

 
I guess I’m discovering my limitations and, one would hope, pushing against them. Flicking back through my journal, I see that most days I’ve been doing the kind of exercise that a couple of years ago would have left me wiped out for a week. I also think I’ve been led slightly along a false path by taking just a little notice of this BMI nonsense. According to that, for my age and height, my range is supposed to be 9st 13lb to 12st 5lb. At present my weight seems to hover about 12st 7lb so I’m fat? Bollocks.

 
And now onto a completely different subject… Another thing I’ve wondering about is when I last did a book signing, and which book it was. I could find out of course by opening my picture files, but then I would see pictures of Caroline and looking at those while stuck inside on a rainy day is not a great idea. Especially when feeling exhausted and weak – my resistance to my inner masochist is at a low ebb at the moment. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the book concerned was Hilldiggers in 2007.

 
The reason I’ve been wondering about this is because, what with the intervention of stuff like cancer and death, the publication of my next book, Dark Intelligence, was deferred to this winter. This will, therefore, be the first time, in about 8 years, that I’ll be physically present in England during the release of one of my books.

 
The good people at Macmillan, spotting this fact, got onto me and asked if I was up for doing something. Well, so long as it doesn’t involve giving talks or readings I am (I did not retreat into my bedroom to write all those years ago because I wanted to be a performer). I will, it transpires, be signing hardback copies of Dark Intelligence in Forbidden Planet, London, on the 29th January. Be there or be square … or quite possibly Kindle-shaped. 

Sunday 29th September

Kakos keros still, and again no exercise. Yesterday, after eating the cornflakes, then later two platefuls of chilli and rice, I ate a bowl of meat, cheese and pickled onions then in the evening went out for a meal of lamb chops, potatoes, rice and salad. In essence, I ate about two to three times my usual. When I weighed myself that morning I came in at 12st 5.4lbs. This morning I weighed in at spot on 13st. Um, so a weight gain of 8.6lbs in one day, most of it sitting in my stomach, large intestine and small intestine. I must remember to feel no fear next time I’m on the crapper, because the world is going to be dropping out of my bottom.

 
Today, thus far, my routine has been much the same, though with one less plateful of chilli. Still I feel knackered, still my hands are slightly shaky and still my legs feel like they did 10 miles yesterday. I did rally at about 4PM when I pushed myself to sweep out the stove chimney (a rat had taken up residence in it earlier in the summer). After that I felt warm enough to take off my hoody and thought I might be able to do a bit more. About half an hour later I again ended up flat on my back on the sofa. Evolutionary imperative I guess. Your body will respond when you push it simply because the bodies that all the time went, ‘Nah I’m too knackered and I can’t be bothered,’ ended up as lunch for a passing sabre tooth.

Other things I’m noticing. A mosquito bite on my ankle that has just been stubbornly not healing up over many weeks, has now dried up and properly scabbed over. Spots that a two weeks ago appeared on my back scalp and chin are also drying up and healing. The result of rest? Or the result of not perpetually dunking them in the sea? I don’t know. I certainly need to research how to body responds to the kind of pressure I’ve been putting mine under over the last … 7 months.

Now, if I can summon up the will, it’s time I returned to my Greek homework.

Positively Negative, or something…

I just dumped a number of blog posts in my Unused Blogs file for the same reason many others are there – too miserable and negative. Now I shall try to be positive because, it often is a matter of choice. Depression can be at a point where you can choose whether to sink lower or pull yourself up by your bootstraps and so it is with grief. I can continue chewing on my own liver by hauling up horrible images and memories for my inspection, or I can choose to deny them and think positively. Hang on, this is getting miserable again. Stop now. Smile.

 
So, Transformation II or Factory Station Room 101(provisionally) has winged its way off to Macmillan. After that, being positive (this was two weeks ago) I opened up a file called ‘Dr Whip’ which I again read through (and no, this is not a short story destined for the pages of Spanking Weekly). Here is another weird character who had a nasty encounter with Penny Royal. He appeared in the first book along with that character Tuppence who appears in my story The Other Gun (Asimov’s). I removed both of these completely from the book, which I guess demonstrates that I do that editorial thing of killing my babies. Asmodeus Whipple had a nasty encounter with Penny Royal and has undergone, and is still undergoing, a transformation…

However…

Sorry to be negative again, but I just could not summon up enough interest in it to continue. Still too soon I guess. I turned then instead to Transformation III or Spear & Spine (provisionally) and started editing my way through that. I suspect that with the new publishing schedule of my books of January to February I’ll be sending that in a year before it’s due.

 
In other news it seems I am now addicted to kayaking. Only yesterday, I took the thing from Revans in Makrigialos up opposite a restaurant called the Kariotsina at the far end of Koutsouras, then later took it in the opposite direction to a beach called Lagada. Those of you who don’t know this place won’t know what I’m talking about, but suffice to say it was a good few miles. This was all after my ‘big swim’. I’m now wondering whether I can go to all three extremes in one day: the two kayak runs above, my three-quarters of a mile swim, all after a morning walk of about eight miles. Of course the problem with this is that I won’t get much else done and will spend most of the rest of the day comatose on my sofa here.

 
It is now September and a crappy one for Crete too and, despite the above, I am not spending loads of time at the beach. I dump my stuff by a sun bed but don’t spend much time on the thing. I sit in Revans bar, but am not boozing till darkness. I drink fruit juice and piss about on Facebook and Twitter via the internet connection there – a pastime with limited appeal. I have therefore started Greek lessons again.

 
In English there are average word counts that differ for people’s speaking, reading and writing vocabularies. I’m not sure what it is for the first of these but, in Greek, I’m sure I’ve learned many more words. Sure, there are big gaping holes in my knowledge but if I could actually use the words I do know I’d have a fair shot at conversational Greek. To that end, the lessons Anna is giving me are slanted towards speaking and grammar. At present, she writes out a page long text for me in English. She reads out a sentence to me at a time, which I write down (so I don’t forget it) then speak in Greek, with her correcting me along the way. This takes up half to three-quarters of the lesson, whereupon she starts hitting me with various phrases in English that I then have to translate – testing all my weak points. Afterwards she hands over the English text and my homework is to translate it into written Greek.

 
Maybe, one day, I’ll translate all of Gridlinked into Greek and get it published here. That’s if I’m still capable when I’m 86.   

Lazy Weekend

Saturday 30/8/2014

I decided to take this weekend off, but not in the usual sense one would suppose. There have been very few days since February 8th, two days after Caroline’s cremation, when I haven’t gone on very long walks. Then, into the spring and summer, swum or kayaked long distances, or some combination of these three. Now I’m starting to feel a little weary. I also had a quandary to ponder, a need to take stock, a need to distance myself from that jaded feeling I’ve started to get down at the beach, and I also needed get some things done. One of these was finishing my edit of Factory Station Room 101. The other was to sort some paperwork for my tax return, because the Inland Revenue is not noted for its patience whether dealing with the bereaved or otherwise.

So, this morning I was up at 6.30 and at 7.30 headed out on a 6.5 mile walk through the mountains. Obviously, something about the idea of taking a rest from exercise had escaped me. Next, I went shopping in Sitia because when I found myself having boiled sweet corn for breakfast the day before I thought maybe it was time to restock the fridge. After packing this lot away, I ate a meal of salad and frankfurter wraps, then I fell asleep on the sofa for two hours.

*sigh*

It took me a further two hours to get motivated and finish those final bits of the second Transformation book. As you read this is should be sitting in Bella Pagan’s inbox. I then sorted through a drawer full of receipts to find the relevant ones for the tax man, and hopefully I’ll get all that stuff completed ready to file my tax return online, which is of course going to be a joy.

I am determined to take it easy tomorrow and not going schlepping up to those wind turbines again, or do any other form of heavy exercise. If anything, I’ll do a bit of light gardening. Let’s see how long this resolution lasts if it’s hot and still and I start comparing my need to sort out my taxes to kayaking along the Cretan coast or swimming in the Libyan Sea.

Sunday 31/8/2014

Minutes of the Committee for Autonomic Function

Hey look, we really like what you’ve been doing with the old organism. It’s looking the best it has in fifteen to twenty years and it’s doing stuff we never thought would be possible. I mean, constant exercise as a response to trauma … well, we didn’t see that coming. The expectation here amongst us was that you’d just load the organism with cigarettes, alcohol and bacon sandwiches. Well, you quit feeding it alcohol, at least for a while, and those ecigs were a great move. As for the food intake … well the cut in input of carbohydrates came as a shock to us but, as the fat dwindled, we saw that you’d made the right decision again. However, I’m sorry, enough is enough. Yes, you’re keeping up the exercise but there have been injuries. You yourself have admitted that the organism requires periods of rest so committee members can get on with some repairs. And, let’s be frank here, you’ve strayed back into trying to use alcohol as a mental analgesic and method of end-of-the-day shutdown, and it’s been a failure. Alcohol-induced insomnia is hindering the repair teams. And when we check for the required materials for repairs all we seem to be finding is empty alcohol calories. You, of course, know all this and this weekend promised to keep the organism at home so we could service it. Yet, what was the first thing you did on Saturday morning? You took it for a 6.5-mile walk. I’m sorry but this was plainly just aberrant and destructive behaviour. Therefore, we of the committee are enforcing inactivity and sleep interspersed with periods of high stomach and colon activity. And you, Brain, you we are shutting down.

It’s been an interesting day and another one of those ‘the body demands’ times. I was up at 6.00 whereupon I ate a breakfast of three boiled eggs and six slices of toast. After that I fell asleep for two or more hours, couldn’t get myself moving properly until 10.00 whereupon I ate a load of salad and frankfurter wraps. I then fell asleep for another hour or so, was sluggish for another hour after that, then ate some more wraps and fell asleep again. Next, I finally got myself motivated to do some cooking and put together a Swedish meatball stew and ate two bowls full of that. Thus far, at 6.30, there’s been no sign of Dr Narcolepsy creeping up behind me.

I only have myself to blame. I’ve been exercising excessively, not eating properly and drinking too much. Mr Insomnia has been with me most nights and, let’s be frank here, Messrs Beer, Wine and Raki opened the door for him. All this needs to change … apart from the exercising excessively bit.

However, on the good news front: I sorted out all my receipts and then, upon checking my tax form discovered that now I file my return online I don’t have to do so until January. It was quite pleasing to chuck the whole lot back in a drawer. Fuck that shit.