I think Fridays will become ‘A catchup on the week and random photo day,’ not that any other day on these pages isn’t random enough.

What have I done this week? Not an easy one to answer as I can’t remember what I did yesterday, let alone… Oh yes. One of the highlights was celebrating 26 years of meeting the man currently throwing himself around the sitting room with grunts and gasps. (Home workout routine before he goes swimming. I, meanwhile, hide and hope I’m not picked on to join in.) We went to Georgio’s Taverna for dinner with a couple of friends and received a hearty feed for a very reasonable price.

I have spent my average of 50 hours per week at this machine wearing away the keyboard and wondering why the H has almost faded and how long the T will last. I have stickers to replace them when I wear out the letters. I’ve spent a couple of hours at the piano trying to master a Mozart sonata I should have mastered years ago but was too busy playing swing, jazz and musical numbers to bother, and have started planning my piano student’s fourth year which should start this month when the schools go back.

Er… Oh, I went up and down the hill a couple of times to plot murders and things. Only book related, you understand. I’ve also been reading about music halls of the late 19^th century and how they seemed to be more about scandal and court cases than song and dance. I’ve thought about changing the trap beneath the kitchen sink but not got around to it yet, and I have spent some time cleaning a cupboard. After that wrestle with the website, the tax bill got paid, freeing me up to donate some money to the water board. Michaelis came to read the meter weeks ago, but I’ve not yet seen the bill. It’s sometimes left in the gate, but never taken, and I wonder if it got put in the landlord’s post box by mistake. If so, it’s not there now (and neither is he), so someone may have taken it to pay on his behalf, thinking it was his. I’ll send a random amount to the account to keep things flowing and, one day, pop into the office with a reading to get the definitive bill. One day.

For now, it’s back to 1892, a steam train, a storm, a tower and a rather complicated piece of plotting which needs weeding in the second draft. Oh, I also watered the ‘garden’ this week.

I was going to tell you that 21 years ago today Neil and I were in Athens on our way to a new life in Greece, rather a year in Greece to see how we got on, as that was the original plan. But…

21 years later, I find myself at my PC wrestling with the government’s tax payment system, and that has knocked all interesting and potentially humorous wind from my sails. I will return to our eleven-day journey to Symi tomorrow, and vent some of that wind, which is now steam. Please excuse me for a paragraph or two, but we’ll all feel better afterwards when I will share some random photos because you don’t want to look at photos of my tax return screen. You can’t anyway. I can’t get into it.

It’s yesterday afternoon and I have just spent a good hour trying to pay my tax and failing. It’s all very well providing an online system, Mr Greek Taxman, but when I can access it one day and not the next, when a friend can access it from her PC and find my ‘needs to be paid’ page, and I can’t, and when I’ve tried everything I can think of with no joy, well, I feel inclined to tell you where to insert your returns.

I shan’t, but I shall wait patiently and try again later, which has been my mantra for the past few days. I’ve tried at four in the morning when the system surely can’t be overloaded with grateful taxpayers clamouring to send you all their hard-earned loot, and I’ve tried at random times through the day – siesta time included – in all manners possible, only to receive the same message about a system error, or an incorrect password when it isn’t incorrect. I managed to get in two days ago with no hassle, but my bill wasn’t ready. Now it allegedly is, I appear to be defeated at the gates every time.

Yes, cookies cleared, add-ins disabled, VPN disabled, and all security put on pause (which is a bit worrying, but you never know), I’ve tried on two browsers, tried doing it standing on my head, copied the username and password direct, copied it via notepad, written it in by hand (played havoc with the screen), typed it, shouted it in two languages, but still, the government clearly do not want my tax payment.

It’s odd. I can’t get into Neil’s either although I could the other day. I have tried on his PC, and that won’t work, yet I was able to look at both a few days ago. Meanwhile, my trusted friend can access it fine, which makes me think it’s an issue on our PCs here, but both of them and randomly? I shall have to either bother my friend to let me in via her magic portal (mine, actually, but on her machine) or speak to my accountant.

Ah well, I will buy myself a cocktail at a certain bar instead, and still come out better off.

Thank you for listening.

Hello and welcome to the week ahead. I was just looking through the photos I took over the weekend (there were only three, it didn’t take long), and thought I’d share them this morning because they sum up what I have recently been about. A corner, dustbins and a view.

The corner is my writing station, an Ikea arrangement that has useful shelves and space for my laptop, and where I can arrange my notes. As you’ll see, it doesn’t allow room for any extras like research books, and in this case, I had to bring in the music stand. I was referring to a book of maps from 1888, a London A to Z, in effect, and there is no space to lay it open. The music stand came in very handy.

If you were wondering what I was writing, it was/is the second part of a new Victorian mystery series. Part one has been out for a week now; a full-length novel set in 1892 concerning a London cabbie and his quest for a better life. Finding a Way is available here.

So far this summer on Symi I’ve come up against various polite enquiries from new friends and old: What do you do? Are you the one that writes the books? What have you been working on? Still writing? There are other versions of the same thing, and I don’t mind any of them, then there’s the: I hear you’re a writer. (Not a question as such but a statement designed to prompt a reply other than a simple ‘Yes.’) There are also comments such as, ‘You have been prolific,’ to which I usually reply, I still am, because writing is my full-time job. By full-time, I mean six to eight our per day, with a long lunch break and time off when I feel like it. Not the full-on 16 + hours a day some people around here put in to make ends meet through the summer, nor the 10-hour days of the labourers and others who work all year round.

When I am not full-time writing in my cosy corner, I try and go for a stroll to stretch the legs and let the mind adjust from fiction world to real – or, more usually, the other way around as I plot as I walk. I tell myself the next chapter in the story and then head home and regurgitate it as a first draft. Sometimes, I wander up the hill as far as I can bear, as I did on Friday…

Other times, I take a shorter walk around the village just to get my steps in, and on other days, I walk as far as the sitting room and collapse on the sofa with a game of ‘Sherlock’ on my tablet. Most afternoons I call down to the bar to see Neil and whoever is there, as a way of taking a break from the house, and on other more productive afternoons, after pottering with words some more, I might set about one of those tasks I was telling you about the other day. Tasks that have waited months or years to get done which, when finally seen to, take no time at all. The other day I cleaned out the saucepan cupboard. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

There is no photo of the cupboard activity because, let’s face it, it’d be pretty dull. Instead, the stray cats who live up the road with the chickens.