Let’s continue to wander the Old Town in Rhodes for a while. It’s so much calmer at this time of year, and if you’re lucky enough to be there on a warm, sunny day, so much the better. The monuments are open, i.e. the museum and the palace, but I’ve not seen the old mosque and library open for a while now, not even in summer. The Palace of the Grand Masters is a great visit and all you’re likely to encounter at this time of year are school parties, which, in my experience, always tend to be polite and well behaved. Once, when on Kos, visiting the Asklepeion, we encountered a couple of coachloads of teenagers arriving not long before we were leaving and had to walk through the flood to get to the gates. In some counties, that would be ‘head down and hope for the best,’ here, it was, ‘Good morning,’ ‘Kalimera,’ ‘Kostas, get out of the way of the gentlemen,’ ‘Have a good day, Sir,’ in both Greek and English as if we were royalty.

Apart from the monuments, you have the architecture to enjoy, and there are places where you can indulge your interest in architectural archaeology. For example, we found protrusions on the outer wall, or inner-outer wall, to be precise, and I was wondering what they were for. They look like they were once a matching pair holding up a balcony, but they were at an odd angle, there was nothing but a wall on one side, air on the other, and no signs of anything ever being attached to or supported by them. Just, roadside ornaments, perhaps? Hard to see in the photo, but if you have any ideas, leave a comment on our Facebook page.

The lanes themselves are remarkable pieces of engineering when you think someone had to collect every stone, bring it and plant it, and the lanes are never uniform. Some are walk-sideways narrow, others wide enough for cars, though there are few of them about once you are away from the main streets. You have to remember you’re walking through someone’s village and directly past their often open front doors, so try not to gawp. Instead, gawp at how well many of the area’s buildings and features are, and gasp at how others are managing to stay upright. For the intrepid, you can even find tunnels to explore.

You also get to see cats, of course, as this is Greece.

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How quickly things can change weatherwise. On Friday, we thought our trip to Rhodes might be rained off, but it turned out to be a warm and dry day over there. Yesterday, we popped out for a drink after music lessons and model making and got stuck in the bar because of a thunderstorm, the boat schedules are up the spout too, but should be back on track by Friday.

There were two cruise ships harboured in Rhodes for the day, we saw several coaches transporting people, the open-top bus was running and some of the tourist shops in the Old Town had opened. Not many, I have to say, but enough to give the few wandering tourists something to view and buy. Once we’d done what we went over there to do, we spent a couple of hours wandering the backstreets of the Old Town, which is a heritage site, and which, when devoid of tourists and the tatty shopfronts, is like walking around a private museum. I’m late to work today, so here are a few photos for you, to give you an idea.

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I’m writing this on Sunday so I can have a clear run at chapter 26 on Monday morning, assuming we’ve not been blasted away by a storm that’s meant to be coming this way. The Patmos ferry schedule has been changed, and the Spanos isn’t running at all. Right now (Sunday morning) the weather’s cloudy but calm, but it’s not looking so good for later. That’s one thing, and it hasn’t happened yet, so what has been going on since last Thursday?

Well, things have been going with a bang…

We went to Rhodes on Friday, and there will be more about that and some more images when I get around to it. The alarm was set for six, but I was awake at three listening to the rain and thunder, watching the lightning, and wondering what kind of day lay ahead. I need new shoes as my winter pair are finally falling apart (€20 from Sports Direct about four years ago, so I’m not complaining), and I didn’t fancy getting wet feet. Turned out to be a sunny day in the end, and we didn’t get wet at all. We had to go because we had medical checkups booked for our annual MOT. Again, more about that when I get around to it.

Saturday was our godson’s name day, and we were invited to his BBQ. I say ‘invited’… We were at the table building our model kits after piano lesson last Thursday, when he mentioned his name day and I asked if he was doing anything for it. (I knew he was planning a BBQ, as his mother had told us.) He said he was having a BBQ, and I asked if we were invited. ‘I don’t mind either way,’ was his reply, which made me laugh. What he meant was, yes, come if you want, and we did. I don’t know what your view of teenagers is, but if it’s one of rowdy, rude and raucous, you’d be off the mark when it comes to the Symi teens who came to the party.

There was a pack of nine of them at the BBQ, all boys, and they did everything; the cooking, the salads, the eating… In fact, once it was all ready, they did so much eating there was nothing left for the adults, me, Neil, mum and big brother Sam who’d come up from Yialos especially. Jenine dispatched herself to the harbour to buy us giros, while Sam turned his nose up at the English-style sausages we found in the freezer. (He’s done his chef’s training and has secured a great job on Symi for the summer. I will tell you about that another time). Oh, and of course, after the feeding frenzy, the lads all piled upstairs to play on the Xbox, have a laugh and swear a lot, while leaving the clearing up to the adults, but that’s par for the course around here.

What was also impressive was the amount of English being spoken. I’d say 80% of the boys were fluent in it, having been through the private English lessons system here on the island. Not only that, but they were also very polite, chatted to us about all kinds of things, and were a pleasure to be among.

And back to Sunday, where Neil is prepping something in the kitchen, I have written half a chapter and am about to set off into Somerset House in 1892 – but I can’t find a description of it from that time nor any images. I’m sending my characters to the records office to track down a few people. I know how the system worked with indexes and searches and so on, but not what the place looked like in the North Wing, where the GRO was. So, tomorrow will be research followed by making it up, if I can’t find any accounts written at the time. Back to the Victorian web for me, and my favourite site Dictionary of Victorian London. But that’s for tomorrow, for now, it’s time to go and play Sherlock and batten down the hatches.

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I once read a book by Paulo Coelho in which one character told another to always walk looking at the horizon, not at your feet. I expect there was some spiritual message behind that, or a good reason, and I tried it to see if it changed my outlook on life. It made me change my attitude towards people with dogs, and councils who didn’t fix their paving slabs. However, standing there scraping my shoes against a broken paving stone to get the dogdo off, I did have the chance to look up and admire what I could see of the horizon. Since then, I’ve always told people to stop now and then and look up, as I mentioned on the blog the other day. We tend to walk looking down, and in some places, that’s a necessity. I rounded a corner on my walk through the village yesterday and nearly trod in a stack of cat sh*t, and I mean a good three-inch high pile some animal had swept into one place. In other parts of the village, I found myself stepping over the remains of some dog’s yesterday’s dinner its owner had charitably left there for a small child to pick up, play with and eat. In other places, I was permanently looking down to avoid falling down steps or tripping over water pipes. The lesson here is to stop now and then and look around. Look up to see what’s above the standard Boots shopfront and you might see a Tudor building, or don’t gawp at the unaffordable price of houses in the estate agent’s window, but look to its second and third floors and you might see a stunning piece of Gothic revival architecture.

The point of all that was to say the opposite. Also, look down, especially when you’re on Symi. I was standing outside the taverna last night, waiting for Neil to join me, and I noticed a carving on the stone I was standing on.

There are many instances of this kind of historic graffiti dotted around the island, just as there’s a growing number of post-modern depictions of penises and some fundamental instructions on what to do with one’s fundament; people, it seems, will always want to leave their mark, just like dogs and lampposts. Some of these engravings depict boats, some are names in that classic “carve your initials in a tree” kind of thing, and others are patterns. What interests me are the dates that sometimes appear with them. In today’s case, not only did ΝΠΚ leave his/her initials, but he also left the date, 1939.

I’ve darkened the photo to try and bring out the letters and date more, and it’s not that easy to see, but you get the picture…?

I’ll keep my eye out for more of these when I remember and post them here. You can find this one at the top of the Kali Strata opposite the arched door into Georgio’s.

That’s me for the week. Off to Rhodes for the day tomorrow, so I’ll be back here on Monday.

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Just a few photos today as I don’t have any news to tell you, not unless you want to read that I have put an undercoat on the bathroom window ahead of painting it later today. That’s about as exciting as it got around our house yesterday, so here are a few shots of Yialos instead. If you’ve eaten at the Trata (Trawler) you might like to see what it looks like in winter. If you’ve ever walked on the road, you might have wondered if it will ever be repaired decently. And, if you have ever walked around the backstreets and alleyways, have you ever looked up to see what you are missing above?

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