MEDITERRANEAN MEANDERINGS

22ND SEPTEMBER 2010

The week approaching today's Autumn Equinox has been a very quiet one for me in Kapparis.  I am just getting back into the routine of my life here. According to the Cyprus Mail we are still getting temperatures that are 5° above the average for this time of year, so as you can imagine I am not able to get very far in the day as there is only so far you can walk without melting in the direct sunlight. The evenings are now getting cooler, however, and I am sleeping without the fan again. As always though my body gets cold when I am tired and it doesn’t take any notice of the external temperature. On Sunday I was so tired and my hip was incredibly painful (which was my own fault as I will explain later) that I had to get the old cherry stone pillow out. This brings the warmth back into my bones and when I told myself to get a grip and go out to the pub quiz in the evening I realised that it was actually quite warm in the real world! 

The reason my hip hurt was that Sandra had a party for her 60th Birthday at the Barleymow on Saturday night and I do love to dance. It was a lovely party and I had a great time. I made the decision to enjoy myself knowing the price that I would have to pay and I don’t think it was a bad deal. Jimmy Spender (yet another person called Mick, as I have said everyone is called Mick or Sue!) provided the live music and also provided fabulous conversation when his set ended. Despite the fact that the official figures say that Protaras has had a good year, Mick was saying that he could not see how this was so and it is hard to see how they arrived at these figures. April was dead because of the volcano and there are still empty seats in all the bars now, despite the fact we are being told the contrary. Still economics has never been my strong point, so what would I know? He is always a good live turn and gave me plenty to dance to. The music he played on this occasion was obviously tailored more to Sandra’s taste than mine (I know, how selfish of her) but I can dance to anything – even the Mavericks and that song winds me up possibly more than MacDonald’s! It was lovely to see Carl, Sandra and Pat’s son, who was over for the party. He now lives in Hove, so I was also able to meet up with him when I was back there, where he took me to a pub that only serves road kill – but that is another story! He was his usual flamboyant self and had put a lot of effort into making the Barleymow look festive. Unfortunately, although I love to dance, dancing does not love me and partly due to the heat, partly due to my weight and partly due to the pain in my hip, as the sweat drips off me it makes me look like an amorphous soggy mass (or should that be mess?). Still I am not blind enough to think I am likely to pull even if I sit there pristine, so I might as well enjoy myself! For some reason though, it only seemed to be me and Carl who danced most of the night, along with Gill - who is involved with every dance activity in Cyprus – I think she only had tap, salsa and line dancing this week, so she needed a bit of freestyle on Saturday night - although other people did get up to join in on occasion. 

The other saga of the week has been that of the washing machine. As I said at the end of the last blog I had been unable to get any power to it. Lovely Charlie, the electrician – who used to be in an Abba tribute band, but that too is another story – came out to check that it wasn’t just me being thick and that there was no power. He firstly humiliated me by pulling the washing machine out with one hefty pull, after I had spent hours pulling and fussing at it. He checked the plug; he took off the top of the machine and checked the electrics inside. He could find nothing wrong with it at all, but still we could get no power to come on. By this time I was running out of clothes. I had no idea how I was going to get to the launderette as, although it is only a 15 minute walk away, I would not be able to walk there carrying a bin bag full of clothes. My trusty steed Laurenciou had been stolen while I was away – although what anyone wanted with a rusty old trike that is prone to punctures is beyond me – so I didn’t even have that option. I had been worried about how I was going to collect my water from the old posimo nero machines, but Davide had found an old trolley in his cupboard and Gill had found a bungee cord, so I had managed to go and get that without too much trouble, but a big bag of washing was another thing. In the end Sandra came to the rescue. She said she would pick me up to take me to the coffee morning on Thursday and we could drop it in on the way. The lovely lady in the launderette (which sounds like a Beatles song) dropped it off to me at the Charity Shop on Friday afternoon and so Gill gave me a lift home with it. I truly am very fortunate in the people that I have around me. Anyway, to get back to the washing machine, two Cypriot repairmen turned up first thing on Monday morning, switched it on and it worked perfectly! Their English was not brilliant and my Greek is pathetic, so they left just thinking I was completely barking (probably very astute of them), completely oblivious to my comments of: ‘but even the electrician couldn’t get it to bloody work!’ And before I give Charlie a bad name, he is the man who fixed my extractor fan and who is well known around here for being very good at what he does. So what was wrong with it remains a complete mystery. In line with the oneness of life and its environment, I seem to have the only washing machine with ME. It was just too tired to work and when it felt rested enough it started again!

I managed to give the bus service a try again yesterday, as it was time to pay my bills. It has already shrunk from its over-optimistic beginnings. There is now no bus to Larnaca Airport as the taxi drivers protested until it was removed. There are still circular buses, (that is buses that run on a circular route, not cylindrical buses!)  but they run fairly infrequently. Still, at least they are running at all, which is an improvement on none. It also enabled me to provide my service as Bodhisattva of The Bus Routes. I always think I look like a tourist, but there must be some invisible sign on my head that says: ‘ask her’. So, I provided my usual service of telling people not to worry that there hadn’t been a bus for a while, one would turn up when it was ready, along with my secondary facility of calling out to various people along the route: ‘this is your stop’, after they had asked me how they would know where to get off. It is nice to know that I can be useful for something as that is an issue that has been much on my mind lately. 

I have found myself at the edge of the pit this week, one short step away from plummeting into the darkness, but I will not allow this to happen. I have got that gnawing and nagging nervy feeling in my gut that I cannot assign to anything in particular. It is possibly just the time of year - the Autumn Equinox being the date that day and night are of equal length means that as from tomorrow the darkness starts to eat into the light.  It maybe just to do with my constant worry about money, but it seems to be more than that at the moment. I have taken a long hard look at myself, as I often do and, as is just as often the case, I have found myself wanting. Just what use am I? What is the point to me? There does not seem to be anything that I have the desire to do with my life. I have no urge to do anything apart from be free and to be in the sunshine and near the sea. That is not a career! I don’t have any ambition; I don’t feel drawn to do anything. All I want to do is read, and even then it needs to be what I am free to read – as soon as I am told I have to read something I lose all interest in it. As I have said money is a big worry to me at the moment, but I don’t even have the urge to do something in order to combat that. It seems to take all of my energy just to survive. I use up big spurts of energy, as on Saturday night, only to know that even now four days later, I am paying for having a few hours of fun. My life is incredibly fortunate in so many ways. I have an amazing existence in the scheme of things, but I look around me and I have to ask myself what am I contributing back for all that I receive? I know that comparison is pointless, but I see people working so hard and I feel worthless next to them. There must be something that I can do for all the wonderful people in my life. While I was back in the UK my mother and my brother helped me out no end, again! Yet what do I ever give to them in return? Unconditional love, and obviously I send out my prayers and chant for them every day, but that does not keep them in the luxury which they deserve in return for all they do for me. So what is the answer? I have no idea. It is one I will ponder on time and again, until something tangible turns up that I am good for. In the meantime I will use all that is fortunate in my life: the sea; the sun; the warmth and the amazing people that turn up around me wherever I go in the world to keep myself from the precipice. If it wasn’t for that fact that this has sunk me in the past I would just say it was PMT!

So au revoir chaps and here is a Japanese proverb for you: ‘We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we may as well dance.’ or as Samuel Becket said: ‘Dance first. Think later. That is the natural order.’ and obviously where I have been going wrong. More dancing and less thinking from now on!