Just sitting here yesterday morning and I saw the Poseidon going out, presumably on its sea trials after its winter maintenance. The seas looked a bit windy, not so much rough as being blown about by the wind across the surface.

The same wind, form the north by the feel of it, was whistling in under my window next to the desk and cooling the fingers somewhat. It was also letting itself in uninvited through the sitting room windows, so shutters were shut and battened down against rattling.

The IKA folk are rumoured to be, or have been, or might have been, or were, on the island in the past few days. This usually sets off a flurry of mild panic from Harani to Horio, and if this is true, then it’s one of the earliest visits I can recall. They come, primarily, to make sure that workers are being employed legally and are being looked after. It is their job, I am told, to protect the employees, and to be strict with the employers. Usually they are around slightly later in the season, there must be a load of folk just starting work, helping get paces ready and not doing very much but still ‘at work’ who have not yet had time to get all their paperwork in place.

You might remember from last year that my paper trail for my unnecessary (under the EU) work permit that accompanies my (not necessary) resident’s permit, was a bit of a complicated affair. It involved a meeting with the accountant, a visit to the bank to pay a small fee and get a certificate to say I’d paid said small fee (the whole process probably costing more than the small, fee I paid), a trip to the police station to collect forms that looked like they’d been run off on a Gestetner Cyclograph device in 1948, a trip back to the village to pass on a form for the boss to fill out, a trip back to the police station to find no one home, a return journey a day later to hand in forms and fill out two more, different from each other but with the same info on it, and then hand it all in to a completely disinterested officer who wanted to know what I wanted. So I told him for the third time. He put the papers away and no more was said on the matter. No card, no evidence, just a waste of time.

Now though it gets better, or so rumour would have it. (Yiannis is checking with KEP and everyone else today.) Now you have to go to a hospital or other medical centre and get a chest X-ray done – which you used to have to do – and also do a… well, a test on yesterday’s dinner, if you see what I mean. How this is achieved is still a mystery but as soon as I hear I will let you know. So, Neil, who is working on IKA this year, will soon be off to Rhodes to have his… well, never mind the details. But the point is, IKA are here early and I bet a lot of others have still not gone through all these hoops.

Anyway, enough of those kind of details. Back to the typewriter.

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Mornings never seem to have enough time in them for me, even if I get up at 5.30 there is still too much to do at the end of the morning. I am one of those people who works best in the mornings and hardly at all in the afternoon.

So, setting the alarm for six now gives me an extra half an hour to get things done. It still doesn’t always work out though, and today (yesterday as you read this) I am hurrying off a blog so that I can get ahead of myself for tomorrow. An hour getting ready to, and then exercising, is fine, but then another half hour given over to a quick and, let’s face it, often too hurried blog, eats in to the rest of my day. So, blog today, time tomorrow. When the weather is warmer we’ll be up at 5.30 some days in order to get in the sea at 6.00.

As one of my characters in ‘Straight Swap; puts it, when talking about an early start: ‘It is far too early for this time of day.’

And on the ‘Straight Swap’ front, I have been ploughing on in the afternoons – when I can actually get some work done – and have now reached 35,000 words and the end of ‘act one’ as it would be called if it were a film. Let’s say roughly a quarter of the way through a first draft. At this rate it will be 140,000 words long – but that’s okay, I can cut it down in draft two.

Something I did notice about my titles is that they are not always suitable for abbreviating. ‘Symi 85600’ is fine (S8, sounds rather trendy), ‘Carry on up the Kali Strata works, roughly (COUTKS, sounds almost like a bank) and ‘The Judas Inheritance’ as TJI sounds like a TV show at the end of the week. But I will have to be careful with ‘Straight Swap’ (you can work it out for yourself) and we shan’t even think about ‘Shocking The Donkeys.’

And on the subject of books, I need a cover for LH (Lonely House) and I wonder if any of my readers were book cover designers who do that work American lawyers do, you know, where they do it for free? No, seriously, if there are any designers out there who would be interested in giving me a quote for a book cover, please drop me a line – the email’s at the bottom of the main page here, under Contact, or you can PM me through FB. I have ideas. I can send an outline of the book, or even the MS if you don’t mind reading it on a PC or MAC. Thank you!

That’s enough abbreviations for one day. Hope you enjoy the pics today – do you prefer them bigger like yesterday, or smaller around the text like today? You can enlarge them by clicking on them. Any strong thoughts LMK. (Let me know.)

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Keeping it simple this morning and sharing five Symi photos, taken by Neil over the past few days. You will see they are page-fitting size again. A few people have said they like this format, so I thought I’d employ it from time to time. If you follow Facebook you might like to follow the Neil Gosling Photography page. You will always find interesting images there and not just from Symi, but from his travels too. So today’s first photo:

You can wend your way up from Yialos by several routes. From the bottom of the Kali Strata, head upwards and then take the first set of side-steps up to your right and zigzag up; it looks daunting, it is at times, but you find great views. And some chickens. Lots of chickens. Oh, and plants:

On this ‘Graham’, if you look closely, you can see Trevor the spider eating poor old Amos the fly. ‘When he said come for lunch,’ said Amos in his last interview, ‘I didn’t think he meant…’

As you know, I am not a plant person. I leave all that to the experts: Adriana (see her blog) and Lyndon (see his blog).

Some of the island’s church are open at all times, others are locked. You can try the doors but don’t force them. They say not to use flash when photographing frescoes (though I think that might be to do with chemicals, from the old days?) and of course, be respectful. I always drop a coin or two in the box though if I light a candle, I blow it out before I leave. I’m a bit ‘health & safety’ in that respect.

And here we have the man himself being Stig of the Dump, a book I remember fondly from a few years back. We found this chair in the quarry on our way back from a walk.

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Just back from the Monday morning walk/jog up the hill and back, Neil’s exercising in the courtyard, and I am eager to get to the typewriter, not that I own one. Today it’s that Monday morning feeling of getting back to work after a weekend that seemed to last forever.

It started on Saturday morning with me being able to do some work on the comedy novel, and then us heading down to Yialos to find some blank DVDs, and ink for the printer. That ended up with a light lunch at Mereklis, sitting in the sun and staying far too long, before walking back up the hill. Neil went to work and then, at five, we headed down to Pedi where we had been invited for ‘nibbles;’ and drinks.

Well, if that’s nibbles, next time I’m going for dinner! A wonderful spread and with great company. The boys came with us and were a joy to have around. On the way back up the hill we were singing like the Von Trapp family, an assortment of country songs and songs from shows. The highlight? Harry, aged seven, leading the way, then stopping, turning around and saying, ‘Mummy, you know, sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.’

Three adults in stitches all the way up the hill and two boys asking what’s so funny? A couple of glasses at Rainbow on the way home and, hey presto! It’s Sunday. I was going to prepare a blog post so I didn’t have to do it this morning, but I was, once again, able to get back to ‘Straight Swap’, the comedy novel set in my home town. Before I knew it, it was lunch time and before I knew that was done, it was time to go to a barbeque (it was a light lunch of salad). Again, great company, great views, two well behaved young men (and Neil) and another great spread.

This morning then, starts with exercise, then typing, and later today, a tap dance rehearsal. The show is two weeks away now so it’s about time I learned which bit comes where – and hunted out a suitable costume. And on that note, I am going to pour a coffee, post this up and then settle into the start of a whole new week. Have a good one.

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I left you overnight at the small church of Ag Raphael. It was here, while on our healthy, afternoon walk, that we were invited in to take photos and join the name day festivities. We celebrated our health-walk with a beer and donuts. Actually, we didn’t eat the donuts there, we took them home, but we did have a souvlaki. It is rude not to. We also took some photos inside and around the church. Here are a few:

Back to the Symi walk and, slightly lightheaded, what you do is this: You can looks one way and see the other side of the island, across the main road and towards Ag Michaelis Roukouniotis…

… and you can look the other way towards Symi harbour. Looking that way, with the church on your right, you head down the semi-made up road a way.

Keep an eye out to your left where you will, after a short distance, see red marks and arrows that apparently point to nothing in particular. Look more closely and you see you’re on an old calderimi, a ‘donkey path.’ From here on it’s easy.

All you do now is walk, very carefully, downhill following this old path. There’ also a water pipe at one point, but don’t follow that all the way as it has business elsewhere. Follow the track past the copse, zigzag down and you will, eventually come to a gate by a ruined house. Through there and the path is more made up, but still uneven. But follow that all the way and you will, eventually, come out at the back of the harbour at the Grace Hotel.

From then on it’s easy enough to find your favourites Symi bar, or taverna, or coffee shop or find your way home. This walk took us two hours from home to harbour, but we did stop at the church for about 20 minutes and we don’t amble, we kind of hurry-walk, especially between one beer and another.

That’s it! Have a good weekend! (Normal sized photos will be back next week, I was just seeing how they looked in this kind of format post. Remember you can click one and you should then be able to run a slideshow of all of them in the open window.)

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