We travelled twice to Crete once was a holidayof two weeks once was something different for six months. The first time we stayed with my sister-in-law and her partner who gave up their bed for her sister and I.
We hired a car and left him to his work and her to hers rescuing cats thankless by Cretans and we travelled that corner of Crete the lofty coast road south to Sitia great banks of flowering shrubs in their pomp painting our way giving glimpses of the empty sea blue below. Returning, the sunset meal above a dizzying drop down to the sea and opposite the entrance the coolest water flowing silently into a trough out of the heart of the mountain. We gazed in awe at the Ha Gorge where only younger people in wetsuits might slide down from pool to pool and then not without risk to life and limb.
In the year of the pandemic in September, the disease settling in for the long haul and we periodically locked down made an escape before borders clanged firmly shut at the sister-in-law’s suggestion because Crete had no cases and the winter would be warmer than that in England and we could keep company installed in a winter vacant flat next door. Two weeks in Crete locked down with a decisive severity at odds with England’s ‘s Boris led shilly-shallying silliness even though Crete was almost Covid free and England certainly was not!
The winter, as promised as warm as an English summer as befits a country a mere stone’s throw from Africa with only the occasional storm thundering around the many mountains. Oh! We had a grandstand view from our apartment in Elounda the sun bursting up across the bay the evening light rendering the mountains purple and gold so crisply shadowed you felt you could reach out across twenty miles and touch their roughness where they fought a losing battle against the elements solid slabs descending into slopes of scree.
But when all was said and done we were trapped in a gilded cage on a short leash at best allowed to local shops suitably masked and sidestepping others in a semblance of social distancing but longer trips forbidden more living but less sightseeing.
And yet… on my solitary exercise walks down to the two town supermarkets I watched the tiny Cretan olives ripen to purple-blackish bloom the family bubbles spread the nets beneath the trees and mechanically flail the harvest to the ground afterward – pruning-burning bonfires raising columns of smoke all over the island and eventually I saw the tiny olive flowers blossom to make next year’s crop sights you wouldn’t see on a two-week holiday.
My reward when I reach the town a masked conversation with the supermarket’s owner at her checkout an unexpected Pink Floyd superfan telling of a last ticket last minute flight to see the group play an ancient Athens amphitheatre whilst I exchange a treasured memory of the week I worked for the group in the run-up to the premiere of The Wall my bucket list never saw that coming! I add the memories and many photos to my store.
We do not look back on it as a holiday more time served under lockdown albeit in a beautiful cell and though we can say we lived in Crete for six months it was not life as we know it…
The quandary over holiday v. living continues… We are experiencing some “survivor guilt” combined with some separation anxiety in regard to family back in England not to mention friends – we feel blessed to be somewhere so paradisial (mosquitos excepted) whilst family and friends must fight through an English winter made worse not just by the counter-Covid measures themselves, but by the stress of watching an inept, misguided and venally self-serving government bluff and badger their way through the crisis. At present, the local governments of the North of England have been demanding more money to help the afflicted if they must go into stricter measures again and the government are ploughing ahead anyway. This is really a battle against the “power-grabbing to the centre” of the Dominic Cummings led government and quite rightly so – nor is this dilemma solely being enacted in Britain but in many countries around the world including here in Greece…
On the “living in Greece” side – we have attended a wedding of our next-door neighbours – him Greek her Russian, their baby so was baptized following the wedding- a beautiful church whose interior was completely covered in paintings of saints, bishops, and disciples. Followed by dancing at the wedding feast – limited to 50 attendees – so more than thrilled to have been invited. My partner’s sister’s partner was doing the catering for the event.
Furthermore, we have begun to learn the language in the contemporary manner – using the app Duolingo! Whilst choosing a suitable app – came across Busuu which is named for a language whose native speakers had dwindled to a mere eight before the app (which unfortunately doesn’t cover Greek) offers the chance to learn Busuu as well as a small selection of other languages – so now there are presumably more speakers – who knows, perhaps like the native American tribe used for communications during WW2, there is a society of surreptitious Busuu speakers defying the eavesdroppers on the internet, whispering sweet nothings to one another or who knows what!!!
On the “going home eventually” side of the coin, our funds are finite and life is not cheap here and of course, Brexit still looms…
Nevertheless, we have been here over a week now and some sort of “new normal” begins to emerge.
It is not my intention to make this a nature blog, but when a locust, an animal of mythical status quite literally, drops into your hand, or to be precise, onto the USB cable you have in your hand – it is worthy of a photo at least. They do occur in small or rather, regular numbers here in Crete but I understand they rarely get triggered into the massive swarms possible in nearby Africa. A quick search of the internet shows there are many species of even the European Locust but I was not able to identify this one easily – any entomologists out there?
Locusts are an apt metaphor for the outsourcing companies that the UK Tory government see fit to issue with contracts for Covid 19 Test and Trace as part of their ideological drive to centralise power with the Cabinet, richly reward their donors and no doubt themselves at some point down the line. It is the latest version of neo-liberalism and driven on the ideological side by Dominic Cummings (principal advisor to Boris Johnson) who is determined to curb what he sees as the bloated power of the UK Civil Service. However, as the linked article shows, this outsourcing is highly inefficient and costly. to give one example, local authorities in the UK have highly skilled tracing teams for use in sensitive areas such as STD cases but the government ignored this resource at the outset of the pandemic when it could have made a great difference in holding back the tide – preferring to centralise power to itself, not to mention the profits inherent in outsourcing. The outsourcing teams were undertrained, the privacy issues minimised for centralised efficiency and due to general inefficiency, were underused (staff reported being paid to sit on standby for calls and not receiving any) and when they did get calls, their efficiency in tracing (64%)was much lower than that achieved by local authority teams in their fields (97%). Still the locusts swarm around the government who are secretive about the amount they are dishing out but may very well run into billions on track and trace alone…
Meanwhile, here on Crete where our personal escape plan seems to have succeeded, that is to say, we arrived by air without so far, displaying any sign of having Covid 19 (touch wood). Due to the UK government first saying it was impossible to issue travel/quarantine on return bans for anything less than a whole country, they then did one of their trademark U-turns and following a planeload of returning holidaymakers from just one Greek island, the government imposed a 14-day quarantine on all people coming from all Greek islands. This ignores the fact that it was those British holidaymakers who probably took the disease with them and shared it amongst themselves as well as the islanders. Consequently, many people cancelled their Greek holidays, unable to take unpaid holiday leave to quarantine on their return and their employers unwilling to grant it anyway. Our own direct flight to Crete was one of the casualties and we had to fly via Athens which was a rushed and harassing connection.
The effects on the Greek tourism industry have been catastrophic – especially on the islands which often depend on tourism and considering that the total covid record for the whole of Greece amounts to say – one day in the UK, this seems very unfair and it is quite ironic that one should be expected to quarantine passing from the comparative safety of Greece to the dangers of out-of-control Britain. Given that most Greeks do not know anyone who has contracted covid 19, even at several removes, the level of compliance in mask-wearing in shops and by those serving in restaurants, is all the more remarkable. I feel that in the long term, people will look back on this pandemic and see the apparently limited numbers of victims compared say, to Spanish Flu) as opposed to the long-term effects which we are just beginning to suspect the extent of and be amazed at the initial good response of people to something they could not see happening for themselves and the squandering of that good effort by some governments due to concerns for economic health. The Greek islanders – through no choice of their own (unlike say, New Zealand) – have been forced to take the economic hit but been saved, so far, the health hit – it remains to be seen whether they will feel blessed by that…
Meanwhile, Barbara and I are still in the process of settling in to what is clearly more than a holiday (at a projected three-month minimum) and yet not an outright move to live in another country. This is what exercises our minds presently…
P.S.
On the millipede front, I was wondering what other creature might benefit from the bonanza of the beast’s appearance since this seems to be axiomatic fodder from our watching of nature documentaries. Every morning there are many dead bodies on the steps down to our apartment and no sign of anything eating them – so imagine my surprise when I saw the not merely dead, but somewhat desiccated body of a millipede moving with apparently unnatural animation – a sideways movement impossible for a live millipede. The cause was an ant, a fraction of the millipede’s size who not only dragged the beast on the horizontal, but up a 7cm step. Unfortunately, I missed this feat by the time I got the video up on my phone but below is some of the heroic event on the flat – David Attenborough eat your heart out!
I resurrected this blog shortly before the Covid 19 and just in time to participate in the A to Z 2020 Challenge which since I had only discovered on the first day and thus being totally unprepared for in terms of a subject, I wrote about what was going on at the time – Covid 19!
After the rigour of posting once a day, I tailed off rapidly and I see now that it is just over four months since I last posted – enough with the confessional – Lewis Carroll, a prolific letter writer opined that one should never spend more than a page and a half apologising for not writing sooner…
So what now? Well, Covid 19 still dominates the headlines as well as the smaller column inches of the media and truly it has impacted all our lives. In my own case, my partner and I have just taken ourselves away from the UK and off to Crete to sit out the shit storm which continues to be the UK government’s handling of the pandemic. I realize that sentence needs many qualifications but more of that later.
My partner’s sister lives in Crete with her Greek partner and suggested we might be both safer and happier wintering with them since the effect of isolation on mental well-being is, for many of us lucky enough not to catch the virus, by far the worst aspect of the crisis. Those of us who are in later life especially so since the virus is mainly milder for younger people so we must be more careful than they, more isolated. We had, of course, to brave the perils of flying, weighing up the risk of catching against the risk of escaping the virus. Since the entire covid 19 record of Greece amounts to about one day of the UK history – it was not too hard a choice.
So here we are on our second day, a fierce sun has just shot up, as it does here and we are planning to stay for at least three months since the next looming crisis is the end of the Brexit Transition Period on 31st December 2020. Will it force us to return or can we afford to stay longer? Time will tell…
So I don’t wish to make this new trenche of posts to be all about the virus because we have all had enough of that – even if we can’t help looking at the news, the science articles and the noise and nonsense of social media. So I will leave you today with a picture of a different plague – not of locusts but of millipedes. We travelled on Friday just gone, to the news that Crete was suffering an unseasonal downpour of rain and this was the signal for these little critters to emerge from whatever damp place they call home, and climb the walls – literally. Whether climbing the walls is an understandable response to being locked down underground during the long hot summer or some other compulsion such as breeding – I cannot say! they were, however, everywhere – not just outside, but clinging to ceilings and walls inside having squeezed under locked doors – it’s life Jim – but not as we know it…
Oh – and if you do pick them up – they squirt a lingering smell of creosote in their defence… Perhaps somebody can give us their true name, and why they climb the walls?
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!
Oxford – The Bridge of Sighs
Oxford is my city of birth and this photograph is from my last visit in 2017 to meet up with school friends. Due to the wonders of the internet, we have been connected by a Yahoo group for over twenty-five years. We used to meet up in Oxford and play the current boys at cricket, but now the youngest of us is 65, that doesn’t quite work! We should have been meeting up again this month but Covid 19 has put paid to that. So this photograph is a reminder of the last time but also of growing up in the iconic city. There is something special about growing up in a place that so many people visit, recognize, attend university at – it is yours but it is everybody’s…
Although this is called the Bridge of Sighs due to a resemblance to the bridge of that name in Venice, it actually bears a closer resemblance to the Rialto Bridge – also in Venice. It is part of Hertford College.
This post was too long for my Facebook status so I am posting it here…
This time last week I was slipping into a hot tub at the swimming pool in Iceland with Groa and Ingo and also we met up with Britta and Mel.
If this week has shown me anything it is the power of Facebook. Not only has the spirit of last weekend continued to bubble like a geysir – erupting regularly with photos, videos, sounds and most of all, comments, but the power has been revealed in other ways. My friend Laura McManus who sings in Leeds City Harmony with me, was devastated as the tragic shootings in Whitehaven unfolded for her via Facebook posts from friends who still live there. She was able to ring her Mum and make sure she was alright – in fact she was locked in a shop which the gunman walked past.
Other friends have been sharing news and comment about the Gaza atrocity – yet another disaster for Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians. In Bob Dylan’s words “When will they ever learn?”
So Here we live in a world of cities so big they produce alienated individuals who can go on a shooting spree and at the same time, Facebook connects people instantly across the world in a new kind of super-community.
It’s thought provoking…
So here in a special dual language post courtesy of Google Translate is the post in Icelandic – sort of…
Í þetta sinn í síðustu viku var ég renni inn í a heitur pottur við sundlaug landsins, með Groa og Ingo og einnig hittum við upp með Britta og Mel.Ef þessi vika hefur sýnt mér neitt það er kraftur af Facebook. Ekki aðeins hefur anda síðustu helgi hélt áfram að kúla eins og Geysir – erupting reglulega með myndir, myndbönd, hljóð og umfram allt, ummæli, en vald hefur fundist í öðrum hætti. vinur Laura McManus minn sem syngur í Leeds City sátt við mig, var rúst sem hörmulega shootings í Whitehaven ósamanbrotnum fyrir hana í gegnum Facebook innlegg frá vini sem búa enn þar. Hún var fær til hringur Mamma hennar og tryggja að hún var allt í lagi – í raun var hún læst í búð sem gunman gekk yfir.Aðrir vinir hafa verið að deila fréttum og athugasemd um Gaza hörmungar – enn eitt stórslys fyrir tengsl Ísraels við Palestínumenn. Í orðum Bob Dylans’s “Þegar þeir vilja læra alltaf?Svo hér við lifum í heimi borgum svo stór að þeir framleiða alienated einstaklingar sem geta fara á tökur gleðskapur og á sama tíma, Facebook tengir fólk saman í stað um allan heim á ný tegund af frábær-samfélagsins.Það er talið vekja upp …
