Another sighting of the laughing doves yesterday. They were happily investigating the path between the chairs and coming closer, so I could get a better photo on my camera, when this lump of a tourist comes through taking a walk while she’s on the phone and wearing a bathmat or something and scares not only the birds, but me. ‘Don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret…’ she projects into the phone loud enough to be heard in Rhodes. (Only she was doing it in Italian so she could have been saying anything. Italian is not one of my languages.)
Have you noticed how it’s more impressive to say, ‘It’s not one of my languages’, or ‘It’s not a language with which I am familiar’, rather than to say, ‘I don’t speak Ancient Mayan’, or whatever? ‘It’s not one of my languages.’ Oh? What languages to do you know? If you say, ‘English and a few others,’ they’ll see your bluff. Similarly, ‘This and that,’ doesn’t cut it. ‘Music, basic BSL, a smattering of verbal Latin, Greek, of course, and I can read Egyptian hieroglyphics to a degree. Oh, and I’m working on Hieratic.’ I mean, some of that is true, and who’s going to whip out an ancient parchment and ask you to translate it? If they do, you can make up anything because they clearly don’t have a clue either.
I have no idea where that came from… I was thinking vaguely of the ‘Lazy Steps’ which is what many people call the zig-zag path from Gymnasio/Horio to the harbour side below Pitini. I was thinking of them yesterday because I walked down them in the morning, except I didn’t because, as I understand it, the ‘Lazy Steps’ are further along the harbour as you’re leaving it, and are not the slope and zigzag, mainly because there’s nothing lazy about them at all. The real steps got their name because workers used to take time out there in the shade, or hide from work there, or some other possibly apocryphal story I heard from I can’t remember where or whom.
Anyway, the morning trip to collect post was over and done with by 10.00. The afternoon saw one of our last piano lessons where little Mozart (now as tall as me) played the second movement of the sonata well enough to pass grade four at least, and I was more than happy. So was he with the deserved praise he was given, and he went away happy. Probably not so much later when waitering at the ever-busy Kali Strata Restaurant. ‘You looked busy the other night.’ ‘Oh yeah, we had a table of 15 turn up – expected – the same time as a table for 10…’ I have no idea how they do it, but they do.
They do, and I did, so I’m done. Off into a weekend of writing and lazing about (once the chores are seen to). Have a good one, and pop back for more nonsense next week.
