More Crete Stuff.

Still no luck with the Internet – it turns out that OTE just don’t provide it up here in the wilds. Basically they provide it where there will be sufficient users to pay for it and, since our village with its population of 60 has only two people who are likely to use it, I don’t see it arriving in a hurry. Our only option would seem to be something from Vodaphone, which I’m guessing is expensive and limited. Ah well. The plus side of this is that though my communications will be intermittent and my posts here not as frequent as previously, I won’t have my work interrupted by the Internet.


However, my work is being interrupted by something else. Despite asserting that I would never put games on my computer, I’ve done so. I’m playing various hidden object games and am presently on Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox. If I work at it I can kid myself that this is research...

It turned cold here for a few days and, since we were running low on wood and needed to keep the stove burning, I made some enquiries about buying some more. Gulp. 150 Euros for a pick-up truckload. I guess I have to remind myself that back in Britain, over ten years ago, a pick-up full of cut wood would cost £50 and, compared to Crete, Britain is covered with trees and full of people who use gas and electric heating. Here, when it’s cold, the chimneys are smoking constantly.

I bought the wood from an Albanian living here who, like them all here, has a Greek name as well as his Albanian one. His name here is Vangelis whilst in Albania he’s called Angelos. I don’t get that, since the latter is also a Greek name. The Albanian who did some work on our house is Yorgi to the Greeks but I call him by his real name: Miri, or Simira. A similar thing happened to me when we first came here. Our neighbours couldn’t quite handle Neal so renamed me Nico, yet they were perfectly alright with Caroline. Go figure.

Incidentally, look out for some Greek names and references in future books from me. In The Technician, for example, there’s an AI called Ergatis, which in Greek means ‘worker’.