Woke up stuffed up with hay fever. In a grumpy mood, and computer things are trying to take over my life. Sounds like a line spoken by a character who wears a tin foil headpiece and thinks Area 51 is listening in, but it’s actually spoken by me every time I turn on my laptop. First of all, my anti-virus protection software thing acts more like a virus than a virus does. No matter how many times I go to settings and disable notifications it finds a way of popping up another notification about something I’m not interested in. ‘Your AVG Secure VPN is active, secure your settings.’ [Changes settings to turn off my VPN unless I say it can be turned on.] ‘Your AVG Secure VPN is inactive, activate it here. [Turns off notifications for this product.] ‘Your AVG Secure VPN notifications have been turned off. Turn them on here. [Gives up and moves on.] And breathe.

‘Let Co-Pilot help you…’ What? Who’s… What is this fresh hell? Microsoft’s new Co-pilot, ‘Let AI do your living for you.’ No thank you. I’m going to write now, so I open Word and my file explorer so I can find the last chapter and have a re-read. ‘Let Co-Pilot find your last chapter for you.’ No! I’m quite capable. Quite capable of searching out the Co-Pilot button and switching it off. (Sometimes it’s not hyphenated, as in, Copilot, and it looks like it’s saying copulate, or is that just me?)

‘Your Copulate has been switched off. You can turn it on…’ No.

And so, to work, but first, a quick check on Facebook in case there are any free advertising opportunities.

Well, there are plenty of adverts. ‘Sell your book with AI.’ ‘Let AI live your life for you.’ ‘Write a book with AI.’

WTF? (Stands for What the Faulkner?) That last one is a definite no. I mean, how insulting can a machine be? How may times have I seen an advertisement for some book-writing AI software? It’s everywhere and it’s foul. It’s like saying, ‘Hi, you want to have a baby? Let AI do that for you with Microsoft’s Copulate, it’ll even bring it up for you so you can get on with the housework and Martini mixing.’ Write and publish a book in a day with AI…’ No. Just no. I’d rather spend over 500 hours doing it myself while AI sees to my household chores, exercise and tax bill, but can it do that? Can it buffalo.

Here’s something you can all do for us impoverished writers who now have to contend not only with the prejudice of not having a ‘real’ publisher, but also with computers that will write books for imbeciles, the lazy and the talentless until the whole world is dumbed down to the level of Trumpery. When you see an advertisement on social media saying something like, ‘Let AI write a book for you’, do what I do, and report it as offensive, because, frankly, it is.

Anyway, on that wrong side of the bed note, I shall now get on with chapter 11 without the use of AI, Co-pilot or anything else that is designed to take the living out of life. Oh, hang on, there’s an AVG notification to swat first… Oh look, a laughing dove…

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Last day of June, 6.50 am, 27° degrees, 20% humidity. Yesterday afternoon it was 39°, and the ten-degree difference is noticeable. Do you get used to it, you ask? Yes, in time, though the older you get, the more you feel it, and it depends on the humidity. Dry days are easier than humid ones, but all are there to be lived to the full, only, sometimes slower than usual.

In garden news, the roses are rosing again, and we have both orange and red plants about to bloom. I took a dodgy picture of the new orange one the other day…

I’m waiting for the mains water to be turned on right now. As you might recall we only have water three times a week. This means we can only fill up our 500 ltr tank three times a week, and once it’s full, it’s full, so we can’t store any more. The tank usually does the two of us for three days if we are careful. Last week, the owner was preparing the downstairs flat and had a vigorous cleaning person in to get it ready. She clearly didn’t know about the water setup, and that the flat also uses our tank, and we ran out of water on the Thursday afternoon, meaning no more cleaning or flushing until Friday. On Saturday, a new chap moved in downstairs, and he too, didn’t understand the setup and we ran out of water on Sunday lunchtime. I had to go down there and explain the situation in my best Greek. So, now, we have expensive (by comparison) bottled water to use until we can properly flush, wash and clean ourselves again, but that should happen in the next hour. Thank heavens it’s not a bank holiday. The owner has told me he has asked a plumber to put in a larger tank or a second one. You’d be surprised how much water you use, even when being careful. 500 litres sounds like a lot, but it isn’t.

Anyway… Anything else? I just saw an enthusiastic visitor put up a social post declaring they had booked Symi for next May and what was the best time to book the ferry? I couldn’t stop myself from writing, ‘April,’ because… well, calm down, it’s a way off yet. Today also marks the penultimate piano lesson of… well, of ever, I suppose. Potentially this will be the second to last time I sit down with my boy, and we ‘do’ piano. There’s to be a vague kind of grade four exam part one, with some scales and other necessities, followed by the first movement of the grade five sonata. Part two will happen on Thursday when it will be the last lesson, possibly ever.

I expect the boy downstairs will be grateful. Mind you, I got the impression he was a military person and so, should be out six to four. When I saw him, he had a short back and sides haircut, was young, fit, wrapped in a dressing gown and had just got out of the last shower the water tank could sustain. Oops. Mind you, the gown looked like silk, so perhaps he’s a trainee officer. He’s only here for nine months anyway, by which time he might have just got used to us oddballs upstairs. Poor thing. Anyway, moving on into the day…

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Another sighting of the laughing doves yesterday. They were happily investigating the path between the chairs and coming closer, so I could get a better photo on my camera, when this lump of a tourist comes through taking a walk while she’s on the phone and wearing a bathmat or something and scares not only the birds, but me. ‘Don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret…’ she projects into the phone loud enough to be heard in Rhodes. (Only she was doing it in Italian so she could have been saying anything. Italian is not one of my languages.)

Have you noticed how it’s more impressive to say, ‘It’s not one of my languages’, or ‘It’s not a language with which I am familiar’, rather than to say, ‘I don’t speak Ancient Mayan’, or whatever? ‘It’s not one of my languages.’ Oh? What languages to do you know? If you say, ‘English and a few others,’ they’ll see your bluff. Similarly, ‘This and that,’ doesn’t cut it. ‘Music, basic BSL, a smattering of verbal Latin, Greek, of course, and I can read Egyptian hieroglyphics to a degree. Oh, and I’m working on Hieratic.’  I mean, some of that is true, and who’s going to whip out an ancient parchment and ask you to translate it? If they do, you can make up anything because they clearly don’t have a clue either.

I have no idea where that came from… I was thinking vaguely of the ‘Lazy Steps’ which is what many people call the zig-zag path from Gymnasio/Horio to the harbour side below Pitini. I was thinking of them yesterday because I walked down them in the morning, except I didn’t because, as I understand it, the ‘Lazy Steps’ are further along the harbour as you’re leaving it, and are not the slope and zigzag, mainly because there’s nothing lazy about them at all. The real steps got their name because workers used to take time out there in the shade, or hide from work there, or some other possibly apocryphal story I heard from I can’t remember where or whom.

Anyway, the morning trip to collect post was over and done with by 10.00. The afternoon saw one of our last piano lessons where little Mozart (now as tall as me) played the second movement of the sonata well enough to pass grade four at least, and I was more than happy. So was he with the deserved praise he was given, and he went away happy. Probably not so much later when waitering at the ever-busy Kali Strata Restaurant. ‘You looked busy the other night.’ ‘Oh yeah, we had a table of 15 turn up – expected – the same time as a table for 10…’ I have no idea how they do it, but they do.

They do, and I did, so I’m done. Off into a weekend of writing and lazing about (once the chores are seen to). Have a good one, and pop back for more nonsense next week.

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Thanks to Christine, I believe we have solved the curious incident of the doves in the day-time… What I thought might have been turtle doves turned out to be laughing doves. See this:

The neat thing about this is, according to Wikipedia, other names for this dove include the laughing turtle dove, so it could be considered a bit of both. I didn’t hear my pair laughing, they were too busy looking for dropped crisps and suchlike. Anyway, good to have found out what they are/were. And now for a random photograph taken from above the ‘mousecastle’ last October.

I was up there for a walk with Harry, so he could show me the ruins of an old settlement or farm he’d found not far from the start of the Ag Marina path. We came across an old gun emplacement and a piece of flattened ground. I assume flattened by man and something to do with the last war. We started talking about field walking and archaeology, and I suggested we walked the flat ground to see if there was anything of interest there, and would you know it? Within a few seconds, he’d found a WWII bullet shell stamped in Greek and with the date, 1944. Just think, that had been lying there all that time, unfound, until that moment. Needless to say, it’s in his special cabinet with the Titanic model and other mementoes of growing up. There’s also this cave up there, but whoever uses it and whatever they use it for… they need to clear up after themselves.

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They were back again yesterday, the two doves who have taken to wandering through the village square in the afternoon. Seemingly unbothered by the cats and people (until they come too close) this pair are happy to mill around beneath tables and chairs, seeing what’s been left lying around.

The thing is, I am sure they are turtle doves. I tried to get a decent photo but was unable, so you’ll have to make up your own mind. It’s not that I usually get excited by birds, as I’ve said before, we have all kinds outside the house including a pair of collard doves, and they are not the same as the café pair. The thing is, I’ve not seen turtle doves so close before, and I wondered if they’d always been in the village, but I’d just never noticed, or they had never come close enough to be recognised.

Yeah, I know, not that thrilling, but it helps fill a page when there’s little else to talk about, because I really don’t have anything else to talk about. So, I’ll leave you with a decent picture of the real thing, the European turtle dove.

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