I was just having a cup of tea on the balcony—listening to the new neighbours’ new air conditioning unit and watching nothing happening because it was too early in the morning for anything to be happening—and realised it was July. I’d suspected this for a few days, but you know how it is when one day is pretty much the same as the next. It occurred to me that it was also 2023, and ten years ago, I was preparing to release ‘Village View, a Year on Symi.’ This is a collection of blog posts from this very blog, all written during the year ten years ago, and it comes with pictures.

Rushing to my study at the pace of someone holding a mug of tea, I took the book down from the shelf and had a flick through, only to realise I have one of the few copies where the photos are in colour. I remembered speaking to Amazon about this a while back, and asking why the book was on sale for around $200.00, thinking it was one of those scams organised by the unscrupulous who occasionally manage to get through Amazon’s defences. Turns out it’s what the book costs if printed with colour images. I’m sure I never paid that for it. Luckily, the black and white version (which looks just as good) is only $19.63 in paperback and $4.99 on Kindle.

According to the book, ten years ago this month, I was talking about the new Nautical Museum opening (now closed and turned into the house for the top clergy, I believe) and the Symi Shrimp Festival which was around this time. There are other snippets of info and island news/stories too. The book takes you through an entire year with several posts per month and runs to nearly 300 pages. It’s the third in my four Symi books, the first being ‘Symi 85600’ which also continues to sell and doesn’t cost $200.00, I’m pleased to say.

That was one thing. Another was news from my yUK ex-journalist mate who told me that the fires on Rhodes have now dropped out of the UK news (or at last, the news he sees). In the tradition of the great British press, when a story has made its sales, it’s shoved out of the way in favour of what dress a certain ‘celeb’ was popping her boobs out of on a red carpet last night, and who fell over on ‘Strictly’, whatever that is. But Rhodes hasn’t dropped off the agenda at all; it’s still happening, though some good news yesterday from an online Greek reporter told us at least one of the fire fronts had been brought under control. (There are more, and that info might have changed by now.)

As I posted the other day, if you want real, local and reliable news, then check the Greek press and not the distant scabloids of other countries who put up headlines such as, ‘Tourists sent into the jaws of death’, when they mean a plane landed at an airport 30 km away from a fire, and on it were people who had chosen to keep their holidays because they were staying in an entirely different part of a very large island. Is it any wonder readers are ill-informed when those who have taken on the role of informant batter readers’ brains to a pulp with sensationalist nonsense because they need to sell copy at any cost?

Anyway… That’s my early morning view on thoughts that sparked when I was on the balcony. If you want to know what they were ten years ago this year, then pick up a copy of Village View: A Year on Symi.

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Woke up this morning at three to find it 26° in the courtyard as opposed to 31° as it has been (42° in the afternoons), and to hardly any wind, after the force fives of yesterday. That info, like today’s photos and text, is apropos nothing apart from trying to raise a smile.

We’ve probably all heard of ‘misheard lyrics’, when you mishear the words to a song, and from then on, can only hear the wrong words. Sometimes it’s years before you realise what you thought was being sung was actually something entirely different. What I hear around the house is something slightly different to that, as my husband has this knack for producing song mashups. This is where you take parts of one song and put them with another, and I have to admit, on occasion, it works rather well.

Here’s an example. Imagine the song by George Michael, ‘Faith’ with the chorus line, ‘Cause I gotta have faith’ and the syncopated repetition that comes after it.

Got that in your head? Good. Now cast your mind back to Paul Young when he was in Streetband, and their 1978 hit, ‘Toast’ with its groundbreaking lyric, ‘Put the grill on, Slip a slice under, And have toast, A little piece of toast…’

Put them together while you are pottering around the kitchen, and, if you’re Neil, you get, ‘Cause you gotta have toast, toast, toast.’

That’s one. Here’s another.

‘I saw the sign,’ a song used in Pitch Perfect, the comedy about a cappella singers in the USA. Mix that with a bit of Bob Marley, and you have the mashup:

‘I saw the sign, but I didn’t shoot the deputy.’

I know, makes no sense, but it keeps me smiling.

I did a similar thing in a romantic mystery I wrote called ‘The Blake Inheritance.’ In it, one of the characters mixes his poetry, so his says things like:

‘Let us go then you and I, to a place where the wild thyme grows,’ which I rather like, though Eliott and Shakespeare might not.

Another one I rather liked from the same book:

‘One upon a midnight dreary, the owl and the pussycat went to sea.’

And, ‘Curiouser and curiouser, said the spider to the fly,’ which isn’t poetry, but by now, we’re so far down the rabbit hole, it doesn’t matter.

Let’s take it a stage further and I’ll give you a challenge based on a parlour game I’ve seen on TV where you have to sing one set of lyrics to a completely different tune. (This one’s for you, Louise.)

Imagine, remember or listen to, ‘Do you hear the people sing,’ from Les Miserables:

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!

Got that tune in your head? Right, now think back to the stage show/movie Grease, and Stockard Channing singing:

There are worse things I could do
Than go with a boy or two
Even though the neighborhood
Thinks I’m trashy and no good…

Excellent. Now put the two together and sing ‘Worst things’ to the music of ‘Do you hear.’ It fits rather well – to start with at least.

Anyway, there are worst things I could be doing than putting up this nonsense at 3.30 in the morning, and I should go and get on with them. I have the first in a new series due for publication early next month and the MS is going off to the proofreader in a day or so, so I need to get back to my final read-through before it goes to the abattoir of editing.

Back tomorrow with more ado about nothing.

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