Wednesday started off clear, then wet, then clear again and finally settled down to what people were jokingly referring to as ‘Kalokairi’, summer. I wouldn’t go that far but as I write, late on Wednesday afternoon, the sun is lighting up Harani and the church of Evangalismos, the sea is a kind of grey-blue hybrid, and calm, and there is a sky that resembles the opening of ‘the Simpsons.’

Actually, it’s not as late as I think, I haven’t seen the Blue Star come back in yet and that’s due at 16.30. We saw it come in in the morning, as we were down in Yialos dealing with some bits and pieces: Cat litter, doctor visit, accountant, cat food, post office check, collecting a new toaster, having a coffee, watching the world go by, that kind of thing.

We managed to collect several bags and a large box and so didn’t walk back up, not with five kilos of kitty-litter, two kettles, one toaster and shopping, not in the ‘summer.’ Back at the house we discovered that Jack had not been guarding the place and ‘Ginger Spice’ had helped herself to not only his food but also to stuff from what I thought was a bag yet to be un packed, but turned out to be yesterday’s potato peelings. She, Ginger, was clearly not impressed by them and left them on the floor for me. But now she thinks she’s allowed in and has serious designs not only on eating Jack’s food but making him the adopted father of the kittens she’s about to drop. We’re not having that!

Jack is now spending more time outside growling at Ginger Spice and sniffing the walls, and when he is not doing that he is wandering around randomly shouting at things, checking every closed door and following me about like a dog. He’s fine in the evenings when he settles on his rug beside the heater as we watch films from the discomfort of our director’s chairs. Which brings us on to furniture deliveries. We didn’t see the big truck coming off the boat this morning and Michaelis has no idea if our furniture is on it if/when it does arrive; he won’t know until he opens the doors. But, as I write, the boat is due in half an hour and from up here in my aerie I am going to watch to see if the big truck comes off it. More scintillating furniture delivery news may come your way very soon if you are incredibly unlucky…

But before that, you might like to start the on-going adventures of ‘Neil and the name-change.’ Our landlord wants the electricity bill for the house to be in the tenant’s name – Neil; the accountant has given him some papers and instruction to take them to the ΔΕΗ. He’s been to the ΔΕΗ and the chap there had no idea what to do with them and suggested he called the ΔΕΗ helpline that you find on the bill. That’s part one of this tale which, I have a feeling, will run and run.

Oh, but talking of luck: Symi is now on digital TV and if you don’t have a certain kind of TV you will need to buy a box or something. I thought I’d give our non-smart TV a go and found that it automatically tuned itself in to about 15 sparklingly clear Greek channels without the aid of a digi-box. So our TV does have a use after all!

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Clean Monday was a bit of a wash-out for most, though I am sure everyone did what they could and had a good time. Remember, ‘If you can’t do what you want to then you do the things you can.’

We worked at home in the morning, and then went to the Harry house for a rather non-Clean Monday indoor barbeque complete with quizzes and regular boat check-ups. It’s become something of a pastime around here, clicking back to your tablet to check on the Live Ships app to see where the Blue Star Diagoras is and follow its trail as it hangs about off Rhodes waiting for the wind and swell to die down. It did though call into Symi yesterday on its way back to Athens. Let’s hope it got there in time to turn around and head back here tomorrow.

And on that note: no sign of the new furniture as yet, though there may be by the time this gets auto-posted on Wednesday morning. In case you were wondering: when you order from Ikea.gr you can get a text message saying when your things have left the warehouse. Then you might get an email to say they are on their way. We (or rather Jenine who is dealing with it) got a message to say things had been delivered, but that actually means delivered to the courier, I guess. So they could be sat at Piraeus still, waiting for the truck to be filled so it can be dispatched. They could then have been on last Tuesday’s boat that never was, and not actually been unloaded until last night. We shall never really know. But when the company says delivery has been made, it doesn’t necessarily mean delivered to you.

We had a similar courier problem just before Christmas when Neil’s order didn’t arrive even though the courier headquarters told us it was on Symi. We asked all the courier agents we could think of, and the postman, and never did find the delivery. Not until Neil had asked, in mid January, for his money back and the shop he bought the things from tracked down the courier agent on Symi who had had the package since well before Christmas but had not told anyone. And so it goes on: the joys of having deliveries made to Symi. I think there’s a section about this in ‘Symi 85600’ or ‘Carry On Up The Kali Strata.’ (See the links on the right and order copies if you’ve not got one already.)

And on the book news front: we are still editing and preparing ‘Lonely House’, my next horror novel to come from RC Publications – due out around March or April.

Now that I have my new ‘office’ more or less set up and am getting used to it, I can see that it’s going to be so much easier to be disciplined in this new house. I don’t mean told off or given the slipper, I mean self-disciplined. Leaving the living quarters part of the house and entering the ‘office’ side gives you a feeling of actually going out to work, rather than working from home. There are fewer distractions, with only the view of Yialos and Nimos to distract me from my tasks. So hopefully, soon, when it’s slightly warmer, I will get back into the coursework I want to do and the writing I want to do and put down another novel of some description ready for Christmas sales. Perhaps.

First though, I have shopping to do and an enthusiastically filled cat litter tray to empty. Ah, the life of a novelist eh!

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The boat finally came in and, I imagine, some folk arrived, some managed to get away, deliveries have been made and there should now be things in the shops.

That was Sunday afternoon, it’s now Monday and the boat is due back again, from Rhodes, this afternoon, or evening. And it might be bringing our furniture with it, or that might have arrived last night. As I write this I have no idea and no further updates. But I can tell you that Monday dawned cloudy and wet, and slightly warmer than of late. It started raining during the night, and I was woken up a few times by new sounds – sounds of the new house that I am not yet familiar with: rain on the roof, drips from gutters and so on.

It’s also Clean Mondays today (yesterday as you read this), but not the weather for having barbeques, as we had planned, or flying kites, not this year. No traditional picnics unless things improve considerably this afternoon, which looks unlikely.

And so, instead, I am writing up a quick post and then getting ready for an indoor BBQ at Jenine’s house, while looking down onto a gunmetal grey sea and listening to the gutters still dripping outside and the air conditioning blowing out a little warmth from above me. If you’ve been following our house move then you might like to know that we have dropped the keys to the old house back with the owner, via Lefteris at the bar as Lefteris of the keys was taking deliveries from the boat, and so we are now well and truly moved – apart from the furniture which may or may not be on the island. If it is, I hope it is somewhere dry…!

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And the usual Symi Dream blog is all about cats and weather – well, maybe with some stuff about writing and living on Symi. Today it’s about nothing in particular, except cats and weather, as I do a quick Sunday morning catch-up before heading off to hang pictures, put some more things away, do some more housework and go shopping for a barbeque which may or may not happening tomorrow.

You may have heard about the problems we had with boats and wind and how the man now known as ‘Captain Kotopoulo’ (Captain Chicken) decided not to stop on Symi on Friday evening because someone here told him the weather was giving ‘cyclone conditions’ on Symi, when in fact it was a meagre force five dropping to four, with very low swell. (I sound like the shipping forecast.) Well, instead of calling in, he turfed 120 Symi-bound people off the boat, leaving them stranded for another night on Rhodes. (There had been no boat to Symi since Tuesday, and some of those trying to get here had left Athens on Tuesday morning and had still not arrived.)

Anyway, the Dodecanisos came in on Saturday morning, and the Blue Star is due to put in an extra run today (Sunday) and call back in later this morning and again tomorrow. Mind you, the forecast now is for a force seven on Monday so, unless Captain K feels adventurous, there may not be another big boat in until Wednesday… And so it goes on. It’s what you have to expect from Symi at this time of year, or any remote and small island with a difficult harbour to dock at. The new one landing jetty coming on though, and I heard that most of the underwater work is now done, so we should soon start seeing something concrete down there, quite literally. Hopefully, when it’s done, the boat won’t have any trouble docking.

And so, to the house. Well, we’re all in now apart from the new furniture and fridge freezer which, I assume, have been ship-bound since being loaded in Piraeus on Tuesday morning. If it is on the boat then it’s been to Rhodes, hung around there for a day or so and then been back to Athens, and is now, on Sunday, heading back down again. Let’s hope it’s a) on the boat and b) the boat lands and c) gets unloaded and d) everything is in one piece. (Well, it’s from Ikea, so it will be in many pieces, but you know what I mean.)With Monday being a bank holiday here (Clean Monday, the start of Lent) we are not expecting to hear anything until at least Tuesday. Meanwhile we continue to use the marble kitchen shelf as the fridge, sit on two director’s chairs in a rather big and empty sitting room and dress ourselves from ruck sacks and plastic bags.

Jack has been settling in. He loves it that he is allowed to sleep in the bedroom at night (until he is 100% confident with outside), and he has even adjusted to his litter tray, which is a bit noisy and smelly at his usual ‘go’ time, which is around five in the morning, but which will, eventually, end up outside. So, here’s wishing you a good week, and watch this space for more ‘un-put-downable’ boat, furniture and weather news.

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One of the things you need to consider, when considering a move to Symi, is how much of a rush you might be in. We go on a lot about the weather and boats around here and there is a very good reason for that.

Imagine if you lived in Middle-Marsh, twenty miles from the nearest town, with only two buses per week, no car, no taxi service and no way of getting to or from your idyllic village if the bus didn’t run. And imagine if the bus didn’t run when it was raining. Well, that’s a bit like being here on Symi, except it’s a boat not a bus, and it’s wind not rain. And that’s what we’ve been suffering from this week in particular: high winds.

And not just us (at least we didn’t have snow as they did on other islands). The weather was so bad it stopped the boat from docking at several places on its way down from Piraeus, including Rhodes. And that meant that some people, going from Athens to Rhodes, were stuck on the ship from Tuesday morning until sometimes on Thursday afternoon, in rough seas. Similarly, some people who popped over to Rhodes for a day or two ended up staying a week as, if I remember correctly, the last boat into – or out of – Symi was last Tuesday. (I’m writing this on Friday and the Blue Star is due back tonight.)

At least I am hoping it comes in to night as there are people who have already missed flights and who were due to leave on Wednesday to get back to the UK. Which is what I meant about being in a hurry. Sometimes you can’t be. It was one of the things we discussed when deciding to live here permanently: if there’s an emergency in the UK, we may not be able to get there straight away. When going on a holiday, where a flight from Rhodes is involved, we always go at least one, if not two, days early and add two days in Rhodes onto our break, just to be sure of catching the plane. Expensive, yes, but that’s the choice we made.

So, enough of this, the wind has dropped slightly and I am able to open my office shutters and share the view for the first time. After getting this post ready I am going to find a long ladder and something to fill in a hole in the ox eye window in the sitting room. With a curtain up, shutters closed and heaters blasting, it was still only around five degrees in there last night thanks to a break in the ox eye glass.

Oh, and then I am going to see if Jack has found his litter tray yet. He has been in the house since Wednesday afternoon and has not yet ‘been.’ He’s shouted at everything, of course, he’s had a look around the roof, he’s been shown his litter tray (but after 12 years of never using one I am not surprised he has no idea what I am showing him) and he has met the pregnant female cat who sits outside our door each day. So, hopefully, by the end of the weekend, he would have settled down and ‘been’ and in the right place too!

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