MEDITERRANEAN MEANDERINGS

30TH OCTOBER 2010

Hello Chaps and Chapesses. Firstly I apologise for not being in contact for the last month but I haven’t been able to string a coherent sentence together and that is all very well when you are talking, even if it is a bit strawberry when you use the wrong fusebox – to quote Monty Python – but when you are writing it is a bit more important that you at least vaguely make sense. Also I am under no illusion that I am a writer of the quality of Marcel Proust. He may have made ennui worth reading about, but I have not yet worked out how. There is only so much you can write when your days consist of waking up, walking as far as the sofa, sitting down again and having a bit of a nap, standing up, walking as far as the kitchen, getting a drink and thinking I need a bit of a sit down now. See you are all asleep already! I have had better days than others, but it has taken all my resources to get out and do a few bits and pieces and then recover from them. However, in the last week I have started walking Scruffy again for the first time since I got back from the UK and I am on the upward stroke again. 

My mother made me laugh the other day. She said ‘it doesn’t normally take this long for you to get better’. Isn’t it funny how quickly we become complacent. I have been so much healthier since I have been in Cyprus that she has forgotten the last winter I spent in the UK when the poor woman had to keep coming to Devon to look after me because I had spent months not moving. I reminded her of this and the fact that even though I was not at my healthiest I was nowhere near as bad as I was when I get like this in the UK as the sunshine gives me the energy to at least go out and get things done on occasion, even if I do have to lie down for 24 hours afterwards. 

All that aside I can definitely confirm to you that the frogs have hibernated. I will repeat that: the frogs have hibernated! I am not lying to you this time. They have not made a peep, or indeed a chirrup or a croak, for at least three weeks now. My next question is where on earth do they go? There were hundreds of them and now they are all gone, gone and never called me mother. The silly thing is that I think I miss them. Oh well I expect I will get over it. 

Cyprus is having a rough time with its own grown produce at the moment. The prices of vegetables have sky-rocketed in the shops, with a cauliflower coming in at over €5 a couple of weeks ago. The summer was so blisteringly hot here this year (in fact the hottest they have had for a while and definitely the most humid) that most of the vegetables in the fields withered and died. Hence they are having to import most of their fruit and vegetables at the moment, which is a bit of a shock for a farming nation. I missed the worst of the summer ( I never thought I would use that phrase) as I was in the UK in August, but everyone is viewing the onset of Autumn with relief and it does have to be said that October is just about a perfect month in Cyprus. The air is clear again – the views of the panhandle have been almost unimpeded in the last few weeks; the temperature is beautiful – being warm without being exhausting in its intensity and we can all get back to working or walking about without having to stop and change our wringing wet clothes every ten minutes. Not that I minded the heat that I was here for, but I wasn’t working and I do have to admit that this is far more comfortable. In fact May and October are probably the most wonderful months to be in Cyprus. 

We also get the odd bit of rain at this time of year as well. There are two sorts. The first is very refreshing. You are out with the sunshine and the humidity beating down on you and then all of a sudden you feel drops cooling your skin. This does not last for very long at all, just some minor aberration. The second, however, is violent in its intensity. Again, it does not necessarily last for long, but it is torrential for the time it does last. A couple of weeks ago I was doing my stint in the charity shop (one of the things for which I dragged myself off my backside) when in an instant the heavens opened. Within five minutes the main road was like a river. The shop was crowded with people in shorts and strappy tops trying to find a bit of shelter. Within another five minutes Gill and I had to stand at the door with brooms sweeping the water out as fast as we could before we were flooded. Yet only an hour after that we were sitting outside on chairs that had already dried having our coffee break in the afternoon sun. Now that’s proper rain, not this drizzle that lasts for months on end, never actually making you wet just constantly damp and miserable! 

I was also very grateful to Zeus for putting on a fabulous entertainment for me as I lay awake in bed one night at 3am. I was able to lie there, being too tired to move, or read and watch the fabulous storm that was raging about five miles out to sea. It was too far away to hear the thunder, but the lightning was beautiful and constant. It lit up the sky for miles around and I could see that the sky above my balcony was completely cloudless and the stars were bright and clear. A very strange anomaly for someone who grew up in a country where storms are only viewed through grey clouds. 

I am very grateful too to a couple of friends, who wish to remain nameless, who have bought me a new pair of glasses. I am then able to pay them back monthly as I could not afford to buy them outright myself. I took my old glasses to an optician to see if there was any chance they could be mended but he just looked at them sadly and shook his head. Chris suggested I wind a coat hanger around my head and suspend each lens off the wire and over each eye, but I didn’t think my practical dexterity was sufficient to pull this off. Jonathan managed to superglue them for a few days, but they soon slid down either side of my face again. Sue tried to use epoxy resin but this too was to no avail, so in the end I had to admit that they had died. Eyesight is another thing we get very complacent about. I thought I could try the glasses you get in the supermarket for €5, as lots of people seem to get by with these. Having worn glasses for the last 13 years I had forgotten just what was wrong with my eyes and when I tried on the various strengths of these glasses I realised that these would not be of any use to me whatsoever. Not only is my left eye considerably weaker than my right, but, as the optician reminded me, I have pronounced stigmatisms in both eyes – I know trust me! I had come to the conclusion that I was just going to have to cope without glasses for a while and although this was not a pleasant fact, it was a fact nonetheless. When you can see well (whether with glasses or without) you forget what it is like to walk around and not see anything. I was ok in the day because my sunglasses are prescription, but at night it is quite nerve-wracking not knowing who or what is coming towards you until you are more or less level with them. I have never worried about walking around at night in the dark, but I was beginning to get nervous because I felt at a disadvantage. The street lighting here is at a minimum and there are very few pavements. Anyway to cut a long story short these lovely people argued with me for about an hour before I would even begin to agree to accept their help. Despite the fact that they kept saying to me ‘we are not having you messing with your eyesight’ and ‘that’s what friends are for’, my pride still takes a fair bit of conquering. In the end they didn’t give me a choice and told me they were arriving to take me to the optician the following day knowing that I would be too polite to leave them waiting in the car without turning up! 

It has to be said that the optician was fabulous. They do not charge you for eye tests here as they know you will be buying glasses from them and so consider it part of the service. If you don’t need glasses then you will go back to them when you do. The glasses were ready within 4 days and were cheaper than any pair I have ever had in the UK, despite me being very fussy about getting frames that went with my hair! I now understand why people come and get their glasses here when they are on holiday. It is much cheaper and a much nicer experience than sitting in one of the generic opticians in the UK. Although, the independent optician I went to in Totnes was brilliant as he wasn’t part of a conglomerate and could therefore actually care about his patients individually. 

This brings me to Good Fortune. It is something that has been much on my mind in the last few weeks. I am so lucky to have people around me such as the lovely people who have helped me out with the glasses. Buddhist Sue has been cooking me a proper meal once a week and everyone here is always kind and helpful to me. I couldn’t be more fortunate. If you look at my life dispassionately, which I do quite a lot, you would be forgiven for thinking it is a crock of shite – not to put too fine a point on it. I am 34 years of age and I know that I am unlikely ever to be able to do a full day’s work again. I subsist on hardly any money. I have so many things wrong with me that they had to build a special set of shelves in the NHS vaults just to hold my notes. Yet, as I say that is all dispassionate and only the surface. I am not pretending that any of it is easy, but at the same time just how fortunate am I that I was born where I was born, into the family I have, who look after me and care about me; to have the friends that I have and the help that I have. I could so easily have been born with all the same things but in a slum in India, or in a village in the middle of Africa, where the people may be just as wonderful but where there are just no resources and where quite frankly I would have been dead a long time ago. We forget to look at all the good fortune we have created in our lives and so often concentrate on the bad. I just want to use this opportunity to say thank you and I love you to all the people that make my life so much easier every single day (despite the fact that I know they are reading this and saying ‘soppy cow’). 

As Daisaku Ikeda says: ‘When we have a genuine sense that, no matter how difficult our present circumstances, we are not alone – that we are vitally connected with others and with the world – we will, without fail, rise up to the challenge of living again.’ So take care my lovelies and Happy Samhain for tomorrow.  I am now off for a lovely sit down!