Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please…?

 

I have a BIG apology to make.

A little while ago, I received a notification that my blog was no longer going to be delivered to subscribers via something called FeedBurner from July. As with most technological things, I tried to ignore it and hoped it would go away, until I realised that July was almost upon us and I had to do something about this. There was a list of instructions about how to download the subscriber details. I needed to click first on ‘Analyze’.

But where was this word to click on? I started to search the back room of Blogger, browsing the strange terminology. Fallback subdomain. Enable custom robots (that sounds fun!).

And then purely by chance I clicked on Comments, and found more than a hundred unread comments on my blog posts. Some of them were unwanted advertising, spam, the very reason I’d activated something a few years ago that allowed me to moderate comments before they were posted. But I hadn’t also activated something to notify me of comments that needed moderating. I didn’t know they were there. So many were lovely comments from you, the readers. Some of them, especially around the time I bought my house, almost had me in tears.

Please forgive me – I didn’t mean to ignore you! Some of you had written lovely things about my books, or about visiting Tilos and seeing me, or had asked for advice. And I had no idea.

To be honest, I’d stopped posting regularly because everyone had gone quiet and I thought you weren’t so interested in the blog any more. A few of you had commented that it was a shame I didn’t blog so often these days…

I still don’t know how I will deliver this blog in the future as I still haven’t figured out how to download the subscriber details. Perhaps if you would like to continue to receive it as an email, you can send me your email address in a message. Otherwise, please continue to check in from time to time, and I’ll try to keep posting.

I have, of course, been busy, as always – and only partly with writing and editing work. With the abrupt change to a hot, dry season, suddenly the lovely wildflowers and long grass that had filled the garden all winter and spring turned to straw and needed cutting down so as not to be a fire risk. The head gardener (my mum) then arrived from England, and as if alerted of her presence, the travelling plant-sellers started arriving by ferry with trucks full of lovely plants to sell to us. 

Moreover, since the new era of freedom began, it’s been wonderful to travel again, and to have family and friends visiting. Our first trip was to Rhodes to start the process to convert my residence permit into the infamous Brexit-prompted biometric pass. So what if the SAOS ship Stavros takes five hours, going via Halki and Symi? It was a journey, on a ferry! And can you imagine a more beautiful journey, moreover taking in a coast of Symi that is so rarely seen, with its magnificent cliffs? And then once we were there, the shops and restaurants were open again...

It was a year and a half ago in winter that I was last in Astypalea, failing to meet the cheese man. So last week we arranged for people to look after the garden and Fishbags the cat, and took advantage of a new route on the Dodecanese Seaways catamaran and were on the lovely westernmost island of the Dodecanese in three and a half hours. Two days later, our return via the same route looked compromised by a predicted 6 Beaufort, so we took that as a perfect excuse to stay longer. Everyone on the island seems to be a dog-lover and the animals are mostly kept away from the village, so Lisa had some wonderful off-lead freedom too.

And so it was that on Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday morning, we were trying to catch a little sleep on the hard benches of the Blue Star Chios back to Tilos, with incessant announcements blaring through the loudspeakers in some form of torture, perhaps designed to make more people pay for cabins. All we’d hear was:

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please…

Followed by a minute indecipherable gobbledegook. It’s wonderful to travel, but I think we’ll stay at home for a few days.

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Last Day in Astypalea

The cheese man isn’t there. Maybe because it's Saturday, although a few days ago at the café he said, ‘Any day, just come here at ten.’ The door of the kafeneio is padlocked, and on a table by the door are some remains from the night before, I guess: a glass, a bottle and a cigarette lighter.

A few evenings before, I ate a delicious saganaki here, local cheese lightly pan-fried. Panayiotis the owner, wearing leather boots, his black beard knotted under his chin, asked if I liked it and said if I wanted to buy some, he could call the man who makes it.

‘What I’d really like,’ I said, ‘is to go to where he makes it and see how it’s done. But I don’t know if that would be possible.’

The kafeneio in Maltezana was in ruins until Panayiotis decided to fix it up. Panayiotis' father was from Astypalea but like many families from the island they lived in Athens. Panayiotis grew up in the city and did building work, but there wasn't much going on with the economic crisis so ten years ago he came here and restored this kafeneio. He kept the original stone building from 1956 but added his touch of colour. The fishing and farming village has only eighty permanent residents, though plenty of tourists stay here in the summer. In February it is calm and sleepy. A guy came in for a coffee. A woman played with her phone. The dogs sniffed around, looking for food and attention. 

As I was finishing the salad of tomatoes and paximadia with lots of oregano and olive oil, a large man in a rain jacket walked in and sat by the wood-burning stove with a beer, and Panayiotis said, ‘This is the man who makes the cheese.’

The cheese man was talkative and full of stories, like a lot of the people I've met here. He used to work on boats, but since retiring from that he raises sheep and goats, and he makes cheese regularly from Easter onwards, though just in small quantities at this time of year when the animals need their milk to feed their young. The fresh, unaged cheese is called klori. He keeps about five hundred animals.

‘We had a big problem when it didn’t rain for the last three years.’ Without rain, there’s no grass and they have to buy feed. This year there’d been plenty of rain, and clear streams were flowing down the hillsides into the dam. ‘There are twelve and a half thousand animals on the island,’ he said. ‘They mostly belong to the church. But there are farms with animals all over the island.’ He reeled off a list of places. Astypalea is a small island with only three villages; most of these places are in the hills. 

It's a beautiful day and perhaps it would be a shame to be indoors all day watching milk boil. Maybe he’s out on a fishing boat instead, catching calamari… Since the kafeneio is closed, I have a coffee at the taverna overlooking the sea instead. I can make the most of the sunshine and go for a walk and maybe a swim. Just along the coast there are fishing boats, a church with a dovecote, a path covered in mauve, purple and blue flowers, and the remains of a mosaic floor from the fifth century AD, the late Roman/early Christian era. It’s only my second trip to the island; maybe next time, I’ll catch up again with the cheese man.