Clean Monday was a bit of a wash-out for most, though I am sure everyone did what they could and had a good time. Remember, ‘If you can’t do what you want to then you do the things you can.’

We worked at home in the morning, and then went to the Harry house for a rather non-Clean Monday indoor barbeque complete with quizzes and regular boat check-ups. It’s become something of a pastime around here, clicking back to your tablet to check on the Live Ships app to see where the Blue Star Diagoras is and follow its trail as it hangs about off Rhodes waiting for the wind and swell to die down. It did though call into Symi yesterday on its way back to Athens. Let’s hope it got there in time to turn around and head back here tomorrow.

And on that note: no sign of the new furniture as yet, though there may be by the time this gets auto-posted on Wednesday morning. In case you were wondering: when you order from Ikea.gr you can get a text message saying when your things have left the warehouse. Then you might get an email to say they are on their way. We (or rather Jenine who is dealing with it) got a message to say things had been delivered, but that actually means delivered to the courier, I guess. So they could be sat at Piraeus still, waiting for the truck to be filled so it can be dispatched. They could then have been on last Tuesday’s boat that never was, and not actually been unloaded until last night. We shall never really know. But when the company says delivery has been made, it doesn’t necessarily mean delivered to you.

We had a similar courier problem just before Christmas when Neil’s order didn’t arrive even though the courier headquarters told us it was on Symi. We asked all the courier agents we could think of, and the postman, and never did find the delivery. Not until Neil had asked, in mid January, for his money back and the shop he bought the things from tracked down the courier agent on Symi who had had the package since well before Christmas but had not told anyone. And so it goes on: the joys of having deliveries made to Symi. I think there’s a section about this in ‘Symi 85600’ or ‘Carry On Up The Kali Strata.’ (See the links on the right and order copies if you’ve not got one already.)

And on the book news front: we are still editing and preparing ‘Lonely House’, my next horror novel to come from RC Publications – due out around March or April.

Now that I have my new ‘office’ more or less set up and am getting used to it, I can see that it’s going to be so much easier to be disciplined in this new house. I don’t mean told off or given the slipper, I mean self-disciplined. Leaving the living quarters part of the house and entering the ‘office’ side gives you a feeling of actually going out to work, rather than working from home. There are fewer distractions, with only the view of Yialos and Nimos to distract me from my tasks. So hopefully, soon, when it’s slightly warmer, I will get back into the coursework I want to do and the writing I want to do and put down another novel of some description ready for Christmas sales. Perhaps.

First though, I have shopping to do and an enthusiastically filled cat litter tray to empty. Ah, the life of a novelist eh!

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The boat finally came in and, I imagine, some folk arrived, some managed to get away, deliveries have been made and there should now be things in the shops.

That was Sunday afternoon, it’s now Monday and the boat is due back again, from Rhodes, this afternoon, or evening. And it might be bringing our furniture with it, or that might have arrived last night. As I write this I have no idea and no further updates. But I can tell you that Monday dawned cloudy and wet, and slightly warmer than of late. It started raining during the night, and I was woken up a few times by new sounds – sounds of the new house that I am not yet familiar with: rain on the roof, drips from gutters and so on.

It’s also Clean Mondays today (yesterday as you read this), but not the weather for having barbeques, as we had planned, or flying kites, not this year. No traditional picnics unless things improve considerably this afternoon, which looks unlikely.

And so, instead, I am writing up a quick post and then getting ready for an indoor BBQ at Jenine’s house, while looking down onto a gunmetal grey sea and listening to the gutters still dripping outside and the air conditioning blowing out a little warmth from above me. If you’ve been following our house move then you might like to know that we have dropped the keys to the old house back with the owner, via Lefteris at the bar as Lefteris of the keys was taking deliveries from the boat, and so we are now well and truly moved – apart from the furniture which may or may not be on the island. If it is, I hope it is somewhere dry…!

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And the usual Symi Dream blog is all about cats and weather – well, maybe with some stuff about writing and living on Symi. Today it’s about nothing in particular, except cats and weather, as I do a quick Sunday morning catch-up before heading off to hang pictures, put some more things away, do some more housework and go shopping for a barbeque which may or may not happening tomorrow.

You may have heard about the problems we had with boats and wind and how the man now known as ‘Captain Kotopoulo’ (Captain Chicken) decided not to stop on Symi on Friday evening because someone here told him the weather was giving ‘cyclone conditions’ on Symi, when in fact it was a meagre force five dropping to four, with very low swell. (I sound like the shipping forecast.) Well, instead of calling in, he turfed 120 Symi-bound people off the boat, leaving them stranded for another night on Rhodes. (There had been no boat to Symi since Tuesday, and some of those trying to get here had left Athens on Tuesday morning and had still not arrived.)

Anyway, the Dodecanisos came in on Saturday morning, and the Blue Star is due to put in an extra run today (Sunday) and call back in later this morning and again tomorrow. Mind you, the forecast now is for a force seven on Monday so, unless Captain K feels adventurous, there may not be another big boat in until Wednesday… And so it goes on. It’s what you have to expect from Symi at this time of year, or any remote and small island with a difficult harbour to dock at. The new one landing jetty coming on though, and I heard that most of the underwater work is now done, so we should soon start seeing something concrete down there, quite literally. Hopefully, when it’s done, the boat won’t have any trouble docking.

And so, to the house. Well, we’re all in now apart from the new furniture and fridge freezer which, I assume, have been ship-bound since being loaded in Piraeus on Tuesday morning. If it is on the boat then it’s been to Rhodes, hung around there for a day or so and then been back to Athens, and is now, on Sunday, heading back down again. Let’s hope it’s a) on the boat and b) the boat lands and c) gets unloaded and d) everything is in one piece. (Well, it’s from Ikea, so it will be in many pieces, but you know what I mean.)With Monday being a bank holiday here (Clean Monday, the start of Lent) we are not expecting to hear anything until at least Tuesday. Meanwhile we continue to use the marble kitchen shelf as the fridge, sit on two director’s chairs in a rather big and empty sitting room and dress ourselves from ruck sacks and plastic bags.

Jack has been settling in. He loves it that he is allowed to sleep in the bedroom at night (until he is 100% confident with outside), and he has even adjusted to his litter tray, which is a bit noisy and smelly at his usual ‘go’ time, which is around five in the morning, but which will, eventually, end up outside. So, here’s wishing you a good week, and watch this space for more ‘un-put-downable’ boat, furniture and weather news.

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One of the things you need to consider, when considering a move to Symi, is how much of a rush you might be in. We go on a lot about the weather and boats around here and there is a very good reason for that.

Imagine if you lived in Middle-Marsh, twenty miles from the nearest town, with only two buses per week, no car, no taxi service and no way of getting to or from your idyllic village if the bus didn’t run. And imagine if the bus didn’t run when it was raining. Well, that’s a bit like being here on Symi, except it’s a boat not a bus, and it’s wind not rain. And that’s what we’ve been suffering from this week in particular: high winds.

And not just us (at least we didn’t have snow as they did on other islands). The weather was so bad it stopped the boat from docking at several places on its way down from Piraeus, including Rhodes. And that meant that some people, going from Athens to Rhodes, were stuck on the ship from Tuesday morning until sometimes on Thursday afternoon, in rough seas. Similarly, some people who popped over to Rhodes for a day or two ended up staying a week as, if I remember correctly, the last boat into – or out of – Symi was last Tuesday. (I’m writing this on Friday and the Blue Star is due back tonight.)

At least I am hoping it comes in to night as there are people who have already missed flights and who were due to leave on Wednesday to get back to the UK. Which is what I meant about being in a hurry. Sometimes you can’t be. It was one of the things we discussed when deciding to live here permanently: if there’s an emergency in the UK, we may not be able to get there straight away. When going on a holiday, where a flight from Rhodes is involved, we always go at least one, if not two, days early and add two days in Rhodes onto our break, just to be sure of catching the plane. Expensive, yes, but that’s the choice we made.

So, enough of this, the wind has dropped slightly and I am able to open my office shutters and share the view for the first time. After getting this post ready I am going to find a long ladder and something to fill in a hole in the ox eye window in the sitting room. With a curtain up, shutters closed and heaters blasting, it was still only around five degrees in there last night thanks to a break in the ox eye glass.

Oh, and then I am going to see if Jack has found his litter tray yet. He has been in the house since Wednesday afternoon and has not yet ‘been.’ He’s shouted at everything, of course, he’s had a look around the roof, he’s been shown his litter tray (but after 12 years of never using one I am not surprised he has no idea what I am showing him) and he has met the pregnant female cat who sits outside our door each day. So, hopefully, by the end of the weekend, he would have settled down and ‘been’ and in the right place too!

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First blog from the new house and we are still not quite ‘in’ but we are getting there.

It’s been a tiring week, but the start of the process was made really easy thanks to Dora and The Symi Estate Agent who found the housed and dealt with all the tenancy matters and other things that needed sorting out; a wonderful job and thank you! http://www.thesymiestateagent.com/

And then things were made easier still by the equally as fabulous Jenine who has cleaned everything even if it didn’t need cleaning, and who has been unpacking as well as feeding us, looking after Sam who’s not been well, and keeping Harry down to medium-speed mode. Harry has also been helping when not at school.

We had three strong guys helping us yesterday (Wednesday) and they are coming back tonight to finish off the last heavy things, the cooker, table, chest of drawers etc. And then, when that’s done, we’re going to see if we can get Jack installed. I went back to the house this morning (Thursday) to collect a few bits and he was there, alone in the middle of an empty room looking slightly bewildered. But he is fine and he’ll get here later today, as long as we can get him in his box. We’re waiting until everything else is in so we don’t have to have the courtyard doors open onto the road, in case he escapes. So, all being well, we should be 100% ‘in’ at the end of today.

And then we have to get some basic things seen to, like getting some curtains up to keep out the drafts. The house is open-plan and faces north and we must be in the middle of the coldest February in the coldest, wettest winter since we’ve lived here. Wednesday was blowing a gale so much that the Blue Star didn’t even bother trying to dock, it just went straight on past to Rhodes and spent a lot of the day going up and down the coast. I think it’s still there –Thursday at 9.40.

I would show you the view from the desk, but the shutters are closed against the biting wind. Even with the air conditioning heating thing going (how posh!) my fingers have still not warmed up. It was the same at the old house but at least this room is heated. You will get a view as soon as it’s warm or safe enough to open the shutters.

So, off down to Yialos this morning to source cat litter and a tray for the Alarm Cat’s first night/day inside the house before we let him out to explore. I’m keeping half an eye on the news and watching the ‘Grexit’ with vague interest, and my mate in Britain is sending me updates and his journalistic thoughts regularly. The guys in the taverna last night (still not got the food and cooker sorted in the house) were laughing about it all. They were also serving us Noufris’ ‘famous’ Viagra dip, which sounds horrible but which was actually very nice. Pestrami, feta, chili, something else, all mixed up together. No idea why it’s called Viagra dip.

Anyhow, must get on. Loads of unpacking needs doing, and we still haven’t finished off in the old house yet. May blog tomorrow or Saturday, probably won’t be back to normal until Monday though. We’ll see.

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