Mediterranean Meanderings

13^th June 2010

This week I am writing this blog in conjunction with Scruffy-dog. She is ably assisting me by sitting on my feet in 40° heat, which is kind of her! She arrived to stay with me Wednesday evening and she is with me for a week whilst Larry and Margaret go to their son’s wedding. She is a beautiful dog and I love her dearly, but once again I am reminded why I do not have a dog of my own. I find constant devotion extremely disconcerting, although I am sure that lots of people enjoy it. However, to me it is repressive and I immediately feel the need to escape. This is a trait that has followed me around time and again in my past and when people become too close I push them away in a need to be free. So Scruffy is an extremely good learning tool for me. Saying that, we have been having a lovely time together and managing to get out and do brief walks three times a day rather than one epic one in this heat. It is also the reason that this blog is rather late this week – for which I offer profound apologies – I do get slightly knackered with Scruffy here and as you will read there has been quite a lot else going on, so I have been resting as opposed to writing – although I am sure you will all get over it.

Last Saturday I had everyone round to my place to chant. I was only expecting there to be four of us and it ended up with eight, so that was lovely. About half an hour before everyone arrived I thought I better make an effort and put the air conditioning on, which is a thing I never do. About ten minutes later I was starting to perspire and I thought: this is ridiculous; the air conditioning is making the room far hotter than it was before. It was then that I remembered that I had not used the system since January when I had it on as a heater and it was blowing hot air around the flat. Thank goodness I tried it out before people arrived as my flat is only small and with eight people in it the place was already hot enough without extra heating.

After the meeting Sue and I went into Protaras for the evening. Ostensibly to find some fancy dress, more about which later. It is no wonder people are worried over here at the moment. We are right in the middle of the season but there were empty tables in all of the bars along the strip. It was still busier than anywhere else, but you could see the gaps that the financial climate has left. Unfortunately there seems to be a bit of a mental block here currently. Everyone is aware that the numbers of tourists are down, especially after the whole Volcano (I am not even going to attempt to spell the name of it) incident, and the short-sighted way they are dealing with it is by increasing prices. They (and by this I mean the bar and restaurant owners and hoteliers) cannot seem to understand that if they put the prices down people would come back. As it is the tourists are moaning because of the expense and they can’t afford to do anything but sit on the beach. A bottle of beer in Kapparis is a good deal cheaper than a bottle in one of the resort bars. This year’s tourists are very likely to go somewhere like Slovenia next year, where the prices are much lower. It is such a shame because Cyprus has so much to offer if they could only get rid of the immediate need to make money, which will lose them a fortune in the long run. Still what would I know, I am useless with money, so I will stop preaching.

On Thursday I went on a boat trip with the Coffee Morning ladies. This was fabulous because I had not seen my home from the sea before and, as is a well known fact about me, I am never happier then when I am on the sea. We left from the beautiful harbour of Agia Trias/Triada, (whichever you prefer). We were told that we were going to view the enclosed town of Famagusta from the sea, but in point of fact you can see just as much of it from my balcony as we could from the sea as the boats are only allowed as far as the black buoys which demarcate where Northern Cypriot waters begin – don’t get me started on the whole ‘water doesn’t belong to anybody’ argument again for Goodness Sake! A friend of mine back in Totnes, Ishvara, had brought to my attention, some months ago now, the poem ‘The Old Ships’ by James Elroy Flecker and, as things have a habit of doing when they are in your consciousness, it has since turned up again several times, most recently in a novel written in the 1950s by Sheila Kaye-Smith called ‘Death in Cyprus’ which I was reading a few weeks ago. And so it was, that as I sat there on the sun deck looking back at the land I found myself within the poem, which begins: ‘I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep/ Beyond the village which men still call Tyre, / With leaden-age o’ercargoed dipping deep / For Famagusta and the hidden sun / That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;’. Famagusta is an ancient port and I can see how Flecker must have been inspired by the vast history of the ships that have sailed in and out of its harbour since before the Trojan War. Although you can still access the old town of Famagusta and its harbour walls it is such a sad state of affairs that since 1974 the town that is less than 100m from these walls lies behind barbed wire and is accessible to no one.

One of the ladies on the trip was telling me that up on the panhandle near Cape Apostolos Andreas there is still a settlement of Greek Cypriots who had been cut off during the invasion. They live in Rizokarpaso (Greek)/ Dipkarpaz (Turkish) which is right on the peninsula and they were therefore unable to flee south as there was no way through. They are still being supplied by UN convoys. This population is now quite elderly and is as a consequence shrinking. There are still so many things I am learning about Cyprus every day. As a brief aside I got into trouble the other day for referring to the ‘border’. I was told that there is no border only a ceasefire line. He said that this is just what the Turks wanted, for people to get complacent and just accept it as a separate country. As I have said before I am not on any side except that of Cyprus as a whole, but he is right in one sense in that not having been involved in the conflict I do forget that this is a country still at war, albeit in the midst of a long truce. In fact, I try hard to forget war at all times and focus only on peace, because peace is never engendered by those who care only about war; but I will try and have more respect in the future.

After Famagusta the boat turned round and headed the other way along the coast, passing Pernera and Protaras (which it has to be said looks much nicer from the sea) and we stopped at the Blue Lagoon near Cape Grecko where lots of the ladies swam, although I put a mattress down on the sun deck and, I know this will not surprise you in any way, read my book for a bit.

On the way back along the coast I was looking at the beautiful sight of the church of Profitas Elias on the hill behind Protaras, when the bloody huge M of MacArseholes came in sight and stood out in its vomit-yellow vastness against the hill. Is there nothing on this earth that MacShites have not ruined? I make no apology for my language here as I think both these names are far less offensive than its proper name which is just a byword for everything that is wrong with the world at the moment. I am now going to leave this subject before my head explodes with anger!

On Friday I was invited to my friend Ghislaine’s birthday party in Nicosia. This was an 80s theme party and I was completely flummoxed by what to wear. However, luckily all the youf are wearing 80s stuff at the moment so I was able to find an outfit. I did try to find someone with a Volkswagen so I could nick their badge for the evening a la Beastie Boys, but I was out of luck. The party did not start until 9pm, but as I was going to do most of the journey by public transport I had to leave at 3pm. I caught the bus into Agia Napa where I met up with Chris. From here we caught a bus to Larnaca where Sue, may 1000 blessings fall on her head, came to pick us up. We went to her house in Aradippou and changed there as both Chris and I had point blank refused to traverse the island in costume. Besides which we would not have been a very pleasant sight after travelling in the heat of the afternoon in full rig out. I was very impressed with myself as I was brave enough to wear a ra-ra skirt, I did have lace leggings on under this – not brave enough to actually show my legs, although they did have more of an airing in public than they have had since 1992! I had orange fluorescent lace gloves and a fluorescent lime green bow in my hair. The look was completed with vast dangly earrings and smiley acid-house studs. It was a brilliant party. We were just a small British contingent as the majority of people were French, so most of the music was what had been popular in France in the 80s and I was therefore not au fait with all of it. Still it was great to catch up with people like Jenny, Tony and Shuko who I rarely get to see in a social environment and to have a good laugh. Sue, and her sister Babs, who bless her heart had only got off the plane from England at 5 o’clock that afternoon and had been game enough to come with us, drove us all the way home. This is a long way out of their way and was incredibly sweet of Sue to offer, as it saved me and Chris not only hours but a fortune in taxi fare. I have said it many times before in this blog but I will say it again I am blessed to be amongst so many bodhisattvas of the earth here who look after me time and time again.

I am going to stop wittering now as Scruffy has got up and I can hear her claws clipping away on the tiled floor, sounding like Gene Kelly about to tap dance across my kitchen. I am going to leave you with some Native American wisdom this week as I have been reading yet another amazing book which shows how quantum physics is only just beginning to catch up with the remarkable knowledge of the indigenous shamanic tribes of this earth and the philosophies they have espoused for millennia. Come on Western civilization catch up! Just on a very minor note I was very interested to see that they have always said that the world was round, whereas we here in ‘civilization’ only worked that out 500 years ago. What have we been doing with our time? So, here is a Native American saying that I hope we can all empathise with and hopefully of which we will take some notice. ‘Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then will we realise that we cannot eat money.’ Are you listening MacIdiots?