Mediterranean Meanderings

27^th May 2010

Would you believe that it is raining while I am writing this? We are in the middle of a thunderstorm and it’s just not right! What is the point of living in a Mediterranean country if it is going to rain? I have struggled to be warm all week actually and when indoors have not been able to keep warm without having recourse to my fabulous hot pillows. As the bus went through Frenaros yesterday the thermometer in the town square announced it was 35°, but I am not so sure about that. The indoor thermometer says it is 24° right now, but that can’t be right as I have jeans and a jumper on and I wouldn’t say that it was even tepid, let alone warm. Still, hopefully the rain is only a minor aberration and we can get back to cloudless skies very soon.

It has been a very quiet week for me personally down here on the border, but Cyprus itself is in a constant state of flux. Last weekend saw the Kataklysmos Festival – in commemoration of Noah’s flood (hence our term cataclysmic) and Pentecost. I am not sure what the two have in common, but then my knowledge of Greek Orthodox Christianity is, at its best, patchy. I didn’t go, firstly because I was tired, but for the most part because the main events didn’t begin until the evening and there are no buses then – well certainly no buses back anyway.

The farmland beneath my balcony is full of melons and wherever you go there are fields of varying sorts of melons everywhere (Mark, if you are reading this, I leave it to you to put in your own double entendre and Sid James cackle!). In the last six months I have seen a number of different harvests in the farm and it is amazing how fruitful this seemingly barren and dry land is. The land is definitely getting a desiccated look about it again. All the greenery of a couple of months ago has faded and the wasteground is going back to its bare and dry state (although I expect it is full of puddles after the rain today.) This does not seem to put off the wildlife. When walking anywhere I am not sure who jumps more, me or the lizards. They are so well camouflaged that you don’t see them until they hear you coming and they get up and run. I always feel guilty. They are sunbathing happily, drinking all of that beautiful warmth into their bodies and because I am stomping around they have to go and hide back in the shade. They are getting so large now that it is easy to see how dinosaurs got their name (it comes, of course, from the Greek for terrible/powerful lizard). They do look like raptors that have shared the bottle marked ‘Drink Me’ with Alice.

On the phone wires opposite my balcony a flight of swallows (I just had to look that up, as I couldn’t remember the collective noun for swallows – what a nightmare the English language is and how I love it!) spend a lot of their time perching. They sing all day and swoop off to catch the proliferation of flying insects that swarm around here. I have never watched swallows closely before and I am amazed by how beautiful and graceful they are. They have been with me for about a month now and I will really miss them when they decide to move on.

The frogs are much quieter than they were, but they are still chirruping away. The pond directly below my balcony is full of tadpoles, which (thankfully, in line with the laws of physics) are growing larger every day. There are also some newborn kittens and their mother living in the shrubbery to the side of the pond. I am so fortunate to have all these wonders around me. I am considering ringing David Attenborough and asking him if he wants to camp on my balcony for a bit.

In Protaras last week they were building a new coastal walk and the land gave way to reveal an ancient tomb beneath. Apparently this is quite an amazing find. The archaeologists found four sarcophagi and some intact pottery, amongst other things, and think that it dates from the Hellenistic period of about the 3^rd Century BCE. Personally I was just amazed that they had found some culture in Protaras. If the bodies in the sarcophagi turn out to be holding cans of lager and are wearing baseball caps I, for one, will not be surprised - but then maybe I am just a cynical snob – I will leave it to you to decide!

On Sunday I had a real shock to my system. Whatever else has gone wrong with me physically over the years the one thing that has always worked has been my memory. I needed to get to the bank to withdraw some money as I had none in my purse. It is a round walk of an hour. Tired as I was I thought it would do me good to get some fresh air and so I set off. I got to the cashpoint and for the first time in my life I forgot my pin number. This does not happen to me! I can still remember my ex-husband’s pin number and we have been divorced nearly five years – although I am sure he has been sensible enough to change it by now! I can remember pin numbers and passwords for everything I have ever used but could I remember the four numbers I needed at that moment – could I buggery! So I had to walk home, look up the number and go out all over again. Two hours walk just to get some money out! When I told them at the pub in the evening, two of my teammates, Lynn and Jonathan (or Jin and Lonathan as I seem to spoonerise them whenever I mention their names to someone else – another sign of brain injury!) very kindly asked me why I hadn’t just asked them to drive me to the cashpoint on the way to the pub in the evening, which would have taken a grand total of five minutes, bless their hearts. The sad truth is that this would never occur to me. I am so used to just getting on and doing things myself that I never even thought of it. So, having felt a bit dense already that day, I was relieved to see that one of the quiz rounds that evening was anagrams. Normally I whizz through these in no time, but it was like wading through treacle. I think that the rest of the team got more than I did. We all have our separate strengths in the team and mine is usually words, but although I did get them all eventually I felt like I had failed them that evening. To coin a phrase that I seem to use an awful lot in daily conversation – ‘it’s not right!’ So, I think my brain must be about to explode. It has reached maximum capacity and is refusing to retain any more trivia and – being the good socialist that I have trained it to be – it has gone on strike!

Yesterday I got on the bus to Larnaca to meet Buddhist Sue. (While we are on the subject of Sues, it was Bingo Sue’s birthday last week and we had a lovely time at the Barley Mow in the evening and then true to her name she had won us €37 each at the bingo on Tuesday, which came in incredibly handy!) Anyway, I had not made this bus journey before and had spent very little time in Larnaca. At the bus stop, as we waited half an hour for the bus to decide whether it was making the journey or not, I got talking to a lovely Cypriot lady named Maria. She is 83 and had lived in Richmond for some years but had been back here for a while. She was telling me her story. It was so refreshing to hear someone who was not bitter and had no political agenda, she was just incredibly sad. She told me that she had grown up in the village of Achna, which at the time was the most prosperous village in the Famagusta area – Paralimni, she said, was just a one-donkey village, where there were so few people, that those who did live there had to bicycle all the way into the city of Famagusta to sell the few tomatoes and cucumbers they had grown. As we wound through the villages on the bus route we got closer and closer to the area of her birth. Achna has now been rebuilt on the Greek-Cypriot side of the Green Line, but the village in which she grew up can still be seen from the road. Indeed the border is only a line of posts joined by what looks like telephone wire, interspersed at various junctures with little concrete outlook posts. She pointed out to me the church of Agia Marina. In this church she had been christened and married, but since 1974 it has had its roof removed and is now used for housing sheep. She then showed me a row of trees just the other side of the line – ‘all this was my grandfather’s land’. She seemed resigned to the fact that it would never belong to her family any more. As we continued along the road she gestured at a ruined house. This was the place to which she and her husband had been going to retire to run a cafe. They had gone to Richmond in the late 1940s to earn some money and this had been the place to which they had dreamed of coming back. On the other side of the road, back on Greek-Cypriot land, she indicated to me the place she had buried her husband, who had wanted to be laid to rest within sight of his home village. They had come back to Cyprus 20 years ago, but their family was now scattered around the area; hence her trip to Larnaca that day, off to see her brother who now lived there. Yet, although this had turned into quite a poignant journey for me, we laughed about many things as well. She was a jolly and amusing lady. As I said, she was not bitter, just so sad that she would never be able to go home.

I liked Larnaca a lot more than I had imagined I would. It is a working town, not really a tourist spot and I enjoyed its authenticity. We wandered along Phoinikoudes towards the old fort and then after enjoying a drink and a gossip by the sea meandered back through the town past the beautiful church of St, Lazarus. I have to say I am seriously considering moving in this direction when my year’s lease is up in Kapparis. I am not ready to leave Cyprus yet and I do love Kapparis and all the people therein, but from a cultural and even spiritual point of view there is far more going on in this area. I do miss activities that help you to learn. I love going out for a laugh, but I need both to live a balanced life. However, I have a few months to go yet, so I will sleep on it and see what the universe throws my way.

I now see that the sun is trying to poke its way through the clouds, so I will take this as a cue to go off and buy toilet rolls and salad – such an exciting, exotic life I lead!

So, this week I am going to leave you with a quote from one of my favourite people, Marcus Aurelius. I always turn to him whenever I am struggling and he always speaks the truth. I have been struggling again this week after having a phone conversation with someone who always seems to know just how to push my buttons and I invariably leave the conversation feeling worthless. Yet, rationally I know that is it not she who is at fault, just my own weaknesses being highlighted and not having enough faith in myself to stand up and say ‘my life is its own justification, not anyone else’s business’. Marcus Aurelius (perhaps best known for being Richard Harris in Gladiator) says: ‘You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.’ So, I have taken full control of my mind, for now anyway until it explodes, and I say with full strength – my life is worth living and I am doing the best I can, and I am sure that this is also true for every single one of you.