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.
