But what goes on, on Symi, in the winter?
To answer this oft-asked question, here are a few views of what’s going on in the village this week. From these images, you might think ‘not a lot’ but actually… The bus is running up and down on its usual route and winter timetable, there is building work going on (when it’s not raining), people are at work in their shops and at their businesses, the taverna is open and hosting name day parties and other events on top of its usual service, there is live music being played at various venues, the cinema shows films on a Sunday, there are church services and festivals in the village, the harbour and all over the island, and people are also at work on their farms, smallholdings and allotments. So, I suppose there is quite a lot going on.

Fishermen are going out of a morning and bringing their catch back in the afternoon, or late morning, and selling it on the streets and the quayside. The inter-island ferry comes and goes bringing some post and supplies, the catamaran comes in four times per week with some Greek day trippers from Rhodes, and the taxis are running up and down the hill and across the island as needed. The church bells ring, the town hall makes its announcements – the main road has been closed for a couple of days for work – the new jetty is now expanding and they have started excavating for the road link (I think that’s what it is) and there are fitness classes and yoga and other classes going on, including free Greek language lessons organised by the Dimos (Town Hall).

Back up here in the village, we’re getting on with our usual day to day, I’m almost done on draft five of my next book and thinking about a cover design. It will still be a while as it has to be laid out and made ready, finally proofed (each time I go through I still find odd typos that three readers and I so far have also missed), Neil is working on his course, we are saving as much as we can for the year ahead – travel to the yUK for Niel’s exam and a wedding, and our own celebration in September. I will soon have to start arranging our annual health MOT in Rhodes, get my passport renewed (before December) and, as soon as the book arrives, start teaching myself the concertina – don’t hold your breath for sea shanties anytime soon; it’s not as easy as it looks.

So, when people ask, ‘What do you do in the winter on Symi?’ there are a few answers for you. About the only things we don’t do is sit in the sun or go swimming but then I don’t do that much in the summer either. We do spend a lot of time cleaning up the courtyard after downpours and we still have the vine and a fig tree to cut back before they start growing again. The inside of the house could do with a coat of paint and a spring clean throughout (I must remember wher I left the vacuum cleaner) and then there’s always the next story to write.

Putting your feet up for the six months of the winter season? I don’t think so.

Sunday morning this ‘n’ that
Warning! This post contains a graphic image.

I was sitting at my desk on Sunday morning, trying to think of something interesting to write about, when it started raining. It was a warm morning and so I thought I would open up my shutters for the first time in days and see what was happening with the view. I found this:

Which just goes to show, it’s always worth opening your eyes even in bad weather. I nipped up onto the roof in my slippers and in only three layers and took a couple more shots from the roof. I say only three layers (t-shirt, thin jumper, sweatshirt, as recently I’ve been wearing four, including a woollen jumper over the top of everything else and then adding the fifth layer, a blanket, when watching television in the evenings. It was much warmer on Sunday than it had been of late. The weather is now set for cloudy, wet and warm (15 or 16) through the week ahead. But, back to the things of interest.

Cigarette packets. Even here in Greece ‘they’ (whoever the ubiquitous ‘they’ are) are putting images on cigarette packets, to deter smokers from buying them I guess. This is a bit naughty (what I am about to write, not the habit of putting shocking images on packets), but I can’t help feeling that if one collected enough of these things, one could start a game of trumps.

“I have ‘Grieving family’ and I play that against your ‘Tracheotomy.'”
“Ah-ha!” the opponent plays a triumphant hand. “I trump you with my ‘Smoking baby.’ See, it has a cigarette instead of a dummy.”
Player one considers this and decides he has the ultimate hand. He lays down the image below… “And I trump all with this image of Nigel Farage.”

And there was great rejoicing throughout the land.

I shall say no more on that subject, either Trump or Farage, suffice to say, one can always wishfully think.

I had to get that piece of satire out of my system. Please do excuse me. Normal service is now being resumed.

Irish passport? Well, the news on that front is that there is a new application form on its way back. Apparently (and this will be of interest to anyone else in the locale who is considering a new Irish passport application), the KEP office at the town hall are not included in the list of approved signatures on the application. It must be an accountant (who ran screaming when we asked him to witness and sign), a doctor, a chandler, candlestick maker or a chocolate beer specialist – or something. We’re assuming that everything else is okay, as the email from the very helpful lady in Athens didn’t suggest anything else was amiss and so, when it arrives, it will take a few minutes to fill it out and then Neil will take a trip to the doctor, or whoever else is on the list and have it witnessed again (I am sure it said something about council officials/local authority officers; perhaps this is different because this is a first-time application). Should only hold up the process by a week or so, now Christmas is over, and there’s no great rush.

And, by the way, there is such a job as a chocolate beer specialist. I found an image of one, a man named Jim Koch. If you ask me, he has the best job in the world, and a pretty fab name as well. I think I am going to be him.

My Sunday morning ramble is in danger or rambling over the hills and far away, in search of the rainbow perhaps, so I will close and head off into the week. A week that, so far, has not very much in the diary. The usual typing, aerobics for Neil, I must go down to the bank and apply pressure to the ATM to squeeze out the rent, I have ‘The Saddling’ draft five to re-check, I am hopping my ‘How to play the concertina’ book arrives and I can start on that, some singing practice (not for me, I just tinkle the plastics (no ivory on my piano, note)), perhaps a walk with new camera – and thank you for all the nice comments about my photos these days – and dinner at the taverna tonight as a treat. I’ll let you get on now and I really do apologise for the image of Farage in a hospital bed. Or do I?

Symi Saturday photos
First: I had to share this with you as it made me laugh. You may know about these ‘inspirational’ quotes and images that people put up on Facebook; if you are a Facebook user you can’t avoid them. Well, I saw one yesterday that made me laugh. Actually, it was the reply that made me laugh, the quote was quite sensible:

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
Lao Tzu

Reply: What about if you are living in Battersea?

You could replace Battersea with anywhere I guess, but I thought it was funny.

Anyway, moving on… I have a few Symi Saturday photos for you today, showing some more that I took recently on the new camera. If I can, I will get out and about this weekend and get some more but I’m right into some editing of ‘The Saddling’ at the moment and it’s going so well I want to stick with it until it’s done. Mind you, we have been invited to a games party on Sunday so it will have to be put on hold for that. A games party isn’t as dodgy as it sounds, it’s mainly quizzes and mezethes, drinks and ‘I knew that!’ for a few hours with friends, and I am really looking forward to it. It’s one of those ‘What do you do on Symi in the winter?’ things: games parties, social evenings or afternoons, walks with the camera, writing…

So, here are the photos and here’s wishing you a good weekend wherever you are.

Symi playing at ‘home’?
A quick follow-on from yesterday’s post with a bit of an update. If you want to help the Symi under 12 football team realise their dream of playing in a European tournament in the UK later this year, see the post for yesterday (bellow). What I didn’t include was the link to the organisation that arranges these team and friend building sports tours. So, you can find more info here: https://www.sports-tours.co.uk/ I just read that the guys may end up at Camber Sands, near where I grew up and near where my brother still lives at Dungeness – how spooky is that? If they get the funds together they will, in my case, be playing at ‘home’, as it were.

What’s also rather spooky, and completely off topic, are the noises Jack has been making these past few days. He’s been very unsettled, might be the weather. When not sleeping or concentrating hard on what’s in his food bowl, he has been wandering around the courtyard and house shouting at nothing in particular. Making the most amazing noises that sound like he is in distress but, apart from his bleeding ears and a bit of fur loss (being treated with athlete’s foot cream again) he’s quite fit and healthy. I often wonder if the house has nomadic ghosts that only he can see and he’s shouting at them.

In Symi news, such that I’ve noticed, there’s a film showing at the cinema club at Mandeio and that seems back to its normal Sunday afternoon/evening routine; Neil has been attending the aerobics classes; the boats have been coming and going despite some bad weather, and we have escaped the snow that has debilitated many places across the country recently. It’s actually quite warm today, Thursday, at around 10 or more degrees and it is, once again, colder inside the house than it is outside.

As you can see, it’s a bit of a no-news day today as I spent yesterday at home with my books and things. I’ve moved on from reading about great mountaineering disasters to a biography of Laurence Olivier while keeping one eye on what’s on Netflix and starting on ‘The Hollow Crown’ (thanks mother) which is a very good way of understanding Shakespeare, apart from anything else. I wish we’d had such things when at school ‘studying’ Henry IV part two, I would have understood what was going on much more easily than I did. Luckily, for my O Level, we had a film version of Great Expectations on the TV the night before the exam and I watched that. Well, it saved reading the book and I still got a B for English Lit.

Anyway, enough of this no-news, I’m off to check where the cat might have been bleeding and get some veg on for lunch. Oh, the excitement of the winter on Symi.

Symi football, under 12
I’ve had a few requests over the past few years to talk more about football. These people clearly don’t know me. It’s not a subject I know much about or take much of an interest in. Not until I hear stories of how a lad from Rhodes has been selected to play with a very big London football trainee camp, and also had several other offers and callings from other top teams and we aren’t talking Maidstone United here, we’re talking Arsenal or something. These kinds of stories spark my interest as it’s good to hear of local boys and girls getting a chance in life. And that’s what today’s post is all about (with unrelated images from the roof).

Symi has a few football teams. (For exact details talk to someone in the know, not me.) One of them is the under 12s team who regularly play against other islands here and on Rhodes and, I assume, on those other islands. Well now, they have an opportunity to take part in an international junior football competition in London (London, UK, for our American readers) later this year. The trouble is, of course, getting them there.

A page has been set up on Facebook to advertise the fundraising that the team are now doing. There is a specific organisation set up for this, so it’s all bone fide, and the money will go towards the boys’ flights and travel. Parents and other interested parties will have to pay for themselves, if they can and these days, in Greece, a lot of folk don’t have enough for heating, let along foreign travel. So, the news today is: you can help get our team there by making a donation either into a bank or via PayPal. The money will be accounted for and used for travel and the boys will have a once in a lifetime opportunity to play their game abroad, in London as it happens. An invaluable experience in all respects, I am sure you will agree.

For more information you can find the team’s fundraising info on this page: https://www.facebook.com/SYMIAOSTOLONDON/

If you are not a Facebook user, here is what that site says – in part –

If you would like to donate to this cause a bank account has been set up especially for this purpose under the name of our secretary at Alpha bank;
Dawn Stirrup-Karagiannis
IBAN: GR2401407910791002101045329 BIC: CRBAGRAA

And: A paypal account has also been created purely for fundraising purposes for this cause and is linked to the above account, for those of you perhaps out of the country. We sincerely appreciate all help received, however big or small. https://www.paypal.me/symiAOStolondon

That’s my news today and that’s the appeal. I don’t have any of my own photos of the team so I’ve pulled this one of the Facebook page, so you can see who you might be helping with their opportunity of a lifetime. Thank you.