Tuesday 23rd August

Funny, in my last post about the goings on in Libya and Tripoli I ended with the comment that maybe I was being too cynical, but apparently I wasn’t being cynical enough. Whilst the BBC reporters were swallowing whole the rebel claims, and reporting on the capture of Gadaffi’s sons and his imminent fall, I was foolishly swallowing whole their reports. It’s been a pertinent reminder of how partial the news can be and, really, it ain’t over till it’s over.

Checking out the various lists on Amazon I see that the Kindle version of The Departure has risen to the number one spot in ‘Science Fiction, New and Future Releases’ with the hardback at number five. If I confine myself to the ‘Science Fiction, Hardback, New and Future Releases’ it’s at number three whilst in ‘Science Fiction, Bestsellers’ it is at number fifty-five (though of course yet to be released). Generally, over my last four or five books, a new release has always risen to one of those number one spots on Amazon for at least a while. I’m guessing that in sales terms my course hasn’t really changed much i.e. they’re climbing slowly but steadily with each new release.

Wednesday 24th August
Jupiter War is now into the 90,000s and steadily growing. I twittered last week that I might finish this book, which is the third of a trilogy, before the first book of the trilogy is even published, but I now think that’s unlikely. Certainly I’ll have the first draft done before we return to England in November

Friday 26th August
I hear this morning that Japan is 10 trillion in debt and beside the flippant ‘to whom and let’s shoot him’ I have to wonder just which countries aren’t in debt or, rather, which parasitic governments aren’t in debt. Here in Greece the leech government is sucking harder as the host country dies. I learnt yesterday about further confiscatory taxes with people who own houses above 100 metres in area being hit, PAYE tax payers being hit with a €50 ‘solidarity tax’, people with a boat above a certain length being hit, whilst if you own an SUV, combined taxes can amount to as much as €2000. Meanwhile the banks are preparing for the inevitable default and the possibility of Greece crashing out of the Euro. If this happens, this means me drawing out all the money I’ve paid in to my bank here, stopping payments and waiting. Greece may go back to the Drachma at a government set exchange rate followed by the rapid devaluing of said currency, which will mean a better exchange rate for me later, but the Greeks maybe having to use a wheel barrow to take their drachmas to the bakers for a loaf of bread. I utterly despair of the stupidity of governments across the world. As a guy I was chatting to yesterday noted, if governments had been companies the politicians would have been fired by now and prosecuted for fraud.

Here’s a couple of praying mantises knocking about our garden. I tried finding out a bit about them in my laptop copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica but found it only under ‘mantid’, which seems a bit daft in this hyperlinked age.

Monday 29th August
Oh dear, I must look into what is happening to Alpha Bank, which is my bank here. Apparently it is merging with Eurobank so as to be able to survive. I really don’t want the cash machines telling me to bugger off. I must also get myself a safe…

Meanwhile the weather here is turning a bit crappy. Though it is still in the 20s here up in the mountains, quite a lot of cloud is already appearing. I rather suspect another crappy winter is on the way and that we’ll be burning up a large portion of our wood supply before we head back to England… Um, but checking some of last year’s blog posts I see that my first moan about summer ending was on the 24th August

Meanwhile, I’ve learnt that our new neighbour has had a car accident, possibly while driving his car back here from Belgium. Stelios said something about him having a metal plate in his skull or face…

And just to introduce something a bit lighter, here’s a picture of me wearing silly glasses:

Wednesday 17th August

Yesterday I drove to Iraklion airport to pick up Samantha and Dean – my niece and her boyfriend – who are staying in our ‘ruin’ for two weeks. No real problems on the drive because if you remain aware that there are nutters on the road you can generally keep out of their way. The temperature hovered at about 30 and after the drive there and back I must have sweated about a gallon into my car seat, this was probably why, afterwards, two half litre glasses of ice-cold beer hardly touched my tonsils on the way down. It’s a struggle here.

Thursday 18th August
The chillies are coming thick and fast now and, having collected half a kilo of them it’s time to make sweet chilli sauce. I never actually wrote the recipe down for myself (unless it’s buried in this blog somewhere) but recollect it being half a kilo of chillies, one whole garlic bulb, salt, a cup of sugar and a cup of vinegar. However, I did write the recipe down for someone else and that says two cups of vinegar and sugar, and yet someone else told me I put corn flour in to thicken too. The only way to find out is to just do it…

And, retrospectively, here I am about essential authorial tasks, that is, preparing onions for pickling:

Well, the kids seem to be enjoying themselves. They took chairs up on our roof to soak up some rays in the morning whilst I wrote my 2,000 words, and then spent most of their time in the sea when we were all down in Makrigialos. As we were on the way back, intent on buying some bread rolls and not able to find enough, we decided to eat in the Gabbiano, whereupon plates were cleared, much laughter ensued and photos had to be taken of us being able to smoke in a restaurant. They retired to the ‘ruin’ at midnight and we hit the sack shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile, to send in an email, I took a few up-to-date pictures at and from the house, which I thought I might put here:

Friday 19th August
I’m presently reading through The Hyperion Omnibus by Dan Simmons and both enjoying and remembering the book Hyperion, which I read many years ago. When I finish the omnibus I’ll maybe write a review of it, but meanwhile let me share a couple of things with you now.

As many of you will know, Hyperion is loosely based on The Canterbury Tales what with the travellers telling their various stories (in these cases usually involving some hideous encounter with the shrike) and from ‘the Poet’s Tale’:

On Heaven’s Gate, I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labour could be; not mere physical labour, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labour. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher plains.

Much hollow laughter ensued from me after I read that. There speaks the effete writer whose closest encounter with a spade has probably been in a deck of cards and whose knowledge of physical labour has arisen from other effete writers, but whether that’s the poet in question, Martin Silenus, or Simmons himself I leave you to speculate. Hard physical labour numbs the mind, probably because all the blood flow is concentrated in the muscles, and the mind is focused on such mediocrities as not chopping off ones toes with the spade. In that situation the most it can manage is endless repetitions of ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’

The next bit to share is also from ‘The Poet’s Tale’:

Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the other’s successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in his or her heart that he or she was the true artist of the word who merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.

And there speaks a writer with true and direct personal experience of other writers and the writing world!

Saturday 20th August
Bugger, the wind is back. After I polished off two and a half thousand words yesterday we went down to Makrigialos as usual. I managed my harbour swim, though coming back doing breast stroke I had to keep my head turned out to sea to manage to breathe. Thereafter, lying on the beach trying to read Hyperion became a bit wearing, because I didn’t want my entire body, including my eyeballs, exfoliating.

Whilst we were sitting inside Revans for a while Caroline checked out the books and discovered one that had been left there. I’m never sure whether to be glad to see books left like this or not:

Ah, here’s some of the local wildlife, the latter of which I’m saving to show our visitors:

Monday 22nd August
Well, it looks like Colonel Gadaffi is on the way out what with the rebels into Tripoli and his son being captured. Let’s just hope he’s not sitting in a bunker somewhere on a nuclear warhead with his finger on a button. Now, apparently, they are all free in Libya and will be able to say what they want. There’ll be no tribal conflict and everything from now on will be hunky dory what with peace and democracy settling over the country like a big comfy duvet. This is of course is about as naive as the thought that the rebellion would be over in just a few months. Look forward to the fanatics trying to push their case, various factions at each other’s throats and terrorist bombs going off in Tripoli over the next few years. Yeah, I know, I’m a cynic.

Wednesday 3rd August

Well, things seem to be stirring on the Hollywood front. I’ve just heard from Tim Miller at Blur Studios that one Robert Rodriguez has now optioned the Heavy Metal project and that in so doing he doesn’t get any of the stories/concepts/art previously submitted. This unfortunately means that you won’t be seeing a total of five of my short stories animated for the big screen. However, along with this bad news came the good, and it seems that something might happen with a certain short story called Snow in the Desert. This was, as those of you who have been following this saga might remember, a story of interest to some guy whose name was … damnit, what was it, er, Thomas travel, Tommy Journey? No, I’m sure it had something to do with ships. Cruise?

As I noted in my previous post an LA producer also got in contact with me wanting a chat. Now this may be connected to the above or have nothing to do with it. Since, as I’ve discovered, these things tend to be rather secretive, i.e. say anything about this and we’ll have to have you shot, I’ll try to keep you updated but can’t promise to.

Of course all this is very exciting and leads to some drunken speculation out on our Papagianades terrace of an evening, but I’m not holding my breath. I keep on with the bread-and-butter work of writing the books and trying to keep you guys entertained and, if I get too big-headed, Caroline will certainly find me some sweeping up to do or a toilet to clean.

Monday 8th August
Damn, I had to take a bit of a break from typing from Wednesday last week because of something annoyingly petty: the end of my little finger hurt. It’s some form of RSI from typing I’ve had before which results in the end of a finger hurting quite a lot at a simple touch. ‘Type with your other fingers!’ I hear the cry. No, if I carry on it tends to spread to other fingers. Now I’m attempting to be a bit less heavy handed, which will of course change when I get excited about something I’m writing. Which reminds me: I once actually managed to wear a hole through the space bar of one of those old grey keyboards, so why is it now that they tend to go wrong before I can get anywhere near that stage?

Along with the cicadas and other big insects we’re getting some of the nice big spiders appearing here now. This one, which is about two inches across, has made its home on the side border leading up to the ‘ruin’. The day after I damaged its web with the spray from a hose pipe the line of white glyphs appeared on its web below it. A rough translation runs something like this, ‘Stop breaking my web – I’m eating those noisy buggers for you!’

Since the beach is now overrun with holidaying Greeks we went on Sunday to a taverna at a place called Kalo Nero (this means ‘good water’ and, as Stelios told us when he was showing us around, ‘not any more’). Here we have a nice demonstration of the price variations between tourist areas and places more remote. In Makrigialos a half litre carafe of white wine ranges from €4 to €6. Here (and the picture is of the view) a carafe costs €2.50. Also, in Makrigialos the price of a beer can be €3 whilst in some places in the mountains it can cost as little as €1, along with enough mezes to feed you for a day.

So, with a buggered finger I caught up some of my reading. On Friday I finished off the last book of four by Simon Scarrow telling the stories of Wellington and Napoleon. These are Young Bloods, The Generals, Fire and Sword and Fields of Death, and I heartily recommend them. As I noted before, the battle scenes and descriptions of the campaigning got a bit wearing and repetitive, mainly in the middle two books, but then how many different ways can you describe cannon balls and canister shot ploughing through files of soldiers? I would imagine that in trying to stick to historical fact Scarrow allowed the dry dead prose of the historian to slip into the books. However, these were four massive 600+ word tomes and I read them all, so the above, whilst it had an effect, did not stop me reading. What I also enjoyed was the acquisition of historical knowledge, about the Napoleonic Wars, about the politics, national manoeuvring and attitudes 9like the low regard for human life), about the way technology was developing (the first use of howitzers, for example) and, as always, this sort of stuff gives an insight into the present day. It is of course the usual insight of ‘technology advances whilst humans are as bad as they’ve always been’ or ‘no, the world is not falling apart – this is just business as usual’.

Tuesday 9th August
So, just before my swim to the harbour I noted a large boat moored outside the harbour, just beyond the buoys marking the dividing line between the swimmers and the jet skis. As I set out the water was clear enough for me to see the frappe cups and plastic water bottles on the bottom. About halfway to the harbour I noted slews of a pink substance floating just below the surface and thought that might be something I’d seen before: masses of globular objects that had to be eggs of some kind. At the harbour I turned round and swam back, momentarily encountering what I briefly thought was a jelly fish but turned out to be a plastic bag, which is why so many jelly-fish eating turtles are dying with guts packed with plastic. After a relax on the beach, reading the Hyperion omnibus by Dan Simmons and then having to put it down before suffering RSI, I went for another swim with my new mask and snorkel. There wasn’t much to see, unless you enjoy drifts of coffee stirrers, fragments of plastic sheeting and the occasional dilapidated tennis ball. I then noted more of that pink stuff, along with something else floating near the surface. This other object, this brown lump, changed my earlier assessment of what that pink stuff was. Andrex, probably. I’m guessing the people on that boat are flushing their toilet straight into the sea. Nice of them.

But of course turds and toilet paper swiftly come apart and rot down in the ocean so, apart from inclining me to scrub really hard in the shower and wash out my mouth repeatedly, these are nowhere near as much of a problem as all that plastic out there. The environmentalists should be focusing on stuff like that, which is one of the many reasons why I get so angry with their present preoccupations, like their insistence on the need to build bird choppers (American whooping crane anyone?), or their delight in the closing down of nuclear power stations in countries that last saw big earthquakes and tsunamis when Noah was wishing he’d left out the woodpeckers. And of course, I utterly despise their need to get rid of a gas that is a plant food and which they insist magically causes snow storms whilst also frying us in our beds, despite the fact that the main thing to track the rise in quantity of that gas in our atmosphere is the number of luxury cars being hired at climate change conferences.

With these riots going on in London, Teresa May tells us, ‘The police need the help and support of the local community,’ which is the usual politician-speak urban-elite claptrap. Well, here is the result of decades of ‘sensitive’ urban policing, irresponsible parents, a complete lack of punishment for criminals, political manipulation of the police, HSE bollocks, and cops being employed and promoted on the basis of gender, racial equality, their political correctness and ability to fill in reports, rather on them being over six feet tall and capable of collaring thugs. What the police need, Teresa, is to grow a set. Perhaps what we could do with is a few less diversity-trained ethnic outreach community relations officers, and a few more fifteen stone hairy bastards who know how to use a truncheon.

Ach, enough of that.

Having finished the Scarrow Napoleonic War books I then picked up Col Buchanan’s Stands a Shadow, kindly sent to me by Julie Crisp at Macmillan. On the back of the dust jacket is a quote that runs ‘Two pages into Farlander (the previous book) I was hooked … I’ll certainly be reading the next book, for I have a feeling it’s going to be even better. Nice one Mr Buchanan’ by a guy called Neal Asher. So was this even better? I didn’t find myself being immediately hooked for any of a number of reasons: my hangover was getting in the way, because I couldn’t remember the story of the previous book, or because the prose seemed laboured to begin with. Really I should have read Farlander again before going onto this. Another thing that kept pulling me up was the odd chemistry of the ‘black powder’ here, and in one case a confusion between grape and chain shot (but then would anyone who had not just read four books on the Napoleonic Wars notice?) Anyway, I did get hooked later on and ended up finishing this at about 2.00 in the morning. My overall impression was that this wasn’t as ‘clean’ as Farlander – maybe suffering from a touch of mid-series syndrome – but it was as vivid and believable and a damned sight better than a lot of the lauded fantasy books out there, and I’ll certainly be reading the next one.

Wednesday 27th July

A certain retired Dutch physics teacher of my acquaintance said to me, ‘I’m glad I met you before reading your blog, else I would have expected someone always angry with steam coming out of his ears.’ This is because I use the blog to let off steam, but it is also about what is interesting.

If you sit down and watch 24 hour news you might think everything is falling apart when, in reality, all those wars, murders and natural disasters have been going on from the year dot and the only up-scaling is relative to population and to the number of TV hours needing to be filled. Through 24 hour news our impression of the world can be distorted because we’re not being told that meanwhile, in the rest of the world, an earthquake, a war or a famine didn’t happen. Equally, in the flesh I am not a hugely angry man, but I do post my exasperation and anger on my blog, so the impression given of me can also be distorted. It’s also the case that though this is a writer’s blog, what can I post about my writing?

Honest, no steam coming out of these ears, though having heard that from the Dutch guy I will endeavour to be a little less ranty, especially after that last one. Time to talk about plants and stuff…

Before we came here this year I got onto a website listing all sort of exotic seeds. The main ones I was hoping to see a result from were seeds for pitcher plants, Venus fly traps, tea and coffee. None of these came up in the first couple of months so I consigned the pots I’d planted them in round the back because there was always the chance they’d germinate later. Recently I decided that the seeds must have rotted so began emptying the pots, first picking up one I’d planted a coffee bean in. I emptied and found a sprouting bean so hurriedly put it back and waited. Now it seems I’ve got a few coffee plants on the way, but I’m buggered if I know where I’ll find room for them:

Another plant I’ve had trouble growing here is coleus, but I’ve done much better this year. Most of the seeds of ‘Top Crown Coleus’ germinated along with all of the seeds I’d saved from a dark red coleus last year.

Thursday 28th July
It seems I’m going to be even less ranty than predicted what with Caroline refusing to let me see the BBC news. This morning, for example, she sneaked a look at it while I was in the shower. I am in fact perfectly fine with this and feel no urge to turn on the TV to find out what members of the arsehole-ocracies of the world are doing. And almost certainly it’s better for my health.

One little thing I was thinking about doing on here was my own collection of aphorisms, perhaps trying to limit them to the character count of a Twitter message. Something along the lines of these: ‘Those who protest about cliques probably weren’t invited to join,’ or, ‘Those who moan about cliques probably don’t realize they’re in one.’ These occurred to me here because I really am someone who doesn’t like joining such groups, but time and time again I’ve heard people bemoaning the ex-pat cliques in Makrigialos to members of their own ex-pat clique. It’s a tribal thing really: we of the umpalumpas spit upon you Wanglefrogspouts.

Friday 29th July
Damn, and now I’m groping for something to write about now I’m not seeing anything on the news to get me irate. This, I guess, shows how habit-forming moaning can be. It’s certainly a trait to watch out for since it’s one that annoys me in others.

Okay, here’s how life is for me here at the moment. I get up in the morning, turn on my laptop, and while it warms up I bucket the grey water out of a barrel buried in the garden and use it to water the plants. With that done I return to my desk and warm up my writing faculties with a blog post like this one. I then turn to Jupiter War and aim to get 2,000 words of it done by the early afternoon. Just lately I’m not managing that because, like yesterday, I’ve been running back and forth through the book working out the plot – deleting, adding and altering. Yesterday, for example, my word count was 177 for the blog and 1606 for Jupiter War.

At some point during this we fit in a late breakfast and then, when I’ve finished writing for the day, I load copies of Jupiter War to two memory sticks. One goes in a drawer here whilst the other goes in the bag containing all the bits and pieces I take down to Makrigialos. This gives me two back-ups and, should anyone break in and steal my laptop, I’ll still have a copy or copies of the book, which is worth substantially more. We head down to the beach then where I have my ‘harbour swim’. This is over ten minutes of crawl across from Revans Bar to the harbour, then a little longer using both crawl and breast stroke on the way back. I’m not sure what the distance is but, me being very anal about counting stuff it’s about 320 strokes of crawl (one way), which I do in sets of three whilst bilaterally breathing. Maybe half a mile or so in total? I must check…

Next further dips are interspersed with whatever I’m reading, or the Athen’s News crossword or some work in a notebook as I sort out plot points. Presently I’m reading through Simon Scarrow’s four books on the Napoleon and Wellington – enjoyable, but the battle stuff is a bit repetitive, but then I suppose in reality it was repetitive. Later I’ll turn my attention to the stack of Dan Simmons tomes I brought here.

Having then worked up a sufficient thirst it’s ‘ora ya krasi’ (time for wine), with glasses of water and little bowls of nuts, seeds, crisps and sometimes water melon and other fruits. This is also people watching time: seeing the Greek mother who hasn’t realized that a number of years ago the doctor cut the umbilical cord attaching her to her child, or the Greek father blowing his stack because a boy from a nearby restaurant kicked over his sand castle, or an English guy of our acquaintance ‘on the pull’, or the woman in danger of being relaunched by Green Peace, or the twit on a lilo suddenly realizing he’s half a mile out at sea and in danger of paying Gadaffi a visit.

After a couple of hours of this it’s back home for something to eat, some time on the terrace in the evening discussing our eventful day and the meaning of life, then to bed, ready to start the whole circuit off again the next day.

I’ve had one or two interesting emails this week that are worth a mention. One was from a guy in America who really enjoyed Gridlinked and then: I caught myself doing something I promised myself I would never do after several disappointments; I went to your blog expecting leftist socialist drivel simply because that’s what I’ve been seeing with many authors. I think you can guess how the rest of the email runs…

Another email was from Night Shade Books explaining the ‘Night Shade Silence’ and why I and others haven’t received royalties we’re owed. The letter from Jason Williams should be required reading for anyone wanting to set up a publishing company.

Then there’s the email from an LA-based producer who is a huge fan of my books and a partner in something called Black Box Management and who works with directors, writers and actors. He wants to get on the phone with me for a chat…

Monday 1st August
Damn the cicadas are loud this year. I guess there’re lots of them because of the long cold and wet winter, just as there’s more of all the insect life and other life besides. Their noise, I read somewhere, is capable of damaging ear drums at short range, and I can well believe it. When one is close I certainly get the feeling of something rattling in my ears. Oh, and the one whose job it is to catch and eat the buggers seems to be slacking on the job:

Even whilst avoiding the news it’s not difficult to pick up on snippets about the various ‘countries in debt’ across the world. Greece is going into default, no matter how European leaders might like to style it, and the rest of the PIIGS are following. Britain’s debt, when counted properly is in the region of 4 trillion pounds, whilst America’s is 14.3 dollars, and who knows how that’s being counted. But the statement that these countries are all in debt is absolute rubbish. In reality it is the large fat parasites attached to the countries, which have eaten up in some cases nearly half the country concerned, that are in debt. Governments, with their bloated bureaucracies are the ones that have been profligately over-spending, over-paying themselves and setting their own limit on their credit cards. And, as always, it’s the governments and those bureaucracies, who like leeches care little for the blood supply of their host, who keep on sucking until the last.

We’re avoiding Makrigialos over the weekends now because it is now holiday time in many places across Europe including Greece itself. There are many more people down there now, including Cretans from across the island heading to the beach for the weekend. This gives us time to get some shopping and generally sort things out around the house and garden though, with the temperature up in the thirties, all these are carried out at a rather slow pace.

Tuesday 2nd August
Okay, I need to get something off my chest: cicadas are not crickets. If you take a nice close look at one of the ugly bastards you’ll see something like a big horrible horse fly with more eyes than feasible. Here’s a picture for you:

Also, just as I was corrected years ago when in a short story I talked about the ‘scent of bougainvillea’ (it has no scent) and luckily did not compound my error by talking about ‘colourful bougainvillea in flower’ (all the pretty stuff you see is leaf bracts)…

… the sound of the Mediterranean (or more specifically Cretan) night has nothing to do with ‘cicadas singing’ because they stop their racket when the sun goes down. What you hear are crickets and frogs. Elsewhere in the world it might be different, because there are thousands of varieties of cicada and some of them do sing, apparently. Here they make a raucous racket and are tempting targets for a BB gun.

It’ll shortly be time to start picking the chillies:

I have to say that you do see some sights here. Yesterday we got a little bit concerned about a swimmer who was beyond the buoys, and who was therefore in danger of being run down by a speed boat or jet ski, and seemed to be swimming but getting nowhere. We wondered if this character was trying to do himself in, had just swum from Libya or Egypt or was just a bit of a nutter. Views through the binoculars of him wearing a sun hat, using plastic sandals on his hands to propel himself and wearing white socks seemed to confirm the last option. He eventually made it to shore – a quite porky individual who had to struggle in the shallows to put his white sandals on over his white socks before staggering up the beach to his towel.

Funny old world.

Prince of Thorns
Okay, some of you may remember my review of The Prince of Thorns, which has been one of the bets fantasies I read in a while. At the time some of you bemoaned my eight months early review of that book. Well, Mark tells me it’s out now so go buy it. You won’t regret it:

Wednesday 13th July

Well, apparently ‘the public’ is ‘shocked and horrified’ by this ‘phone hacking scandal’. Personally I’d like to know where we can find this public (first name Joe?) so as to tell him to stop it so we can get back to some interesting and relevant news stories. Of course the cynics amongst us might note the relish with which Murdock’s competitors are attacking him. The BBC presenters and reporters are positively dribbling at the mouth as they wheel out endless bumf about how horrifying it all is, meanwhile quickly skimming over unimportant stuff like wars, earthquakes, financial collapses, plagues and assassinations (of course the elitist lefty pricks at the BBC have no interest in who ends up in control of BSkyB, ho ho). They even had the temerity to take the hockey mask off a tearful Gordon Brown so he could witter on about how terrible it all was for him. Oh yeah, well I think a few more tears have been shed by the millions of people that Anti-Midas butt-fucked over a decade and a half. Next, after a few other outraged Labour Party MPs, we got the goggle-eyed millipede demanding controls and jail time for anyone who does not love Labour. What a wanker. The Cameroon got a bit of air time too, for balance, but I couldn’t distinguish him from the previous lot.

Still considering things political I see that now Ireland’s credit rating has been cut to junk status, now joining Greece and Portugal (and Italy soon). Meanwhile the Euro MPs demand controls on and sanctions against the credit rating agencies involved. Nothing must stand in the way of the European project, not even reality. Of course the MPs aren’t getting into a panic because of how the financial collapses of countries might affect those who live in them, but because their whole project seems to be falling apart and that could result in a termination of the flow into the Brussels’ trough.

Ack, enough of that. I’m working my way through Zero Point and should be sending it to Macmillan by the time you are reading this. I think you’ll like it but, of course, neither you nor I will know for a year or more.

Thursday 14th July
Ah, I see the Murdock has been forced to drop his attempt to take full control of BSkyB, but now lefties across the world are howling for blood. Like the cowards they are they see a weakness in an enemy and scoot out of the shadows to get the knife in and, of course, this is all a wonderful chance for them to grandstand, make political capital and a distraction from how they are just sacks of wind (Milliband being a prime example). Certainly the Democrats in America are finding this a welcome distraction from 14.3 trillion dollars of debt. Ooh I love the smell of burning witches in the morning…

Friday 15th July
With hints that the phones of 911 victims were hacked, the ‘phone hacking scandal’ grows upon the smell of a compensation feeding-frenzy in America. The Murdock-haters are doing the best they can to keep it running, but I guess Murdock himself, more than anyone else, is aware of how today’s front page news is tomorrow’s chip paper. And, regarding his dumping of News of the World, running a media empire he’s also aware that this decade’s newspaper is the next decade’s profitless website…

Now why am I writing about this? It’s a morning reaction to the news of, ‘Oh not that load of wank again’.

I’ve finished the read-through and addition of chapter starts to Zero Point – rather quicker than I expected – and have now returned to Jupiter War. I’m 66,000 words into that and presently resolving some plot points. I need certain things to happen all over a short period of time and need them to be both plausible and not too chaotic a mixture.

Okay, back to Crete and its environs. A number of years ago I bought some succulents from one of the roadside sellers in Sitia. These produced excellent flowers and I collected the seeds from them to grow them again the following year. I then bought more with different colours, and collected the seeds from them too. This year I’ve grown these succulents from seed in red, yellow, cerise and salmon pink. They’ve come up a lot better this time and there are a few crosses, mutations or reversions in there, because white and orange ones have appeared now too. Maybe I’ve asked this before (and forgotten the answer) but does anyone know the name of these?

We’ve had guests in the ‘ruin’ over the last week (Caroline’s parents) and they seem to be finding it comfortable enough. Having separate accommodation like this certainly has its advantages: no need to put on pants when going to the toilet in the night, no need to cook a breakfast for four, breathing spaces and periods of needed privacy. And thinking on the last of these I see that the Cretan family, who were the bane of our lives for a couple of years with their inability (or plain refusal to) to understand the concept of privacy, have now attached themselves like leeches to the new Belgian neighbour. Perhaps he’s quite happy with that, I don’t know. We weren’t and it took me, after much agonizing, finally losing my English politeness and starting to shout to get them to back off.

It’s interesting here to see how various expats have dealt with similar problems. I see a lot of compromises around me where people are perpetually invaded by their ‘Cretan friends’ and kid themselves that this is all okay, not a problem and ‘aren’t we integrating well’. Others put up fences and have to ensure that their doors are locked, whilst still others have come out the other side of the home invasions when surrounding Cretans have either accepted their need for privacy or grown bored with the game. As a foreigner you are a source of entertainment, a curiosity, someone to be pontificated to about the correct way to do things and a person whose home can be invaded at will. Of course, if you stroll into a Cretan’s home in the same manner, demand coffee and start picking up items and asking how much they cost, you soon discover that the traffic is all one-way.

Saturday 16th June
This Belgian guy moving in next door has raised all sorts of unpleasant memories of our initial time here. Wandering back from Makrigialos a couple of nights ago we noted the Cretan female neighbour, and one of her small sons, sitting out on their roof. Now what’s the problem there you might wonder, it’s a beautiful little Cretan village with wonderful views. Well, no, they were sitting facing the Belgian’s front garden and courtyard, staring and waiting.

How reminded we were of her sitting in our house, staring, whilst I struggled with my Greek to find some way to explain to her that no, we don’t like her stepping over onto our front terrace and pressing her nose up to the glass doors, then immediately stepping inside, uninvited, when I open them and, really, we’ve got a leaking roof that needs fixing and we’re living in a dump sitting on plastic chairs and I have books to write and would she kindly piss off? And oh, incidentally, could she please stop her kids coming inside when we leave any door open, since this is our house and not their playground and our belongings are not their toys?

I actually wrote more about our first two years here but then decided it best not to publish it on this blog, it being potentially libellous. I’ve dumped it into a file named ‘Cicada Scream’ which will be the title of a book about our time here, if I ever get round to being able to concentrate on it without wincing. Some stories, really, can be too painful to tell.

Monday 18th July
I see that there’s been loads more about the ‘phone hacking scandal’ with resignations, arrests and further lefties (like the Australian Greens, who might have some desalination plants going cheap) leaping onto the bandwagon. Numerous are the cries about media monopolies and more control of the media. Okay, so who is going to ‘control’ the media and decide what monopolies should be broken up, the same people presently conducting this witch hunt? That will mean that the BBC monopoly will continue untouched because it is on-message, whilst you can guarantee that if the newspaper concerned had been the Guardian the whole damned thing would have been played down. Don’t for one moment be fooled into thinking this is all about integrity in the media, it’s about partisan politics.

The temperatures are zooming up here now. This morning at 9.00 it’s 27 in the shade and steadily on the rise. Interestingly, just lately, the addition of those roof windows and them letting in the early and late sunlight has resulted in the inside temperature being fractionally higher than the temperature outside (where the sensor is on the front wall) when, previously, the temperature inside was always two or three degrees lower. Maybe this will result in us having to use the bedroom fan – which we haven’t used – and maybe we’ll end up getting quite hot in August, but the benefits from this in early spring and late autumn will certainly outweigh that.

Oh, and here’s a picture from Revans Bar. Once, last year, I glanced over to Kostis behind the bar then, just half a second later found him standing by our table serving our drinks. I was certain I hadn’t drunk enough to start experiencing blackouts then, after a little confusion, and a ‘hang on what the fuck is going on here’ moment, it all came clear. Kostis is the one on the right and is older than his brother Lefteris by maybe five or ten minutes.

Tuesday 19th July
Oh dear, more resignations and now a death. Now if Murdock had had someone bumped off because of all this then that would be an interesting story. But it seems unlikely and really the whole farrago is just uninteresting and irritating now. Harriet Harman was this morning relishing this as a way of attacking Cameron because he hired one of those involved. Really, those at the top of Labour over their decade and a half reign should really be hiding in shame, or they should be in prison. Oh hell, Millipede and the Anti-Midas Brown again, and more about how ‘the nation has been shocked and horrified’. I feel sure that the wankers at the BBC are as disconnected from ‘the nation’ as the politicians. Only the professionally offended are shocked and horrified by this circus, the rest of us have lives to live.

Advice to foreign home buyers everywhere: make sure your house is too small to accommodate visiting relatives. Remember that people you can tolerate for one evening become potential murder victims over two weeks.

Well, the last ever US shuttle mission is drawing to an end. I wonder how long it’ll be before the space station is abandoned whilst politicians on Earth concentrate on such critical occupations like bombing Arabs, wasting money on windmills, buying off large numbers of those who vote for them by employing them in pointless bureaucracies, taxing businesses to extinction whilst pocketing huge salaries and expense claims and growing increasingly disconnected from reality by their perception of how important they are.

Sigh.

Thursday 30th June

Perfectly in line with my previous comments about state-sector parasites I see that public-sector workers are coming out on strike in Britain today to protest against the cuts (not forgetting that the only cuts we’re getting are in the increase in spending). Seeing who is involved I fail to see what effect Inland Revenue workers going on strike will have, other than causing a concerted cheer. I also fail to see what effect a Border Agency strike will have, other than a day in which blue-rinse grannies won’t be searched for explosives and smokers won’t be illegally hassled for the amount of tobacco and cigarettes they buy.

The teacher NUTS were out in a mass of corduroy and facial hair waving their placards and shouting, ‘Cameron out!’ which tends to imply, ‘Miliband in!’ and didn’t the Labour Party do a great job last time? I wonder what their answer to the national debt is, oh yeah, tax the private sector because of course it is a bottomless well of free money. Meanwhile it’s perfectly right that private sectors workers should work harder, for longer, and have smaller pensions. It’s quite frightening that these tossers have control over the development of young minds.

Wednesday 6th June
Well, on the Thursday above the builders turned up to start cutting holes in our house. First the solar panel had to be moved to make room for the one over the kitchen, then the intention was to cut through with a big diamond wheel cutter and chisel out the rest. However, the belt snapped on that so they resorted to a smaller cutter and electric chisels. I now see that the roof is a lot thicker than I thought i.e. the builders who renovated this house laid the new roof over the top of the old. During the next two and a half days it was all noise and the resultant dust and rubble. Luckily we now have the ‘ruin’ which, that evening and the following evening, we moved into for the night. Here’s some pictures of how it was:

On Friday the air vents went in and finally on Saturday morning the windows were fixed in place. They tidied up nicely but like many Greek and Albanian builders here their finishing left a lot to be desired. I rather suspect that using silicon as tile grout isn’t a great idea:

Afterwards I went up there and finished the job myself:

Here’s some wildlife shots taken today. Anyone know the name of this butterfly … and don’t say ‘Eric’.

Wednesday 22nd June

I have to make some mention of the wildlife up here in the mountains (if I haven’t already done so and then forgotten). One evening whilst sitting outside with a couple of visitors (Hi Roddy & Ruth) we saw a pair pine martins running across nearby roofs, then another larger one nearby apparently eating our strawberries, whilst being watched closely by a local cat. The next morning we spotted a weasel on the ruin opposite our house and then, on our way out, watched a large green lizard, about twenty-five centimetres long, nip up into our geraniums. Our ‘ruin’ now has its resident gecko and other lizards of all different kinds can be seen here and down on the beach in Makrigialos – in fact Caroline was feeding one cheese crackers only a short while ago. Quite often, when sitting outside we’ll see a pair of eagles circling on thermals above the valley, whilst hawks of various kinds are also frequent visitors. Other birds include the usual, like sparrows and swallows, but occasionally we’ll get some brightly coloured visitors I couldn’t name. Hedgehogs we see occasionally, but then that’s not surprising considering the population of snails here, and I’m told there are badgers out there but I’ve yet to see one. Thus far I’ve had one snake in the garden but I have seen plenty on the roads. At night, near a neighbour’s house behind the village, frogs set up a chorus and we also hear little owls hooting and have seen the silent and ghostly shape of a snowy owl flying over our terrace then perching on wires opposite.

Then there are the insects. Thus far I’ve found about five scorpions in my little shed, and recently captured one for those neighbours with the frogs to show a visiting autistic kid who really wanted to see one last time he was at their house. Quite often I’ll see them scuttling from under plant pots too. Whilst digging in the bank next to our house I’ll often unearth centipedes about three inches long and I have been bitten by one. The garden abounds with shield bugs, long-legged leaf-cutting wasps, normal wasps and plenty of the kind Alien was based on, bees, ants ranging from the size of a pin head to three-quarters of an inch long and crickets the size of cafe crème cigars. This time of year, and earlier, bloody great beetles fly at your head or walk across the terrace in hobnail boots, and when flying they can easily be confused with the huge blue-black bees we get here. Soon the cicadas will be setting up their racket, and my tinnitus will fade into non-existence. Swatting flies can sometimes become a competition but, fortunately, we don’t get eaten alive by mosquitoes. However, there are flies here that look like normal house flies but which bite and a very small fly, which almost looks like a floating speck of dust and will lunch on you too.

Plenty of butterflies: tortoiseshells, cabbage whites, red admirals and a big yellow one with black markings I don’t know the name of. Yet, even with the cabbage whites settling on my veg I don’t get many caterpillars. I think this is due to the quantities of predatory insects out there eating them. The same applies to greenfly and black fly. Certainly, back in England, the stuff I grew would get hammered by all the above if I didn’t spray often. This is probably because that garden was amidst fields – monocultures – where the predatory insects are wiped out by the sprays getting rid of the pests.

Okay, I must take some pictures…

Thursday 23rd June
The chilli plants that survived from last year are, I’m happy to say, already producing chillies. The tomato plants I bought in Sitia have their first green tomatoes and the pepper plants from the same stall are also producing. Though there are lots of bunches of very small grapes on the vines they look a bit sickly, which is, I’m told, due to the rain we’ve had here. Other plants have succeeded or failed, but generally things are good and the gardens here are going to be stunning. Meanwhile, as I concern myself with the garden, with writing a book and with nipping off for an afternoon swim, the world seems to be going to pot all around me.

Sectarian violence has kicked off in Belfast again and when I see the rioters turning rabid and smashing the fuck out of police vehicles I wonder what point there is thinking about the future of the human race. When I then hear that Obama is spending two billion dollars a week on that pointless fucking war in Afghanistan the feeling is reinforced. With the amount of money being blown on these silly adventures we could be established both on the Moon and Mars by now and have orbital satellite industries and hotels visible from Earth. The world seems to be run by idiots and the waste of human life and wealth is sickening. I guess, when writing SF and imagining wonderful technologies ‘like magic’ one must never underestimate the massive power of human stupidity.

Meanwhile, here in Greece, the debt continues to grow whilst the politicians feast and dither. All sorts of new methods of taxation are introduced one day then dumped the next. The latest I’ve heard is that they now want to tax the already taxed money people like me bring into the country. Greece and Britain have a dual tax arrangement whereby if you’ve paid taxes in one country you shouldn’t have to pay them in the other, but apparently they’re trying to ignore that. Nothing must stand in the way of feeding the corrupt, nepotistic regime here and the bureaucrats and politicians must always be the last to take a pay cut or be put out of work because, obviously, they’re so important.

Friday 24th June
Interesting bit of info came our way yesterday from a couple with a home up in Stavrahori. Apparently they have thick glass windows in their roof. Now here one of the problems is the lack of windows and light inside. Often, when I come back in from outside, I have to wait a short while for my eyes to adjust, and often we have the lights on inside during the day. It’s also the case that because the house is set into a mountainside there are no windows at the back. And, both early and late in the year, the sun is mostly either behind or above the house so we get no direct sunlight through the front windows. This results in silly situations like us having the stove on inside whilst it’s also possible to sun bathe on the roof.

I looked into these ‘sun pipes’ often seen on ‘going green’ TV programs, but they are hideously expensive and really, with the flat concrete roof above we don’t need much in the way of the pipe part of them. I asked our builder about roof windows but all he suggested was aluminium windows set in built-up sections. I considered the idea of glass bricks in steel frames and setting them into the roof, but the kind of glass bricks I’ve seen are hollow and could be easily broken – I want thick glass up there that can stand being walked on.

So, today we’re going to go take a look at these roof windows and also obtain contact details for the builder who is making them. It would be great to not have to turn on the light every time we go to the toilet, and everywhere in the house it’ll be nice to get a bit of the powerful sunlight and heat beaming in.

Saturday 25th June
Yup, seen the roof windows and they are exactly what we want. Whilst we were there the guy whose house they are in called the Greek/American builder who did them and he’s coming up to see us at 10 this morning. The complications are that we’ll have to move the solar panel up onto the ‘ruin’, that once again we’ll be deep in dust and crap and, of course, ensuring the price is not a rip-off. If the guy is not in rip-off territory I may ask him to give me a price on putting air vents through our walls at the same time, at which point it might be an idea of me and Caroline to move up into the ruin for a while.

Monday 27th June
Wind wind wind! It started on Saturday night and is still going at 10 this morning. Thus far it has fried the sweet peas, picked up various plants in their pots and dumped them on the ground again, mauled a fuchsia, torn off unripe grapes and generally drained and sapped the plant life here. I don’t know if this wind is the one they call the ‘meltemi’, I just know it can get bloody windy and go on and on. There have been occasions when it’s blown like this for weeks on end and I’ve been overcome by the urge to run around screaming ‘Fuck off!’ at the sky. Of course it’s just this kind of anthropomorphizing of phenomena in the world that led to religion, so I really shouldn’t do it.

Tuesday 28th June
Feeling a bit stir-crazy yesterday we went down to Makrigialos expecting to have to sit inside a bar sheltering from the wind. This wasn’t the case. This wind is coming down from the North and tearing through the mountains, but overshooting Makrigialos to hit the ocean beyond. I was able to swim and we were able to sit at a table outside. However we returned to the wind here…

The wind is still blasting away at 8 this morning. We were told that we won’t have much of a grape crop, because of the rain and also because we haven’t sprayed them. Frankly I’m glad not to have wasted the spray since the vines have now been stripped of about half their leaves and most of the unripe grapes. Numerous other plants are looking sick – leaves and flowers wind-burnt – and there are drifts of ripped off leaves and flowers everywhere. It’s all somewhat heartbreaking and when it finally stops I’ll have a lot of clearing up to do.

Wednesday 29th June
So the Greek politicians are voting on ‘harsh austerity measures’ and, in response to this, they’ve had the worst riots in Athens for a year. Of course, this being the BBC we find a certain degree of terminological inexactitude. We are informed that things will be difficult for the government because the public are protesting. Sort of right but as ever misleading. Opposition parties are protesting but mainly it’s the state sector workers and unions that are protesting (along with the usual scattering of anarchist wankers) because they are the ones who will take the biggest hit. They are the overpaid non-producers with early retirement and large pensions. They are the ones whose organisations are going to be privatized and who will discover that the cushy little number, usually arrived at through nepotism, of sitting on their fat arses in offices shuffling paper, might end up being cut.

To a lesser degree it is the same people who are protesting in Britain and elsewhere across the world. Really, the lesson to be learned from Greece is that expanding the state sector and spending prolifically to buy votes is the road to bankruptcy and chaos. And the only way to make a country wealthy is to cut bureaucracy, cut taxes and let the wealth producers, i.e. everyone in the private sector, get on with doing what they do best. Of course this lesson will be ignored because those making the decisions are state sector parasites themselves. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

The wind ended yesterday afternoon at last. I went out and started clearing up the snapped off branches, the piles of crispy flowers and leaves and dumping plants that had simply shrivelled and died. I then did a lot of watering because the wind had sucked the moisture from everything. So much for my earlier comments about how well the gardens here are doing…