If you follow any of the various Symi pages on social media, or follow friends who live here, you won’t have failed to notice that yesterday was something of a damp day, to say the least. It’s still raining this morning, but it’s due to clear up later, and we may not have any more for a day or so, when it’s set to come back. We’ll see.

The Oxi Day parade still went ahead, though in limited form, with the solders and officials attending the service and the commemoration at the War Memorial, and let’s face it, if Greece can stand up to Mussolini in 1940, it can stand up to a deluge. There are a couple of You Tube videos from Symi TV showing the river of muddy red water coming off the hills behind Yialos and flowing into the sea under the bridge, and here’s one of them:

You can find more from Symi TV on their YouTube channel.

There are other videos going around showing other usually dry riverbeds in full flow, with the topsoil washing into Nimborio, for example, and through the mountains. As far as I can make out, no-one was hurt by the weather, though a couple of mopeds didn’t do so well. Our bathroom roof and porch are holding up, but the lean-to has water running down the walls, and we’ve got some ingress via the pointless aircon unit in the attic directly above the bed, so after going to bed, we got up again to put down towels up there, and I’ll take a look at the problem once the rain stops.

Apart from a quick dash to the shop between showers, it was a day for staying in, writing and making tomato soup, as you do when you don’t want to spend the entire day on the sofa. The day before, I found a simple recipe for peanut butter biscuits, which I did in the air fryer, and yeah, they’re fine, but you may as well eat a teaspoon of peanut butter with a side order of a teaspoon of sugar and let your internals do that baking. What with the price of groceries being what it is around here, it’s cheaper to buy a packet than it is to make them yourself. But it’s something to do.

Another thing I’d like to do is visit the immersive Titanic exhibition currently showing at the Goudi Digital Theatre in Athens, but sadly, that’s not in my rather bleak winter budget forecast. As I’m on things I’d like to do, I’d also like to see a ban on adverts such as this one: ‘Writing a book used to take years. Now it takes one afternoon — and $19. Your story, Amazon-ready by tonight.’ Sickening, but the debate about such things I will leave for my other blog.

In better news, I had a message from our landlord last night to say the new house contract is ready, and the terms are the same as now for another year, and as it’s all now on Taxisnet, all we had to do was open the program and accept. Except I’ve never been able to get into my Taxisnet, though big sis Jenine can, so she was able to do it for us, giving us another year here unless the house is sold or he wants it back. Breathing space, at least, but it also shows how much better and more transparent Greece is becoming on such matters. A problem only for those trying to avoid tax or be in some other way dishonest.

Right on cue, the thunder has started rolling in again, so I’d better post this now in case I have to unplug the internet.