Sanders Blog

25th October, 2009

This time last year we were blanketed with snow in Huddersfield. It was extremely cold. We were preparing for an Ofsted Inspection and feeling frazzled. How things change. It hasn’t been great weather but at least it’s warm. We aren’t using our central heating yet. We are on an Energy Project. It has nothing to do with environmentalism – we don’t wear sandals – but an experiment in monitoring costs. It is just for fun. I’ve told you before that Pauline records on a spreadsheet-based financial package every item of expenditure. She has done it since 1978 when we got married. Recently, I’ve found out where she got this from.

Pauline’s Mum is still struggling with Shingles and we’ve made a trip or two to Oldham to see her. The other day a bill arrived in the post while we were there. Pauline’s Mum – Jane – got out her accounts book and began recording the payment while murmuring to herself: “Yes, that’s what I had expected.” This could have been Pauline but (a bit) more wrinkly. Pauline forward accounts, spreading annual costs on a monthly basis, setting out contingencies, predicting surpluses, etc.. Now we’ve started to invest money in institutions and not property she is in her element.

26th October, 2009

Over to Oldham from Huddersfield. There are two main ways: the M62 which is the highest and one of the most congested motorway stretches in Britain or the parallel road across the moors known as Nont Sarah’s. When you are a worker, you take the M62 because you kid yourself it is quicker. So often it isn’t. When you’re retired, you go across the moors and savour the view.

  

   

The Nont Sarah’s road is particularly tranquil and picturesque at the moment.

27th October, 2009

Pauline & I are very sad people. We record and tabulate everything. We were made for each other. I know nothing about astrology but I was told that Aries (me) and Libra (Pauline) are a natural pair. Pair of what I don’t know but we do complement each other perfectly. Before I wrote this, I did some research. Aries and  Libra: the god of war and the goddess of beauty. How do they know us? Aries is solely concerned about the “I”; the “we” is left to Libra. Something spooky going on there!

More prosaically, I design spreadsheets, Pauline loves to record things on spreadsheets. For 31 years Pauline has maintained our accounts. For the past 5 I’ve been recording Blood Sugar Levels, Blood Pressure and Pulse rate twice a day. Now we are recording Electricity, Gas and Water meter readings every Saturday. I nearly got into the habit of recording petrol consumption in the car but suddenly saw Dad doing that in his little notebook he kept in the car. Does anyone remember that?

28th October, 2009

Northern Rock sent us our house deeds today and confirmed the completion of our mortgage_settlement.

It probably won’t seem it on re-reading but £270,000.00 felt a lot to get off our minds. Having been burdened with a big mortgage for more than thirty years, we had a bowl of porridge to celebrate. Do you like porridge? I’m hooked on it. I learnt 40 years ago that I have a compulsive nature. If I do anything five times in short succession, I get addicted to it. So smoking, red wine, Greece, etc all became habitual. Equally, if you give me porridge for breakfast, salad for lunch water for dinner, etc often enough, I become addicted to them. Pauline is trying to get me addicted to housework at the moment. I should have told her that was the one exception.

29th October, 2009

Pauline & I agree on most things. Particularly, we agree on Global Warming. We are confirmed deniers but the warmer it gets for us the better. Our Local Authority, Kirklees, however, are totally committed to saving the planet. They try to get everyone separating their rubbish into categories, for example. They try to pretend that they are generating power and other useful things from people like us who they charge for the privilege of being told to separate our rubbish into categories. Can you believe it? Rubbish by definition is something to be thrown away not played with. We pay for Kirklees to collect and throw our rubbish away. Why on earth would we choose to do that for them? However, Kirklees have gone up in our estimation recently. They have Project Warmzone.

Along with about a dozen other companies in the country, they have employed the Government funded agency, Warmzone Ltd, to supply insulation to houses in the Borough. The thrust of this project is to reduce fuel poverty and, in Oldham, the LA is means testing households and targeting the needy. In Kirklees, every single household is being offered additional loft insulation and cavity wall insulation free of charge. Kirklees have employed Miller Pattison to supply this service to us.

They are coming to survey our house next week to tell us what we need. They also provide free energy saving light bulbs and support with maximising central heating efficiency. Nice to see they are taking Global Warming seriously. We pensioners could freeze to death!

30th October, 2009

Yorkshire Water sent us £350.00 back today because we’ve opted for a meter. They wanted to say thank you. Such lovely people Yorkshire Water.

18th October, 2009 

We’ve been back in UK for a fortnight and we are still struggling to come to terms with the temperatures in Yorkshire. The last couple of weeks in Greece were 25-26C. The past couple of weeks here it has been 11 – 12C.  Of course, as newly retired persons we are still a little unsure of our finances. Our joint Electricity and Gas bills over twelve months amount to about £2000.00. Now we are at home all day and the LA are not heating us. Today we switched, using USwitch, from British Gas to First:Utility who say they will save us £420.00 per year. That’s worth a good couple of meals out at least. We have done this a couple of times over the past few years but now we’ve got time to torment all these companies with our fecklessness.

19th October, 2009 

Our water bill from Yorkshire Water is £1100.00 per year. We are not metered. We are the only people in the Quarry who are not and our bill is related directly to our Council Tax band. We’ve always resisted a meter because we water our garden so much. In fact, we have become the communal tap when someone else wants to water their garden as well. Our neighbours told us recently that they pay less than £20.00 per month for water and our jaws dropped. We will not be watering the garden now we are away so much so we asked Yorkshire Water for a meter. We emailed them from Greece and they came today. Ten minutes fiddling about in our garage which is where our stop-cock is and the meter was fitted. The whole service was free. We now save about £70.00 a month and I’ve got an excuse not to wash too often!

I knew you wouldn’t be able to live without a view of our stop-cock and new water meter.

20th October, 2009 

Our mobile contracts have been with Three for the past couple of years. That was fine while we were mainly in England. In Greece and on Sifnos the main providers and best reception comes from Vodaphone. In fact, the fastest transport back to Athens apart from a helicopter is the High-Speed Hydrofoil which sponsored by Vodaphone.

What is particularly good about Vodaphone is their International Passport which allows one to use contract minutes abroad as if from UK. Our new contracts bring a smart new touch-screen phone with excellent web browsing and email facilities. Graphics can be snatched from the web, edited and emailed on on the hoof.

21st October, 2009 

On Monday the Waterboard were in our garage. Today it was the turn of the AA. Yesterday, I had spent time in the garage connecting our new mobiles to the voice operated Sat. Nav./Radio/DVD/CD by bluetooth. As a retired person, I am quite slow and had to read the book carefully before completing the operation. To do that, I had to put on all the reading lights. When our phones eventually reported successful communication with Honda HFT, I excitedly returned upstairs to my wife to get praise for being so clever.

This morning I walked downstairs to the car to find the battery completely flat. I had left the reading lights on all night. Fortunately, our car comes with Hondacare – full AA Home and Abroad cover – and within half an hour an nice young man on a bright yellow bike was recharging the battery.

He left with a bottle of wine for his troubles. He was looking round our garage as he charged the battery and couldn’t help seeing a spare bottle. I really like our garage. It is triple size with a double and a single door. As soon as we moved there, nearly ten years ago now, we had it automated so we can drive straight in and walk up the stairs on the inside to the house.

   

22nd October, 2009 

How does the time fly so quickly? Every day we are up at 7.00 am but, before I’ve really achieved anything, it’s Tea Time. Not today. By 10.00 am we had paid off our mortgage and about five accompanying Mortgage insurance policies. Pauline and I are flying around the lounge with the lightness of being mortgage-free. Indulge me if this is getting you down but writing about it is the only way I can come to terms with what is happening to me. I am sitting at home reading The Times and eating buttered toast while receiving substantially more income than when I battled down the motorway at 7.00 am each day to a shabby, old school building and some fairly shabby kids. All of this at the age of 58! Is this really happening? I keep expecting the phone to go and somebody to tell me to get back to work. Indeed, Pauline & I had thought we might do a bit of Tutoring or Consultancy work but now we don’t need to, we can’t be bothered.

I spend my time now searching out good investments, special deals for this and that. In a week or so we are off to the South to look at potential properties. Gillingham, Chatham, Sittingbourne, Faversham, Ashford – those sorts of places we intend to explore. Anywhere in the centre of a flood plain.

France may have to wait until the pound strengthens if that happens in my life time. At least we can pop over there from these towns quite quickly and easily.

23rd October, 2009 

Spent quite a chunk of the day with Pauline’s Mum. At 95, it’s hard to cope with shingles. It’s in her hair and across her face and it’s giving her real pain. Pauline’s sister, Phyllis, and her husband, Colin, drove down from Chertsey, West Byfleet to stay with her for a couple of days. We sat and chatted for a few hours. When we go down to Kent, I will call on them and set them up with a colour printer and some internet training.

24th October, 2009 

Desperate day today. Dark, wet, blowing a gale. At least Stoke beat Spurs. Looking forward to United v Liverpool tomorrow. What am I saying? Get a life, John!

11th October, 2009

Even after six weeks away, it is wonderful to sleep in your own bed again and that is how it has felt for the past thirty years on the first night after returning from Greece. Not this time! After three months in Greece, Huddersfield doesn’t completely feel like HOME. Our bed, which we bought from And So To Bed in 1980 for £500.00 and which we thought was a massive luxury, now feels tired and ordinary. Rather creaky actually. The bed we had made for us and shipped to Greece six years ago is an absolute delight to sleep in. One of the problems was that I got up in the night, thought I was still in Greece and turned right instead of left for the toilet. I nearly ended up stark naked on the garage roof. I thought I’d grown out of that!

When you’re away for six weeks, the waiting post is colossal. We usually do Keep Safe with the Post Office where, for a fee, they keep all your post until you return. (Of course, nowadays, they just don’t bother delivering it at all.) We have a fantastic postman and, apparently, he needed two bags just for our post and he had to make two trips to deliver it because it was so heavy. Huge piles of post wrapped in thick elastic bands completely covered our dining room table and it took us jointly six hours to open and allocate to new piles of:

• Must Deal with on Monday
• Must Deal with during the Week
• Put in the Diary
• Interesting – To be read in time
• Put in the bin
• Shred & Put in the bin

All the time, I was looking for two envelopes worth our entire year’s salaries. In Greece we could check our Bank Account and we saw our wonderful lump sums arrive. We even saw our pensions arrive but the Redundancy payments that we had worked so hard for failed to materialise. We even phoned our legal adviser to follow it up. She told us the Local Authority had posted them. I had visions of striking postal workers steaming open envelopes. As we worked our way methodically through the mounted piles, we began to form the opinion that Sod’s Law would prevail and they would be the last two envelopes left on the table. True to the Law, we got down to the last two envelopes but there were no Cheques.

The concern level rose distinctly. We went through all the possibilities including that they wanted us to go back and teach. We heard while we were away that two of our colleagues who were desperate to finish and who had been lined up for redundancy had had it snatched away at the last minute. Our Legal Adviser was away until Monday. We had to wait. Meanwhile, I thought I had better try a suit on just in case.

12th October, 2009

Our Legal Adviser is a wonderful woman who works for AMiE, the Professional Association for Leaders and Managers in Colleges and Schools. She was responsible for negotiating a fantastic deal with the Local Authority. We contacted her immediately this morning. She called back to say that the HR representative who she had destroyed in our negotiations had been moved over the summer and had ‘forgotten’ to action our settlement. She gave the HR twenty four hours to sort it out or face legal action.

13th October, 2009

By 9.00 am this morning, the money appeared in our Nat. West Account. That settled, we just prepared for a comfortable day when Pauline’s Mum phoned. She had been in agony all night with a headache. We shot over there. She didn’t look good. In fact she had a suspicious rash diagonally across the front of her face and her left eye was sore and swollen. We called the doctor who confirmed she had shingles. In a 95 year old and affecting her eye that is serious. We had to take her straight to hospital. We were there for five hours. I hate hospitals and yet I’ve been to some wonderful ones recently – public & private. Oldham’s is not pleasant, not well equipped and fairly depressing. What gets me most of all is the modern facade masking the Nineteenth Century mill-style building. I also hate the cripples in gowns and slippers who have escaped the lung cancer wards to smoke in the carpark. You need an oxygen mask to get through the front entrance.

 

Pauline’s Mum was discharged with enough pain killers to subdue a herd of bison and told to take it easy. To be honest, if she took it any easier she would be permanently horizontal.

15th October, 2009

It is six days since we arrived from Greece. We drove over to Oldham to see Pauline’s Mum. It is a simple drive over the moors but it looked like the middle of winter. If we had got stuck in a snow drift, we wouldn’t have been surprised. Only one week before we needed sunglasses constantly. The contrasting shots below show Oldham Moor today and the port of Igoumenitsa, the last stop in Greece on the way up the Adriatic before we reach Italy. If you ever buy Sea Bream from the supermarket, the odds are it comes from the fish farms in Igoumenitsa bay.

 

16th October, 2009

Pauline’s Mum feels a bit better today and has got other visitors so we are free to get jobs done. Off to the Refuse Disposal Tip today. I refuse to pay and sort my own rubbish so I stick sacks in the car and dump them in the General Waste skip. It’s no hardship and it’s on the way to Sainsburys for some more rubbish. Unless you go early in the morning, the lane leading to the Refuse Disposal Tip is absolutely full of like-minded citizens who refuse to bow to the Stasi Council officials in Environmental Health.

Coming home to find our neighbours mowing our lawns, we phone Northern Rock to get a Redemption figure for our mortgage. We want to settle it next week. Pauline and I have met mortgage payments every month since 1974. Not doing so now will be a lovely feeling. A year ago, when our fix ended, we decided to go on Standard Variable rate just so we didn’t have any costly tie-in at this point. We will be £2670.00 per month better off immediately. Ironically, they had written to us yesterday to offer us a rate reduction for loyalty. We weren’t tempted.

17th October, 2009

Pauline did the dutiful daughter thing by driving over to Oldham. I watch Aston Villa thrash Chelsea. Couldn’t be better.

Received a lovely letter today from Coutts Bank Manager, Sue Riding. While at Nat. West, she was the Accounts Manager who helped us with bridging finance and great encouragement in buying our Greek land and building the house. Not only that, she visited our island to view the land. Like us, she has just retired at the age of 57 and sent us pensioners’ greetings.

4th October, 2009

Incredibly hot today – about 85F. I spent two hours watering the fruit trees giving them their last good water of the season. We prepared the car for leaving tomorrow – oil, tyres, washer bottle, and full valet. We didn’t go for a last swim because there were three football matches to watch. They didn’t really live up to their billing even the Chelsea-Liverpool one. As we went out for dinner on our last evening on the island, it struck as fantastic that I was in a short sleeved T-shirt at 9.00 in the evening in the open air. In fact it was 73F as we drove home at 10.30 pm.

5th October, 2009

Pressure’s on this morning. We leave on Speed-Runner at 2.20 pm. We have to pack the car, cover all the furniture, vacuum pack the clothes we are leaving behind, put away all the garden furniture, close and lock all the shutters and then drive down to the harbour to park our car for the ferry. We will walk back to the cafe for a late breakfast and hope to pick up the Sunday papers because it is Monday. Newspapers for eleven weeks will have cost me about £300.00. As I write, it is the most wonderfully serene island day. The sky is pure blue and is reflected in the mirror-flat sea. There is not a breath of wind. There is a tinkle of goats bells on the mountainside and the air is heavy with crushed thyme. The Greeks always do this to us. On the day we leave they make us desperate to stay.However, the car is packed although not with much. It is gleaming clean and so is the house.

The Speed-Runner hydrofoil service is fast. We will only be on it for just over three hours. At 5.30 pm we will roll off into the screaming Piraeus/Athens traffic and drive for three hours out of Athens to Korinthos, over the Corinth Canal to Patras. We will stay at the wonderful Patras Palace Hotel for two nights before boarding Superfast Ferry for our twenty four hour trip up the Adriatic.

Today is Pauline’s 58th birthday and I remember to wish her ‘Happy Birthday’ before we close the shutters and lock them for the last time this year and, after turning off the electricity, driving down to the harbour. Parking by the jetty, we looked back across the bay we swam both ways across each day for 82 days to our house nestling in the foothills.

 

Everything went to plan and by 5.30 pm we were fighting our way through the Athens’ traffic over the Corinth Canal to Patras with its spectacular bridge.

 

We checked in to the Patras Palace Hotel and crashed out for the night – after dinner and a bottle of wine.

6th October, 2009

We managed to get the Sunday papers and relaxed with those and coffee most of the day. That is, after the gargantuan buffet breakfast taken on the roof terrace. These views of the harbour and the Superfast ferries are taken from the balcony of our room and up on the roof terrace.

   

   

7th October, 2009

Boarded Superfastat 12.30 pm and went to our cabin. Wonderfully warm and calm weather made for twenty four hours of effortless sailing. We spent our time in the internet cafe, eating in one of the restaurants, out on deck reading the papers and sleeping.

8th October, 2009

Arrived in Ancona at 10.30 am – right on time. By 12.00 pm we were in the local super marche buying dozens of bottles of vino rosso and great slabs of  Parmigiano Reggiano

We drove through the rolling hills of Le Marche and up through Emilia Romagna past Bologna, Parma, Milano to the Lakes – Como, Maggiore, Lugano, Lucerne. All the way the weather was warm and sunny but as we descended the Alps to our first real stop – Gotthard Rattestatte – at about 6.00 pm, the rain drew in.

After a brief meal which is always terrible there we pressed on through Switzerland (They have the most expensive and the poorest maintained roads I have ever driven.) into France and, by 11.00 pm, we had reached Aire de Keskastel.  This is ideal because it means we have done two thirds of the journey and leaves just about 300 miles to do the next day.

We are parked in the super efficient filling station grounds. After making a hot drink and then using the service station’s toilet and washing facilities, we put screens up round the car’s windows, recline the seats and snatch a good few hours sleep. It has been a long day.

9th October, 2009

Being creatures of habit, we like to stop in Thionville on the way back to buy wine and foodstuffs in Carrefore there. With the car stuffed to the gills with wine, olive oil, mustards, cheeses, vegetables, etc, we do the last four hours to Zeebrugge. We arrive for 2.30 pm – about an hour before check-in.  The picture below shows Pauline on the dockside making sure no imigrants have sneaked in to our wine boxes.

10th October, 2009 

At this time of year, nothing is busy. P&O arrive in Hull on time at 8.30 am and the short drive down the motorway means we are at home by 10.00 am. We have so much post, our neighbour and her husband had to do four trips carrying it to our house. It took us three hours to go through cursorily. Off to Sainsburys.

27th September, 2009

The log burning stove was installed in May this year after a six year wait. From the moment we arrived in July, temperatures have precluded trialling it. Tonight the temperature went down to 22C (70F) and we thought we had better take the chance while we could. I had been chopping up wood and filling the baskets. The stove is a clean-burn Jotul wood burning stove that hardly emits any smoke. The gases that are produced by burning the wood are used in the second burn which makes it much more efficient and environmentally friendly. Not that I’m bothered about the latter at all but, if it gets one extra points and points make prizes, I’ll have them.

28th September, 2009

We leave the island on this day next week. That fact rather drives our agenda from cleaning and servicing the car to eating up the freezer. I am being forced to have pork chops twice in a week, Bolognese Sauce twice. Pauline says I’ve got to have at least two and possibly three Rocket salads before I go. All the windows and doors have been cleaned and oiled. The tree watering is tapering off now. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard from the OTE about my telephone line. I was told it could be two weeks or two years. It’s two weeks on Friday. I’m starting to get a sinking feeling.

30th September, 2009

Wonderful day today. 29C (85F). The beach and the sea were lovely and quiet. The swimming was fantastic. Across the bay and back now only takes us forty minutes because we are getting so fit.

This is a picture of Miss Last Day of September.

1st October, 2009

If anything, the weather was warmer and more perfect today. All looks set fine for the rest of the week, for the Elections on Sunday and our departure on Monday. It is always a bit of a worry when leaving a Greek Island. Sudden strong winds can blow up and all boats are cancelled leaving one stranded and isolated. This is particularly true of the recently introduced and much faster Hydrofoils. They are less stable than the huge, ex-British Channel, Ro-Ro ferries. Ferries are usually cancelled when the wind gets to 9 Beaufort. Hydrofoils can’t really cope with 8 Beaufort. On Monday, October 5^th the only vessels going are Hydrofoils so the strength of the wind is crucial. It is forecast to be 4 Beaufort which will be wonderful.

This is a picture of Mr First Day of October drowning. It is not clear which will save him first – the boat or the church!

Today we picked and bottled our first jar of olives to take back to England. Pauline is very proud.

2nd October, 2009

A notice went up on a post down the road from our house. It was from DEH. You won’t be surprised to learn that it was all in Greek. I can read some Greek. In fact, I am better at reading it than speaking it but this notice was part hand written and contained words I had never seen. I was my usual anti-social self. When we drove back from swimming yesterday, I took the notice off the post so that I could go through it at home with my Greek-English dictionary.

I forgot about the notice until this morning. We got up at 7.00, as usual, and over a cup of tea I was just struggling with the notice and saying to Pauline that I thought it was from the Electricity Company, when the power went off. DEH is the Public Electricity Company and the power went off across the island for four hours this morning. It is amazing how much one misses such a service particularly on a Greek island where it is the main source of so much. All our water is pumped by electricity. All our heating, lighting and cooking relies on it. There is no gas on the island apart from in bottles. For four hours we couldn’t flush the toilets, make a drink, cook bacon & egg or watch the BBC News. The world just imploded. We had to sit outside in the sun until normal service was resumed.

3rd October, 2009

The big day has arrived – I have to watch Pauline cleaning the car. She’s also good at checking the oil and tyre pressures. Most people on the island think she drives the car as well and are shocked to see she’s not watching the road. Most of them have never seen a right-hand drive car before. Fortunately, that means I can cut them up and Pauline gets shouted at. Anyway, the car is the order of today because the house will have to be packed up tomorrow ready for leaving on Monday morning.

Below is the view from our patio where we drink our first coffee of the morning and our last coffee of the evening. This is a view we won’t be seeing for six months. The next Blog entries will be posted somewhere in the University town of Patras and then again on board Superfast in the middle of the Adriatic.

20th September, 2009

There can be only one item – Man. United 4 – 3 Man. City. I felt sorry for City but only a little.

21st September, 2009

This is officially the last day of Summer in the Northern Hemisphere and, right on cue, the weather got cooler. Today it was only 26C and, as the sun went down, so did the temperature. Of course, being Monday, today is Sunday so we spent the day reading the papers. This is how the day ended over Kamares:

 

22nd September, 2009

I have cleared 40²m of virgin land for cultivation next Spring. I will cover it with weed-suppressant fabric to keep it weed clear over the Winter. If I don’t do that, it will be carpeted with flowers by the time we return in March/April time and Pauline will make me leave them until they have finished flowering. I am still watering the fruit trees because of the hot sun during the day. Today, the first official day of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, we picked our first peaches. We have six this year all on one tree and we ate the first one straight from the tree. It was a delicate, scented, sweet flavour that I have never tasted before. Of course, one’s own children are always the most gifted, aren’t they?

23rd September, 2009

Pauline has spent the last two days minutely cleaning and the oiling every window and door in the property. When we first had it built, now over five years ago, Stavros said that we had a big decision to make about the windows and doors. We could have Sifnos windows and doors made by the woodman and costing about £5,000.00. They would need painting every year because of the intense sun and would rapidly shrink allowing the wind and rain through the gaps. Alternatively, we could have industrially made windows and doors which would have none of these problems. The downside was they would cost £25,000.00. We gulped but chose the latter.

The windows and doors were ordered from an industrial producer in Northern Greece called Sylor. They are unitary items with three parts – hard wood, double glazed window/door that opens normally or on a tilt and incorporates an insect net that pulls down like a roller blind and, on the outside, a shutter which pins back to the wall when open and locks when closed. It is a fantastic piece of kit that was well worth the money. The warranty is for 10 years and they are guaranteed not to need painting in that time. This is unheard of in Sifnos where the paint is peeling off ordinary objects after one summer of hot sun. The shelf above the window is typical of Sifnos architecture. It is intended to deflect rain. We don’t really know if it works. Every door or window has an external light above it. Not only do we look like a power station with them all on, we need a power station to keep them running.

After five years, everything is perfect and Pauline intends that they stay this way. The manufacturers give us each year a free bottle of detergent and a free bottle of oil to clean and treat our casements. Pauline, true to character, does this painstakingly and methodically every year. I know this because I watch her while I am reading the paper.

  

  

24th September, 2009

The swimming over the past two days has been wonderful. The beach and the bay have been virtually deserted. Everyone seems to have gone back to work or to school. Pauline and I spend an hour swimming from one side of the bay to the other each day. I remember being absolutely knackered the first time we did it three months ago. Now I am just warming up. I made the mistake of taunting Pauline that she just wasn’t fit enough and suggested we double the swim. We did and I couldn’t walk the next day.

Now that the tourist season is over, the ferry service is severely cut back. Tomorrow, for example, the only one comes in at 9.00 pm. I think we are nearly the only foreigners left on the island. It was a lovely morning this morning – about 73F. We decided to go out for a drive. We went to Kastro. This is one of the oldest settlements on the island. It is the castle hill where a fortress was built to provide safety for the islanders against invaders – notably Venetians and Turks. It doesn’t look particularly secure now but it is full of dark passages and hidden doorways.

26th September, 2009

Courgettes appear on Greek menus a lot. In the English version they are called Zuchini and in Greek they are called colochqaci. Robert kindly sent me a recipe cooking courgettes with feta cheese. It sounds very healthy. Catherine sent me an email telling me she had been growing them in England. Courgettes are clearly headline news at the moment. I’ve grown them in England many years ago and the danger is having a glut at the end of the season. Growing them in Greece is a different thing altogether and I wouldn’t say I have been brilliantly successful. At least I’ve got some.

Of course, my memories have always put me off eating courgettes. I don’t know how many of you remember ‘stuffed marrow’. I remember it as the most awful, retch-inducing thing I have ever been forced to eat in my life. The disgusting, sloppy-wet texture of cold, baked marrow stuffed with minced meat will stay with me for ever as will Dad’s intention that I sat at the table until I had eaten it. I have long had a horror of courgettes for that reason. I once came back from a holiday to find a courgette plant had to continue to ‘fruit’ and they had developed into marrows. I had to get Pauline to dispose of it I was so scared.

Unfortunately, I seem to find that the vegetables I least enjoy are the ones that I grow most successfully. I have never been particularly fond of cabbage but I can grow them for fun. Similarly courgette. However, the Greeks have taught me to love it although the healthy eaters among you (Jane BG) will almost certainly not approve. Thinly sliced, dipped in egg and flower or light batter and deep fried is my favourite way of eating courgette or aubergine (another sloppy-textured vegetable).

  

Interesting football today. Came back from a long swim to watch Chelsea lose to Wigan, Man U. win at Stoke and Everton beat poor old Portsmouth. Tomorrow I will be able to watch the F1 race with Hamilton on pole but hoping Jensen Button came get enough points and follow that by watching Sunderland – Wolves. On Monday we’ve got Man. City West Ham and on Tuesday Fiorentina – Liverpool. It’s going to be a busy week!

13th September, 2009

Watched Birmingham – Aston Villa and Fulham –Everton. I don’t know why I bothered. These are also-ran teams and I was bored. Booked our tickets for the return journey from the island on October 5th. We get home to England on the 10th. We will spend a couple of nights in our favourite hotel in Patras – The Patras Palace. Great buffet breakfasts. We can spend some time exploring the Peloponnese before getting on a Superfast Ferry bound for Ancona in Italy. It may seem early to be booking our tickets but it is just our luck for Karamanlis, the Greek Primeminister, to call a General Election for October the 4th. Everybody registered in Sifnos has to return to the island to vote which will mean the ferries get booked up quickly.

14th September, 2009

The island is showing subtle changes. The temperature has settled at 80F rather than 90F. The sea is, if anything, a little warmer than in August. The beach is almost deserted save for a few, older couples who can come out of peak season.

15th September, 2009

Thought you might like to see some different shots. This is looking down the land to the house.

 

It is 80F today. The sea is like a mill pond and warm. We swam for an hour and then collected the paper before lunching on garlic pizza made by Pauline with a chilled bottle of Orvieto Classico. Tonight we will post this on the internet at the cafe and then come home to watch some European football. I hope Ruth & Kevan haven’t drowned. The Times was late today. This is Pauline looking out for it.

 

17th September, 2009

Big day today. We went to the OTE – the Greek equivalent of BT – to apply for a phone line and ADSL connection. My friend from the internet cafe will help me set up a wireless network and a proxy server. This is necessary because the BBC have scrambled the signal from the satellite so we can’t get Radio 4 through our TV like we used to do. They have also blocked access to the radio channels across the internet if you are using a non-UK service provider. To get round this, you need a proxy server which makes it look like you are in the UK.

When I got to the OTE building, there were two men sitting at desks doing nothing. I had to fill in a form which included my passport number, my Greek insurance number and my father’s first name. Anything official in Greece demands my father’s first name. I am always John Richard Eric Sanders. Pauline is always Pauline Philip Sanders. I might get my phone line in two weeks or two years depending on the engineer’s report.

Nearer 90F today. Spent our customary hour swimming across the bay and back and then staggering back to the car. Started to mark out a patch of land – 40²m – which we will develop immediately for vegetable growing next spring. People here grow tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, cucumbers, melons plus onions & garlic, potatoes & broadbeans, etc.

18th September, 2009

Fabulous day today. The temperature was 92F. The sea was crystal clear and warm. The hour we spent swimming was quite magical. Today I worked up a sweat chopping wood for the log burning stove. A couple of years ago I bought two lovely log baskets that I watched a man weave in the carpark in Kamares. They have been standing empty next to the log burning stove which has been waiting for installation. Now that’s been done, I’m determined that, however hot the evening, we will test drive the stove before we go. We have just over two weeks left before we leave for Italy.

 

We bought a new desktop computer to add to our laptop and brought it with us. I installed Pauline’s accounts programme on it. It is an integral part of our lives and may become more so in retirement. Pauline tells me today that our expenditure over these nine weeks averages £192.00. We are both amazed. We thought that prices were quite high this year and, of course, the pound is quite weak. We haven’t been extravagant but nor have we denied ourselves. £1700.00 over nine weeks is quite extraordinary.

19th September, 2009

One of the things we have tried to do in this Greek house is include things which have a tie-in with our past lives and our houses. For example, for her thirtieth birthday present, I bought Pauline an oak settle or bench which she had been admiring in a Saddleworth Junk/Antique shop we frequented in those days. This settle wasn’t just any old item but it had real meaning for and connection with Pauline. She is from Oldham. The settle – looking rather like an ecclesiastical object – was from the old Town Hall in Oldham which closed at the end of the 1970s. As you can probably see, it has churchy overtones in its design and one of those arched ends was damaged in its removal from the town hall. Pauline was 30 in 1981 and an old woodwork teacher, Wilf Hall, who was just about to retire repaired it with a replacement carved oak piece that is almost perfect. It is nice to have such a connection in Greece. The photos above it are of Slade House and Quarry Court.

   

6th September, 2009

Hot and humid day – 33⁰C left us feeling lazy and tired. The Greek TV is advertising back-to-school products. They start on Tuesday after finishing in the middle of June. People think British teachers have it easy. Continental Europe is way ahead of us. Anyway, I am starting a campaign to take a fresh look at teachers’ contracts of employment.

• School holidays should be set at 6 weeks in total per working year.
• The working day should be from 8.00 am – 6.00 pm (Monday – Saturday)
• All working teachers should take a 10% cut in salary to help the economic recovery
• Pensions for all working teachers should cease to be Final Salary with immediate effect.

I think it is ridiculous what these teachers think they can get away with. Let’s give them a dose of reality. The job is so easy compared with sitting in an air conditioned office drinking coffee. Why do teachers think they should be cosseted with special conditions? After all, half of them can’t spell. Some of them can’t even use an apostrophe.

7th September, 2009

The Teachers’ Pension Service is a wonderful organisation. They are giving us money for not working. Not only that, they are giving us much more money for not working than we had when we were working. Admittedly, their lump sum has paid off our huge mortgage and that is why we feel so well off but it also feels totally immoral. For months we have not known what position we would be in and, suddenly, we have all our anxieties removed.

To explain, we went to the internet cafe today and, in doing so, checked our bank account. The TPS had put more money into it and we could, at last, work out what our monthly pension would be. Everything happened so quickly when we finished that these finer details had not been elucidated. Our pensions were only supposed to be paid from August 31st and we were a little unsure how much it would be. Knowing nothing about retirement other than the apocryphal stories of belt-tightening and reduced circumstances, we expected the worst. It has turned out to be the exact opposite. We are 25% better off than when we were working. And we get to swim every day in the sunshine. Lovely people at the TPS. Lovely people in the Oldham LA.

Went out for lunch at a taverna by the beach at a little fishing village called Vathy that has only become accessible by road in recent times, to celebrate our good fortune and then came home to read the Sunday papers and pretend it wasn’t Monday.

8th September, 2009

I was reading the Teachers’ Pension website – as you do when you are retired – and discovered that, in future, teachers retirement age will move to 65, they won’t be able to take a lump sum and their pension will not be based on their best salary in the past ten years as ours is but on a salary average over their career. All of these things would have severely worsened our position. To add to this, the Labour Party’s Works and Pensions guru has proposed a £50,000 cap on all Public Sector and Quango pensions. Soon, you will not be able to afford to grow old under Labour. Soon, you won’t need to!

9th September, 2009

Enough about pensions. We actually got rain in the night and, when we woke up at 7.00 am, the temperature had dropped to a mere 70F. The Greeks were wrapped up for a trip to the Antarctic. The tourists were naked on the beach determined to get a tan. Pauline and I had no idea what to do. We are not Greek and we are not tourists.

10th September, 2009

Where ever we live, my favourite room is the study. In Quarry Court, Pauline and I sit back to back each with a computer on a wireless network sharing colour and mono printers. In Greece, featured in the photo, we have a desktop and a laptop but no wireless network. It is a real frustration to me that we cannot get a telephone line easily installed and so get a broadband, wireless network. I have to do everything off line, save on my stick and go up to the internet cafe in Apollonia to upload everything at €3.00 per hour which is not a bad price but it is inconvenient. This will be one of my targets for next April.

11th September, 2009

Woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a 1000 marauding monkeys on the roof. I don’t wake easily. A couple of years ago there was an earthquake in Staffordshire which rattled our garage door in Yorkshire. Apparently, Pauline shot out of bed thinking someone had crashed into the house. She ran round the rooms looking for signs of damage and, after half an hour returned to bed. She told me about it the next morning. I was really disappointed to have slept through the experience. I always wanted to know what and earthquake is like. Anyway, on this occasion, it was absolutely torrential rain accompanying a thunder storm. It was wonderful. No fruit tree watering for a while.

We think we’ve solved the mystery fruit. If you saw the photo a week or two ago, we asked if anyone knew its name. A Greek in a restaurant in the port told us its Greek name – Kidoni – and said we had picked it too soon. It should be left on the tree and would turn yellow when ripe. Even then, it would be too sharp to eat. We had to cook it with plenty of sugar. That triggered in my mind the Medlar Pear. I am going to check it out in the internet cafe when I post this. It turns out it is a variety of Quince.

12th September, 2009

The wonderful thing about Greece is that it can rain torrentially for half an hour and then be brilliantly hot and sunny immediately afterwards. In this photo taken the morning after the rain you can see some of the rubbish washed down the mountain on to the road but you can also see what a wonderful morning it is for taking your breakfast outside – if you were allowed to eat breakfast.

Of course, rain and 80F warmth means growth. I thought you might like to see some items from the garden. Courgettes and cultivated wild rocket, for example and the olives swelling nicely.

  

This is a rocket, basil and salad leaf salad all home grown and dressed with olive oil, lemon and Dijon mustard.

Then there are the flowering plants we are working on like bougainvillea. We have a white/red mix and a beautiful translucent faded orange colour. We also have a number of Bottle Brush of Callistemon bushes. The name is Greek Kali Stemon (Beautiful Stamon).

   

   

We also have this beautiful Yucatan Palm at the edge of the gate.

30th August 2009

Lovely day today. Went to the Internet Cafe to post my Blog and send some emails to friends who are going back to school on Tuesday. Checked our bank account and found that the LA had placed a life-changing amount of money there to say thank you for all our hard work. That’s nice and rather comforting. Lovely people the Local Authority.

We have now done 155 weeks in Greece or 3 years since we first spent 3 weeks in Zakynthos in 1981. Most of that but by no means all has been spent on Sifnos. Today, we witnessed a most unusual weather condition which would be normal for us in Huddersfield in Autumn but not in the middle of a Greek summer.

Often, as we drive across the Pennines, descending steeply and rapidly from the M62 (the highest stretch of motorway in Britain) into Saddleworth we are above the clouds which have settled on the moor below. We can go from clear blue, sunny skies into darkest winter in the matter of a few yards. Today, in Kamares, it was 31⁰C and absolutely still. High humidity had made it a bit sticky. As we set off down to the beach to swim and cool off, thick mist/cloud/fog rolled off the sea and turned the beach into night. There was the bizarre sight of sunbathers laying on the sand under a dark sky. A ferry coming into the harbour took five times as long as it felt its way to the jetty, hooting out warnings as it came. It was so unusual and so hot we continued to swim but couldn’t make out our usual landmarks as we swam across the bay.

We finished our swim and walked back to our car. We couldn’t see the ferry because the fog was so dense. Our car was a hundred yards away and, by the time we got there, the fog had rolled away and left just this view from our house.

 

31st August 2009

Today we got our first piece of junk mail. I was so excited for lots of reasons. Firstly, as Pauline, will tell you, I love opening post – any post. I open everything that arrives at our house. I love getting the most basic and inappropriate junk mail – cashmere pashminas, incontinence pads, hearing aids, Viagra – I love them all. Secondly, for a long time we have been asking Stavros where we live. Nobody seems to know, including us. Thirdly, it just marks us out as members of the community to have letters delivered to our house. This particularly piece of junk mail was from Nova Satellite TV inviting us to spend more money with them. I won’t be but I shall keep their letter pinned to the notice board in my Study here for some time.

We have had one other letter delivered. It was from me. I sent it to myself to find out where I lived. I had a rough idea and Stavros and I worked out a rudimentary address. I wrote ourselves a letter saying “Dear Us ….Love Us”. We posted it in a box 500m away from the house and it was delivered one month later by a postman who lives next to the post box. Anyway, this is our address:
John & Pauline Sanders                      John & Pauline Sanders
Kavalaris                                                Kavalaris
Kamares 840 03                                   Kamaron 840 03
Sifnos                                                      Sifnos
Cyclades                                                 Kiklades
Greece                                                    Hellas

I’ve only got five weeks left this time but, next year, it would be nice to hear from you.

1st September, 2009

White Rabbit. I have been in Education since September 1956. On the first occasion, I went to school without being taken and managed to remember my name, my date of birth, my address and whether or not I was staying to school lunch. I wasn’t but how I wished I was! This is the first of 54 Septembers that I will not be packing my bag, trying to remember my name and date of birth and trying to get ‘Seconds’ if not ‘Thirds’ for school lunch. Already, I feel strangely isolated and out of the loop. I will sit in the sun up a Greek mountain and cry into the wind as I listen to Donnizetti’s ‘Lucia de Lammermoor’ at full volume to drown out the memories.

I have become a strangely maudlin man, prone to tears at the least predictable moment as a memory creeps past the firewall. Are all old men like this or just the odd ones? I can cry on reading an obituary in ‘The Times’ or thinking about someone from the past. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Mum. I don’t think I am depressed. I enjoy almost every bit of every day. I particularly enjoyed watching United beat Arsenal last weekend. I am very optimistic about the future. But Mum’s death has exposed something very vulnerable in me that I knew was there but didn’t acknowledge.

2nd September, 2009

Received emails from Ruth and Jane this week. It was nice to hear from them. Ruth sent me photographs which were interesting. They showed Bob & Jane on holiday.

  

Jane and some other chap and Ruth with a gang of hooligans.

3rd September, 2009

Until recently and certainly when I was younger, I thought my work was really important. I would work all day and stay up half the night analysing data, writing reports, developing new policies. I spoke at meetings with commitment and enthusiasm. I encouraged my staff to embrace new ideas and try out new methods. Particularly, I encouraged staff almost as old as me to adopt new technology to do their job better. What first hits you when you stop doing it and stand back is ‘What a lot of bollocks it was’. Life’s like that. They don’t miss you. There is always someone else available to stand up and spout bollocks enthusiastically in your place. Nothing is that important but, while you are doing the job, it is often not easy to see.

4th September, 2009

Travel can be undertaken in two ways. One can either move or one can stand still. In our younger days, Pauline and I were committed to movement. We would book as many holidays as we could, ticking places off our cultural lists. Paris, Arras, Lille, Milan, Rome, Venice, etc – we spent four or five days doing them all. We did the Canary Islands and Cyprus, Belgium, Luxembourg, Northern France, the Alps, the Italian Lakes, Switzerland, Scandinavia. In between, we visited twenty different Greek islands. We were always on the move. Our lawns never got cut because we were always away in our time off.

Eventually, travel, the symbol of cultural enterprise and enjoyment, began to pall. We decided to build the house in Greece and stop moving so much. Of course, we have to get here and return to England and, of course, that involves movement and travel but it also involves a lot of staying still. They say that if you stay still, the world will come to you. I can believe it. Certainly, here on our island, you observe the whole gamut of human relationships in microcosm. It is quite amazing how many people I meet who have a connection with my other life, however tangential. Two or three years ago, we met a family out walking on Sifnos. Within five minutes we had established a common acquaintance although they lived in Ipswich and we in Huddersfield. Richard turned out to be a Geography teacher who had once worked with a professional who subsequently worked in our school as an advisor. Not earth shattering, I know, but a lovely feeling of common bond.

5th September, 2009

Nikos the tiler came to our house today. He doesn’t speak any English but his wife who runs the tile shop speaks it perfectly. Last year, we drove up to see her one day in our shiny, black Honda CRV. The next thing we know her husband has bought her a shiny, black Honda CRV. It is the only CRV on the island and she hardly ever drives but it looks good in the garage. Anyway, Nikos came and measured up our patio. It amounts to about 140²m.

We have already chosen the tiles. It will cost us about £5500.00. He also measured the kitchen which will cost another £500.00. So £6000.00 for the tiles this winter and I’m a pensioner!

Went up to a lovely little village today called Artemonas. They had hosted a food festival featuring the produce of individual Cycladic islands. Represented were Serifos, Sifnos, Milos, Santorini, Paros, Andros, Kythnos, Syros. Pauline and I have visited every one of these islands. Each had a booth and brought food or produce particular to them. Live bouzouki music was played at full volume. It started at 7.30 pm as the sun went down and the scene was magical.

  

I’m amazed to report that, in spite of visiting the Food Festival, I have lost 4lbs this week.

23rd August 2009

There is nothing else to say but – Yes, yes, yes. We won The Ashes. Fantastic!

 

Ruth kept me up to speed. The BBC were hopeless. They are the British Broadcasting Company. They told us more about Camel Racing in Sudan than cricket in England. They forget we finance them! CNN were better but what would we do without Ruth?

24th August 2009

Painting day today. Warm (only about 30⁰C) and fairly still. We painted the lower half of the house and rails round the patio. The house looks crisp and smart now – in our view.

  

Today is Monday and Pauline has declared Monday the new Sunday because we get the Sunday papers and I am quiet for six hours.

Just driving down for our customary hour in the sea at about 4.30 pm when an animal hopped across our path. It had long, translucent pink ears and red eyes. Other than that, it was pure white. It was, we think, an albino hare/rabbit. The long ears made us unsure. Strangely, we drove right up to it on the mountain road, stopped and lowered our window and proceeded to talk to it for ten minutes without it being at all phased. We half wondered if it was someone’s escaped pet but the Greeks don’t have pets they can eat.

Watched Liverpool lose to Aston Villa. Who said Liverpool were going to win the League this year?

25th August 2009

Every year since 2000, we have started our trip home on this day. We would get a ferry to Piraeus and drive across Athens, across the Corinth Canal, on to the Peloponnese and round to the University port of Patras where we would have a couple of days in a 5* Hotel
re-acclimatising ourselves with the real world before boarding our ferry for Italy. Not today! We will do all that but not for another six weeks.

26th August 2009

Thankfully we got out in time. The spotlight is just about to fall on Public Sector pensions. Already, in teaching, new entrants have to make larger contributions and their retirement age rises to 65 but that is not enough, it seems. Now the attack will be on existing workers who will lose their current pension entitlement and will be switched to a ‘career average’ which will greatly reduce their pension. I find it hard to believe that one can enter a profession under certain, contractual conditions and have them arbitrarily swept away and have new contractual conditions imposed. It seems that can and will happen. It makes me feel desperately guilty for all my friends in their early 50s who will lose out at this late stage in their careers. Pauline & I really are the lucky ones. A year’s salary each plus final salary pensions at 58. You won’t see many like that in years to come in Public Sector employment.

27th August 2009

This time last year we were driving to ‘Sortir 40’ or, as Pauline calls it, ‘sorty forty’. This takes us off the motorway to an excellent supermarket in the town of Thionville. We fill up with 100 – 200 bottles of red wine and then belt down the motorway to Zeebrugge. Not this year.

By the way, I didn’t tell you about being caught speeding. It was at the last French toll stop before the Pyrenees and the Swiss border. We had just paid our toll when a delightful French police woman popped up and told us to park at the side. They had been timing cars between toll stops and she informed me that the speed limit was 120 kph and I was timed at an average 170 kph. I could have told her I was doing a lot more than that but this was a money-making exercise not a policing one. I paid my €70.00 fine and sped off down the road.

Pauline’s Mum’s birthday today. She is 95. Born in 1914 at the outset of World War 1, she has led a bitterly hard life for most of her 95 years but she has an amazingly indomitable spirit which is irrepressible. Pauline & I have spent the past 25 years away for both our Mothers’ Birthdays. And so it still is.

28th August 2009

This has been the most idyllic, day of the past couple of months. Still, clear, warm and brilliantly sunny. Our swim was wonderful. I spent two hours watering the fruit trees.

Tonight I took a few shots over the valley towards Kamares harbour as the sun went down.

  

29th August 2009

Another glorious day. Up at 7.00 am as usual. After tea and BBC News we cleaned the car before the sun came up. If you don’t, the heat of the sun dries it too quickly and you might as well have not bothered. It’s covered in water stains. After that, we measured up the patios in preparation for ordering the tiles. The tile shop closes for the whole of August but reopens on September 1st so we want to be ready. The total area of patio around the house is 1502m which at €35.00 per 2m will cost us just over €5000.00 which will be about £4500.00. Still it is a permanent improvement. Went for a wonderful swim today. Weighed myself afterwards and found I had lost 3lbs this week. I have lost exactly 10kg so far. My courgettes are just about to flower. The salad leaves will be eaten for the first time tomorrow and the basil is almost ready to pick. I am perfectly satisfied with this first attempt.