We’re cooking more ideas about living here permanently (‘monima’ – sounds monumental).
Yesterday we met a German couple, a cozy retired maths teacher, his independent wife, still hacking a 3 subject teaching job, and their gigantic, floppy Leonhauzer (?) doggy. They’ve put up a cabin on some land by the sea here and my first thought was how did you get hold of the land? Zia’s simmering with an idea of cultivating a humble hectare of tomatoes in plastic greenhouses. Surely there must be a law against polluting the view of the tidily planted plain, full of olive trees and mildly grazing random flocks of sheep? Plastic greenhouses would be horrific.
They know a German couple – Wolf, of the tiny shorts, and wife – who live along the road from us in Patsianos. “But it’s not a werry nice village is it,” the cozy mathematician said. I had to agree. Those damn dogs yowling and yapping in two hour stretches from ten pm each night…
But our view across the plain to the sea, with no abandoned cars or random piles of rubbish – astonishing and consoling all the livelong day. And the moonlight bathing the sea across to Gavdos.
Coming here this time was a comedy of errors: missed the 0650 direct flight. I was convinced it was 0805 takeoff, God knows why. Bought new flights for the same night and realised, as the plane revved its engines for takeoff, my trusty laptop wasn’t in my rucksack. I’d left it in the security bin while I limped about airside, munching vegan burgers and drinking beer. Within minutes, strapped into my seat, I’d located it through the lost property website and made a claim, just as we taxi-ed onto the strip.
A long night of waiting in Athens for our connecting flight segued into a long wait at the garage for a new fuel pump. That strong smell of petrol as I zoomed about on my last stay here was a death trap. We found an apartment to stay in and limped into Chania to have sea bream at a lovely taverna in a square by the harbour. Drank rose-flavoured raki and delivered home by the half Greek half Norwegian waitress’s taxidriver boyfriend Manos. He’s only ever been to Sfakia twice in his life.
We got home to Sfakia two days late, in the end, and the message arrived from Heathrow lost property that they had my laptop and my claim was accepted. Minutes later, it turned out I knew the woman who was writing to me from the office – an old Japanese friend whose great fulfilment in life had been to land this job 10 years ago. I remembered her giving the experience at a discussion meeting. So it was safe with her.
I decided the co codamol painkillers had been frying my brain and resolved to give them up for good, no matter how hard it gets before the op (still no date).
The house is cosy with rugs now, and we have a swish new stick hoover to keep them dust free.
I’m immersed in Edna O’Brien at present – a great piece in the New Yorker about her. She loves to be bardic about the darkest places in humanity but a Cambridge scholar rates her more highly as a critic of social mores. I’m with her on that. I remember being on the edges of her son, Carlo Gebler’s circle at York University and smile again at another near miss, brushing only lightly against greatness as usual.
Izzy Brown 