It’s 8.30 am, and already baking hot outside, the sea calm and inviting, though for now I’m sitting with my coffee looking out the kitchen window, just listening. Lisa barks at someone walking by. A few cars pass. These are the busiest days of Greek summer, the 15 August tomorrow, and I’m thankful to be in a peaceful place.

These are days of enforced rest, when it’s too hot to do very much at all except take another cold shower or a nap. Water the garden, pick some figs, read a book, have a swim. Pick some more figs.

A week or so ago, ants were breaking and entering all around the house. I felt quite gleeful one day to open a cupboard and not see them scurrying around – then I realised the cupboard was actually quite empty as everything had been secured in the fridge or thrown away. The ants had eaten neat holes in plastic to get to anything tempting.

Then monstrous fat caterpillars and green grasshoppers started munching through various plants in the garden, even oleanders, leaving a trail of fat black droppings that was often the only way to find them camouflaged against the leaves. The vines have few grapes this year (having been cut right back for the building of the new pergola) so thankfully there are no hornets buzzing close to the house. The bees have been enjoying the flowers.

I’m usually getting up in the cool of morning around six, when Lisa comes to me for strokes and is excited to go for a walk to Ayios Antonis harbour. She checks out her territory and soaks herself in the sea before breakfast, before the sun’s too strong. Her siesta starts around eight in the morning and lasts until four or five in the afternoon, when she’s ready for a proper walk to a beach. Fishbags is more than happy to do the same, without the walk. 

I realise I need these days of enforced rest, close to home. I worked hard finishing off my book, AN ISLAND HOME AND A SALTY DOG, revising and revising it, then figuring out how to publish it myself – a conscious decision this time to put less pressure on and to have it available on the island and Amazon this summer. That moment of opening the first box of books was nerve-wracking but more exciting than ever. It was a kind of gift to myself, taking the time to do this and to have the pleasure then of hearing that people are enjoying it. It's been fun receiving photos from people as they start reading.

My laptop seems to be telling me it's ready for a rest too - the battery gone, the keyboard now faltering too. I have a new one but need to set it up, and that challenge is not in the least bit tempting right now. So, I’m going to sign off and go and relax with a book. Enjoy your summer, wherever you are!

 

 

Hoopoes and Swallows, Asparagus and Taramosalata...

 

When Lisa wants to go for a morning walk, all winter I’ve been used to piling on whatever warm clothes come to hand, a woolly hat over unbrushed hair. But this morning I ran into several neighbours, two of them dressed smartly in black for church. It’s the start of Easter week and more people are back on the island.

Also back are the lovely hoopoes – I’ve seen several, not noticing the medium-sized brown birds until they take off in flight and show their flamboyant black-and-white-striped tail feathers. I’ve heard the whistling sound of bee-eaters – it seems early for them – but not seen one yet. Much more evident are the swallows, swooping low and fast, midnight-blue plumage on top and snow-white underneath, tail like two long, fine tines of a carving fork.

Yesterday morning, four young goats were playing on the old drystone wall in front of my house, two of them trotting over the rocks and head-butting each other. Despite the abundance of fresh vegetation everywhere, they stand at my fence and look greedily at the garden.

Goat farmers are much in evidence too, guarding their stock and fattening them up. ‘Don’t let the dog out of the car here!’ snarled one when, having seen him with his flock, I stopped to ask where it was OK to walk. We’re avoiding Plaka and Lethra until Easter is over, when there’ll be a lot of confused mother goats saying, ‘I haven’t seen young Johnny for days…’ ‘Meh, and my Matilda’s disappeared too… And what’s happened to that nice man who kept bringing treats?’

Livadia and Megalo Horio will also be off-bounds for the next week while firecrackers are exploding – I heard the first yesterday, while in between downpours we walked along Livadia seafront. More rocks had been washed up by powerful wind and waves from the south recently. As we walked around the bay, the pebbles looked brilliant white against a clear aquamarine sea and a brooding sky. Lisa, of course, went in for a swim.

We’ll stick to places far from firecrackers, the fields in the Eristos valley where Lisa loves to sniff for rabbits, occasionally making one leap out of a bush and safely away, while I keep an eye out for other prizes. Perhaps because we’ve had plenty of rain, or perhaps I’ve got better at looking for them, I’ve found more fresh wild asparagus than ever before, and more exquisite orchids – sending photos to my orchid-ID gurus Eleftheria and Gerry. And in the hillside terraces closer to home, I look out for tiny fragments of old pottery with an unusual pattern or glaze. Yesterday afternoon, I found a little of everything so didn’t mind that my feet were squelching in my boots from walking through wet grass. Lisa had a wonderful time, enjoyed a huge dinner and watched neighbours walk by while I pulled up weeds from the garden, enjoying the evening sunshine. By the time I lit a fire for a cosy evening, she was in a deep sleep.

 

I’ve been using the excuse of Lent and long walks to eat halva every day. My favourite from Drapetsona in Piraeus was made with carob syrup. During the ‘fasting’ periods leading up to Easter when some give up meat, certain traditional foods appear. After eating delicious white taramasalata at tavernas in Rhodes and then Astypalea during trips last month, I decided to try making my own. The pink packaged stuff is terrible in Greece compared to good supermarket taramosalata in the UK. For the first time, I bought the salted roe from the minimarket and got instructions: mashed potatoes (or bread), olive oil, lemon. Mine tasted bland until I added finely chopped onion. The ladies at the minimarket said not everyone likes it with onion.

Before this last rainy week, we had weeks of dry weather, good swims, even lying in warm sun. But the heavy rainfall this winter has been a blessing for the island.

Now big leaves have now grown back on my fig trees, and sparrows are knocking down the hard green figs, discarding them when they find they can’t eat them, looking instead for other things to eat in the soil, taking baths in Lisa’s water bowl.

For the last months, I’ve been working on revisions of the new manuscript. It’s something I was writing on and off for ages, and finally felt driven to finish last year. With the help of an excellent editor, I hope I’ve knocked it into shape. It’s about my adventures on Tilos with Lisa since we moved to this house at Ayios Antonis with its fig trees and vines, surrounded by mountains and sea, life in an amazing place with an amazing dog, woven in with stories of island life past and present. Maybe AN ISLAND HOME AND A SALTY DOG?

Ahem, says Fishbags, aren’t you forgetting someone?

The amazing salty dog just came to look at me through the open kitchen door, suggesting it might be time for another walk or another breakfast. Ah, and the power’s just gone off again – for about the tenth time in two days – so this will have to wait until later…

Delivery, Small Island-Style

 

A dozen years ago – can it really be? I’ve never lived in a place for so long! – Yorgos Orfanos showed up one day at the Honey Factory to deliver all my belongings I’d shipped from England.

Now I’ve been in my own house, equally unbelievably, for five years. When I bought it, I’d agreed to buy it with all the contents and I didn’t want to change too much about this authentic little island house by the sea. But my house is finally entering the twenty-first century – which feels OK now that it’s 2024 and all.

It started with a trip to Rhodes a few weeks ago to take the car for its MOT (KTEO), meet my mum at the airport, and take Lisa to the vet; then since I had the car, we went for a drive out of town. I’m pretty sure last time I visited the IKEA in Rhodes there wasn’t much of a showroom. That may have been several years ago.

This time, it was rather more impressive, and I’d been thinking a few of my old things really had to go. Maybe I was ready for a new couch (I have two, both second-hand, or maybe third-hand). And some new outdoor furniture. And a thick rug would be nice under my feet in the winter. Oh, and some lightweight, stackable chairs. And…

The sales assistant at IKEA at first insisted they didn’t deliver to Tilos. But luckily I knew that they did. We insisted. They checked. They did deliver to Tilos. We placed the order.

Back in Tilos a few days later, the next thing that happened was that another hotplate became unusable on my old cooker. This stove was also in the house when I bought it five years ago, and already very old, but two of the hotplates and the oven still worked. Why change it…? I even painted over the rust a couple of years ago with white enamel. Really. And painted little icons to show which knob was for which hotplate.

But recently it seemed the oven only had two settings, off or burning. And there were no numbers left on the knobs, so only I knew how to work it. To be fair, I have considered buying a new one, but the little hotplate for the briki, the Greek coffee pot, has been something of a sticking point – and not because it hasn’t been cleaned. Most new cookers don’t have them, and I didn’t want an extra appliance. I liked making my Greek coffee on my stove.

Then one night when my mum cooked dinner, one of the knobs came flying off onto the floor. An accident? I’m not sure… But I did go online and order a lovely new cooker.  

Anyway, so, a few days ago I was in Livadia when I saw Yorgos hanging out with a group of guys I knew, and as I said hello, I mentioned that I’d ordered some stuff, because Yorgos is still the man who transports large items by truck via the big ship from Rhodes to Tilos.

‘It might be here already,’ he said. ‘What is it, chairs?’

‘Yes, and other things… Call me!’ I said. I was excited; and then as several days passed, I figured it must have been someone else’s chairs that had arrived.

Delivery to Tilos is fairly haphazard, at the mercy of boat schedules plus mysterious other obstacles. Christmas cards from the UK arrive in February. Last year I ordered something from a company that refunded my money because it took so long to arrive, even though I told them that was normal. Yesterday I received an email from another company asking me for feedback on my recent purchase of a new bag. Don't you get tired of being asked for feedback on everything? But in any case, it hasn’t arrived yet.

This morning was Sunday morning, as peaceful as most Sunday mornings at this time of year. Lisa stayed in bed after a big walk to the monastery yesterday, so I made myself a Greek coffee and a little breakfast. Then I noticed someone standing at my gate, and heard my name shouted. It wasn’t Nikos the fisherman, and didn’t seem to be one of the farmers with vegetables…

It was Yorgos, with a truckload of boxes that he said were all for me.

‘Where d’you want it?’ he asked as he and his helper started unloading and carrying stuff in.

I suggested they just stack most of the stuff against the outside wall and I’d sort it out myself, but clearly the cooker at least would need to find a place in the kitchen to await the electrician.

‘If I’d known it was coming,’ I said to Yorgos, smiling, ‘if you’d called me, I could have made some space and cleaned…’

But Yorgos perhaps thought that most people would have their house already in some kind of order and cleanliness, i.e. as a general state of affairs. Whenever I clean, I think how nice it looks and that I should do it more often. But then I go for a walk instead, or into the garden to plant some seeds. And with my front door always open, the kitchen floor seems constantly covered in mud, dust, sand and bits of firewood.

I hurriedly moved boots, dog food, bags, socks, snorkel, sarongs, etc etc and swept a space for the cooker, and the guys carried it in.

Yorgos said, ‘Don’t stand on it,’ and grinning, pointed to the icon on the packaging on top of the cooker that did in fact show a pair of feet and an X over them.

‘Oh, I was hoping to dance on it!’

(And anyone who's been to a party in my kitchen knows that stranger things happen.)

The whole thing had taken maybe ten minutes and then they were gone, with everything piled neatly. I thought Yorgos probably doesn’t call people in advance because this way it all gets done quickly, or as they say in Greek, derived from the ancient Doric I believe, ‘taka-taka.’

It was a warm, sunny morning, but somehow it felt like Christmas. I retrieved my coffee and started opening my first package.

The storm is coming

 

It’s Sunday morning, 6 November, and we’re preparing for a storm – though the sun is still warm and bright. For weeks we’ve woken to perfect blue skies and calm but now dark grey clouds are gathering and a restless wind blowing from the south. 

A thunderstorm is always hard for Lisa so I’ve given her an extra-nice breakfast. There’s a comfortable, dry space in the woodshed for Fishbags the cat. As for the other cat - the one that shows up several times a day meowing for food, however determined I am not to have a second cat - it will fend for itself, I'm sure. That one is 'The Cat Formerly Known as Girlfriend' - the one that acted like Fishbags' girlfriend, until its anatomy developed. I'm not sure if they'll still share the space in the woodshed.

In summer I remove some of the windows to let the wind blow through the house, and replace them with wire mesh screens; yesterday seemed a good time to put the windows back on. We rearranged the kitchen furniture – my furniture is always rearranged with the seasons – to bring in a second couch from outside, an old bed piled up with cushions. I covered the big old couch outside with a tarpaulin.

There was a strange day or two of rain in August and a day in mid-October, but otherwise the ground hasn’t been soaked for many months. The island’s roaming goats have been suffering with nothing fresh to eat; in a half hour’s walk from home we see half a dozen dead or dying. 

Olives suffer from the late rain too – they like a good soaking in October. This week I gathered them in from my two trees. It seemed a little early, and others had firmly told me ‘Not before the rain!’ but Antonis, visiting with some olive oil, said they were ready for alati, salt; he meant brine, and explained how to test the saltiness of the water by seeing if a fresh egg just rises to the top. I spent an hour or two later pruning the olive trees, then decided to open the 20-litre barrel of attempted wine from this summer’s grapes. Excitingly, it smelled and tasted good! Still a little fizzy and cloudy, but certainly more like wine than vinegar.

I’ve been watering my garden every few days; I’m still picking a tomato or two every day from my plants, and there’s rocket, the spinach is coming back, and the radish seedlings are coming up. I’ve been grabbing a handful of dates from the palm every day; they have big stones, but the taste of fresh dates for free is a sweet treat. I’ve been planting, thinning out seedlings, digging new beds, heartened that gradually the garden is yielding more. The jury's still out on whether the avocado tree will survive.

Some delicious flavours of the new season came this week on Dimitris’ truck: seskoula or chard, boiled and served with a squeeze of fragrant local lemon, as well as chopped garlic and olive oil; a feast with potatoes, and salt-cured fish, and feta, and just-ripe mandarins. Dinner tasted great with retsina, but we also ordered some red wine, white wine and souma from Embona in Rhodes for the winter.

During September and into October, if you wanted to go out for dinner, it was hard to get a table in Livadia. Now, only a couple of restaurants remain open. The kafeneio in Megalo Horio closed its outdoor terrace, and has a cosier, locals’ feel; food is available but might have to wait until the card game is over. The island is quiet, with fewer cars around. The bus stops in mid-afternoon.

On the dry paths high on the hillsides we’ve seen mauve colchicums, a few mauve crocuses and a tiny delicate autumn narcissus. I’ve heard melodious birdsong while sitting at my desk with the door open to the garden. We’ve seen eagles circling in the sky, kestrels and owls taking off. The moon and stars have been very bright at night.

The sunshine at this time of year has lost the burning heat of summer and is easier to enjoy; I’ve found it impossible to stay indoors too long, when the temperature is so good for walking. The late afternoon light is radiant, golden. Walking back from a walk in the warm dusk under a bright moon, you hear the peep of the scops owl.

Though many beaches are in shadow by mid-afternoon, the sea has been clear, warm and calm, ideal for snorkelling. At Eristos, for the first time, I saw small calamari very close to the surface; I’ve watched pearly razorfish with their soft, delicate pink and green colouring, pottering around the seabed alone. A germanos, spotting me, raised all the spines along its back, its mouth an ‘o’; an octopus hid motionless in a little cave, disguised by making its head as spiky and mottled as the rock.

Off the beach near my house, thornback rays have been gliding elegantly across the seabed with their wings billowing to either side and their long, pointed tails. I’ve been close enough to see the subdued gold under the mostly greyish brown, the little point of its ‘nose’ feeling its way in the sand, the back flipper guiding. A few times I’ve seen flat little flounders crowding the ray’s tail as it forages in the sand; and a white trevally, striped with yellow, hovering directly over it, picking at it. Bizarrely, when a ray took off and sped away at a hand’s height above the seabed, the fish went in seemingly hot pursuit, hovering either above or below the ray. Funny fish behaviour.

And still once or twice in late October I’ve come back from the beach exhilarated and showered off under the hosepipe in the back garden, looking over red and pink flowers and through bright green palm leaves to the blue sea and headland beyond.

Flies and damp evenings heralded the change in the weather. Now the wind is beginning to get up again, tossing the bougainvillaea around. A crow caws. The thunder begins, and gets louder, the sky gets darker… The first drops of rain are pattering.

A New Twist in an Old Tale

One morning a few months ago, I woke up to a message from a woman called Barbara in Chichester, which is where I was living before I moved to Tilos. I didn’t know Barbara, but she had an unusual reason for getting in touch. It turned out we have a strange connection.

In May 2009, six months after turning forty, I spent the month alone in Tilos and decided to try to live on the island. Determined to make it happen, in the meantime I returned to my job in Chichester. I’d known a man around my age called David Cairns as a casual friend for a couple of years and always enjoyed chatting with him, but one night that summer we had a deeper conversation which led to us starting a relationship. If you’ve read my book Falling in Honey, you’ll know some of this already. In the book I called him ‘Matt’.

We had simple fun – he read books and we explored, he was always making me laugh and buying me dinners and clothes I’d never have splashed out on myself. But we were also serious from the start about trying to have kids, and we got engaged. He had two daughters – he kept their photo on him always; he currently wasn’t able to see them but sent regular maintenance payments, and I encouraged him to work towards having more contact. Dave had a few properties which were rented out since he often worked away, he said, but he decided to spend more time at the local factory he owned so we could be together and moved in with me, which made me happy. After I introduced him to Tilos, he loved the idea of us moving together, and he put in an offer on a house here.

By April 2011 I’d given notice on my job, confident about going freelance. Dave was spending those days buying things he’d need for life on Tilos – a new laptop, summery clothes. His purchase of the Tilos house had stalled but I arranged for us to rent a place. My last day at the office coincided with our appointment at the fertility clinic – we’d been having tests to find out why I wasn’t conceiving. Dave called to say he couldn’t make the appointment but had to talk to me. In tears, he confessed that he’d been lying to me about everything, every day. I later found out he'd been stealing money from his workplace and using credit cards.

Thankfully, I had no problem moving to Tilos alone. The episode was weird, shocking, disorienting, saddening – but I put it behind me. When it became an unusual twist in the book I was writing about moving to Greece, I disguised Dave’s identity a little and never referred to Chichester by name, only as a ‘town on the south coast of England’. In the media articles that came out around the time of its publication, I wouldn’t use his real name or photo. I believed he needed psychological help, not public shaming. The story is much more complex than I can sum up in a few hundred words.

All of it seemed well in the distant past when I received the message from Barbara. She’d found me after a friend showed her a Daily Mail article, still online, that was published after Falling in Honey came out.

Barbara’s vivacious, outgoing and sociable, has children and lots of good friends and works in education. A few years after I left to live in Greece, she met Dave Cairns and they became a couple. ‘We had an amazing life. My friends and family loved him,’ she wrote. Dave told her about the property he owned and his job, and it seemed they would have a happy and secure future together. He explained that he wasn’t able to see his children but ensured they were looked after.

‘He wrote down how much he had in his savings, plus the money he would get from his house plus his pension.’ They got married and rented a lovely flat together in the town centre. Then he told her he had sold the property he owned by the canal, and they put in an offer to buy a house together and had it accepted. They celebrated and put the news on Facebook. He messaged a friend to ask for help with moving, and another to say their rented flat would soon be available.

‘It was the next day when he should have been at work that he messaged my friend to say that he had packed a bag and was going to leave because he had lied to me… He was very drunk.’

When she wrote to me, two days after learning she’d been deceived for six years, she was devastated. She had loved him and trusted him, and as well as lying to her, he’d been spending her money.

‘He spent £27,000 of my money that I put in his name in premium bonds, and I took out two credit cards [for him] in my name.’ He claimed he didn’t want to take out a credit card in his own name because his ex-partner, the mother of his kids, had forged his name and racked up huge debts. When he paid Barbara his half of the rent every month, it came from her own premium bonds – he’d been taking out large sums. He took about £34,000 in total but the police said she had no case against him. ‘I want to warn others never to put money or credit cards in any other person’s name… I can’t believe he has no remorse at all.’

She found out he didn’t even have children – something I’d always wondered about. One of her colleagues happened to know his ex-partner and messaged her to find out. She said the children weren’t his. Barbara met up with Dave a week later and asked him. ‘He admitted that it was all lies.’

She was ‘numb with disbelief’, as if someone she knew had died. It all sounded very familiar. As before, he left with hardly anything and slept rough for a while. I remembered buying him food and a sleeping bag. A few weeks later, she wrote to me:

‘I don’t believe we are going to be the only people he hurts… I am coping but just very sad… Sold wedding ring and engagement ring today.’

I felt guilt that I hadn’t done more to expose him at the time, but also angry. How did he get away with doing the same thing in the same town using the same name?

A friend who had known me and Dave when we were together got in touch after she heard he had struck again. She started a new job five years ago and got to know a few female colleagues. One was talking excitedly about their impending marriage to a man named Dave. It was only when she attended the after-party for the wedding that she realised it was him. She was shocked and tried hinting to friends that he was bad news.

‘They told me people change and I really thought he had got help and was sorted. I thought long and hard but decided it was not my place… A couple of times I did ask him outright if [Barbara] knew anything – he said she did.’ But he was lying. Then he discredited her, suggesting she was crazy.

Dave is very clever at manipulating people – getting people to like him. And people do like him. We all did. But he can’t help himself from lying needlessly. He then contrives to keep people apart so they can’t compare facts.

Another acquaintance, who has known him for years through the factory he worked at and stole from, said that years ago, before he met me, she discovered he was lying to colleagues. ‘He told us he had just had triplets – my mum even bought them all outfits! He told us he bought a big house at Southbourne – he hadn’t, I rang the estate agents to check. He said he went on holiday to Iceland – he didn’t as he didn’t get his first passport until a year later. I could go on…’

When Dave met Barbara, this friend asked him if he was behaving properly now, and he told her he was. She was very sorry she didn’t say anything directly to Barbara earlier. ‘I really thought he may have changed but sadly not. I think he needs to be stopped from doing it to someone else.’

When I got to know Dave, I was a recent incomer to Chichester but there were people around who’d known him for years and I assumed someone would have warned me if there was anything to be concerned about. I’ve now dug a little deeper and spoken to someone who went to the same high school, Chichester High School, though he hasn’t spoken to him for years. He said another friend was in the same crowd when they were in their teens and claimed not to know him that well. But both agreed that Dave, fond of telling stories about a military past – stories that he also told me, saying the subsequent trauma explained the self-harming scars on his arms – showed signs of being ‘a fantasist’.

Before speaking out, I waited for Barbara to get legal advice and try to recoup some of her losses; he promised to get a job and start repaying her, but she says that’s no longer happening and he’s spending a lot of time in the Wetherspoons pub. Another friend wrote: ‘We saw him several weeks ago in town… dressed up like a country gentleman.’ He’s been spotted having changed his appearance, happily wandering around Chichester with shopping bags, showing no sign that he understands the severity and repercussions of what he’s so recently done.

Barbara’s a remarkably strong woman. She’s found a lodger so she can keep on her flat, has been doing three jobs to keep her head above water and take the holidays she needed. ‘I am exhausted and have been really down at times but I have dragged myself out of those times… I’ve been lucky to have amazing friends and family.’

But it’s important to reduce the chances of this happening again. Back when Falling in Honey was published, a number of men and women got in touch to say something similar had happened to them. Please talk to people, share this however you can.

*Photos from 2010...

Meet the President

My life on the little Greek island of Tilos mostly revolves around my dog, the sea, my garden, walks, swims, nature and my island neighbours, writing and editing books – which is how I like it and I feel grateful that is the case. I’d never really paid much attention before to the role of the president of the Hellenic Republic. And while I used to do formal meetings for my job a lifetime ago, now I prefer underwater meetings with moray eels and octopus…

But for a few days last week, the first item on my to-do list read: ‘Saturday 1.30, meet the president.’

It started when a message arrived on Thursday morning from Stathis in the mayor’s office. ‘The president of Greece is coming.’

‘I know!!’ I replied, excitedly. I’d heard rumour of it, though maybe for reasons of security I hadn’t seen any announcement, just a brief mention. The reason seemed to be our official status as Greece’s first ‘zero-waste’ island, an initiative that aims to recycle and re-use nearly all the island’s rubbish.

Privately funded by PolyGreen working in collaboration with the municipality, the scheme seemed very ambitious when first announced in a meeting in the square. But much happened last year to prepare, and over recent months young people employed by PolyGreen visited every home on the island to explain how it works. The element of education is important, bearing in mind that in Greece, ‘recycling’ bins are regularly filled with normal rubbish.

Now on Tilos bins have been removed, electric vehicles collect from each household several times a week, and everything is sorted to be shipped away for ‘circular waste management’.

But Stathis didn’t mention this. What he said was that the president of Greece was coming and wanted to meet me. Strange things happen sometimes, I’ve found, when you write books on a small island. Still, it seemed very odd. He asked me to come to the square on Saturday where the president would have a ‘relaxed conversation with citizens of the island’, which sounded more realistic, although not particularly ‘relaxed’ from my point of view.

It was a good pretext for learning something about the president of the Greece a.k.a. the Hellenic Republic, however. The role of Proedros tis Ellinikis Dimokratias was established in 1975 when Greece became a presidential parliamentary democracy; elected by parliament but with mostly ceremonial powers, the president is the official head of state and the commander-in-chief of the Greek armed forces. Katerina Sakellaropoulou, a lawyer and judge, became the first woman president of Greece in March 2020. Photos showed her sometimes looking appropriately fierce and sometimes with a kind, wry, rather cute smile.

Amazing! I was looking forward to seeing her on Tilos, and joked to Ian that maybe she could make me an honorary citizen of Greece, like Victoria Hislop…

On Saturday, I woke up listening to the waves, and the birds; the wind of the last few days had dropped and the sky was a deep blue. It was a beautiful day. Then I received another message from Stathis saying I was invited to join the president at her table. I was honoured but petrified and wanted to learn more. ‘We’ll talk in the square,’ he said.

I tried to continue my morning in the usual way. In the garden, I cleared some more of the winter weeds that grew while we were away in Romania, and planted some seeds. It was hot and we went for a swim – I tried to read a few pages but couldn’t concentrate. When we came back a farmer’s red truck was by the gate, and I bought some vegetables. Then I put on a dress and sandals in lieu of my usual shorts and boots, and drove off to meet the president.

Other people were going about their day in the usual way too, it seemed, until I approached the helipad and saw a Chinook recently landed, a few locals standing around it.

In Livadia, the post office in the square had got a fresh lick of paint, a peach colour with burgundy trim, and the scruffy old noticeboard on the harbour sported a new ‘zero waste’ sign. People were dressed up and bagging tables in the shade – which were covered in the usual way, alas, with plastic water bottles and plastic frappe cups…

Time ticked on, and the youngsters chosen to make a presentation wearing the full traditional dress of Tilos, long layers of embroidered wool, looked listless… Then dark cars drew up and, accompanied by a security man and important-looking personages in full military regalia, there was the petite figure of the president of Greece in a stylish white jacket. Everyone clapped as she strolled through the square greeting and talking to people.

Half an hour later, at Michaili’s Taverna, with butterflies in my stomach, I was ushered to a place at a long table next to our mayor Maria Kamma, and then the president of Greece, Katerina Sakellaropoulou. I was even introduced to her, and although I was too nervous to say anything interesting at all, I was able to present her with a copy of my last book, Wild Abandon, and she was gracious enough to examine it, ask some questions and ask me to dedicate it to her. I’ve never dedicated one of my books to a president before. So if you own a copy, you’re in good company…

There were presentations of other, more official gifts, by our mayor Maria.

‘Exigiseh to elephantaki!’ - explain the little elephant! - hissed the lawyer of the municipality of Rhodes to Maria as she stood there with the unenviable task of gifting a cumbersome metal statue of a Tilos elephant.

‘Eh, vevaia, of course…’ she replied.

The president drank white wine with ice (‘the colder the better’, she said, because it was a hot day, though maybe she’d had bad island wine before…). The table was heaped with salads, courgette fritters, fried calamari, tiny shrimp and huge fresh fish… I’m not sure if the president didn’t like the tiny shrimp or is just an animal lover, but at one point I spied her feeding some to the cats.

I listened in to conversations. The CEO of PolyGreen, Athanasios Polychronopoulos, talked about the zero-waste programme to the president. ‘We have to change many minds,’ she said seriously. He explained how he had chosen to implement this initiative on Tilos because of the openness of its community to embrace change; there was talk of the first gay weddings in Greece and how the island had handled the Syrian refugee crisis.

There was also plenty of banter. The Regional Governor of the South Aegean ordered a plate of goat, and the owner of Eleni Beach Hotel smilingly declined to taste it because it was from the other village, Megalo Horio.

Sadly, my Greek felt rusty from my time in Romania and my nerves kept me quiet (honestly!), afraid to make some terrible faux pas. That said, when dessert arrived and the restaurant had run out of plates and spoons and decided to provide plastic ones instead, I felt I had to speak up and say no thanks to unnecessary plastic!

President Sakellaropoulou demonstrated great poise and knew how to say and do just the right thing. Before she left, she had some photos taken. She stood on the steps of the taverna after lunch with the ladies who’d provided it, and made sure everyone was in the picture. She even asked to have her photo taken with me, but I haven’t managed to get a copy of it.

And then she was gone, and I went and had a swim and relaxed.

And now the next things on my to-do list are the more usual work items, tax return and reading the proofs of my new book… But I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I met the president.

 

Here are the wonderful official photos of the president visiting Halki and Tilos:

Επίσκεψη στη Χάλκη και την Τήλο – Προεδρία της Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας (presidency.gr)

President – Presidency of the Hellenic Republic

Last of the Summer Wine

 

There he was – the man I’d been looking for. Not in the sense of ‘all my life’, just since my grapes started ripening on the vine (and that isn’t a euphemism). I wanted to see if I could learn how to make very basic wine, and I’d heard Yiannis was a good man to talk to about it.

An unassuming man of medium stature, he was standing by his rickety old scooter. We’d last had a conversation early in the summer when he’d been encouraging me to pick mulberries from a tree on the road out of the village. A retired seaman who lives with his wife in Megalo Horio, he’s often out and about tending his beehives or fishing off the beach.

I’d gone to his house the previous day but although the scooter was there and the gate open, and although it wasn’t yet siesta time and I’d shouted hello in my usual hesitant way, there was no sign of life and I couldn’t get up the nerve to stride in. But now I’d spotted him on the road as I was driving to the post office, and I pulled in swiftly to the school car park.

‘I hear you make wine,’ I said, ‘and I want to learn.’

He smiled cautiously.

From late July to late August is grape and fig season, and I'd been told the grapes needed another couple of weeks on the vine, but one day, sick of having hornets buzzing around, I cut down most of them. 

I’d done the same a couple of weeks before with the smaller, seedless grapes from a different vine and was drying them into raisins in flat dishes using 15 denier ladies’ hosiery to keep the flies and ants off while allowing enough sun to get in. The bigger vine in the front of the house gives good shade and the grapes are delicious. My old pal Antonis had asked if they were for eating or for wine. I had no idea.

The fridge was already brimming with old wine bottles filled with grape juice, and old tahini jars filled with fig compote as well as caper leaves preserved from earlier in the year. Because I go easy with salt and sugar, I daren’t keep much out of the fridge, especially when the daytime temperatures in August were rising over forty Celsius and dropping at night to a mere thirty.

I’d been so excited about having my own vines and fig trees when I got this garden. And really, I am. Everything is getting healthier now after a few years of neglect and being attacked by goats. But it does demand quite a bit of time and attention over the summer. I’ve got more advanced this year with the produce, baking the fig compote and fresh raisins into cereal bars with oats and seeds. I’ve roasted lamb chops with grapes, figs, tomato and onion. I’ve made pizza with two kinds of local goat’s cheese, ripe figs and rocket from the garden. And I've regularly had icy fruit smoothies for breakfast.

So now I’d been stuffing masses of fat, juicy grapes into the fridge and hopefully thought I’d try again at winemaking. I’d really meant to go to Embona on Atavyros Mountain on Rhodes, talk to the experts and get the right equipment, but somehow it never happened, so here I was at the last minute asking Yianni.

He had already squeezed his grapes and started his wine, he said, having experienced the same problem with hornets. Some people leave the bits of skin in during the first days, but he removed them and used only juice. He mentioned a piestirio, a press; I’d been using my hands.

‘So you leave it for three days,’ he said, and although I didn’t understand what he said happened for those three days, from my Wiki research last year I know it’s when the stuff starts fermenting. I’d actually already tried a batch and the kitchen smelled like a bakery when I walked in. ‘You put it in an open container,’ he continued.

‘Covered with a cloth?’ I asked.

‘Yes, a cloth with holes, like the stuff they use for bonbonieras.’ Something gauzy, like the stuff they wrap baptism gifts in, to let the air in and out.

‘So what do you do after the three days?’ I asked, thinking I’d missed something.

‘Nothing,’ he said, leaving me puzzled. ‘After, you leave it for forty days. In the house. Then you try it. Ama yinei,’ he said, pausing – then he made a fist and brought it towards his mouth, the thumb sticking out like a spout heading for his lips, and tipped his head back.

When it's ready – if it works – you drink it.

I smiled, asked a few more questions, and thanked him. I could give it a try, I supposed, though I wasn’t entirely surprised when he added that a neighbour had lost his whole batch of wine for three years running. Maybe Yiannis was cannily keeping the real tricks to himself. I got back in the car and drove down to Livadia. As so often happens, a quick trip to the post office was about to take three hours. Picking up my post took a mere ten minutes – the rest was impromptu chatting, coffee, and a swim off the rocks.

Now the wild, soaring temperatures of summer, with biting flies and wind that feels like a hot hairdryer, are waning, and some evenings here at the north of the island can feel soothingly cool and damp. On Eristos beach, the first sign that the busy days of summer are over are the miraculous sea daffodils poking up out of the sand. And the tents are thinning out, with campers heading back to the cities. 

For a couple of months, Lisa has refused to leave home before late afternoon unless we're going in the car, but now we're beginning to walk again in the afternoon and it feels great. Yesterday we briefly had Skafi beach to ourselves, and when I went snorkelling I saw shoals of miniature versions of mullet and bream. I'd never thought much before about when fish had their babies but it's been fun watching the little ones grow. The damselfish start out bright blue when tiny, in July.

In my last blog post, I confessed I had no idea how posts would be delivered to your inbox in future after the demise of Feedburner. But the extremely helpful people at follow.it have solved the problem. You may have received this thanks to their tiny postal workers slipping it into your email inbox, but if you didn’t and you’d like to in future, you can sign up using the little box that should appear somewhere top left of the page. Apparently there are additional features, though I can’t imagine what they’re for. The helpful people even offered to give me inspiration about what I could write, or pictures I could use. Maybe they can just produce the whole blog post in future, leaving me more time to walk to a beach.

In fact, thinking about it, maybe they know how to make wine…