The basics of English grammar
Yes, a quick grammar lesson today, the start of a new series of occasional posts about the usage and abusage of the English language. Well, this is a writer’s blog as much as a blog about living on Symi, and you may find it interesting and useful. (And there are some nice photos of Symi.)

I recently bought myself a copy of ‘The Elements of Style’ by Strunk and White. You may know if it, it’s an English grammar and usage book that every writer should have a copy of. Even if you are not a writer, it is interesting and goes a long way to helping folk like me know where to put a comma or a semicolon, and all that stuff. Here are a few examples, ‘translated’ by me and interspersed with some local photos apropos nothing other than keeping you in the image-loop with Symi. By the way, I don’t say that just because I have this book means I have yet stashed all the rules under my belt. I am still working on it. (Maybe that should have been a semicolon there not a full stop…?) And of course, most of the folk reading this will know these things, but you might like to pass this post on to others who you feel could do with a bit of a brush-up.

Lesson one – and a lot of Facebook and forum readers could do with paying attention here.
Possessive: adding the apostrophe to make something belong to someone. Here’s a simple example:

The book belongs to Ben; therefore, it is Ben’s book. (See what I did there? Ben’s = belongs to.) Not, The book belongs to Bens as that would be plural, many Bens, and you would need to add ‘the’ before Bens to make any sense of it at all.

So what if the name or noun (thing) ends in an s, as in Collins? Well, according to my new book we should all write Collins’s, though there are exceptions with names ending in -is and -es. So I could write, James’ book but should write Collins’s book. I must admit it, I usually don’t bother with that and would write. Collins’ without the extras s, that’s either laziness or a more modern exception than when the book was first written (1950s I think, though mine is the 4^th Edition, 2000).

However, if the word simply doesn’t sound right, the book examples “Moses’ laws”, the book suggests that you restructure the sentence and write, the laws of Moses, which does sound a lot better on the ear. And there are other exceptions, such as, For conscience’ sake – again it would not sound correct to write or say, ‘For conscience’s sake.’ But as many people on Facebook at al don’t seem to have a grammar conscience it’s unlikely they will bother with that one.

A quick look at pronoun rules. (Pronouns replace nouns (things/names etc.) such as I, you, she, it, his. Pronominal possessives have no apostrophe even though they are possessive. Say what? Well, that simply means that Hers, Its, Theirs, Yours, are not written Her’s, It‘s, Their’s and Your’s; how silly would that be? Not very silly according to millions of people who should know the difference between its and it’s, another very common error when digging around your contractions and pronominals.

And what that means, basically, is that when you write Its, the thing you are talking about, though possessive, has no apostrophe: “Symi is warm in the summer, its summer months are hot.”

As opposed to it’s which is a contraction (shortened version) of the verb it is.
This is clearly wrong: “Symi is warm in the summer, it is summer months are hot.” Which makes no sense when you read it like that. So, if you are unsure if it’s its or it’s, simply say the sentence out loud in full (uncontracted) and you should hear which is correct. “It is summer in July.” Yup, can’t fault that. “Its summer in July.” Suggests that there is more to come as we are talking about something’s summer: “Symi is warm, its summer in July is hot.” Correct, ten out of ten!

“When visiting Symi, it’s a clever man who takes advantage of its summer.”

That’s page one of the book, and now you know all about possessives. In days to come I’ll knock out some other simple grammar rules so you no longer have to suffer the indignity of being pulled over by the grammar police on social media and other places. (I just hope I’ve not made any typos here. I am sure if I have, someone will let me know.)

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Monday morning and it’s a bit rough and windy out there, but not that cold. The news of the weekend is that Jack came home so we have had our 6.00 a.m. alarm calls reinstated. No idea where he’s been or what he was doing but he looked fine and was in fine voice when we saw him in front of the house on Saturday. I now have to go back to sleeping with earplugs in.

Here are some shots from Friday/Saturday. Firstly, continuing our theme of things in trees, here’s a kitten in a vine.

As you can see, down in Yialos the Fish market is being painted up in its usual green. You do see some fishermen here selling their catches on the stone slabs. You also see them around the edge of the harbour with their polystyrene boxes of ice and fish, swiping away the wasps, as they sit with their weighing scales

waiting for customers.

There’s a flock of pigeons down in the harbour as well. From up here in the village you can often see them sweep across the sea, low down, as if they were someone’s flock of racing birds set free for daily exercise. They were feeding on some grains thrown down for them by the supermarket guys when we passed.

And here’s a shot of Harani, the island’s boat yard (one of them). As you can see, we had those kinds of clouds that look like they belong behind a galleon sailing through high seas in a painting-by-numbers kit; shades of grey and blue, heavy but not dark. It pretty much looks like this on Monday morning as well. Looking down below I can see the surface of the sea being blown along, not only in ripples but also in spray.

And then, finally before I get on with Monday, a cat with all the mod cons. It’s easy to take a snooze when you can rest assured that everything is in its place: the air-con, the sunshine and, most importantly, the Catellite TV. Have a good week.

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Saturday Symi Photos
We’ve not had a set of photos for a while so here are some that Neil took on a walk around the village the other day. Now then, there’s a problem with our photo presentation plug-in, inside the WordPress set-up, that means you can’t, at the moment, open these and run a slideshow. I’m not sure why this has happened by we’re looking into it. The images you see here are resized anyway so they don’t get any bigger, but you’ll have to bear with us while we try and arrange for normal service to be resumed. Meanwhile, enjoy the browse down.

News of the various writing projects I’m tinkering with: I am now half way through a rough draft of ‘Shocking the Donkeys’, the comedy/drama about Greece’s first gay civil partnership (made up) that is actually a screenplay. I am turning that script into a book, and it’s an interesting exercise. It’s not going to be a standard novel, in fact, there should be nothing standard about a novel, else it would not be novel, the adjective that gives its name to the noun. For a novel to be a novel it needs to be novel. This one is. Not in story construction – it’s a classic four act film progression, but in the way the story is told as a book. So far it’s all rather fast, with brief scenes cutting from one place to another. That would look fine on screen, but how it will read when I have re-drafted it later remains to be seen.

I intend to do the final draft of this in early June when I should be on Tilos again for a week, the same as last year. There, away from the distractions of home, I was able to bash out quite a few thousand words of ‘Straight Swap’ so this year I hope to have the second draft of ‘Donkeys’ ready to take with me so I can fine tune it and have it ready for proof readers and editor by, at the latest, the end of June.

‘Straight Swap’ may now be titled ‘Remotely’ for reasons that will become obvious if you ever read it. I am working through the edits on the final draft and hope to have that ready for the editor by the end of this month. He, the editor, meanwhile is dealing with a crisis at the Berlin Film Festival, so that may delay things slightly. The cover designer is also working in the background and I aim to have this book ready for publication in a couple of months’ time. And, while doing all of that, I have two other ideas on the go and that short story to finish, the one I started last week about ‘Throwing the Stocking.’ But that’s really an exercise and just a bit of fun.

So, there’s plenty going on up at our hose at the moment what with writing, going for photo walks, plotting and thinking up ideas for projects I’d like to write. Which all means I had better get on. Have a good weekend.

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Thursday morning on Symi: cloudy and with a bit of rain about. Not enough to boost the sterna water supply as yet. The sea is grey and the wind calm.

A few more photos from around the village today. More cats being fed and looked after – still no sign of Jack though. Thanks for all your messages about the star of the blog, but there is still no news about where he might be. He’s been away since last Friday now and is not at our old house. We and others have been looking for him around the area, and the neighbours there know him and will report if he is seen. So, still a mystery but not un-cat like behaviour. He is nearly 14, though seemed in perfect health as usual, but you never know…

That aside, and as there is nothing we can do, things tick over up here in the village. The name day of Haralambos was celebrated on Wednesday and this was, I think, the first year we’ve not made it to church in the morning. This was due to the tree-felling appointment, and we’ve still to take the old branches away to the bins, something we will do bit by bit when we go to feed the cats. Now we can see the harbour more clearly, at least for a while, until it grows back. Around the village there are restoration and building works taking place; a house two doors down from us is being done up, there are various other projects on the go and the sound of cement mixers and donkey hooves mingle in the lanes.

It’s definitely a quiet time here on the island, as February is usually the darkest, coldest month that, ironically, feels longer than most other months. I guess the other extreme might be August which feels lengthy as it’s often hard work. Temperatures of 40 degrees feel so far away on days like today when, though not cold, it’s still only around 15, at the moment. Sometimes you do actually long for August to melt into September when you know it will start to cool down, just as you start to long for February to thaw into March, where things start to improve. March for us means medical MOT on Rhodes and that’s something we will put into place shortly. Now I am on private health insurance I have a built-in scheme for basic ‘older man’ check-ups once per year, and though in IKA (Greek National Insurance), Neil also has a similar scheme. So we usually have a three or four day ‘health holiday’ around March/April time. Oh, the things we have to look forward to!

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Symi cats, trees, walks, weather
We’re back on track now with today’s post being written yesterday (Wednesday). The Blue Star has been in, gliding into port on a calm sea under the sun. It came in on Monday too as a special visit to bring supplies, so when we went to the post office on Tuesday there were several packages for us and there were fresh supplies today in the shop. Including cat food.

We’ve just had a tray of Rokus (cat food) delivered to the house along with a few packs of water. Habib brings it on his moped for us, it saves us carrying it the huge distance from the shop, and I think he likes getting out and about every now and then. He stays on his moped as he puts the water on our step, rings the bell and rides off to turn around. Usually by the time we get to the gate he is sailing back past merrily shouting ‘Your nero is here’ (in Greek) and heading off down the hill back to work. But back to the cats:

We have reached the end of our supplies – we’re talking stray cat food supplies here. I think we’ve probably been a bit over-generous with our set of strays as we give them leftovers and biscuits every day, or a can of Rokus and some biscuits, plus water. We also bought some cheap pasta to mix up with it all to make it go further so later the bin cats near us will be having ‘Pasta a la dubious meat from a tin’ with a side order of dry biscuits and a 2016 bottle of ‘eau de tap.’

We were out and about for a walk the other day, taking an hour after lunch to get out and enjoy the sun. You start off from home with your thermals and jumper and coat, and end up down to a t-shirt (with some kind of trouser arrangement of course) by the time you’ve reached the top of the village. It’s the same when you go to Yialos; start out dressed for the final push to the pole and end up at Elpida’s in a t-shirt, in the sun with a frappe. Such is Symi winter weather (not all the time). Apparently it was 16 degrees yesterday but try telling that to the sitting room where the thermometer read 10 all day, and it’s set to stay fair and warm (14 to 17 during the day) and sunny with some cloud. As we know, these predictions can change quickly.

We were on hand to keep our appointment with our landlord on Wednesday morning, but it must have slipped his mind so we did some work on the tree unsupervised. There’s a fig tree in front of the house that he cuts back each year and, as it grows back again, it obscures part of our view and, more importantly, endangers the phone lines above it. We went out and did what we could, taking off any branches thin enough for our loppers to cope with. The main branches need a saw and a strong arm, or an electric saw and me, and we need to know if we should take the wood away or leave it there in case anyone wants it for their fires. The tree will have grown back by June, but at least it will only grow back to how it was and not carry on growing higher, potentially cutting off six buildings from their phone connection. It’s a start and I am sure the landlord will knock for us when he wants us to help with what remains.

That’s about the highlight reel for the last couple of days: sun, a boat or two, cats (still no sign of Jack), shopping, lopping, keeping warm and vowing to call the plumber every time the pump fails to kick in and never getting around to it as you can (at the moment) simply flick the switch to re-set it and start again. We are planning a few more walks before the weather changes, as the forecast sown it will be doing in March, so there should be some more photos to look at over the coming days, which means that you can keep right up to date on what’s happening on Symi. At least, you can as far as what the weather and Symi Dream are up to.

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