Please excuse a bit of trumpet blowing, but I’ve had the second review of ‘Lonely House’ put up on Amazon. Thank you so much to Sarah and Mr Stephen for taking the time to write and post their reviews. You can check them out on the ‘Lonely House’ on Amazon page from where you can also buy a copy or three, but here they are as well:

“Wow!” (five stars)

“Really inventive and would make a very spooky Film. A very good thriller typical of James Collins. I loved it.”

“A True Page Turner” (Five Stars)

“Mr Collins has certainly found his feet in the literary dark world of mystery, suspense and horror with his latest offering – Lonely House. James has a light side, just look at his other work, but having served up (oops) the excellent ‘The Judas Inheritance’ which has been made into a film set on the wonderful Greek island of Symi, he now invites the reader to the Birthday Party from Hell.

This book is a feast (oops again) from beginning to end. Drover and Pete are Steinbeckish in their relationship and slowly their characters are unpeeled (!). The family they encounter proves to be equally interesting and James tantalises you by just releasing enough information on each to keep you wanting to know more about each of them. He has mastered that technique of forcing you to start the next chapter as you really care what happens to these people – some you want to stay with you, others you may want to kill.

This excellent story has a very satisfactory outcome – depending on your moral compass. You will not be disappointed if you are a fan of the macabre.”

If you’ve thought, ‘It’s not about Symi and I don’t like horror’ well, fair enough. It’s got nothing to do with Symi, but there is a little horror in there. It’s not that I am fanatical about the gory stuff, I’d much rather a good gothic Universal black and white film style creepy story than anything to do with blood and guts, but it is interesting, to me, to take ‘ordinary’ characters and put them in extraordinary situations and see what happens. Not that any character you create for a novel should be just ‘ordinary’ and I hope the six in this story aren’t. But the two main characters certainly were not expecting to deal with what they end up having to deal with and that’s the horror part for me. It’s not about blood and guts, it’s about the horrific choices our two characters have to make.

And so, on to the next one and I’ve spent the weekend working through ‘Straight Swap’ and, again, no ordinary characters here. This lot are a bunch of oddballs living in a made up seaside town and there’s no horror – just a lot of confusion and I hope, a few laughs along the way. So, that’s coming on and soon I’ll be able to get a proof printed so I can get my ‘beta’ readers to check through it for me.

Meanwhile, the winter break is now all booked and finalised, more or less and I did go for The Nutcracker in the end. Well, I took a look at the Bucharest opera house and thought, ‘Gotta see that, it is SO camp.’ And the music’s good and it’s been ages since I’ve seen men in tights throwing girls in tutus in the air. So we’ve booked two stalls seats at the second highest price (only one or two rows behind the most expensive seats) and they cost us around €45.00 each, so you’re not gunna say no are you? I’ll let you know how it goes. I may even write a review. Which reminds me. Click this link, read the LH reviews again and start ordering copies for Christmas presents.

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A few holiday plans have gone into action over the last few days. In fact, flights and hotels have been booked, all that needs doing now is sorting the train tickets nearer the time and saving the money to pay for it all. If anyone wants to Jack-cat sit for two weeks towards the end of the year, let me know. If not, I am sure the house and cat will be well looked after during that time.

The plan is to go to Rhodes to get the plane because, let’s face it, you can’t get it from Symi. Knowing the weather at that time of year we’ll leave three weeks in advance to make sure we don’t miss the flight and connection. The flights to Vienna are quite civilised actually. It takes from 10.30 in the morning until six at night to get there via Athens, but that’s because of a wait in Athens of a few hours. And at least it’s not like the Romania flight where we had to stay overnight in the Athens airport hotel, nice though it was, and pay €60 for two sandwiches and three glasses of wine. We can ‘Plaza-it’ the night before, have a curry, and wander to the airport by bus in the morning.

After the Vienna weekend comes a train to Prague for a couple of nights, and then a train to Budapest for a few nights, and then a train to Belgrade for a few nights and a flight home. I looked into coming back all the way by train, well, as far as Athens as you can’t actually get a train to Symi anymore, but the journeys were overnight. I like being on a train so I can see scenery pass by, like having a kind of ever-moving stage set to watch. There’s little point in getting and over-night and sharing a sleeping-berth-thing with four snoring Serbians for ten hours only to arrive at Thessaloniki, where you need to change and then spend a few more hours heading to Athens, where you then need to get across town and find the boat, making sure you’re on time and hoping that the weather is going to be calm so it can leave. And then paying out €160 minimum for two people to share an inside four person cabin for 17 hours. An outside two person one being around the same cost as a flight for two from Belgrade to Rhodes, which you can do in only a few hours.

So, four cities in two weeks and three decent train journeys looks fine to me. Not the best time of year to be traveling I know, but what can you do when you work seven days a week from April to October? I thought I’d check out the opera and state theatres and see what was on in these cities when we are there. Sadly there’s nothing very inspiring in Prague on the spare night we have, even with stalls at the opera only costing €30.00 or so. And ditto Bucharest where there’s the Nutcracker to watch (same kind of good price) but, well, I’ve already cracked that one a few times and ballet’s not really me thing, you know? And trying to find the advanced programme for the Serbian State Theatre (online) is a bit like trying to locate the other half of the Rosetta stone; they only seem to have the month of June available at the moment. (As it’s August, perhaps they will have this December’s programme available in February next year.)

But still. There’s some advanced warning for you that there will be no blog for a couple of weeks later in the year, but maybe a lot of blog when I get back. Before then of course there’s a lot of work to do and money to save. Have a good weekend!

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Another quiet day yesterday. An early morning walk-thing, some work, a vegetable lunch, some reading… Quiet summer days staying out of the heat. A breeze helped keep things a little cooler, though I still sit by an open window one side with a fan on the other.

Somebody asked me the other day about alternative routes up to the village. There is the road, which you can walk up, or get a bus or a taxi up, and then there are the steps. There’s not just the Kali Strata, which, if it’s your first visit or you are only over for a day from Rhodes, is not that easy to find. The Kali Strata is the main way up by foot, and was a track until it was widened in the 19^th century; the original way up being the Katarakis at the back of the harbour. That’s still in its original form and you can walk up and down that way, but there’s not a lot of shade for most of the way.

So, find the bottom of the Kali Strata by heading to the south west corner of the harbour, the Trawler Square, or the Vapori Bar, Bella Napoli or Harani Bar, it’s there in that corner. You can follow the steps all the way up if you want, just follow the main, wide ones, there are about 380 of them to the village square that way. Or you can come up any of the side steps that join in, but here you’ll need to keep an eye on where you are going. I went on one of these paths the other day.

Start at the bottom of the main Kali Strata, go up past the Old Markets hotel, and the old door, and then the old ruin that everyone wants, the ‘Doctor’s House’ as it’s sometimes called, and you get to the renovated red property on the left. Here you can turn right and there is a very steep set of steps facing you. Go for it – as long as you’re fit enough. They are steep but they get you to half way up the hillside in only about 100 steps (I haven’t counted them). There you find the start of a zigzag path that first heads out to your right, and then starts to hairpin back. The area here has been cleared of trees recently and I hope not just so some rich house buyer has a better view.

Keep following the zigzag heading upwards and you will eventually come out on a road; this is the road to the domed church H Lemonitisa that you can see from the harbour. Turn right towards that or left towards the village square. You can also come up any of the side steps that lead off the south side of the harbour, behind the taxi rank, just past the bus stop and so on. These will start to join the Kali Strata at some point. Further along, heading out of the harbour, you find steps heading up to Petini and from there you can meander through to the village or up to the windmills.

Whichever way you go, take your time, don’t rush, do stop to admire the view and get your breath back and take photos. In summer, take water and wear a hat. It doesn’t take long to get up if you are fit, it takes me five minutes from bottom to top at a slow pace, without stopping. And coming back down from the village is easy of course, no matter where you are. You just keep heading downhill and you will find the sea eventually. It might be the wrong bay, or the back of the island, but at least it will be the sea.

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It is actually Thursday morning as I write this, now how about that for a change? I ran out of time to get ahead yesterday, what with writing and walking and heading to the harbour. So, here I am at 6.44 on Thursday morning, just back from a walk/jog up the hill to the viewpoint.

We didn’t go so far today thanks to having a ‘hitch in my giddy-up’ as a Californian once put it; a slight twinge, in other words. I didn’t want to risk a sports injury. But still, up past the museum, straight up the steps – always a hard warm-up in this humidity, then onto the road, and on up. A brief stop at the top and then down again. Simple. The sun was just coming up as we got home so I nipped up onto the roof for a quick view. And now here I am at the desk with the fan on and the mosquito spray to hand; I’ve already been got twice and I’ve only been here five minutes.

Yesterday, the harbour was pretty busy with day-trippers. I checked the post office. Found my delivery of a rather unusual DVD. A recording made at Abbey Road by Eric Wolfson of a musical about Poe. I’ve got the CD and listened to it a couple of times, but I always think musical are better watched than the soundtracks listened to on their own, they make more sense that way. So there’s that to look forward to.

After that I headed to the dentist and saw Vasilis. We had a chat, he fixed a small filling, gave me a check-up and declared I had ‘petra’ behind my bottom teeth, ‘stone’, which translates into… well, the kind of thing dentists scrape off in adverts for toothpaste. So I’ll go back and have that done soon. I made an appointment for Neil for next week while I was there and discussed the Symi Festival events. The nice things about the surgery is that it’s air conditioned; you could lie there feeling cool for hours. Were it not for the implements and purpose of your visit.

After that I wandered back up the Kali Strata, as midday – mad dogs and all that, and headed to Sotiris for shopping. It was Sotiris’ name day yesterday. I picked up some decent veg and bits and pieces and arranged for four packs of water (24 bottles) to be delivered. Habib now drops them round on his moped, it’s so much easier being on the road. And that was that. We were going to do some work in the courtyard last night but that idea fell on stony ground, so we watched a couple of films instead. And that was the day that was. Onto Thursday now and more of the same, but without the dentist.

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Yialos by night. (Not brilliant photos, they were taken on my underwater camera, and it was very dry.) This was last week actually, I’ve not been out and about at night much over the past few days, though we did nip out to the Windmill on Monday for no reason other than because we wanted to. And very nice it was too.

The war memorial is lit up at night. On a Sunday some of the soldiers parade with a flag, sing the National Anthem and then hoist the flag at the flag pole. They return in the evening to take it down, but this one stays where it is.

Some tavernas, like Aris here, put their tables further out towards the road leaving room inside for dancing, but also to catch any breeze that may be out and about. (The lens needed cleaning.)

This was still early evening, it had just got dark, but darkness falls pretty quickly after sunset around here. This is on the corner by the bridge, a popular café. Behind it you head into the back streets and the first lace you encounter is Georgina’s Emporium which has a large range of wine and a delicatessen.

Earlier in the day the Herb And Spice corner was thronged with day-trippers hearing a talk about the produce. Beside here is a small souvlaki shop, and to the other side, left, is the second pharmacy, then a travel agent. It’s a busy corner and one of the few places on the island where I feel like I should look left and right before crossing the road – sorry, right then left – as cars and bikes come around from the bridge, and from the front, and from the backstreet.

The shops in the harbour stay open until late into the night as it’s a place that comes alive after dark, especially if there is a Festival event on and lots of boats in the harbour. You can buy clothes, jewellery, even your groceries until approaching midnight.

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