Going slightly off piste today and wondering about pensions. As far as I can remember, I’ve still got a few years before my private one kicks in, I think it was 67 at the last count. Age that is, not years to go.

No idea what age I might be able to delve into any UK pension (or Greek one) that I may have paid/be paying into, 97 probably, if there is such a thing as a pension by the time I reach any kind of claiming age; if indeed I reach any kind of age.

But I have been seeing a lot of adverts recently for a company that tells me that, as an Ex-pat, I can claim my (private) pensions early, or move it overseas, or do something wonderfully handy with it – as long as I use their company of course, and I have never heard of them, so I shan’t even fill out an enquiry as I know it will only lead to hours of boring phone calls trying to sell me a product I don’t really want. But, maybe someone reading this knows about what ‘deals’ (for want of a better word) might be available to UK ‘ex-pats’ living abroad, in Europe, who have private or other pensions that that can become better off by doing things with them. And perhaps there’s also someone who can put those words in the correct order and make sense of them.

If so, feel free to email me and I’ll share the info. Please do not phone me about it. There are two reasons I ask that. 1) I hate speaking on the phone, and 2) the phone is currently unplugged so it won’t get answered anyway. Oh, three reasons… 3) My mobile is also playing up and turns itself off when I try and answer it, it apparently hates phone calls more than I do. Oh, four reasons… 4) I don’t want to talk about pension advice, I’m just interested to read about it and share reputable links with the blog readers. So, any ideas via email with handy links would be great. Thank you.

And talking of unwanted phone calls, I’ve already had a few from my mobile provider since I cancelled my mobile contract the other week. I went to the Wind shop in Yialos and Mr Wind there took me through the whole process, and my contract ends in March. He was very intrigued to see my sim card which is now nearly 13 years old and still working. I have a temporary one now and will change that for the new pay as you go one in March. But the call centre somewhere rang me out of the blue to find out why I was leaving my contract, so I told them: I was paying them more than I use, and they magically come up with a better offer. But I still wasn’t interested. So they came up with one that sounded like they would pay me to use their network. But I still wasn’t interested. If I’d wanted a new deal I would have asked for one thanks, so please get off the phone.

All this does mean that all my old numbers are on the card that is now out of the phone. I could out it back in and transfer them mover via the PC but I have packed the lead, so that’s not going to happen. So, if you text me and I reply asking ‘who are you?’ that’s the reason. If you want to text me saying who you are, I will save the number to the phone. But then again, the phone screen is playing up and I will need a new phone soon, so… oh forget it! Forget phones. Lets’ stick with emails and face to face shall we?

There, that’s my Tuesday morning ramble. Off to get on with the rest of the day now, though I have no idea what’s in store…

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Feeling a bit wintery in the house today, down to 13 degrees in the front room at 7.30, been kept awake during the night by the strong winds, the shutters at the front were rattling a bit but I can’t get to them now as the room is full of boxes, so I put the earplugs in and tried to get back to sleep.

Didn’t get out for a walk this morning at 6.30; far too cold and windy to make myself feel any more unpleasant than I feel at that time of day after a rough night’s sleep, so sat for half an hour while I had my hot water and lemon, and played with the new tablet – LG V400, not any other kind of tablet.

I like this thing, it’s got some funny habits. For example, when I use it to check things on Facebook and make a post, I write my pot, and then click share, or done or whatever it is, up pops my post and the tablet tells me ‘You posted this’ or ‘You just shared this’ and I say, I know, I told you to, I am in charge, actually. I mean, how thick does it think I am? I expect there will come a day soon when we won’t even have to like or post our own things, our devices will know what we would like or post and do it for us.

Anyway, meanwhile, what next, where are we? Ah yes. We’re heading off into another winter week on Symi and this one contains all the usual ingredients: tap, aerobics, walks, Pilates (for Neil) and so on, plus a couple of extra ones: signing the contract for the new house (the new furniture has been ordered) and collecting a new laptop. I am getting ahead of myself with this, I’ve found a new one as I want to upgrade before this one goes wrong suddenly, not that it looks like it is going to. Then everything shuffles down: Neil gets this one and his becomes the spare for emergencies. Might sound extravagant, but I’ve been saving up. Thought I should get it now and give myself time to transfer everything across and get used to Windows 8, as that seems unavoidable now.

So, that’s’ me for a Monday morning. Jack has just wandered in from his place on the sofa and decided that the big square box fill of kitchen things is this morning’s favoured bath and sleep place. So, he’s happy.

Have a good week ahead.

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When someone says, ‘Let’s go down town now and get some money out,’ and you’re looking at the weather and thinking, ‘Well, there’s a break in the rain and I can see a bit of blue sky,’ and you say, ‘Let’s go.’ Don’t.

A quick bit of exercise, a walk down the Kali Strata and then back up again for exercise, turned into a couple of hours sheltering at Pacho’s and a taxi, followed by drinks at the Sunrise and dinner at Georgio’s. (Two plates of spaghetti with mince, some cheese balls, two jugs of wine and a glass for Lefteris, all for just €20.00.) That’s what I call my sort of exercise.

But all was not lost, and the treat of going out to eat paid off as we had the chance to chat with our current landlord about how we should leave the house. Now then, I know you are following our house moving progress avidly, and I know that a lot of folk are genuinely interested (as opposed to what, James? Being falsely interested? Pretending to read this blog?) in how the process of moving from and/or to a Symi house actually works. Well, with the on-going assistance of The Symi Estate Agent it’s going very smoothly – the fantastic Dora has now arranged for us to sign the contract next week. We are packing up in earnest now…

But back to leaving this house. When we moved in we paid a deposit and in theory you get this back when you move out, minus any bills that need paying to cover the cost of repairs your landlord might have to carry out after you, etc. In our case that’s going to be a complete renovation of the house, but as that’s not our fault, we’d expect to get our deposit back. Only we know that it doesn’t actually work like that in practice; and there will be some electricity and water bills coming in after we’ve gone so he can use it for that. And the rent’s not gone up in 11 years so we’re happy about that too.

We’re also happy about the fact that he’s said that we can throw everything, leave nothing and not do any repairs, no need to fill holes in walls made by shelves, paint walls or clear the garden, or anything. We can even take the furniture that came with the house, not that we want to. He double-iterated that we don’t need to do any painting (‘Why? I am going to rip it all out.’) and we don’t need to fill any cracks, and we can dump the furniture for him. Well, we may leave it behind just in case. And I am putting this here so the if you hear that we left the house in a mess you will know that that is what we arranged to do. We even told him how black the kitchen was getting due to the damp and mould, and the hall, and the bathroom, and the bedroom where the window and shutters need fixing, and how the front and back doors don’t fit any more… And so on.

So, the way ahead is paved for signing contracts next week, picking up the keys on 16th February, and then using that week to move house. Neil is, as I write, packing the kitchen things not currently needed, into his smalls not currently needed and then into boxes – many currently needed.

And on that note (the boxes, not Neil’s smalls) if anyone else would like to volunteer to help move said boxes (and smalls) on the weekend of 21st and 22nd of February, please feel free to drop me a line.

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Yes, it is still cloudy (Thursday), yes it’s been raining, yes there was thunder and lightning about when we were out walking early in the morning and yes, the house is still dripping and the clothes aren’t dry, but I’ve had enough of talking about how wet it is on Symi at the moment. (The Poseidon weather site shows the rainfall map and is predicting more overnight but a clearer day today, Friday.) I just checked out the month ahead, specifically to look at the week we hope to be moving, and that week (on Accuweather) shows thunderstorms all week. Oh joy! Mind you, that’s still over two weeks away so things have time to change. And that’s it, no more rain talk (today at least).

So, by way of a complete change and to give us all an ‘Ahh’ moment or two, I wanted to share a couple of photos sent in from Suzan. She sent them with a message explaining that these are three orphaned Symi kids (goats) which are now one month old. They were, by the looks of it, hand reared, and they are all now doing fine up at Filimonas’ farm at Ayios Dimitrios.

Suzan, as you may know, helps with Symi Animal Welfare (www.symianimalwelfare.org) and if you want to know more about how you can contribute towards the health of the island’s non-domestic (and sometimes domestic) animals, then click over there and take a look at their site.

Do you know, after a few days of long rambles and stuff, I am going to leave it there today. I find myself with an hour to spare before household chores demand my attention and I still have eight chapters of ‘Lonely House’ to check over before I send them to the editor, so I am going to do that. Have a nice day.

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It’s not really the weather for taking photos, so you will have to make do with some old ones and a couple I took around the house yesterday.

Not that it is very easy to get around our house at the moment. The packing is one reason, as you can see from one of the shots, and the rain is the other – more in a moment. The front room is filling up with boxes and bags, crates and ‘things’ ready to go. I’ve more or less got the front room packed, apart from what I need at the desk, and some larger objects and pictures – which will probably end up being carried as they are. The bathroom cupboards are now down to their basics, and the moussandra/office is pretty much taken care of apart from Neil’s cameras. (About six boxes just on their own.) There’s not a lot more we can do now until we have a firm moving date and the keys, apart from collect more boxes, but where to put them? That’s the question.

Today, Thursday, is day 18 of the ‘moving house on Symi’ saga, and all we are waiting for now is the contract signing day; well, that’s the next stage. Meanwhile, though, we’ve lined up the new furniture that is needed, and have identified a new fridge freezer; all very exciting.

But progress is slightly hampered by the washing. It’s been rather wet of late, out there and in here, and Tuesday night/Wednesday morning brought a huge thunderstorm. It was so ‘Biblical’ that the lightening was going off at the same time as the thunder, a phenomenon usually reserved for horror films. As National Geographic put it: “Since light travels faster than sound, the thunder is heard after the lightning. If you see lightning and hear thunder at the same time, that lightning is in your neighbourhood.” Well, that night it was in our back garden, I reckon. The power went off at the trip switch, luckily after we’d got out of bed to unplug everything, this was at 3.15 in the morning.

I was just getting back into bed when I heard a new sound. We’re kind of used to the drip of the sitting room roof with rainwater falling into the bowl that’s there, but this was different. It was coming from the front room, the saloni, where it hasn’t rained before. So, we found that leak and put a towel under it and headed back to… No wait, there’s another sound. This one was closer to home and it was actually dripping on one side of the bed, somehow coming through the roof, through Neil’s office (where there was no sign or a leak at that time (3.30)) and into the bedroom. That’s a new one. Sorted that, reduced to putting down an old tablecloth as we’d run out of towels, and back to sleep – avoiding the, er, wet patch.

In the morning I discovered that the kitchen was now leaking is six new places, including over the draining board, the sitting room was as wet as usual and the corridor had also sprung a leak. In fact, the bathroom was the driest place in the house. Now we have the washing in the sitting room, near the heater with a fan on it to help the towels dry as we need them for the floors, the door and windows open to get rid of the condensation, and all kinds of damp things hanging about all over the place.

So, when next you think of asking ‘What is it like on Symi in the winter,’ I can give you two answers: one: wet. And two: read ‘Symi 85600’ and ‘Carry on up the Kali Strata’ and you will find out more detail.

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