Wednesday 26th October

Ah, maybe we’ll be getting one more Internet session in before returning to England.

On a slightly depressing day in which I needed to escape my skull for a while I sat down and read Terry Pratchett’s ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’. With wisdom, comedy, excellent characters and a wonderful story I was taken off to Discworld for a day, and thoroughly enjoyed my trip. With all that is happening to him, and him now having to use voice-recognition to write since he can no longer use a keyboard, this guy still hasn’t lost his sense of humour. I’ve seen the words ‘national treasure’ being bandied about, in one case applied to me (which I suspect many would question), but in his case they couldn’t be more true.

I see that the politicians are again getting together to discuss how much of a voluntary ‘haircut’ on their investment in Greek bonds private investors are going to get. I’ve said this before but again this strikes me as a strange use of the word ‘voluntary’ which implies a degree of choice. In a similar way to Orwell’s newspeak this I suppose can be described as govspeak, and the translation of ‘voluntary’ is ‘bend over and drop your trousers’. In fact, the same translation applies to any phrase, used by politicians, in which are combined the words: measures, investment, development, social, environmental, infrastructure, generation, welfare, public, international, job, green, business and many more besides.

Thursday 27th October
With the population hitting 7 billion, floods and earthquakes demonstrating by death toll how overpopulated our planet is, with the numbers of the unemployed growing, governments in debt and organizations like the EU pushing for more integration and more control, I really couldn’t have chosen a better time for The Departure to be published. Then again, with what looks like an outbreaks of sanity across the planet, with the ‘Arab Spring’, the steady swing towards greater freedom in previously communist regimes, the possible collapse of the Euro and the EU – precursor to the Committee – and with austerity measures including cuts to the state, perhaps things are due to improve. Yeah, right. These are just hiccups along the way. Overall, large parasitic governments continue to accrue power over us, the surveillance society ever expands, the population shows no sign of ceasing to grow (readers of this will probably see 9 billion in their life-times) and the first ID implants can’t be much further down the road. And when the software catches up with the computing, and robotics catches up with both of them, look out for trials of the first shepherds and spiderguns.

I just love the implications in Angela Merkel’s recent statement. I’m paraphrasing here but it goes something like this, ‘[unless we sort out the dept crisis] we can’t guarantee another fifty years of peace and stability.’ What started out as a ‘common market’ is actually an attempt to completely unify and integrate Europe so its individual nations don’t end up at each other’s throats again and as most who have read up on any of this will know, the politicians lied to us right from the start. One can see the desperation of Merkel and her ilk when they haul up and dust off the spectre of the world wars to threaten us. Now if the European Union was taking as its model the USA (as it was, not as it is becoming), I would be cheering her on. However, since most of its governments are run by socialist control freaks the EU increasingly resembles a fast-track version of the Soviet Union, so I’m not cheering. Already it is about bankrupt and looks to be falling apart, and Balkanization may well follow, but then, perhaps that would be better than it actually lasting.

Oh good grief they’re putting the killers of Gaddafi on trial? The world we live in is fucking insane.

Friday 28th October
We have now completely entered the time of year when we mostly stay inside the house with the stove burning, hence more in the way of rants here and fewer pictures and stuff about Crete. I have been sorting out a few things around the house: putting strips of tile around the bottoms of some walls outside for some extra waterproofing and sealing holes here and there. I also discovered that a water-based varnish I bought from Lidl for the wood here, and which didn’t seem much good for that, is great for the stone – soaking in, hardening crumbling stone and leaving a slick waterproof layer. This stuff was under €10 for two litres, which is a lot cheaper than the petra latha (stone oil) I used before, and it goes a lot further, so I’ll be buying loads of it next year.

Saturday 29th October
A large tub of paint here can cost €25 to €50 so, what with the damp here, it can get expensive. However, last year I saw Nectarius painting the kazani building with ‘asvesti’. This is a very cheap plastic sack of lime paste – it’s in water which is a better idea than the dry powder ready to blow into your eyes. I wondered how that could work since surely it would wash off during the next downpour. It doesn’t. It’s not as durable as the expensive paint but sets like stone and is, of course, what people have been lime-washing their houses with for centuries. It is also porous so allows underlying stone to breathe. From now on I’m going to use it outside, but I wonder if combined with some sort of PVA it would work as an interior paint.

Wednesday 19th October

I cracked open the cellophane of a DVD last night and inside found a postcard I could use to enter a competition to win a further 10 DVDs. However, the closing date of the competition was December 2008, so I reckon it must have been sitting on our shelf for maybe two years. It was one of a number I bought a while ago on recommendation and because they seemed to conform to my taste. It was Pan’s Labyrinth from Guillermo Del Toro, the director of Hellboy and Blade II and, incidentally, one of those lined up as a director of a section of that Heavy Metal thing I was involved in. Despite being in Spanish with English subtitles the film was absolutely superb and I would recommend it to anyone. As Caroline said, it would have been a bloody good film even without the fantasy elements. But having watched it I do wonder about Del Toro stepping into the Hollywood machine.

The response of some would be that he ‘sold out’ but I perfectly understand how such a move would have been the right thing to do for career opportunities and his bank account. That being said I can also see that if Pan’s Labyrinth had been made in Hollywood the likelihood of us getting a glimpse at Franco’s Spain would have been remote. Almost certainly many of the characters would have been Americans, the setting would have been one Americans could get some handle on, there would have been more explosions and CGI special effects, and it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good.

I see ‘the critics are saying’ that the Booker Prize is being dumbed-down what with, perish the thought, books being judged on their ‘readability’. My goodness, they’ll be judging them next on something as base and plebeian as popularity. The six books contending for the prize were shown and, of course, Caroline and I recognized neither the books nor the authors. Now, I’ve ranted about this sort of thing before, but it always bears repeating. There was this guy who wrote plays and, to ensure they were popular with the plebs and that the tickets sold, he filled them with kings and queens, ghosts, incest, love, betrayals and of course plenty of murder and mayhem. Then there’s another writer who started off writing stories for magazines and newspapers before moving on to produce numerous ‘readable’ books that gained world-wide ‘popularity’ (how dreadful). The first of these was an ‘upstart crow’ full of ‘bombast’ and ‘conceit’ according to one critic, while the second was sneered at by his contemporaries. They were respectively William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. I just have to wonder how many of the books and authors being critically praised in the rarefied field of contemporary ‘literature’ will stand such a test of time. My guess is that they won’t, and that writers like Terry Pratchett and Stephen King will be retrospectively praised by future critics long after Booker prize-winners and the pompous literary critics of our time have turned to dust.

Thursday 20th October
There were riots in Athens yesterday, on the second day of a general strike, and there will probably be more today. I had to allow myself a cynical chuckle about one piece of ‘austerity’ legislation they’re objecting to. Apparently it will now be possible for civil servants to be fired. Ah, the poor little darlings. Now they’ll have to live in the real world like those in the private sector they’ve been parasites on for so long. Now, when they’re lazy, unproductive, corrupt and generally just a waste of space, they can be shown the door. Welcome to the real world!

I’m off to the orthondiyatros (dentist) today to have my teeth cleaned. The guy is a private dentist originally from Iran, and his wife the hygienist. I consider the cost well worth it since in Britain under the NHS a clean of the teeth consists of about five minutes of scraping, followed by some paste and a polishing wheel, then out the door and ‘Next!’ The clean I get here takes over an hour with every tooth individually cleaned. It is the case that only when you start looking at private dental (and medical) care that you realize just how bad the NHS is.

But I wonder if private or public medical care will make any difference for the son of Yorgos (this particular Yorgos is one of the brothers at the Gabbiano, and runs the kitchen there). We wandered in there for a meal a few nights back and noted how down in the mouth they all seemed, and shortly afterwards we found out why. Yorgos’s son, who is 17, had come off his motorbike and broken his back. A vertebra was shattered and pieces of bone shoved into his spinal cord and, because he was thought to be drunk, some people tried to help him up. In the hospital they’re to operate and, as far as I can understand with my limited Greek, rebuild the vertebra with artificial bone. Last I heard the doctors were preparing to tell him that the lack of feeling in his legs has nothing to do with the drugs he’s on and that, at best, he’ll not be walking for a year. At the worst he’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and Crete is certainly not a great place for one of them.

I see that Gaddafi was found, just like Saddam Hussein, in a hole in the ground. Since he was found by Libyan fighters he didn’t last for very long after that. Of course I already hear some twats crying that he should have been captured alive, questioned and tried, and all his crimes closely examined. Oh, and right now they’re whiffling on about how he had surrendered before he was shot. Bollocks. He was responsible for thousands of deaths, including all those people taken out by the Semtex he supplied to the IRA. Good riddance.

Friday 21st October
After much partying over the night many Libyans are waking up this morning with joy in their hearts and enthusiasm to rebuild their society, and hand in hand they’ll venture into a brave new future. Then, as the party atmosphere dies, and as they start clearing up the mess, and as they start turning and threading the nuts-and-bolts of their society, they’ll begin discovering that the guys they were fighting alongside have altogether different enthusiasms and a completely different idea of what constitutes a ‘brave new future’. While some Libyans will be looking forward to voting in a democracy, others will be thumping their heads against prayer mats and dreaming of caliphate, of Sharia law and insuring western influence is forced out, and they, and others, will be gathering up guns and explosives and harbouring tribal thoughts of vengeance. Expect the bickering to start if not now then in a few weeks, then wait for the killing to ensue. If I’m wrong about this I’ll be very happy; if I’m right I’ll be utterly unsurprised.

Ah, it’s like coming home hearing the sound of electric chisels, the thump of hammers and the chug of diesel engines. Mikalis, who rebuilt our ‘ruin’, has now set to work next door. First on the agenda is digging out a trench three and a half metres deep around the neighbour’s back walls ready to seal them with a membrane and concrete. Little side jobs include chiselling out cracks and sealing them, lifting broken and badly-laid tiles and making repairs. Future jobs will, I suspect, include joining roof plates with steel and concrete, tearing up all the tiles to put down a layer of sealant, and putting down new tiles with the correct slopes on for drainage since two corners of the roof collect pools of water at least an inch deep. With any luck Jean-Pierre won’t have water running out of electric sockets and buckets spread throughout his house to collect water the next time it rains.

Saturday 22nd October
Apparently the UN wants a ‘full investigation’ into how Gaddafi died. Why? Why do they want to piss money up the wall finding out? Oh yeah, got to ensure their liberal credentials. Like numerous similar tossers appearing on the TV lately they have to frown and beat their breasts over such uncivilized behaviour. They have to demonstrate their moral superiority over other more primitive peoples. Of course these liberal pricks fail to realize that their patronizing attitude is tantamount to the racism they supposedly abhor. And don’t these same pricks also believe in equality? Then why aren’t they demanding investigations into all the other deaths in Libya? By demanding an investigation into Gaddafi’s death they are showing how they feel his life was more important than other lives. But of course they are all political animals so probably don’t like seeing summary justice dispensed to their kind, since it might be dispensed to them next.

So, the world population is going to be reaching 7 billion this month. When I was born in 1961 it had just passed 3 billion and in the mid 70s passed 4 billion and by 1990 passed 5 billion. The rate of growth now, apparently, is about 80 million per year – more than the population of Britain each year. This is why a major tsunami kills 300,000, floods in India or Thailand kill hundreds and make thousands homeless (probably because so many of them are now living on flood plains and so much land that would have soaked up the water is networked with drainage ditches or under concrete and tarmac) and why earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes now have larger body-counts. This is why so many natural disasters are such disasters. So the next time some ‘environmentally conscious’ twonk connects such events to the usual shibboleth or berates you for not sorting your trash properly or for driving a big car, ask how many kids he or she has.

Tuesday 25th October
When Mikalis and crew did the roof on our ‘ruin’ they first piled sand and cement on the roof of the house next door, then brought up a concrete mixer, then mixed the concrete, whereupon a team of six guys hauled it by bucket to the new roof. That’s the thing about building work in these villages: the work itself is difficult enough but getting materials and machines where needed can sometimes be even more difficult. I therefore wondered how Mikalis intended to go about concreting the back wall of the neighbour’s house. Now I know: he is pumping the wet mix through a pipe:

Oh, and here’s one of the builders in flight for the delectation of all those safety officers out there:

Wednesday 12th October

I’m grumpy this morning. Doing my usual insomniac thing I was awake at 4.30 and just couldn’t get back to sleep. Next, upon getting up at about 5.30, I saw that rain had managed to get into the stove flue and sooty water had dripped over the tiles and splashed up the kitchen cupboard. This is doubly annoying because it leaked last week and, yesterday, I decided to solve the problem: the first section of flue sloped down as it entered the house so any water that came down the chimney and managed to get in the end would run inwards. I chiselled out the hole in the wall by hand to alter the slope of that section, then chiselled outside to ensure water coming down the chimney ran out of the wall (the chimney is set in the wall) and into a drain pipe connected to our waste water. I can only assume that our revolving French chimney pot, which has nicely increased the draw on the fire, isn’t keeping the water out, and that last night we had one of those ‘vertical sea’ rainfalls we get here. I need to buy an electric chisel to open up the wall to increase the slope of the drain and fit some kind of baffle.

But things aren’t as bad here as they are for our neighbour. Like us four years ago he is about to spend his first winter in a house that looks wonderful and is in a wonderful location, but was built before anyone thought of damp courses, has a soggy garden sitting against the back wall (three metres deep) with no drainage at all, and was renovated by the sort of monkeys who would sell you a car in England that looks okay until you get it round the corner, whereupon the filler falls out, the exhaust drops off and the engine heat burns a hole through the wooden piston. He has mud leaching through to stain the paintwork of his back wall, leaking windows and has already experienced the joys of stepping out of bed into a swimming pool. Later he’ll have the pleasure of watching his ceilings turn black with mould, and falling asleep to the sound of water dripping into buckets.

I’m still having trouble with the damned stove flue. I stripped the aluminium tape off the joints, dried and cleaned them, put fire cement round them and new aluminium tape. But there’s water still in the flue and in the joints so with the heat from the fire it buggers up the water-based fire cement and steams under the glue of the aluminium tape and leaks again. I’ve cleaned off the joints yet again and now have bucket under them while I keep the fire running in the hope of drying them out. Next I’ll put on fire cement and wait until it dries solid before putting on the aluminium tape. Ah the joys of having a stove…

Friday 14th October
Here are some pictures for Chris Haringa and others who have visited Makrigialos over this last year. This disappearance of the beach seems to be becoming a regular yearly thing. From hearsay I learned that this has always happened, but from hearsay I have also learned that the beach used to be twice as wide (possibly until they built a rock barrier across the harbour). It gets eaten away like this when the wind is from the south and there have been storms out at sea (apparently).

One must always take people’s assertions about what the weather does with a large pinch of salt. Weather changes by the hour, day, week, month and seasonally and it changes in cycles of years, decades, centuries and of course thousands of years and more. When someone told me it never rains here from June to August, I should have remembered that she had only lived here for three of four years, or when Yorgos in Revans was amazed by a heavy downpour in June, I should remember that he has lived here for a mere lifetime. Our weather forecasters can’t predict the weather, except in very general terms, for more than a week (though Piers Corbyn manages to do better than the Met Office super computer), so hearsay should be ignored. When someone cries, ‘This has never happened before, something major is changing!’ I should note that an ant here might say the same the first time its nest gets hit by the garden hose.

And here, four days later, the beach is back:

I’ve maybe solved the leaking stove flue problem. It leaked again on Thursday and I realized, by the position of the leak and the lack of rain, that the problem wasn’t really rain getting inside it. It is very damp here at the moment and the enamelled insides of the new flues are perfectly smooth. Condensation is gathering and running straight to the bottom of the flue and then into the joints, subsequent heating flexes those joints and boils the water in them, pushing it underneath the aluminium tape. I’ve now used heat-rated instant gasket on them and on the worst one wrapped round thin steel and a large jubilee clip, then the aluminium tape. Fingers crossed!

Monday 17th October
Well, using the perfectly unscientific method of estimating from how much buckets sitting out in the garden have been filling up, I would say we’ve had over a foot of rain during the last week and a half. The water butt filled up during the first day of heavy rain and I’ve now diverted the drain pipe so the water runs down the path to our house. I’ve no need to collect the grey water from the house, and I finished connecting up the drain pipe from the ‘ruin’ to take the water off the back garden. Thereafter I sealed various broken tiles and cracks (the second step between roofs is still in need of work and won’t be done this year, so there was plenty to do there) and now I keep checking the internal walls and ceilings in the expectation of seeing water coming in. I rather suspect our neighbour is looking for places where the water is not coming in, and is probably going to bed wearing a snorkel.

I see we have George Soros (the absolute apex of lefty hypocrisy with his righteous prating while sitting on a $22 billion fortune) funded protests on Wall Street and elsewhere in the world. The usual anti-capitalists are there, and all the sign-wavers are objecting to corporate power and profits, government-enforced austerity, governments supporting the banks, the rich getting richer and the poor, well, not getting richer, and a lack of jobs (and in the mix are a few puzzled looking hippies who dug out signs they used to wave about in the sixties). Some of what they are saying I absolutely agree with, and some not. Objecting about the rich getting richer is just the plain envy that is the engine at the heart of socialism. The lack of jobs should not even be in the remit of governments, and them creating jobs (usually in the public sector) is one whole chunk of the problem: using tax money to create jobs is like running a car by taking out the petrol, then spilling half of it while putting it back in again.

Austerity is a good idea, however, if that means hacking down the state sector, but it’s a really crap idea for wealth and job creation if it means ramping up taxes to keep the state sector funded. Even an idiot must realize that by putting up taxes you get a toxic combination of everything going up in price while people have less to spend. Supporting bankrupt governments is a mistake: we need something better than them mortgaging our future to support bloated parasitic state sectors. Supporting the banks was a mistake too: they should have taken a fall and those responsible should have been prosecuted for fraud. In fact (and I hate to say this), they should not have been allowed to fuck up so badly in the first place, because it’s true that they, and those wielding corporate power, do need to be controlled. Where was the legislation and oversight to stop them playing fast and loose with other people’s money? Probably either unavailable or unenforced, because the problem we have here is that our legislators, who managed to piss all our money up the wall and rack up massive debts, are precisely the wrong people to draw up the rules and enforce them. You don’t put paedophiles in charge of the day-care centre. What’s the answer? I think it starts with a combination of ropes, lamp-posts and politicians, but then that’s just me.

Tuesday 18th October
I few days ago I felt a pain in the sole of my foot and, inspecting it, saw what looked like a thorn stuck in there. However, closer inspection revealed a white sac on the blunt end. It looked like a torn-off sting from one of the scorpions around here. My foot was hot and painful for just a few minutes, and then it settled down to itching, which it did for three days. If the sting had been elsewhere I would have gone through the skin with my fingernails, but then such itching is the same with mosquito bites so nothing unusual. I never found the rest of the scorpion, and I wish I’d kept the sting to put under my USB microscope!

Raki time draws nigh and, in preparation, Nectarius was here with three Albanian masons who stone-clad the back concrete wall of the kazani. Whether they were going to clad all the concrete I don’t know. It might be that the heavy rain or Nectarius’s generosity with the raki finished their working day. Certainly the stone already up needs pointing:

So Hamas are getting a thousand prisoners back in exchange for one Israeli soldier and of course consider that a victory. It occurs to me that the Israelis could assert that one of their soldiers is worth a thousand Palestinian terrorists.

We sat watching a satellite channel called Persian Star last night, which shows English language films etc. The commercial breaks are hilarious and consist entirely of adverts for hair care products, condoms and slimming pills. Apparently using the condoms results in couples leaping through falling rose petals, one of the hair products is a miraculous herbal cure for baldness and the slimming pills knock twenty-five years off fat fifty-year-old men and provide them with a six-pack. I just have to wonder if Persian Star is broadcast in Iran, and why the people involved haven’t been stoned to death yet. Or could it be that the way the majority of the people live there has little to do with the jingoistic drivel coming out of the mouths of their politicians (rather like us), and even less to do with religious fanaticism and nutters with bombs?

Tuesday 4th October

Every now and again, when we had Sky TV, I would catch part of an episode of Farscape and think to myself, ‘Mmm, now that looks interesting’. I never got round to watching a full episode and I never actually figured out what was going on. However, I did pick up four episodes of it in a charity shop and on the strength of those bought the entire first season. We finally sat down for a Farscape-fest about a week ago and at episode 12, about three episodes after Caroline, I finally felt that old Vorlon malady of my intestine crawling up my spine to strangle my brain. I like the Henson puppetry and special effects, and I could see huge potential for a story arc there, but the stories themselves are dire, and probably because of that, the acting was a bit naff and often sliding into silly melodrama. This will go to one of the bars here for someone to enjoy, or not. I’ll not go any further because life if too damned short for this kind of dreck. Such a shame.

Wednesday 5th October
It’s time today to change the stove pipes. They’ve been up for two years, are blocked again and almost certainly reaching the stage where rust holes will start to punch through. They are also the cheap galvanized ones that don’t look all that great.

There we go: I’ve replaced them with the enamelled version they have here, though admittedly mainly because those were the only ones they had in the hardware shop in Makrigialos, and I couldn’t be bothered with a trip to Sitia for the cheaper version.

The main galvanized pipes inside the house weren’t too bad, so I’ve left them down by the bin where, as is usual here, if someone wants them they’ll grab them, or passing gypsies will pick them up as scrap metal. And if not the dustmen will take them away. There’s none of the silly penalties for not closing the bin lid, or making sure everything is inside, or putting your rubbish out on the wrong day. That might be a bit difficult to enforce since one bin serves about ten houses, and the Greek wouldn’t put up with it anyway.

It’s a lovely October day today with the temperature in the steady mid 20s today and very little wind. It will get colder in the evening and, when we fire up the stove again, we’ll need the windows open to get rid of the fumes from the new pipes, aluminium tape and the releasing fluid I used while forcing some of the pipes together.

Thursday 6th October
Still on the learning curve … So, until recently I’ve always called (and I’ll use phonetic spelling) a stove pipe a ‘somber solina’, which is a literal translation. Whilst asking Kostis, at Revans, where I could buy some new stove pipes in Makrigialos, he came out with the words ‘boori, booria & kaminatha’. I found the last of these to mean chimney, whilst also discovering that a chimney can also be a ‘kapnothokos’ but couldn’t find the other words under the letter vita (beta). I later learnt that the two words do not begin with vita, but with the digraph µπ which gives the sound of our letter ‘B’. A boori is a section of flue, while booria is the plural.

Meanwhile, being unable to sleep in the middle of one night, I spent some time searching for boori. I didn’t find it then but I did find ‘votsalo’ (beginning with vita) which means pebble, and now know that a taverna down by Makrigialos harbour, called Votsala, translates as ‘Pebbles’. The mnemonic I now use to retain this is an odd one. Just along the harbour edge from Votsala is a place called ‘Makis’, which is named after the owner who, we were told and now thoroughly agree with, looks like Fred Flintstone. Now Fred Flintstone has a daughter called Pebbles… I’ve subsequently learned that there’s another taverna in Koutsouras called Votasalachia. Now knowing that the addition of that ‘achi’ (or ‘aki’ on the mainland) at the end of a word reduces the size of the object concerned (the additional ‘a’ making it plural), this other place translates as something like ‘Little Pebbles’.

Friday 7th October
Here you go, this shows you how thoroughly entrenched science fiction is in my mind. Whenever I see one of these buggers I think they’re fascinating, but the first image to arise in my mind is a vaguely recollected picture on a cover of a Fred Saberhagen book:

Sunday 9th October
It’s muggy grey and pouring with rain today, but is hardly what you could describe as cold, the temperature right now, at 10.00AM, being 21.4C. However, we are keeping the stove on and chugging away at the lowest possible setting because it’s nice, comforting, and we like it. The problem here is that with the new stove pipes, well dried wood and one of those revolving French chimneys above, the lowest possible setting leads to a house temperature of about 27C, even with windows and doors open. I salve my conscience with the knowledge that wood is carbon neutral, we’re not using the cooker (everything goes on top of the stove, like today’s chicken, leek and butter-bean soup), and having bought the wood I’m helping to prop up the Greek economy (removes tongue from cheek).

Monday 10th October
Okay, so you have this space ship which on conventional drive can only accelerate to about half the speed of light. It does, however, have a ‘hyperspace drive’ it can engage when it has built up enough velocity. This time, when the crew engages that drive, it goes wrong and upon being shut down hurls the ship out into normal space travelling at nine-tenths of the speed of light. The ship then decelerates to finally dock at its destination space station.

Now, read through the above again and if you can’t work out what is completely wrong with that scenario, then don’t try to write science fiction.

Another thing you really need to know is the difference between speed and acceleration and that, in vacuum, an object travelling at say, a thousand miles an hour, will, without some force applied to decelerate or accelerate it, continue travelling at that speed forever. Go look up Newton’s laws of motion.

Tuesday 27th September

After today’s Internet sessions we spotted the boat pictured sitting out on Makrigialos bay. Much was the idle speculation about who might own something like this, it certainly costing somewhere in the millions. Could it be Greek government officials cruising around Crete trying to figure out a way to tax the waves? Was it one of those Athens’ doctors with submitted earnings of less than €20,000, but palatial homes and one acre swimming pools? I noted that it probably belonged to a Greek politician and then, checking through binoculars, realized it must belong to a politician with a deep sense of irony. The boat is called ‘Integrity’.

Wednesday 28th September
There are more huge moths knocking about, almost certainly attracted by the scent of that night flower outside. This one was in our hall. I didn’t manage to put a ruler up against it before it took off, but it was about two inches long:

Thursday 29th September
I’ve just seen a news story about a Spanish town whose council is about bankrupt. A local garage owner is owed €40,000 for fuel by them, policemen are now on foot, mobile phones off and numerous state workers haven’t been paid for months. The mayor of the town said they need extra cash immediately and went on to bemoan how they must ‘cut all but essential spending’. There we go, he’s a cipher for all those governments now faced with debt: first they want more money to spend, and only as an afterthought consider cutting all but ‘essential spending’. Well maybe if they’d not pissed all our money up the wall in the first place on non-essential spending…

Monday 3rd October
Well, with a surge of writing on Thursday I had the satisfaction of writing THE END for Jupiter War, or The Jupiter Conflict, or The Jupiter Incident. I still have a lot to do what with the addition of a couple of sections and my chapter starts, an alteration throughout to a certain character’s attitude, and I also need to read up on some of the science when I have permanent Internet access in a month’s time.

It’s got cold enough for us to have the stove on for a couple of days. I note that as seems to be par-for-the-course on Crete (in the mountains in Eastern Crete) in the spring and the autumn that while the temperature here has dropped the temperature in Britain has leapt up. While you’ve been enjoying 25 upwards it’s been hovering around 20 during the day here and below that during the night.

There’s a machine with a great big cutting wheel which, over the last few years, we’ve observed working its way along roads of the island cutting a narrow trench to take a cable. At the start of this year it was between Irapetra and Makrigialos. Now it’s past the village of Lithines and more than halfway from Makrigialos to us, and will continue on to Sitia. I’m told this is fibre-optic for cable TV and Internet, but whether there’ll be a spur into our village I don’t know (we only have 60 or so people here and I doubt many of them want or can afford Internet), but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Tuesday 4th October
Interesting, I exchanged a few words with the neighbour’s boy this morning. Since school has started here I asked him, ‘Oshi skolio?’ (no school) to which he agreed. I went on to ask ‘Mono tholia tora?’ (only work now) to which he also cheerfully agreed. I found this surprising because I’m fairly certain he’s no more than fourteen. Certain questions occur: What is the law is here in that respect? Can parents take their kids out of school early? Has he been taken out because the family simply needs him to get to work? Are kids being sent home because of a lack of funds to educate them? Could it be that the family simply cannot afford the bus fair to send this kid to Sitia every day?

I remember the school age being raised from 15 to 16 when I was a kid (and how annoyed I was about that since I wanted out of that hell-hole) but I wonder how many years before that it was raised from 14 to 15? When, in fact, did school become compulsory? When I was there many of us would have benefitted from leaving early. My real education began when I drove my moped out of those school gates and buggered off to work. However, that might have been because of how completely fucked-up our comprehensive school system was at the time.

Wow, we’ve been thinking, this summer seemed to zoom by. How can it now be October? How can it be that we are now putting on the stove and contemplating our return to England? Well, I have a theory about that (and it almost certainly isn’t a new one). I just made cups of coffee for me and Caroline. This is something I’ve done thousands of times before but, of course, I cannot remember every occasion. My long-term memory just retains a general file we can call ‘making coffee in Crete’ while my short-term memory either discards the most recent example of it, or doesn’t bother to record it at all. (This last is just like on those occasions we’ve all experienced when we arrive at work and just don’t remember the journey at all, or when we have that moment of panic about turning off the cooker, but always have.)

I’d also submit that because every occasion of ‘making coffee in Crete’ is not added to my long-term memory, the time stamp isn’t either, so my perception of the day is shortened by the few minutes it took me to make that coffee. Time seems to pass more swiftly as we get older because, as we get older, we have done more and thus there is more unrecorded repetition in our lives. Therefore, if we want to slow down our perceived passage of time, we need to do different stuff, learn new things and break entrenched patterns of behaviour. This is also why many older people tend to have an inability to change, absorb new ideas or think out of the box – the repetition leads to hard-wiring.

Wednesday 21st September

Ah, the rain is on its way. It’s been particularly humid lately but warm enough to prevent a lot of condensation. However, last night the mist and cloud began forming in the mountains here and this morning some leaden looking cloud is rising above the horizon. It’s time to start bringing in the terrace furniture in the evenings, and time to ensure we have some dry logs inside the house.

I see, on BBC World, that the Times World Atlas rather exaggerated the extent of ice melt in Greenland and has been picked up on this by people at Cambridge University. The area claimed to have melted in the World Atlas is apparently ‘absurd’. However, the BBC reporter interviewing a sweaty and worried looking Cambridge professor stated, ‘But you wouldn’t dispute that ice has melted?’ This is what is known as a leading question and of course the professor answered as required, though he did manage to slip in an ‘associated with’ global warming rather than the preferred ‘caused by’. What’s astounding about this is that just a few years ago, such a report, it being contrary to accepted writ, would never have made it to the screen. Here we are seeing some tentative ventures into arse-covering and I suspect we can look forward to stuff of a similar nature over the next few years. Enjoy the prospect of BBC presenters pretending astonishment at not having been parboiled in their beds and claiming to be the innocent victims of corrupt scientists.

I note that a previous Afghan leader has been a blown up by a bomb that was concealed in a turban. Damn but those Danish cartoonists shouldn’t have given the Taliban ideas. I also wonder, whilst you’re taking off your belt, shoes and jacket at the airport to put them through the X-ray scanner, whether you’ll see any turbans on the same conveyor. Of course not, that would be the evil racial or religious profiling, and civilization would collapse if you were to note the unlikelihood of any inclination to suicide bomb a plane in the blue-rinse granny being searched ahead of you.

Thursday 23rd September
Yup the weather is changing, though no rain has actually dropped on us. We sat on our terrace last night watching the flashes of a thunderstorm beyond the mountains opposite. Down in Makrigialos the sea was still warm, but only suitable for surfing. I took a bit of a dip and hurled myself through a few waves, but then we both retired from the windy beach which, with this rough sea, is steadily disappearing again.

Now, frequently we get people here asking us if we have tried this restaurant or that, or this bar or that bar. Our reply is always a self-deprecating, ‘We’re really boring’ going on to say that we use just a few of either. We know a few nice bars where we get precisely what we want and we know a few restaurants which have their various quirks but where the food is always good and tasty. We’re often loath to try other places because of the prospect of disappointment. However, yesterday, what with the beach and the sea being out and Revans bar having been occupied by a loud-mouthed knob-head, we ventured off. And what happened rather proves our point.

First we went to a beachside bar we hadn’t been in for months. The moment we walked in we could see it was run down and none too clean. The wine was okay, but the carafe dusty. The tables had been wiped without any real effort to get them clean and the floors were dirty and scattered with sand. We finished our wine and headed off. After a brief sojourn in another bar that we know is good – the drinks are always right, the snacks are very good and the place is always clean and tidy – we decided to try a beachside restaurant people had recommended, though with the proviso that rather too much food is served there. Since by this time I was starving, this seemed like a good idea to me. We wandered over to this restaurant and sat down. Having already had some wine we ordered two fresh orange juices and our meal. The juices turned up, a little tardily, but they were good and big. Next the place began filling up with customers, which is always a good sign, and we awaited our meals. Having come to very much like the lamb chops with garlic served at the Gabbiano I had ordered the same here, while Caroline ordered chicken with pepper sauce. And we waited, and waited.

About three-quarters of an hour later our meal turned up – good platefuls but no spectacular amount. There was also an excess of decoration what with little piles of tomato, cucumber and tzatsiki dotted here and there and herbs sprinkled around the edges of the plate (the expression to describe this is ‘lipstick on a pig’). I dived in to my pile of lamb chops with garlic… Now, maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t lamb chops be served hot? Also, whilst a glob of grated raw garlic dropped on top of cold lamb chops is ‘lamb chops with garlic’ this was not quite what I expected. The only hot thing on the plate was the soggy chips. I also feel that on a lamb chop the meat should outweigh the bone and gristle. After scraping off mouth-burning raw garlic I ate the meat, and ended up with pile of debris little different in size to the original pile of lamb chops. Meanwhile, Caroline had tried her chicken, in its covering of brown muck scattered with a few peppercorns, and decided she really didn’t want her shoes resoled today. We ate what we could, hurriedly paid the bill and left just as fast as we could. On the drive back it was necessary to keep the windows open so Caroline didn’t end up gagging at the smell of my breath. For about an hour afterwards I felt nauseous and back at home had an Ouzo to get the horrible taste out of my mouth, while Caroline had to go and clean her teeth to the same effect. Screw other people’s recommendations and screw trying ‘somewhere new’. We’re back at the Gabbiano tomorrow.

Friday 23rd September
What with the financial crisis continuing, G20 leaders are going to take ‘strong action’. On the news we see sharp-suited politicians (and their pet ‘financial experts’) climbing out of limos clutching folders and heading importantly into buildings, or making speeches at decision-making conferences. All of these people, living in their elitist bubble, are certain and determined about the need to do something during this ‘dangerous time’. Of course the problem here is that people like this have absolutely no idea what to do. Getting paid a large salary without ever any penalty for fucking up doesn’t really prepare one for problem solving. They talk blithely about ‘liquidity, volatility, challenges, calming the market’ or whatever other buzz-words happens to be in vogue at the time, meanwhile seeing no further than insuring their own budgets and salaries aren’t cut and resorting straight away to more taxes and more state control.

So, you want business making money, you want ‘liquidity’, you want people grafting away and increasing your country’s wealth, you want that money flowing into your treasury? Here’re some ideas: Why don’t you stop hamstringing businesses with increasing red tape? Why don’t you stop taxing their working capital into oblivion? Why don’t you lose tax systems that penalize success, that is, are you so stupid that you think taking more money off people because they do more and make more money is actually some form of encouragement? Why don’t you stop paying bureaucrats large amounts of money to shuffle paper and interfere, that is, how about you lose much of the money-wasting business-killing state sector? Why don’t you tear up welfare systems that actively encourage sloth, indolence and state theft? And why oh why don’t you realize that you aren’t the source of solution, but the problem itself? Thank you for listening (ho ho).

With plenty of cloud scattered about the sky we got a shower of rain yesterday. Today it is windy, grey and showery, and the temperature has dropped below twenty. In Britain this would be your average summer’s day, but here it’s a rather abrupt change from the warm seas and temperatures approaching thirty of just a few days ago. We now have the smell of wood smoke in the village, and the likelihood of seeing a Cretan dressed in anything less than trousers and sweater has dropped to zero. Summers have to end, unfortunately, but it’s still a bit depressing. I’ve no doubt that there will be more hot sun, but for me there’s going to be a lot less swimming and more walking, some drainpipes to fix and some holes to seal, and the prospect of having to spark up the stove.

Saturday 24th September
Either someone sent me something or I read somewhere that the hypothesized ‘dark matter’ in our universe is coming in for a bit of a kicking. I never much liked this hypothesis because it seemed far too convenient; far too much of a fudge i.e. I know the density of strong cheddar but when I cut a lump of it which, by my other measurements, should have weighed one pound, I found it weighed a pound and half. I therefore hypothesize the presence of invisible cheese which I will call ‘dark cheese’. To which the reply has to be, ‘Check your fucking scales, mate.’ And now, it seems, Einstein might be getting a kicking too.

By now anyone with a science fictional turn of mind will know that those excellent lunatics at CERN in Geneva, who have been firing neutrinos 400 miles to Italy, have found that the neutrinos have been arriving a bit early i.e. they were travelling faster than the speed of light. Now, if this turns out to be true, Special Relativity just took a terminal wound. You see, even though the mass of a neutrino is very very small, Einstein’s theories tell us that the mass of an object increases with its speed until, as it approaches the speed of light, its mass approaches infinity. So one also has to wonder why Italy isn’t now a smoking crater or, in fact, our whole planet, or the universe itself. You see, if their measurements are right, by Einstein’s theory, objects of infinite mass should have arrived at the end of that four hundred mile course in Italy. But then again, we would have burnt out the universe accelerating them, since that would have required infinite energy…

The guys at CERN are putting their data out to be checked by as many other scientists as possible. One of them asserted, ‘All scientists are by their nature sceptical.’ Yes, that scepticism is a defining trait of a scientist and its lack rather defines what a scientist isn’t. Now, can anyone think of a ‘science’ where results are twisted to fit the theory and the data isn’t put out there for others to check?

Monday 26th September
Caroline spotted this beauty sitting out on the path before our gate. I reckon it must have fallen out of the fig tree where, with these camouflage colours, I probably wouldn’t have spotted it before. Until such a time as someone lets me know what this one is called I name it the Harrier jump-jet moth. And here we are seeing something that looks a bit like some of the landing craft you’ll find in my books.

According to Christine Lagarde, in a recent meeting European leaders all agree they’re going to continue working together to resolve the debt crisis. She tells us it is going to be hard and there are some tough times ahead, doubtless going on to a Champagne supper after the program in which she appeared and further discussions over caviar and biscuits about how difficult it is all going to be. What these ‘European leaders’ mean of course is that it is going to be tough for just about everyone but them. You won’t be seeing any of them suffering because of endless tax hikes, endless increases in the price of petrol, food and household goods; or because their company just collapsed; or because the bank their savings are in just went to the wall etc. They’ll still be on the kind of annual salary most people would be glad to receive for five or ten years of work. They’ll still be swanning about on the European stage feeling very important, they’ll still be heading to various meetings flying business-class or in their chauffeur-driven Mercs while checking their overseas investments, they’ll still be issuing buzz-word sound-bites to the media and they’ll still suffer no penalty for having fucked things up in the first place. Let’s just reiterate something: if government is in debt then a government overspent, okay?

Monday 26th September
Ah, raki season is arriving. Because of the inclement weather going on for longer than usual a lot of the grape harvest on Crete has been spoiled. I’m told a combination of rain and sun at the wrong time was the problem – maybe showers knocking off the grape flowers, or the moisture causing mildew? Anyway, the guy who makes raki right next to our house, Nectarius, wasn’t sure if he would be making it this year. However, he’s a can-do sort of guy and recently turned up with the barrels you see, which are all full of fermenting grapes he had to buy near Iraklion (over a hundred kilometres away). I’ve been co-opted into stirring this stuff up every evening, so I damned well hope they still the raki while I’m still here.

Wednesday 14th September

After yesterday’s Internet session and after my ‘harbour swim’ I heard a strange noise coming from my bag on the beach. It took me a moment to figure out that this was my mobile ringing, since it was only the second time it had rung this year. It was Julie Crisp at Macmillan, happy to inform me that The Departure had risen to number 18 in the bestseller chart. I’m presuming, like with The Technician last year, this is the Bookscan chart, which is compiled from weekly sales of all books in Britain (though whether hardbacks are separate from paperbacks I don’t know).

I was a bit ‘out there’ during this phone call – feeling slightly knackered, still partially into Dan Simmons’ Endymion, and slightly wrong-footed by this contact from the outside world. I also saw it as par for the course with me. The Departure has gone three places above The Technician which, I’m told, finally went to number 21. This is how it has always been for me ever since my first story was accepted and the magazine concerned folded before publishing it – a steady climb of the ladder; another step up in ‘success’ but no massive leap and no huge critical praise and concomitant hype.

I have to add here that I now prefer this steady climb to the high peaks followed by deep troughs in the publishing world. I’ve seen authors receive huge critical praise for a first book then being hamstrung by expectation. I’ve seen authors’ first books being hyped outrageously and them briefly being a big noise in the publishing scene, whereupon the ensuing book or books are just whimpers. While I’ve been steadily climbing the publishing ladder, I’ve seen others falling off and landing hard.

However, with The Departure climbing into the top 20 this means, apparently, that a book of mine has passed some kind of watershed and has become a lot more noticeable. Whether this means they can put ‘Science Fiction Bestseller’ on the cover or you’ll be seeing it in shop displays of top 20s or in newspaper lists of the same I don’t know. Anyway, after the phone call and while part of the way into a carafe of white wine, I began grinning like an idiot.

Thursday 15th September
My goodness aren’t financial markets fickle things. A few politicians get together and state that they’re not going to allow Greece to default on a debt they can’t possibly pay and things are hunky-dory again (probably for a day or two). I’m astounded that anyone can actually believe a politician any more, but maybe there was an underlying message of ‘not yet’ that the markets were responding to. Meanwhile that dipshit Barroso tells us that the solution to the debt crisis is more European integration. Yep, the solution to the pain caused by hitting your finger with a hammer is to whack a couple more fingers. Of course the eurocrats want more integration because that means more power and money for them. Of course the eurocrats want to delay Greece’s default and the subsequent collapse of the house of cards because, whilst it remains standing, the big salaries keep rolling in and they can strut about on the European stage like the little tin-pot Hitlers they are.

Friday 16th September
Congratulations Denmark! The people there have voted in the centre-left and their new prime minister has promised to increase taxes, increase public spending and let in more immigrants. What an excellent way to completely butt-fuck your own country.

Monday 19th September
Well, I can’t correctly say that I finished the Endymion omnibus, since I was skipping large lumps of it as I drew towards the end…

The weather here this September has been very good so those who were saying that because the summer here started late it will continue late might be right, though in reality that was a fifty-fifty bet. The sea has also been surprisingly warm so I’ve been able to continue with my harbour swims with the result that my gut seems to be receding a little. The good weather has also brought out the kind of display on our bougainvillea we’ve been aiming for since we bought this place:

The black figs are also appearing in quantity on the tree next to our house. It’s nice to eat a few but more than say four or five a day results in frequent flier points in the toilet:

It looks to me as if I’ll be getting a ringside seat on seeing a country go bankrupt. The debt here is in the region of €450 billion which, divided over a population of 14 million, comes out at over €30,000 a head. To get its next loan so as not to simply run out of money the government must get rid of a 100,000 government employees and sell off a load of state assets. Instead it’s trying to leech more money out of the working public. The latest wheeze is a tax ranging from €3 to €16 per square metre of your home, the amount to be added to the electricity bill with the power being shut off for non-payment. ‘Vulnerable groups’ i.e. those already costing the state a packet, such as the unemployed, pensioners and irresponsible breeders with four or more children, only get to pay half a Euro. Meanwhile I have no doubt at all that the politicians here are salting away their disgustingly large salaries in foreign bank accounts.

Tuesday 20th September
And another load of chilli sauce to add to my stores:

I’ve made three lots now and the open jar of it I have in the fridge keeps getting topped up with the remainder from each boiling. I’ve also given away about four jars – two to Greeks who actually like the stuff one to a Bulgarian and one to an English couple. It occurs to me that if this country collapses and food was to be in short supply, we might be living on a combination of chilli sauce, figs and pickled onions, which I suspect would involve toilet paper in the fridge and frequent changes of underpants.

Incidentally, Huan Tan, I have your recipe and bought mangoes so as to follow it, but then decided I would rather make sweet mango chutney with them instead. I’ll be looking up a recipe for that today.

The Jupiter Conflict or Jupiter War is now approaching 114,000 words and its plot threads are resolving. I suspect I’ll finish it this month and that it’ll be a shorter book than both The Departure and Zero Point (though I’ve yet to write the chapter starts and this will only be the first draft). This I feel is a good thing. Have you ever noticed the ever inflating size of books in trilogies or other series where the author is suffering from plotline proliferitis and struggling to get it all nailed down with the last book?

Our neighbour Jean-Pierre is back and the Greek neighbours were on him like flies on an open wound. When I walked down to see him last night I asked two of the kids, ‘Jean-Pierre ina mesa?’ to which one said ‘Neh’ whilst the other corrected me by saying ‘Pedro’. I replied, ‘Oshi Pedro, ina Jean-Pierre’. The Greeks up in these villages like to give foreigners pet names – I started out here as Nico and all the Albanians here have their ‘Greek’ names even if their own names are used in this country anyway. I don’t like it and I don’t like the thinking behind it. It is the application of a pet name to a pet. It’s demeaning and a conversational method of downgrading someone. They call me Neal now, probably because I ceased to tolerate any more shit from them.

And finally, just to annoy various people we’ve seen here over the year, and who are now back in their home countries:

Tuesday 6th September

Here on Crete we have the fantasists who feel that being thousands of miles from their home country enables them to get away with the most outrageous lies (if they happen to have come from London they always knew the Krays) but there are also many interesting and genuine people here. We have Roddy and Ruth, the former of whom played with Frank Zappa and has his own band (The Muffin Men), whilst the latter makes, repairs and works with theatrical costumes, has dressed Nichol Kidman, and has just been working in Belfast on the costumes for ‘Game of Thrones’. Caroline now has her hair cut by an Italian guy in Lithines, who was trained by and taught at Vidal Sassoon. But name dropping aside, there’s a couple here who run an astronomy and art school, we have an ex social worker, teachers and university lecturers, someone who worked on the sets for Star Wars and many others besides.

The latest addition to the list above, which is by no means complete, is the guy who may be buying our old car. Whilst chatting with him and his wife in the Gabbiano we learnt that he is a Norwegian narcotics cop, which caused a pause in conversation whilst Caroline and I realized we were gaping.

There is, I think, a bit of a selection process going on. Generally the people who buy a house here, whether they are immigrants or have a holiday home, have ‘something about them’. This something has enabled some of them to accrue the money for such a purchase, but it is also what has driven them to step outside their comfort zone and take that risk. Others who have accrued no more money than what was in their house in their home country, and now live on a pension, also stepped out of that comfort zone and took a larger risk. But of course we must not neglect those who ran away; who thought that the problems they had in their home countries could be solved by a move here, and discovered otherwise. They generally don’t last.

Wednesday 7th September
Well sometimes you get blindsided. Whilst talking to a couple who we’ve met a few times before, we moved onto the subject of books and, inevitably, some mention was made of my books. We were sitting in Revans at the time so I pointed to the book shelf in the bar and said there was one they could try. The guy, Trevor, asked, ‘Which one?’ I pointed to the shelf again and said, ‘Second in from the right on the top shelf,’ and he asked, ‘But which one?’ ‘The orangey one with my name on the spine,’ I replied, slightly baffled. ‘But which title?’ he finally asked. ‘Hilldiggers,’ he replied. ‘Oh yes,’ said he, ‘I’ve read that one. I think I read most of your books before we moved here – the ones with Dragon in them, the Skinner ones and some others.’ I was a bit gobsmacked because, of course, I’m so used to talking to people who haven’t read my books, don’t have much interest in science fiction and quite often those who don’t read many books at all.

Thursday 8th September
Jupiter War has now passed the 100 thousand word mark and those of you sitting there with calculators will know that I haven’t been sticking to my ‘2,000 words five days a week’. I could of course include the word-count of my blog posts but even that won’t bring me up to 10,000 words a week. However, I know that last year I went back to England with 80,000 words of Zero Point done whilst this year it’s likely I’ll be heading back with the first draft of Jupiter War completed at, probably, about 130 or 140 thousand words. So do I hammer straight into the next book? I don’t even know the title, story, whether it’ll be an Owner or Polity book or even one set in the Cowl future. I’m thinking that maybe now is the time to turn to some short stories to send off to Asimov’s and other magazines, or to any anthologies that will have them. One of those short stories may then grow in the telling and actually turn into the next book. We’ll see.

Friday 9th September
Ah I see that Obama is going to inject 450 billion into the American economy to create jobs and cut taxes. Well, maybe if he, and other parasite politicians before him, had left that money in the economy in the first place there wouldn’t be such a problem, though of course this money isn’t coming out of some sort of emergency fund; some wodge of cash stacked away for a rainy day. It’ll just be a further addition to America’s 13 trillion debt. But don’t you just love that ‘inject money to cut taxes’? It’s rather like raiding someone’s larder then, after feasting on the food, noting that the guy stocking the larder is starving and might not be able to fill it up again, so giving him back a couple of loaves of bread to keep him alive. I often wonder how those who jumped on me, and played the race card, when I first criticised the Obamessiah, feel about him now. They probably still think he’s wonderful but hamstrung by the dark forces of conservatism. Certainly the leftist dipshits at the BBC, despite all the contrary evidence, still think the sun shines out of his arse.

Monday 12th September
Since, both this year and last year, I’ve probably given away more plants than I’ve actually planted in the garden, it’s nice when someone reciprocates, and especially nice when it’s a success. After delivering some bits and pieces to a guy called Rich, he dug up a couple of runners from plants in his garden. Of one of them he told me, ‘It doesn’t look much, but the scent is good.’ (This was a plant I’d read about in the gardening section of ‘Athens News’, but cannot remember the name) I duly planted it in a pot and it shot up over the summer. Then, two evenings ago when we came back from the beach, we noted a perfume in the air as we stepped out of the car. As we walked down to the house – about fifty yards from the car – the scent grew steadily stronger and stronger. Rich’s plant had flowered, was surrounding by humming bird moths, and had a scent probably an order of magnitude stronger than jasmine. Here it is, does anyone know the name?

Tuesday 13th September
Ah, apparently the Italian government is to introduce more ‘austerity measures’ because, like the rest of the PIIGS it’s on the slippery slope. After overspending since year dot, mismanaging their economies, pissing money up the wall on silly social projects, hamstringing businesses with fucked-up safety and environmental legislation and always increasing bureaucracy, employing huge numbers of time-wasting paper-shuffling overpaid bureaucrats and generally demonstrating their inability to run a piss-up in a brewery, I have no doubt that the politicians will be the first to subject themselves to ‘austerity’. Doubtless they’ll be reversing the screw-ups listed above, along with cutting their salaries down to something within the realms of reality, ceasing to employ family members in non-jobs, ceasing to misappropriate funds, ceasing to submit huge expense claims, ceasing to take long expensive foreign trips and ceasing to lie and squirm and evade responsibility. Doubtless they’ll also be culling their number and ceasing to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses of party-political ideology. Oh yeah, and have you heard about the cheese mine on the moon?

The BBC is apparently going to have a discussion about the ‘doubts that the governments of giant economies can pay their debts’. Well let me let you in on a secret: most of them can’t. Let me let you in on another secret: lawyers; academics; graduates in political science and sociology; union reps; ideologues and generally people who have had no experience of real life, actually working for a living and real finances (i.e. people who don’t get that you don’t spend more than you’ve got on something that’s never going to make a profit) aren’t the kind of people you want running ‘giant economies’.

And now just for a bit of amusement, and because Chris thought it would be amusing too … Chris was so pleased to sell his wife’s car he celebrated with a bottle of cider, whilst naked:

Wednesday 31st August

In the past I’ve often been prepared to take a look at something someone has written, and yet to have published, and make comments on it. I learnt quite a bit through this process during my ten years membership of a postal workshop and have always been prepared to give a bit back, but no more. Frankly, over the last ten years, very little of what has been sent to me, as a typescript or an email attachment, has been worth the effort, and some of it is quite appalling. So, as of now, I’ll only comment on published books, even though maybe only one in ten of them are worth the fulsome praise being sought.

For example, having just glanced at something that is allegedly going to be published, I abandoned it after the first page. In the first four-line paragraph there were two missing words, a spelling mistake and missing punctuation. The first page had over twenty similar errors I could actually put a red circle around. Other grammatical errors too numerous to detail warranted a red circle round the whole page. Really, if people can’t be bothered to sort out such basic stuff before sending it to me, I can’t be bothered to read it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself to be a paragon of virtue when it comes to the English language. As far as grammatical errors are concerned I can point at them but I don’t really know all the lingo to describe them. I learnt by the seat-of-my-pants from that day, when I was about fifteen, when I sat down at my Dad’s manual typewriter, hammered away two fingered for an hour, then had to stop and go ask my parents what a sentence was. However, this is all stuff that can be easily learnt elsewhere, from books, just like I learnt it.

Sunday 4th September
The dreaded lurgies have attacked again and I’m suffering something much like tonsillitis. Attempting to lay off the fags by chewing nicotine gum results in painful hiccups, I can’t swallow hot drinks and keep on waking in the night choking on phlegm. Wonderful.

Meanwhile we’ve been watching ‘Game of Thrones’ which has been excellent. I tried the first book of the series but gave up after a hundred or so pages, bored with the family stuff and ‘character building’, but after seeing this series I might well pick up the book again. There were notable snaffles or maybe hat tips in this: a fat inept guy called Sam as a companion to a hero (Gamgee anyone?); the girl who wants to fight like a boy and who, during a sword fighting lesson, decides she doesn’t want to practice and gets the lesson on fights not necessarily occurring when you want them (I think I first read that one in Dune and have come across it many times since); and of course horse lords and a dragon lady right from the pages of Tanith Lee. Definitely looking forward to the next series and I’ll be asking someone who has a house here (hello Ruth) which costumes she worked on!

Monday 5th September
One of the things I say when interviewers ask me about how I started writing is how, at a certain age, I chose not to be ‘a Jack of all trades and master of none’ by concentrating on just one of my many interests. I blame my parents with their house full of books, their varied interests, and the various subtle pushes I got from them. I got a chemistry set as many did, but I also got ‘extra’ chemicals from my Dad’s college, followed by some instruction in using chemical formulae many years before I saw them in school. I got fish tank, but instead of putting in water and fish I filled it with caterpillars, watched them turn to chrysalises and hatch out, looked the result up in an Observer book, before then moving on to water scorpions, caddis fly larvae and any other weird creature I found in the stream across the road. I got a microscope which only in later years I realized was a good one – cast iron body and multiple magnifications – and spend many happy hours with my eye glued to the lens. But all this is a round-about way of getting to my recent purchase.

I’m not an easy person to buy presents for, since there’s not much I want beside the odd packet of pants or socks. I can’t be bothered with many of the technological gadgets now available. I wouldn’t want an Android phone or a Blackberry because, thought I know I might have use for many of their functions, they aren’t enough to justify the expense nor the time expended in learning to use the damned things. I don’t really do toys. However, when I saw what was available in Lidl last week I knew straight away that it was a toy I wanted: a microscope with a USB connection so that images and video clips can be taken from it.

Of course, how often I play with this particular toy remains to be seen…

And another purchase this last week. When we arrived here it was necessary to buy a car as quickly as possible so as to avoid the large hire car costs. Stelios put us in contact with a guy from Motor Plan who was selling off some old ones and from him we bought a Renault Thalia. It had 42,000 kilometres on the clock, was a 1.4 saloon with plenty of boot space and has been ideal. Yes, there have been the usual problems what with bearings, joints and a belt (plus tensioner) needing to be replaced, but these are all expected. However, what has been very annoying is a sensor over the flywheel which, when it gets a speck of dirt on it, simply stops the car. The sensor can then be cleaned with a squirt of cleaning fluid in the right area, but more often than not it needs to be taken off to be cleaned.

We carried on with this car for four years, since cleaning the sensor is just a ten minute job. This last summer I haven’t had to touch it for five months and so, when offered a much newer car at a reasonable price I was indecisive. What made me decisive was driving Samantha and Dean back to Iraklion airport and having the car pack up right at the worst possible point, which was in the queue to traffic lights just outside Agios Nicholas. Perhaps this was my own fault in that if I’d cleaned it before the trip I’d have had no problem. The next day I looked at at the other car (a Kia Rio) and said yes.