MEDITERRANEAN MEANDERINGS

23RD JANUARY 2011

Today I feel a bit like Marcel Proust (I am sure you all have days like that). Don’t worry the only resemblance is that I am writing this in bed, you aren’t going to have to read a 200 page sentence, or anything remotely resembling literature. I wish! Still maybe the whole writing in bed thing will inspire me and I will suddenly turn into a literary genius. As I type this I can see the birds swooping in the pellucid sky towards Homer’s wine dark sea – no it’s no good maybe I need the overcoat and the hat too (I am wearing the fingerless gloves already)! 

I have been in bed since Friday evening and I don’t think I am coming out again. It is nice and warm and quiet in here. I am having one of my more exhausted periods but I am giving someone a reiki treatment tomorrow so I know I will have to get up at some point. If only to do the washing up before she arrives! Still it is a friend that I am always pleased to see, so I won’t mind in the least really. 

I know I was here last winter but I forgot how cold it is here in January. Ok, so I know that compared to the UK it is not that cold but there is no carpeting and central heating. Also when you have been used to temperatures of 40° it is quite shocking when the cold comes. In direct sunlight it is beautiful and it is much warmer outside than in. Sitting at the coffee morning on Thursday morning we had the sun shining on us and it was so warm that some of the ladies only had t-shirts on. Even I removed my scarf and gloves to a general round of applause, although the jumper and the cardigan remained firmly in place! But as soon as you move away from the sun, or it goes in, it is freezing. Still it makes me even more grateful to be here as I know that if I was in the UK I would have gone indoors in September and not ventured out until April. Here either the sun is shining or we are having amazing rain storms – but it is always proper weather, not just continuous grey drizzle! Indeed the rain was so heavy last Monday that being in my flat was like being on a ship in the middle of a typhoon. The area around my block had flooded and so I was surrounded by a moat, but more importantly the water was just crashing against the windows and cascading in torrents down the glass. It didn’t last for long, but was quite exciting while it did. I am so fortunate having a window at the side as well as at the front. It makes the flat so full of light all the time and I get a 180° view – as well as one from my bed when I need to retreat to it. 

My friend Jenny, who also dislikes the cold, bought me the most amazing Christmas present. They are fabulous fluffy boots for wearing around the house. I think come March you may have to surgically remove them from my feet. They are so snug and comfortable. They also have a nice thick sole to protect you from the cold marble floor. Fabulous stuff! Pat and Sandra were their usual brilliant selves as well. They gave me an electric blanket. They had two, one each, but Pat doesn’t feel the cold – hardy ex-miner that he is – and he said as he doesn’t use it that I could have it. Well, what can I say except: such toasty loveliness. With the combination of the boots, the blanket, my trusty hot cherry stone pillow and the fabulous Fagin gloves that my mother knitted for me I should make it through the winter. I look so sexy in this rig out that I can’t possibly understand why I live alone!

Something I noticed in the peace and quiet of the evening yesterday was that the frogs are back. I mean, like oh my actual God, or whatever the current phrase may be. (No, it’s no use, I struggled being ‘down wiv da kidz’ when I was one so...) For Goodness sakes, they haven’t even had time for a jolly good sleep. I don’t mind them at all, in fact I have missed them, but you’d think it wasn’t even worth hibernating. Will someone please have a word with the head frog – does anyone have Paul McCartney’s phone number, I believe he has some influence. 

So to go back to Christmas, I hope you all had a wonderful time. Kyrenia was very nice and it didn’t seem like Christmas at all, which was a bonus. As someone said to me: ‘I know you don’t like Christmas but going away to a Muslim Country does seem a bit excessive.’ It is still an ordinary day there so everything is open and everyone is off to school and work as normal. We went down to the harbour in the day on Christmas and I had an halloumi and salad filled pitta bread next to the harbour walls in the sunshine with friends. Now that is what I call Christmas! I also discovered a wonderful thing in the North – Dark Efes. Although I am not a big drinker when I do drink I tend to drink beer – for a start it is cheap! I always drank proper beer in the UK – you know warm and tasteless ales – yum! ‘Pint of Otter please my Pretty Maid’ you know the form. However, out here there is only lager. You can pay a fortune for imported bitters but what is the point. It is also far too hot in the summer to be drinking warm beer and lager is far more refreshing (even if it is a woman’s drink – I have the real ale drinker’s beard and everything!) So it was with huge excitement that I discovered Dark Efes. Efes is Turkish lager but Dark Efes is what would happen if a pint of Bass and a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale were to breed. I now have to find a way to get it over the Green Line. I can walk to the Buffer Zone in about 5 minutes, but it isn’t a proper crossing. Do you think I can arrange to meet someone there and do an Alec Guinness/Smiley-type transaction in a cold-war styley? Still I am sure that it will turn up in my life again soon and I think I will manage to cope without it until then. 

New Years Day was fabulous. I was due to go out New Year’s Eve, but I wasn’t in the mood and I was too tired (plus ca change), so I went to bed early and settled down with a good book. However, on New Year’s Day we had all been invited to Panos and Giovanna’s flat in Oroklini for New Year’s Gongyo. Their flat is even more like a ship than mine is and on a more permanent basis, not just mid-storm. They have picture windows on three sides and are high enough up that you do not see the Dekhalia Road or the immediate surroundings at all. At the front you look out to the Oroklini Mountains; to the side the bay curves around so that you look across to Dekhalia, but when you sit down you can’t see the land beneath, so you look out directly into the sea. The piece de resistance however is the balcony at the back. It is above the beach and as you sit there the waves crash beneath you. I was unable to join in much of the conversation (I know, not like me!) as I was drawn in, as always, by the sound and movement of the sea. It is a good job I don’t live there because I would never get anything done, I would sit and listen to the serene and sometimes savage susurration of the waves forever. As we all chanted together for 2011 to be whatever it needed to be for each of us, surrounded by such beauty, I was truly moved. In the evening I had been invited to Lynn and Jonathan’s for a little get together of 10 of us and so started the New Year with good and kind friends, much more my thing than a big party the night before. Panos and Giovanna and Lynn and Jonathan had provided wonderful food too, so I didn’t need to eat again for about 3 days. Panos is Cypriot, Giovanna is Italian and Lynn and Jonathan are English, so I had traditional food from all three countries that day. 

Something I have been chanting on is to find a focus for myself this year. I have been trying to think what I am qualified and, more importantly, have the energy to do and the only thing that came into my head was Mata Amritanandamayi (also known as Amma, Indian for Mother), the Hugging Saint. Now I know that I am nowhere near the saint bit, but I wondered whether maybe she took on apprentices to hug the people she can’t get round to. I can’t think of anything I am more qualified to do than just hug people all day. It is after all my favourite thing and proper hugs are always hard to come by as people assume there must be something sexual implied by it. I miss my brother anyway, but something he was always very good about was turning up to give me a proper hug if I rang him. He has declined to just get on a plane and give me a hug, how selfish is that. Brighton isn’t that far from Gatwick! A proper hug requires no conversation, no preamble, just complete and utter unconditional acceptance of the other person in that moment. Evelyn once sent me a very funny clip of Matt Harvey’s sketch on the ‘Totnes Hug’ and he gets it spot on. I even have a card in my purse that states that the holder is entitled to unlimited hugs from whomsoever they present it to. Sadly I think everyone would run a mile if I handed it over. People aren’t good at random affection without an ulterior motive as a rule. I do tend to hug and kiss everyone anyway when I say hello and goodbye, but that isn’t the same as a good long platonic hug. So if anyone knows Amma please could you put in a word. I have references and everything!

Just briefly before I conclude my Meanderings for now I wanted to give Cyprus some well-deserved praise. I had to fill in a form to send back to the UK which needed to be witnessed by an official of some sort.  I went to my local bank on Thursday and asked if they would be able to do this. Now in the UK they would charge an exorbitant fee just for signing it.  Here the Bank Manager beamed and invited me to sit down while he patiently read it through (not even in his first language) and then signed for no fee at all and asked if there was anything else he could do! Well done Cyprus! Impressive stuff, for something that should just be common courtesy to a customer and not impressive at all, which just goes to show how far the so-called civilized world has fallen. 

So, here we come to the end again. I have been sorely tempted to find a quote from Wayne Hussey of The Mission as I have rediscovered their 1992 album ‘Masque’ in the last week or so and I had forgotten just how much I loved it. However, it being an album of the Goth Genre, there probably isn’t anything particularly uplifting in the lyrics with which to begin 2011, although angst is always artistically attractive (or maybe that’s just my warped mind!) So I am going to use a quote that I have written in the front of my diary this year. I read it in a book by Daisaku Ikeda, but the quote itself is from Leo Tolstoy: ‘Supreme happiness is to find that you are a better person at the end of the year than at the beginning.’  As always I send you all vast love and the wish that 2011 brings you everything you want and more.