Saturday 27th October

Well, I suppose today has been a fairly typical untypical day, where we just do whatever crops up. It started off this morning when Vangelis asked if it would cause a problem if he left his van parked in the lane leading to our house, as we wanted to take his olives. Now this simple sentence needs so much explanation. First let's deal with Vangelis! Half the men in Karystos seem to be called Vangelis. As each family has its family names so it seems that many towns and villages have a preponderance of the same names. I suppose it makes sense, as the villages grew, with inter-marriage. This Vangelis lives in a village about half an hour away from here, but he owns some land at the back of our house. He visits it maybe five times a year, usually to harvest the lemons or the olives and the rest of the time it looks after itself.
Next, about leaving his van outside our gates. The track leading to our house is only wide enough for one car, so if he leaves his van there we wouldn't be able to get our car out. One of the fantastic things about our location is that there isn't any vehicular access to the land above and behind us, only an old Turkish 'kalderimi', passable by foot or donkey, you couldn't even get a motor-bike up it. This means that we can never be built up, but it also means that on the odd occasion when Vangelis needs to transport sacks of stuff from his land he blocks our drive. We can live with that!
Now for taking olives. Its a week since we had the first meaningful rain of the winter, so now it's time to takes the olives. All around us people have started, families getting together to help each other. We only have a few trees and not many olives this year, so John and I will take ours tomorrow, just the 2 of us in a couple of days. The ideal thing is that you get your olives to the press as quickly as you can after picking them, otherwise the quality of the oil deteriorates. So when families have lots of trees they get together with another family and they all help to take one lot and then the other. It has been a long, dry, hot summer, only a few centimetres of rain since last March, and none at all since May until a week ago. Some of the olives were looking shrivelled even before they started to turn black. Ours are OK because we have watered the garden, but we don't have a very heavy crop this year, they are still recovering from a serious pollarding a couple of years ago because they had got very tall and straggly.
John got to work at the back of the house taking down some temporary metal fencing which we had put up when we discovered that sheep grazing nearby could get into our garden. The sheep have gone, so the fencing can come down, but the main reason is that we need to get it out of the way so that the tall pines can be cut down, (another story for later). I carried on with the rose pruning, but I was very hot as I decided to put along sleeved top on. The rose is beautiful, white aging to lilac and an amazing rambler. It is also scented, but covered in thorns. I have a theory that as growers have bred out thorns, so the perfume has been lost. Things grow here so quickly, some of our mulberry branches made up to 2 metres over the summer.
Then we had visitors, a very nice Greek couple who came to look at the house. The man was called Agamemnon, the first Greek I have met with this name. We have met men called, Socrates, Euripides and Odysseus, but this is the first Agamemnon. They were very complimentary and seemed to appreciate the same things about the house and location which we enjoy. We will see.
Then our friend Melanie, with her friend Michel, arrived, so we all drank coffee and chatted. We had arranged to give Melanie a lift to Marmari, putting her bicycle in the boot of our CRV because she wants to take it back to Athens with her. So when Agis and Elizabeth had left we went off to Marmari for lunch. Marmari is the nearest port to us, about 20 minutes away now on a good road across the plain. It used to take nearly an hour on a bus which had to climb up out of Karystos, over a mountain plateau and then drop down to Marmari the other side. In those days there was also a ferry coming directly into Karystos, so we usually used that, but the harbour at Marmari is much better so the service from there has always been more frequent and reliable. Now the ferry boats are bigger and they can no longer get into the small Karystos harbour, we only have the fishing boats and we have to go to Marmari. It means that Karystos is on the way to nowhere, and anybody who comes here really wants to and knows where they are going to end up. We can live with that!
We had a very nice lunch in Marmari with Melanie and Michel at a nice little ouzerie we know with very friendly people and traditional food. When we got back Vangelis was still taking his olives so we left our car at Koula's house, (more explanation might follow another time). Koula was just leaving so she stopped and thanked John for the odd jobs which he had done for her yesterday and told us that will also start taking their olives tomorrow.
Back home, a few chores to do, a piping hot shower and here I am at 19.40 writing this up. I quite like this blog idea, I wish I'd started it before. I have often wish I had kept a diary, so many fantastic things have happened to us since we have been here, it would have been good to have had a written record of them.