A quick morning ramble from this Greek island: The wind has died down at last and there’s no more breeze through my window over the desk. Mind you, I have put masking tape over the gaps – a temporary solution. The sea below isn’t exactly flat, but there are no white bits, it’s just got a kind of shimmer thing going on. It’s grey, the sun is just coming up, the horizon tinted a mild orange over Turkey, and the streetlights have been switched off.

Yesterday we went to another tap rehearsal, the show is a week on Sunday. It’s later this year because of when Easter fell. It’s coming together. I wouldn’t say I am getting 100% of the right taps in the right place, but more or less. Parts of one of the dances I find so fast that my feet are already at terminal velocity and yet have to work faster to hit the right beats.

I’ve only been out on two walks this week, Neil’s out now actually, at least the gate is open and he’s not around so I assume he’s jogged down to Pedi. I am now regularly woken by the indoor Alarm Cat at around five or five-thirty. So plenty of time to get up and get out before I settle down at the desk, but I really don’t fancy it in the cold and windy. Hopefully the wind has calmed for a while now so maybe tomorrow. Today’s daily workout will come in the form of a walk up the Kali Strata later, after I’ve been to town.

The Alarm Cat is looking a bit tatty at the moment, shabby-chic they all it. His ears have gone pink and the black bits come and go, but spread a little more each time. His nose is currently in black mode, though only in part, and he’s been scratching above his ears and making himself bleed. We suspect it’s his skin allergy, tinted with a little pre-skin cancer. He is 12 after all, and white, and deaf, and a rescue Symi cat, so he’s done pretty well to get to this level of the game – not that I am saying he’s approaching ‘game over’, just that he’s getting on a bit (aren’t we all?). That’s why he is allowed the bed to share at night (I didn’t hear him at all last night, and didn’t get woken up by him walking up and down my head and sticking his tatty old nose in my ear. Today he woke me up by investigating the shelf outside the bedroom and knocking things to the ground.)

But there we go, here come s Friday, and here comes some more work on the new book, I hope. I am adding a little to the first draft more or less every day. Meanwhile we continue to slowly edit ‘Lonely House’, Neil, who is now back from his jog, is working on his next year calendar and hopes to have one or two in a few weeks, to show folk when they come to visit, so there is some industry going on up here while the fishing boats go out down there, and the grey sea remains shimmering.

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Just sitting here yesterday morning and I saw the Poseidon going out, presumably on its sea trials after its winter maintenance. The seas looked a bit windy, not so much rough as being blown about by the wind across the surface.

The same wind, form the north by the feel of it, was whistling in under my window next to the desk and cooling the fingers somewhat. It was also letting itself in uninvited through the sitting room windows, so shutters were shut and battened down against rattling.

The IKA folk are rumoured to be, or have been, or might have been, or were, on the island in the past few days. This usually sets off a flurry of mild panic from Harani to Horio, and if this is true, then it’s one of the earliest visits I can recall. They come, primarily, to make sure that workers are being employed legally and are being looked after. It is their job, I am told, to protect the employees, and to be strict with the employers. Usually they are around slightly later in the season, there must be a load of folk just starting work, helping get paces ready and not doing very much but still ‘at work’ who have not yet had time to get all their paperwork in place.

You might remember from last year that my paper trail for my unnecessary (under the EU) work permit that accompanies my (not necessary) resident’s permit, was a bit of a complicated affair. It involved a meeting with the accountant, a visit to the bank to pay a small fee and get a certificate to say I’d paid said small fee (the whole process probably costing more than the small, fee I paid), a trip to the police station to collect forms that looked like they’d been run off on a Gestetner Cyclograph device in 1948, a trip back to the village to pass on a form for the boss to fill out, a trip back to the police station to find no one home, a return journey a day later to hand in forms and fill out two more, different from each other but with the same info on it, and then hand it all in to a completely disinterested officer who wanted to know what I wanted. So I told him for the third time. He put the papers away and no more was said on the matter. No card, no evidence, just a waste of time.

Now though it gets better, or so rumour would have it. (Yiannis is checking with KEP and everyone else today.) Now you have to go to a hospital or other medical centre and get a chest X-ray done – which you used to have to do – and also do a… well, a test on yesterday’s dinner, if you see what I mean. How this is achieved is still a mystery but as soon as I hear I will let you know. So, Neil, who is working on IKA this year, will soon be off to Rhodes to have his… well, never mind the details. But the point is, IKA are here early and I bet a lot of others have still not gone through all these hoops.

Anyway, enough of those kind of details. Back to the typewriter.

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Mornings never seem to have enough time in them for me, even if I get up at 5.30 there is still too much to do at the end of the morning. I am one of those people who works best in the mornings and hardly at all in the afternoon.

So, setting the alarm for six now gives me an extra half an hour to get things done. It still doesn’t always work out though, and today (yesterday as you read this) I am hurrying off a blog so that I can get ahead of myself for tomorrow. An hour getting ready to, and then exercising, is fine, but then another half hour given over to a quick and, let’s face it, often too hurried blog, eats in to the rest of my day. So, blog today, time tomorrow. When the weather is warmer we’ll be up at 5.30 some days in order to get in the sea at 6.00.

As one of my characters in ‘Straight Swap; puts it, when talking about an early start: ‘It is far too early for this time of day.’

And on the ‘Straight Swap’ front, I have been ploughing on in the afternoons – when I can actually get some work done – and have now reached 35,000 words and the end of ‘act one’ as it would be called if it were a film. Let’s say roughly a quarter of the way through a first draft. At this rate it will be 140,000 words long – but that’s okay, I can cut it down in draft two.

Something I did notice about my titles is that they are not always suitable for abbreviating. ‘Symi 85600’ is fine (S8, sounds rather trendy), ‘Carry on up the Kali Strata works, roughly (COUTKS, sounds almost like a bank) and ‘The Judas Inheritance’ as TJI sounds like a TV show at the end of the week. But I will have to be careful with ‘Straight Swap’ (you can work it out for yourself) and we shan’t even think about ‘Shocking The Donkeys.’

And on the subject of books, I need a cover for LH (Lonely House) and I wonder if any of my readers were book cover designers who do that work American lawyers do, you know, where they do it for free? No, seriously, if there are any designers out there who would be interested in giving me a quote for a book cover, please drop me a line – the email’s at the bottom of the main page here, under Contact, or you can PM me through FB. I have ideas. I can send an outline of the book, or even the MS if you don’t mind reading it on a PC or MAC. Thank you!

That’s enough abbreviations for one day. Hope you enjoy the pics today – do you prefer them bigger like yesterday, or smaller around the text like today? You can enlarge them by clicking on them. Any strong thoughts LMK. (Let me know.)

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Keeping it simple this morning and sharing five Symi photos, taken by Neil over the past few days. You will see they are page-fitting size again. A few people have said they like this format, so I thought I’d employ it from time to time. If you follow Facebook you might like to follow the Neil Gosling Photography page. You will always find interesting images there and not just from Symi, but from his travels too. So today’s first photo:

You can wend your way up from Yialos by several routes. From the bottom of the Kali Strata, head upwards and then take the first set of side-steps up to your right and zigzag up; it looks daunting, it is at times, but you find great views. And some chickens. Lots of chickens. Oh, and plants:

On this ‘Graham’, if you look closely, you can see Trevor the spider eating poor old Amos the fly. ‘When he said come for lunch,’ said Amos in his last interview, ‘I didn’t think he meant…’

As you know, I am not a plant person. I leave all that to the experts: Adriana (see her blog) and Lyndon (see his blog).

Some of the island’s church are open at all times, others are locked. You can try the doors but don’t force them. They say not to use flash when photographing frescoes (though I think that might be to do with chemicals, from the old days?) and of course, be respectful. I always drop a coin or two in the box though if I light a candle, I blow it out before I leave. I’m a bit ‘health & safety’ in that respect.

And here we have the man himself being Stig of the Dump, a book I remember fondly from a few years back. We found this chair in the quarry on our way back from a walk.

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