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.

Enjoyed this post? 

I've now figured out how you can subscribe!

Never miss out on future posts by following!

A Novel About Mental Illness, Family and Love: The Book of Katerina

During his childhood, Auguste Corteau, born Petros Hatzopoulos, remembers his mother descending further and further into psychotic despair. She tried setting fire to the house with him in it, and tried to kill herself with alcohol and pills, yet the hardest thing ‘was the stoniness of her depression, her utter unreachability, the feeling that, no matter how madly I loved her, I couldn’t make her smile, much less get her off the bed.’

When he has suffered his own bouts of clinical depression, he has had to remind himself of the love of those around him.

His novel The Book of Katerina, a fictionalised account of his mother’s life-long struggle with bipolar disorder, was first published in Greek in 2013 and became a huge success, selling 50,000 copies. It’s now being launched in English (translated by Claire Papamichail) by Wales-based Parthian Books as both a paperback and an audiobook narrated by Anna Savva, otherwise known as Lugaretzia of The Durrells.

It was a great pleasure for me to be the editor of the English translation, and so I thought I'd write something about it here to coincide with the British mental health awareness week.

Acclaimed British author Glen James Brown has called The Book of Katerina: ‘a gleefully sardonic novel about illness and family, and how we can never quite cure ourselves of either.’

Although it’s an attempt to understand Katerina’s torments, it’s an unstoppably energetic and entertaining read as with earthy, no-holds-barred humour she observes the saga of her extended family’s ups and downs in the city of Thessaloniki over three generations.

There are fascinating glimpses of the backdrop. At the dawn of the twentieth century in Turkey, Katerina’s poor Jewish grandmother ‘with hair as red as the beard of Judas’ meets a Greek merchant who, a good Christian, agrees to marry the ‘Christ-killer’ but asks her to forswear her true name and lineage ‘or rather demands; men rarely asked for things in those days’.

Thanks to their hard work, at the start of the 1920s they are practically well-off, the children at a good school with piano lessons and foreign languages. ‘And then the Asia Minor Catastrophe happens and they suddenly find themselves in Upper Town, Thessaloniki, without two pennies to rub together.’

After their family dreams are blighted in an instant, the next generation pursue material wealth above everything else – including genuine love. While there are already signs of the hereditary illness that will haunt the family, the narrator also holds the lack of love between parents and siblings accountable for many of their problems.

‘When four siblings out of four end up on medication by the age of forty,’ says Katerina, ‘something very bad must have happened during their childhood.’

She then seems to take things to the other extreme, smothering her own son with love as he is growing up, to the detriment of her marriage.

It was years after his mother’s death that Auguste decided he had to write the book as a kind of love letter to his mother, recreating her as a fictional character. It opens with the scene when he found her dead, stark naked on her bed, having committed suicide. He was in his early twenties when his mother took her life following years of struggling with mental health issues.

She says, ‘I’m giving Petros the biggest gift within my powers: I shall release him from the lifelong duty of nursing a mother who’s constantly deteriorating, spare him the years of dementia that are sure to come… I know this will destroy him, that he’ll need years and years to recover from the blow…’ And then she takes 400 pills.

No wonder that when the book was adapted for the stage, the play left the audience in tears.

When he decided to write the book, he says:

‘I had to recall the exact timbre of her humour, the fieriness of her fury, her tenderness and her despair. It was indeed cathartic, but also painful – which is why I wrote the book in white heat, over a couple of frantic weeks.

‘Back when I wrote the book, it seemed to me way too bleak to be enjoyable. But it turns out I was wrong.’

The Book of Katerina – Parthian Books

The author will be presenting the book at the Mani Literary Festival in October.

Greek Author Auguste Corteau Breaks into the World Market (greekreporter.com)

From my winter notebook

It was about this day in late April that I first came to live on Tilos ten years ago. Ten years! That amazes me, but what’s really amazing is that the joy and excitement haven’t worn off. I no longer see things the way I did as a newcomer, but perhaps more than ever I feel awe and contentment with my life on a Greek island. 

I’ve been especially grateful this winter that I made it a priority to find a place I love, and one where I can continue learning every day. 

It has felt like a true taste of small island life. With travel impossible, this has been the first winter that many of us have spent entirely on the island. But it’s hard to believe I’ve done so much within this little area of land. It just shows, 64 square kilometres can be plenty, particularly when you have much of it to yourself.

My last trip off the island was thanks to the ongoing Brexit-related paperwork saga exacerbated by Covid. I needed passport photos, and the nearest option is Rhodes. At first I leapt at the excitement of travel, though of course I could only go for the day.

With the end of December deadline looming, I had to take a ferry that left at 3am during such a fierce storm the ferry couldn’t dock on first attempt. The rain turned the streets to rivers and it was still dark when I arrived, and even the harbour cafe wasn’t allowed to have people stay inside. A kind taxi driver insisted he take me somewhere, so I spent an hour or so walking very slowly around a supermarket that opened at 7am to kill time and stay dry, my glasses fogging up thanks to the mask. I finally got the photos – though have since been informed there’s an error and because the deadline has now passed I have to start again following a different procedure. Perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise, given how I look in those photos…

And of course, since then I’ve been on Tilos. 

Looking through the photos I've taken since January, I’m reminded of so many joyful moments… The bright moon about to come up over the mountain, seas varying from flat calm to crashing waves, flowers from narcissus and anemones and cyclamen to irises and Bermuda buttercups and freesias, my hair blown about in fierce winds, my skin red from cold seas, the spanakopita I made, the fig and vine leaves starting to return.

I’m thankful that all those years ago I started working for myself from home, and I had some nice editing projects to keep me occupied. One of my challenges over the winter was writing an article for The Guardian to promote Wild Abandon, re-writing and re-writing it as the circumstances surrounding travel changed, until I was sick of it - then being delighted when I finally got it right and it came out. I also did some new writing, and re-released Meeting Mr Kim on Kindle, and had an exciting email exchange with its new Bulgarian publisher.

 

Exploring the old terraces on the hills around my house several times a week with Lisa when the weather was cool or cloudy, I learned more about the flowers, especially the bee orchids. One afternoon, I found an injured hoopoe, a tiny bat and - thanks to Lisa leading me in a direction I wouldn't have taken otherwise - a tortoise. 

I’ve also become more familiar with the scattered ruins: cave shelters and houses and cisterns, the various chapels with their crumbling frescoes and ancient marble and wall markings. While Lisa hunted for rabbits, I kept my eyes to the ground for fragments of pottery with interesting markings. And one day I found a fine cup half-buried in earth, which was confirmed as Hellenistic – third century BC – by our visiting archaeologist and excavated for the new museum that’s still being built. (I’m not allowed to post a photo of the finding.)

I remember back in February walking a little way up the hill with Lisa, but turning back after a short time because the winds were too fierce and cold. When I returned to my house, I saw something unusual on the road. It was the heavy, iron, bird-shaped device that is usually attached to the top of my neighbour Sotiris’ chimney, and apparently it hadn’t been attached well enough. I wondered what might have happened if it had come flying at me. I told him it could have dented his car, and he took to parking the car in the field behind my house. 

Another day, the winds were so wild and cold, they stripped the leaves off plants and young trees here at the north end of the island. The snails and caterpillars meanwhile have done a fine job of removing the leaves off many of the vegetables. 

More recently we had a few days of Saharan dust covering the sky, along with plagues of insects, power cuts, and earth tremors – ‘moderate’ rumblings and shakings from a point between here and Nisyros, continuing for much of April. Antonis said in his seventy years on Tilos he’s never known anything like it. It's getting so I can tell how big they are (I think that last one was only a 3). There’s never a dull moment.

A couple of days ago, the sky was so clear, Nisyros and Kos and Kalymnos and Turkey were all visible on the horizon. Turning to take the road south, I walked past fields of blue cornflowers and oregano almost ready to flower. A thin black snake rippled across the road. Then I heard a distinctive breathy whistle, like a whip cutting through the air – bee-eaters? Sure enough, as I followed the track above the lush fields of Eristos, one flashed past me, close enough to see its black beak, its bright yellow and orange and metallic green-blue feathers.

The hillsides all had a bright yellow sheen amid the deep green from the spiny broom flowers. Halki and even Karpathos were clear on the deep blue horizon as I walked down to Ayios Petros. I swam with mask and snorkel and saw a small group of needlefish hanging in the water, curving their bodies into sickle-shapes and changing colour. When I looked up, a cormorant flapped away.

We’re heading into Greek Easter week and towards the celebration of May the First. Attempting a late afternoon walk on the familiar hillsides, it felt too hot to wear the long trousers necessary for wading through the thorny, prickly bushes – and I no longer needed to gather kindling for my woodburner, which I lit every night of winter. Bees were buzzing around the flowers, and I felt my chest tightening in what must have been an allergic reaction to some plant, so I came back, and instead went for my second swim of the day and watched a small moray raise its head and neck out of a hole in a rock.

Then I sat outside and watched a glowing sun sink towards the lower slopes of the mountain.