A Monday morning ramble

As you know, I’m not going out and about much apart from the occasional walk up to the hill in the morning, the not so occasional visits to the bar in the late afternoon after work, and the necessary trips to Yialos, which tend to be early in the day before the day boats arrive. I was down there on Saturday, early, to collect a package from the bookshop. It turned out to be some music I had ordered less than a week ago. Not bad as it came from England. I’d ordered a copy of Für Elise and Your favourite 50 best classical easy things or similar, for ‘Pianino’, my little piano who I am helping learn to play. (Aka Mozart because, let’s face it, he is rather good.) In the afternoon, I spent about an hour working through the book and going over some of the pieces I used to be able to play about 30 years ago. It’s amazing what your fingers remember, though my technique is somewhat out of the window these days, and needs a complete overhaul. I found I was able to play pieces like Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata reasonable well (up to a point) because I’d learnt to play them when I was in my early 20s, but when I then had a go at something easier from the new book, I was all over the place. I should spend more of my home time at the keyboard doing my scales and Hannon exercises, but then I have so many books to read, let alone the ones I want to write, and then there’s always the distraction of Glee and other Netflix attractions, plus a couple of series of How the Victorians Built Britain and others I’m watching for research.

Anyway… Observations from being out and about on Symi of late. There has been some fun at the bar, where social distancing and safety are the names of the games. Note the rubber glove in the photo below. Before this Yiannis had been serving wine on a shovel – a good-humoured prank, you understand, he and his co-worker, Neil, wear their masks as required, and he’s forever spraying down the chair arms and tables before and after punters, and there is hand-san available on your way to and from the restrooms. The police have been doing their rounds, checking that the bars and tavernas are adhering to the rules.

We had lunch at the Trawler on Saturday, and as it was early, we were the first people to arrive. There was lots of distance between the tables, and yet… The next couple in took the table two away from us, the next party took the one beside us across the wide gap, and the third lot took the table between us and the first, so although there were about 15 other tables available, we ended up in a line of four. Strange how humans do this. It’s like when you’re in the cinema for a wet Wednesday matinee, and there are only ten people in, but they all come and sit in front of you, or just behind as if people can’t exist unless in a group.

But work goes on everywhere, businesses are doing their best to survive, and there are some intrepid tourists about, some behaving better than others, and life ticks along. I think a lot of people are waiting to see what happens in September when the island is popular with northern Europeans. I get the impression businesses are hoping they will have a typical September, though, sadly, I doubt it will be anything like normal nor enough to secure people’s livelihoods and see them through the winter.

On which note, I should stop rambling and get on with one of my projects. There is a Beethoven beast on the piano that needs taming, and it’s not as if I don’t have time to work on it.

Random…

Pleasant

It was a pleasant morning for a walk yesterday, the temperature being 28 degrees at 7.30 as opposed to the 34 + it has been of late. I wandered up the side of the mountain while Neil took off to Nimborio and back.

There was something of a surprise the other day as many people with Greek mobile phones received an alert from the government. The message comes with an unmissable sound, and we don’t hear it very often, so at first, it was a shock. All it was telling us to do was stay safe on the way home from holidays, which was a bit late in my case as I did that months ago, but I reckon it meant the Panagia weekend. I also wondered if it was to prove that Greece is taking the pandemic more seriously than, say, the yUK where things got out of control, and where, rather superciliously, they are now threatening to put Greece on their list. That’s the list of countries you have to quarantine after you’ve come back from. (There has to be a better way to write that, but I can’t think of it right now.) Who knows? Anyway, apart from a rise in cases caused by too many people gathering where they shouldn’t be, an influx of people from abroad and others generally flouting the rules, Greece is still managing things well.

We’ve had day boats and ferries, taxi boats are going out, round the island trips are taking place, I’m sure I saw the Diagoras the other day. The busses are also running their trips to Panormitis, so apart from very few visitors, things are running normally. Masks and distance are the rules. Masks when inside any shop or business (well, any building, really apart from your own home), and distance at all times. It’s not so bad now as people can sit outside cafes in the summer, right up until December sometimes, but when the dark and cold months come, wearing a mask inside while taking your coffee is going to be interesting. Let’s see how many local businesses and people stick to that one, as there are several who are currently not following the rules.

A few Symi beaches

Neil has been receiving lots of praise for the photos he puts up on Facebook after his morning walk and swim. So, I thought I’d put up five images today that show beaches, or where land meets sea. No reason, I just like them, and I’ve got no earth-shattering news for you, so I hoped these would do instead. Have a good day.

Awards, Random Enquiries and Supper

Sunday was an unusual day, or rather, a day with unexpected things in it. We had invited guests for supper in the courtyard, and so shopping was first on the to-do list. That done, Neil set about making his MasterChef inspired desserts, and I checked up on my recipe for vegetarian giovetsi. That’s like a lamb giovetsi without the lamb, but with more of other things in it, and it’s mainly a kritharaki (orzo) dish, and looked pretty straightforward.

With everything planned, we had lunch, Neil went off to work, and I found out I’d won the best screenplay award at the Santorini Film Festival. Well, me and Rebecca who wrote the book on which the screenplay was based. (You can find it here.) One quick siesta later, and I set about the giovetsi, being very organised and arranging everything I needed according to the list of instructions. The dish started off with two tablespoons of olive oil, onions and cinnamon, and continued through ‘set aside, clean skillet and add another two tablespoons of olive oil and gently fry the carrots,’ and onto, ‘meanwhile, take 450 grams of kritharaki and six cups of water…’ I never know how big a cup is, ours vary in size from a polite demitasse to a butch half-pint tea mug, but you know, you do what you can. Seeing how many ingredients were now cooking, semi-cooked or ready to be put together (with yet another two tablespoons of olive oil), I checked the recipe again. I was dealing with a huge mound of stuff, and there was no way it was all going to fit into one ‘large oven dish.’ The recipe was for six people, apparently, more like six families with a craving for olive oil, and I decided to split everything down the middle and bake two. Anyway…

Neil came home and was checking his panna cotta and other inspired desserts, still smartly dressed from work while I was in baggy shorts and nothing else, and sweating like a blacksmith’s bum, when all of a sudden, the doorbell rings. Thinking it would be a quick dispatch, I left my oil heating, the courgettes ready, and dashed to the courtyard to find a very handsome young lady at the door telling me her husband was a film director. That news got around quick, I thought, and a doorstep conversation took place with me half-hiding my toplessness behind the gate. They were looking for someone to speak on a documentary about Covid and faith, or some such, and not seeking a scriptwriter for a million-Euro feature, so I politely declined. I also explained that we had two people coming for a six-family meal in fifty minutes, and agreed to give her my phone number, which I wrote beneath my name.

‘Oh, you’re James?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then who’s Neil? We wanted Neil.’
‘He’s my husband,’ I said, while thinking, Good, he can deal with this, and on cue, he shouted out that my oil was burning. ‘He’s doing something complicated with a pudding,’ I explained and went to fetch him.

Neither of us was willing to be part of a documentary about Symi, Covid and faith, and we politely refused. Apparently, they’d been given his name by a variety of people; one person telling us it was X while another said it was Y, and we don’t mind who. Usually, we’d do what we could to help, but not this time. I’ve had a few enquiries about filming on the island and been asked to take part in TV documentaries before (I was invited to Star News in Athens once for the morning show, to talk about ‘Shocking the Donkeys’, but that was an oxi-oxi from me), but it’s not my thing. My thing was getting that dinner ready, half of which is now to be frozen for a very rainy day, and our supper in the courtyard, which was, I am pleased to say, very pleasant. Neil’s desserts were wonderful and should have won an award. They certainly would have been more interesting in a documentary about pandemics and faith than I would have been, not that they wanted me in the first place.