Symi 85600 – life on Symi
Symi 85600 is my best selling title so far this month: it looks like there’s a lot of interest in Symi at the moment.
I think this fabulous review might have had something to do with it: “I loved this honest and highly amusing account of leaving it all behind and heading to a Greek island. James has a brilliant command of the English language and makes it altogether much more fun than English language ever was at school! If I was to follow in James and Neil’s footsteps then this is the book I would tuck under my arm and head to Greece with. I cannot wait to read it again…..and again…..and again…..I want to be buried with it – which may well be sooner than I think since I nearly died laughing during some of his witty observations!”
(I know there’s a lot of interest in certain other things today, but we’re not going there.) ‘Symi 85600’ (it’s the postcode in case you were wondering) is the first of my three books about moving to and living on this island. I am planning another one for next year, a collection of thoughts based on some of the blog posts from here, but expanded and hopefully made more amusing. That’s next on the writing table after ‘Remotely’ which we are still hoping to have out next month, and ‘the Saddling’ which is currently at 80,000 words of the first draft and for which I have just bought ‘A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms’ as it’s set on the Romney Marshes, in Kent.
Meanwhile, on Symi, it seems that someone has been testing out the Tannoy system that is used to make island-wide announcements. For the past couple of nights we’ve had this strange, disembodied voice, shouting out, ‘Ena, thio, tria’ after a few distorted dodgy notes that are a mix of the Hi-Di-Hi glockenspiel, the Chanel 4 theme and something else I can’t quite put my ears on when I hear it. It happens in the evening and I’ve heard some say it’s coming from the police station. That all sounds rather ‘1984’ to me. On Wednesday night we were treated to some scratchy ‘Zorba the Greek’ and I wonder if we will get any more of it to drift off to sleep to. All rather odd, but amusing, as life tends to be around here. It’s all a bit mabbled, as my new dictionary would have it; all rather confused. It’s also interesting to note that Tannoy without the T reads, Annoy.
As I often do on the occasion of a new dictionary or other reference book, I thought I’d look up a few words that I know will not be in there and see what the words either side of it would have been, just for fun and perhaps for a bit of light education. So, let’s start with Symi – a word that’s clearly not going to be in a dictionary of Kentish words and expressions.
Before it would come, Swot – another word for soot, and after it would be the first of the T section, Taant, out of proportion, very tall, usually used on ships about the mast. Now lets’ try Collins, all rather prosaic I’m afraid: Before there is Collarmaker, a saddler who works for farmers making horse collars and after it comes, Comb, an instrument used by a thatcher.
Looking at Gosling we have Goody, contracted from Goodwife, the title of an elderly widow, and after would be Go-to, to set, as in ‘The sun goes-to’ when it sets. Jack, the Alarm Cat gets Ivy Girl which rather unhelpfully has the entry: ‘See Holly Boy’, and after a couple Jack In The Box and Jack Up, gets Jaul, to throw the earth about and get the grain out of the ground. At last we have a word that I can relate to, especially when clearing up his litter tray at six in the morning where he has jaulled the litter all over the porch.
This kind of nonsense may appear in the new Symi book next year as, apart from Symi stories, there will be other articles of interest (to me at least). And on that note, I will leave you to enjoy your In/Out status, whatever the result will be – I am writing this yesterday so the voting is going on as I write.
And if you were wondering about Holly Boy, it relates to a Shrove Tuesday antic where girls would burn a Holly Boy, a figure of a boy made out of holly, and the boys would, somewhere else in the village, burn an Ivy Girl, a figure made out of Ivy. Both ceremonies were, apparently, accompanied by huzzas. Strange folk, us Kentish.
Check out Symi 85600 and it’s (mainly) five-star reviews here.
