In all the excitement of I don’t know what, I forgot to tell you that the Christmas lights are already going up. A friend sent me a message on the eighth to say she’d seen the cherry picker on the main road near her house, and now, the lights are going up on other stretches of the road too. That can only mean Christmas is around the corner, though it is a long, slow curve of a corner that’s going to take another ten weeks to navigate.

There’s plenty to do and note before then, but in immediate ‘news’, the storm of the other day has passed by leaving a chill, and the rough weather wasn’t as rough as it has been in the past. I managed to get to my teeth appointment, and what an hour that was. I’d been looking at the skies, doing that thing that British people do by staring at it and saying, ‘It’ll clear up,’ because it’s bound to at some point, or ‘It could be worse,’ because that’s also true, but at ten, I set off beneath silent storm clouds and a few drops of rain. It’s always advisable to take the Kali Strata and other potential slip hazards with care after it’s been raining as it is when it’s hot. The stone can become slippery no matter the weather, so I took my time. I stopped to say a quick hello to a couple of people in a café, wandered around the back lanes of Yialos because although I like to be early for things, I never want to be that early, and arrived at my destination in time for a quick chat before taking the chair. Fifteen minutes later, I’m out again with the first part of another root canal seen to (no pain but done with the rumblings of a thunderstorm happening dramatically off stage) and a follow up appointment for today, and off I toddled towards the bus stop, receiving a severe weather alert on my phone on the way.

We’ve been getting these for a good couple of years now, usually as the thing the electronic voice is warning about is taking place, or ten seconds after the earthquake, or, in this case, during the rainless thunderstorm. There were no boats going that day, so the harbour was quiet by recent standards. Some locally staying folks were out and about in cagoules and frowns, gathering in the cafés to wait for the world to go by, and some of the tourist businesses were taking a rare day off as they’d not seen one since May. The bus was still running, but a taxi was about, so I shared it with a friend who arrived at the rank at the same time as me, and was home exactly one hour after I’d left.

That reminded me of the time I took the early boat to Rhodes to pick up my biometric residency card. On arrival, I bought breakfast from Gregory’s in Mandraki, before waiting at the front of the queue at the immigration office. There, dead on eight, I went up, got seen, got my golden ticket, left, walked around to the commercial harbour, got on the Sebeco, and was home before lunch. All very odd. I expected the trip to take all day, and I had a ticket for the Blue Star in the afternoon, and was braced for passing the time with unnecessary shopping, and a long afternoon hanging about a café waiting. You see? As proven by the tap replacement of the other day, things can happen at speed around here, though that may often be more by luck than by design.

Cue dodgy segue: My design today is to get some work done before skipping lightly back to Yialos and the chair to have the teeth work checked, pick up a flu jab on the way home, help someone send their self-published book up to Amazon, and then take the rest of the day off. And possibly the entire weekend.