Now then, may I politely direct you the About page on this website… About. It’s there in the top menu and let’s face it, there aren’t that many menu items. Here’s a summary of the About page: The blog is here to serve my self-publicity as an author. (I sell very few books from here so, frankly, I don’t know why I say that.) I am not a news agency. I don’t purport to have a clue what’s going on and anything newsy you might read here is at least second hand. Nor am I a travel agent. If you want advice about getting here or leaving here or where to stay in between, research and find a travel agent/expert. (I am not an A to Z, a Kelly’s Directory, the Yellow Pages or Tourist Information.) What I do do is put up random photos such as this one:
Cats. Not the musical but the creatures. Last night, we watched ‘A Private Function’ in which Liz Smith says, ‘No pig here….’ Well, there are no cats here, not on this page nor in this house. Cats are something else I can’t help with. Recently the number of emails I receive about stray cats has been on the increase. I know visitors are upset when they see ill, dying or dead stray cats, but writing an email to a random website email address isn’t going to help. If you want to help them, do something while you are here, even if it’s only reporting it to a nearby shop or business. You’ll likely receive the same reply, ‘Thanks for telling me, what do you expect me to do about it?’ That’s kind of how I must respond when I receive one of those emails that makes it sound as if the stray cat population on the island is my personal fault. The only thing I can suggest is to contract either the town hall or the pet shop at the bottom of the Kali Strata, as I have no idea if there is any animal welfare organisation operating on the island now. I’ve asked on Symi Facebook groups but have no website link or email to give you. Sorry.
Pet shop (and clothes shop next door).
On which note, tourism is taking over the world. I just searched for ‘Symi Town Hall’ to get their website address, and what comes up first in the search engines? Boutique hotel guides, ‘The 10 best hotels in Symi’, Hotel Symi something in German, ‘Visiting Symi, everything you need to know…’ apart from who looks after the cats, and the Town Hall website link…
Ah, here it is, in my bookmarks from years ago (so may be out of date), The address is 85600 SYMI, DODEKANISSOS. The phone number is +30 22410 72444… And no, it’s not (yet) a boutique hotel. By the way, the website link I have is out of date and the page is not found so you’re on your own.
Anyway… That’s that, and my news is, piano lessons are now officially ended because a) it’s too hot and we always stopped in July and August anyway, and b) himself is now working, and when the season ends, is off to college in Rhodes. Yesterday, we had our last lesson, and he played Mozart for me to a standard well above what I’d call grade 4 under the ABRSM programme in the UK. So, along with the other pieces last week, the scales and arpeggios and so on, that’ll be a pass, so I must make up a certificate. Yay! And, moving on…
There was some discussion yesterday about that old devil called sunbed. Again. Yawn. I know. It is, however, a popular topic of discussion in all manner of fora, so here we go. Again. A friend who was with us hadn’t read the piece I’m about to regurgitate, so, David, here is the piece I was talking about. It is a repeat from July 2023, and with no suitable photos to put with it, I’ve gone for a random few from five years ago.
Sunbeds
Continuing this week’s theme of one-word titles for blog posts, the word of today is ‘sunbeds.’ It seems to have been the word of the season so far with visitors and locals alike endlessly discussing the things at the bar and on social media. Everyone has an opinion, it seems, and when talking about beaches, lots of people have advice on what ‘they’ should do, what ‘they’ should provide and charge. Some aren’t happy with what ‘they’ are providing and for how much, and how many ‘they’ have now got on their beach, while another ‘they’ have this, and wasn’t it better when ‘they’ did that? And if only ‘they’ could do this. Whoever this ubiquitous non-gender specific ‘they’ is or are, they are not going short of advice, that’s for sure.
The last time I used a sunbed was pre-2015. Having decided to take a Sunday morning off, the two of us packed up a beach bag—you know, shoved everything in as though we were going trekking for six weeks—and walked down to Pedi to claim a free sunbed at Apostolos by 9.30. The intention was to spend the morning on the beach pretending we were on holiday, stay for lunch and for me to catch the 14.30 bus back up to get to the bar for work by three. I lay down on the sunbed at 9.45, woke up at 11.45, and walked home. Not because there was anything wrong with the thing; ‘they’ had provided me with a decent one, but because, frankly, there are always better things I could be doing than lying in the shade doing nothing. On which note, why aren’t they called shade beds?
They are not for everyone, that’s for sure, and that’s partly due to the techniques that must be mastered before successfully using one. Getting onto one of the things is tricky enough in my experience. There’s an art to it.
You can sit in the middle side-saddle, then hoist yourself around in an arc to land with feet at one end, head at the other, only to realise it’s not at the correct angle, so you hoist back again, reach around to move the sloping part, unhook it and collapse face-first in an ungainly heap. Assuming you haven’t severed a few digits in this process, you then yank the back bit up while putting your weight on it and hope the slidey bit finds the correct notch, only to find it doesn’t, and you either collapse again or end up sitting upright as if in some Victorian health contraption. By this time, it’s time to cool off in the sea, so you waddle in, returning later to repeat the process.
Then there’s the straddle technique where you get one leg on either side and lower yourself to a sitting position only for the thing to clamp shut over you like a Venus Flytrap.
Of, course, you have to put your towel down first, and that’s the easy part. If you’re sensible, you can arrange the tilt angle before you mount the thing, and if you are an expert, you can glide gently to place amid oohs and ahs from an impressed stranger who has already settled in to share your intimate, semi-naked bathing space not two feet away.
I don’t advise throwing yourself face-first or even backwards onto one as they are unpredictable, and you never know what enforced yoga position you will end up in.
Once aboard, though, you can lie back and make yourself comfortable before noticing the earth has continued its orbit around the sun, and the shade has now moved, and so must you. There are two ways to complete this part of the assault course:
Grabbing the sides while still prone and spasming your way a few inches towards the shade. This method is also known as the electro-shock technique.
Or, disembarking, dragging, turning, looking up, whipping out your sextant, checking the angle of an observed object, noting the ‘dip’, sighting the horizon, the time of the zenith and the declination of the celestial orb against the desired direction divided by the length of time intending to remain, and then remount using whatever technique has been mastered. (Full details can be found in chapter six, ‘The Master and Commander Style of Sunbed Adjustment’ in my forthcoming tome, ‘Surviving a Symi Summer.’ Hardly University Press.)
That done, and all settled in and sorted, you can then fish around underneath for your bag to grab your latest Jackson Marsh and continue from chapter five, only to realise it’s way back up the beach by now, and what happened to your towel? Ah well, a few minutes catching the rays and it’s down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, with red strap marks across your back, or the imprint of a manufacturer endorsing your behind, and cool off with a dip. Later, returning to your pre-marked territory, you discover a family of nomadic circus performers has encroached, dragged the second sunbed of your pair to elsewhere, not knowing you were keeping it for no reason other than you didn’t want anyone else to sit near you.
You’ll need a lie down after all that, and on most beaches on Symi, you can do just that. How much you will pay, whether you will be on one of the new tier-and-tariff systems, paying X amount for a back row, or taking out a mortgage for the front row, or packed somewhere mid-stalls with no privacy or view, well… that depends on the beach. Whether you get your own personal torture device for free as long as you spend X amount in the café bar or restaurant depends on where you are. Whether you get a bamboo shade that leaves you with a burlap tan, or a collapsible umbrella (the use of which is the subject of an optional instruction manual), or whether you have one of those ‘set-in-a-concrete block and don’t you dare move it’ affairs, all depends on where you are.
Hopefully, you’ll find the perfect match for you, and while looking at the many beaches offering their various arrangements, you won’t think, ‘They’ should do this…’ You won’t criticise ‘They’ for not providing you with exactly what you want, or for over-providing the facilities because they are expecting an entire Virgin cruise ship to empty on their shores, and you won’t bad-mouth ‘They’ if you don’t like what you see and find. If you don’t like it, move on. There’s plenty of choice around the island. For me, I’ll continue to stay well away from the deathtraps, but that’s my choice, and I wish all the hard-working ‘Theys’ out there every success in whatever arrangements they have on offer, because, at the end of the day on the beach, everyone has to make a living.
I wonder what percentage of day trippers to the island get to visit the village? Maybe 5% per day? I have no idea. I wonder how many of that, let’s say, 5% do more than sit in the village square, and how many actually find the museum? Fewer will see sights like this:
A classic upper-village ‘tunnel’, built, I was told, mainly for stability during earthquakes, but also to give more room above. The first house we lived in here was right up at Ag Triada and the back terrace was laid over just such a tunnel as that one. We didn’t use it much, but when we did, we’d sit out there at night and watch the bats and owls doing their thing overhead.
The houses in the upper village tend to be built close to each other with narrow lanes in between, but now and then, you come across a square. Some are bigger than others, some are quite grand, and they hark back to the busy days when 25,000 to 30,000 people lived on the island, mainly in the village. There were (forgive me if this is wrong) something like 13 parishes churches in the village, and more or less each one would serve a part of the wider community, thereby making the smaller and larger squares a meeting place, or simply a place to escape the narrow tunnels and on-top-of-one-another living. In Alamina Square, for example, just below Ag Athanasios, where the millstone is, you can still see the kafeneion, and the ruins of a couple of tavernas, with a shop at the bottom of the steps, and another over the lane, still with its wooden frontage, though now badly painted.
Anyway, I don’t know why I am rambling through these lanes, it’s just my way of waking up, I expect. I want to get on with chapter whatever, before we head down to Yialos for lunch with my piano pupil, whose final lesson will now be on Monday and will be more of a recital than a lesson. Before then, there are watery things to do such as showers, washing and watering the garden, and all that has to be done while the mains water is on, so that we start the weekend with a full tank, and keep our fingers crossed that it’s enough.
So, happy weekend to you and happy Independence Day if you’re into all that.
Well, I never. I was looking at my photos trying to find inspiration, and the title of a film came to mind, ‘My life in Ruins.’ The film is known as ‘Driving Aphrodite’ in the UK for some reason. Set in and around Athens, it’s a Nia Vardalos rom-com, and cute to watch. It came to mind because the first photo I saw was of a ruin up in the higher part of the village, and I thought I’d put that up here today. Then, I went to my One Drive photo collection, and it has this thing where it says ‘On this day…’ or similar. There, I found the book cover for ‘Bobby’, and on checking the release date, I discovered that I published the book exactly one year ago today.
So, as that sounds like the perfect excuse for a plug, here’s the blurb, and then I’ll get back to the usual.
Robert Charles Thompson was many things in his life. Among them, he was a teenage sex worker, a gunner in the Royal Navy, and head housekeeper at a prestigious London hotel. He was also gay, and his story gives us a fresh insight into a well-trodden path of British social history.
This is the story of one gay man, born in 1919 in Tooting. There are, no doubt, many others, but maybe not many led such a diverse life. Bobby’s colourful life crossed paths with King George VI, Sir Winston Churchill, the Dalai Lama, Shirley Bassey, David Bowie, Quentin Crisp, Ruth Ellis, and numerous other crowned heads, politicians, entertainers and leaders of society.
However, he came from the underclass of the homeless, drag queens, and illegal lovers. There at pivotal moments of the gay 20th century, this previously unknown gay man’s richly fascinating career has previously slipped under the radar but is now getting the limelight it deserves.
Other images in the collection for ‘On this day…’ included lots that Neil must have taken because they are too good to be mine. Hot sunrise over Pedi, anyone?
This morning feels cooler as there’s more of a breeze, but it’s still a case of stay out of the sun, put on a hat and drink lots of water. I think I got through over four litres yesterday; at least two large bottles and two small ones, one of which had an electrolyte tablet in it. I ordered some from Skroutz.gr (because they are so much cheaper), they came from Poland, and the tube is labelled Elektrolity na kaca. A little detective work tells me that’s Polish for ‘Electrolytes for a hangover’, not that I have one, but at least ‘kaca’ doesn’t, in this case, mean what it means in Greek. On which note, here’s another sunrise, and on with the day.
I slept far too well and long last night and have still woken up needing another five minutes. Must be the heat? Then again, it’s not been any different to other years, heat-wise. I was chatting to a neighbour yesterday who was saying she expected the high temperatures to have started weeks ago. It’s usually hotter in early June, she said, and it was last year. It’s still only 37 in our courtyard in the afternoon, and we’ve known it be 40° or more. Even so, the hot weather is no excuse for this…
I don’t mean the chap on the left who’s either gawping, fantasising or considering throwing up, I refer, of course, to the unnecessary amount of flesh on the right. All the way up the Kali Strata with her BF cow-towing along behind with the bag of discarded clothing. I once did that for Neil – follow along behind picking up his discarded clothes, but then, it was Brighton Pride, and he was doing a turn on a float. This is a different matter. This is a village. At the risk of sounding like a sitcom character with a catchphrase, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, would you walk through the charming village of Little Bottom Under Wallop with your big bottom walloping about for all to see? This is how a lady walks through the village:
And now, I must away to deal with watery things. We now have a young soldier living below (as I might have said), so our already restricted water supply is being stretched to the limit. (We ran out completely on Sunday, midday.) No-one’s fault, but we have to be careful, so I am having my shower, watering the garden, doing the washing and other similar things in the morning while the mains is on, so we still end up with a full tank at 12.00 when it stops. (We can fill the tank on three mornings of the week, only.) The tank just about lasts two days if I don’t have another shower and leave that for those who need it, like the barmen and soldiers. The landlord is arranging for a second tank to go in so we’ll be okay, and for a solar water heater to be wired up, so the chap below can have control of his own hot water, because otherwise, he only gets hot water when we turn on our hot tank… Confused? You will be after the next instalment of Soap. Which is what I must go and use now, while I can, and after that, sweeping the courtyard, watering the plants, putting the washing on, and having a shower. At last!
