The Technician Rising.

Julie Crisp at Macmillan is rather pleased. Here's a sample from a recent email:

Here's some rather good news for you. THE TECHNICIAN has racked up an amazing 799 copies of sales in hardback in its first week. This places it at number 24 in the Bookscan charts! This is a terrific start and just goes to show how the popularity of your novels is on the rise. Hurrah!

The Gabble -- New Cover.

Well, Mr Sullivan has bin and gone and done it again! Wow!

Smoke from the Ears!

Wednesday 25th


I would say it’s a certainty that I’m going to end up with a sack load of chillies here. Previously I’ve preserved them in olive oil or vinegar, but find they tend to lose their kick that way. This year I’ve decided I’ll dry a load, and turn the rest into something we tend to use quite a lot of: sweet chilli sauce. Has anyone out there done this? After reading various recipes on the Internet I’m inclined to a big saucepan into which will go a pint of vinegar plus a pint of sugar, one whole bulb of garlick then chopped up chillies right to the brim, boiling then bottling...

Monday 30th

Well, a test run using honey instead of sugar (we were given a jar here and simply don’t use it) seems to have worked. Now I have to buy some vinegar and sugar and just wait until I’ve got at least half a bucketload of chillies. At present rates of ripening that should be in about a couple of weeks.

Other projects on the go: I’ve cut from the tobacco plants a collection of leaves that were damaged by the wind and am drying them. The problem is that they dry out rather quickly here and so remain green. Perhaps I need to somehow slow down the drying process. Then again, they’re ‘green’ so they must be good for me.

The beach is now starting to empty. Most of the holidaymakers in the small apartment blocks in Makrigialos are Greeks, usually over from the mainland, with just a scattering of other nationalities. The big hotels at the end of the place, the Micropoli and the Sun Wing, are mostly occupied by Scandinavians – and yes very many of them seem to be blonde. It’s something we are supposed to ignore in this politically correct world, but national traits are much in evidence here. If you see someone running along the beach with one of those strap-on heart monitors around his chest, or cycling vigorously up a hill in temperatures above 30, you can generally guarantee he’s German. Tall women with blonde hair down to their perfectly formed arses are generally Scandinavian whilst the big blonde square-jawed men who look capable of snapping your neck like a twig can be both of the aforementioned. The lugubrious beer-drinkers with big moustaches are often Dutch, whilst the ape-haired men with wives who appear to think that children outside the womb are still attached by an umbilical cord are usually Greek. I haven’t nailed down the few French here, but I’ve been told they are the ones who dislike having to use that international tongue called English. And, unfortunately, Mr fat shaven-headed lobster skin clad in knee-length shorts and a Manchester United shirt, with the gross tattooed wife in tow, is generally British.

Tuesday 31st

Tomorrow Greece is introducing its fourth ban on smoking in indoor public places, and the politically correct wankers who want to force their world-view on everyone else are diligently analysing why the previous bans didn’t work. Apparently they need to be more forceful, they need to make the rules clearer, there’s a need for big fines and it is utterly necessary that smokers be pilloried, racked and beaten with strips of nicotine patches until they die. You see, the barmen and women, and THE CHILDREN must be protected from that lethal, killing secondhand smoke ... Wasn’t it Goebbels who said that if you tell a lie forcefully enough and often enough it will be believed?

Well, the reason why the previous bans didn’t work is quite simple. According to Athens News 42% of Greeks smoke, 63% of Greek men smoke, 39% of Greek women smoke, 37% of Greek children aged 12 to 17 smoke and 45% of the 16 to 25 age bracket smoke. What we are seeing here with the undermining of the rules, the twisting of the legislation, the lack of enforcement and the complete disregard for the new laws is something called ... now what are the words ... oh yeah, what we are seeing here is ‘democracy in action’.

You see, whilst 42% of Greeks smoke and there’ll be some of those who want to be forced to stop, there’s an even larger proportion of the remaining 58% of non-smokers who fall into these categories: ‘children’, ‘it’s got fuck-all to do with the government’, ‘stop telling people how to live their lives’, ‘surely it’s up to the bar owners’ and the huge category called ‘frankly I don’t give a shit’. In our democracies the governments in power would be hugely grateful to get into power on a 42% vote. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the European population would be hugely grateful for governments that did what they were voted into power to do, without corruption, instead of acting as enforcers for the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

In the same paper in which I was reading about the new smoking ban here I also learned that small businesses (ie those employing less than 50 people) make up 98.7% of the Greek economy. So, bearing that in mind, one should also bear in mind that tourism is the country’s second largest income. It would therefore not be too much of a stretch to add that a large proportion of those small businesses are bars, restaurants and nightclubs. Perhaps the Greek government should bear in mind, as it scrabbles for money to cover its huge debts, that in Britain, in 2007, the pub closure rate leapt from 4 a month to 27 a month, and has not dropped below that rate ever since. In fact, the shape of Britain has now been changed forever, with many pubs that were serving beer when Sir Walter Rayleigh was sparking up his pipe, now being gutted and turned into residential homes. And what was different about 2007? Oh yeah, the smoking ban. Occam’s Razor doesn’t lie.

Creepy-crawlies, Moaning Brits, Books etc.

Wednesday 18th

To start us off , here’s a picture of Yorgos, the boss of the Revans Bar, hard at work. He was trying to catch forty winks on a sunbed but, being unable to get comfortable in the heat, decided to cool off. All perfectly understandable when last night he closed the bar at one and the night before at four.

Time for a little rant:

You’ve sold your house in England and gone through all the grief of buying yourself a house on the island of Crete, either in the seaside resort of Makrigialos or up in a mountain village nearby. One would have thought that you would be satisfied, that you’d achieved some sort of goal you’d fixed upon as retirement drew close, but no, here are just a few I’ve heard:

You don’t like the heat, you don’t like olives, you don’t like sunning yourself and you’ll only get into the sea when fishes get out to go to the toilet. There’s no Tescos or Asdas here and it’s difficult to buy your Homepride cook-in sauces. There’s no Chinese or Indian restaurants, and cod, chips and mushy peas are a forgotten dream. You can’t get British TV. You pine for green fields, and for snow at Christmas. You miss your relatives, though after just a few days you want to kill them when they visit. You want to go home where everthing is easy and familiar, wrap yourself in a duvette, eat oven chips and watch Eastenders every day.

Y’know, there are ex-pats here in extreme need of a slap. How well now I understand that Australian appellation for the British: whingeing poms. Many of them are living in a place tens millions of other British would kill to get to, yet all they seem to do is moan.

And when they’re not moaning about Crete they’re bitching about each other. They tend to form up into cliques and chunter on about ‘them in that other clique’. When we first came here we associated with a couple who, so they said, didn’t like the cliquishness of Makrigialos, then got huffy when we didn’t want to go off drinking with them in various mountain villages. We realised then that they were pissed off because we weren’t joining their particular clique. Others here have had rows and fights (hot sun and alcohol, go figure) with the result that so-and-so is no longer talking to so-and-so. Leaving this place for five months every year we tend to to see all this from a perspective that’s lacking in the full-time residents here. It is all rather pathetic to see adults behaving like they haven’t yet found their way out of the playground.

Oh damn, I was bitching and moaning.

Thursday 19th

Perhaps I’m starting to get blasé about these things because I’ve failed to mention until now that The Technician is sitting at the top of the ‘New & Future Releases (science fiction)’ list on Amazon, and has been doing so for three weeks. This happened last year with Orbus, and that book also got to number one in the ‘Bestseller (science fiction)’ list. However, I do wonder if that’ll happen to The Technician since I see that Banks fella has an SF book out, the bugger.


Yesterday we again met a couple who have just returned from Norway to spend a a few months in their house here. Tor and Tova are definitely not a couple of moaners like those I mentioned before – they too get some perspective by leaving this place for a little while. We had a drink with them by the beach, then proceeded to a meal at the Cabbiano where the Greek waiters felt inspired to do one of their dances. Here’s a picture of Niko in mid-leap and Stelios behind him. We bought our house from the latter of these but our problems with it doesn’t keep us from his restaurant, which is always pleasant.

Friday 20th

I’ve been quite remiss this morning, sitting and reading the last few hundred pages of the last book of a trilogy I was particularly enjoying, rather than knuckling down and getting on with some work. But before I tell you about that trilogy, I’ll rewind back through my reading list. After finishing the Karin Slaughter books Skin Privilege, Fractured and Genesis, and enjoying them quite a lot, I felt it was time for me to read something a bit less bloody and traumatic, so I picked up a book Caroline’s parents had brought with them when they came.

Unseen Academicals is the latest Terry Pratchett out in paperback. This was one presumably written with Mr Pratchett’s voice recognition software, now his Alzheimer’s has killed his ability to type, but it was still a thoroughly enjoyable romp. I felt it wasn’t quite as good as a lot of his other books, but it still stands a head and shoulders over the majority of what makes it onto the bookshop shelves and I’ll certainly reread it.

After Pratchett I obviously felt the need for some more murder and mayhem – a need quite adequately catered for my Bait – Nick Brownlee (just read the first paragraph of this book and you’ll see what I mean), and then Evil at Heart – Chelsea Cain. The latter book turns out to be the third in a series, the first two of which I haven’t read. I do wonder if my enjoyment of it might have been spoilt if I actually had read them. Reading references to what has happened in the previous two books I do wonder if this one is a bit of franchise extending.

After these I read The Disappeared by M R Hall. I did like the book prior to this, The Coroner, though the heroine was definitely one that started to irritate. Here we had a fascinating story to follow, which I enjoyed, and a heroine who had moved from the irritating category to thoroughly annoying.

It’s funny, but there’s a thread that connects the trilogy I’ve just read, right back through everything else I’ve read to the Karin Slaughter books: the damaged hero or heroine. It’s starting to get annoying. Do these people always have to be: in the midst of a divorce, recovering from abuse either recently or in childhood, have some sort of problem like alcoholism, drug abuse, depression or in one case dyslexia? Y’know something, a modern police procedural or thriller would be unique if the central protagonist had a happy and relatively uneventful childhood, a happy marriage, good health and complete lack of psychological problems.

Next I read the Steig Larsson trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire & The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Caroline read the first of these before me, as had others I’ve talked to here. All said these were excellent and I would enjoy them. The first third of the first book I found a bit leaden and clunky but by the time I got beyond that I was hooked, mostly by the (damaged) character Salander. There’s not much point in me recommending these books (though there is a point in me saying you must persevere with the first of them) since people only need to take a glance at the bestseller lists over the last year or so. They’re very good. I do however have to comment on one thing that did begin to grate: every bad guy was always a guy, a bigot, always referred to women as ‘whores’ and usually had a penchant for kiddy porn, every woman (except for just one in the first book to whom just a few hundred words were devoted) was strong and on the side of right. Testament to the mind-distorting powers of political correctness.

Monday 23rd

Oh dear, windy and cool on Sunday – I even put on a T-shirt – and cool again this morning. I do hope this doesn’t mark the end of the hot spell and descent into Autumn...

Tuesday 24th

Whenever I casually chuck into conversation that we have scorpions around and sometimes in our house here, this usually raises a shudder only somewhat ameliorated by me telling the listener that they’re never bigger than an inch long. I then relate how, when we first came here and everything seemed to be going wrong, I heard a thud on my pillow in the night , and how it was almost with a feeling of inevitability that I turned the light on to find a scorpion there. I further add the story about the scorpion I found here, some distance from our house in a pile of olive stumps I was cutting up. This one was nearly three inches long and had a nice big fat sting. I’m a story-teller after all.

Talk then usually turns to creepy-crawlies of very stripe. Snakes get a mention, but we don’t see many here. Then there are the beetles that seem to wear hobnail boots and others that fly at you like seeker bullets, the crickets the size of cigars that land with a sound like someone dropping a bag of spoons, the praying mantises that watch you with odd intelligence, the ants that range in size from flecks of dust to an inch long, the black bees as big as strawberries and the hornets that look like they’re made of coloured plastic. ‘Spiders?’ the listeners will enquire. No, not many – they’re bigger in England. I say this with just an element of doubt because I once heard something drop as I opened window shutters and, by the sound, thought it must be a gecko till I noted, just as it scuttled out of sight, far too many striped legs. I recently commented to a couple about this lack of big spiders here and, bloody hell, I walked outside two days later to find this bugger (below) on our geraniums. It measures about two inches from leg tip to leg tip. I comfort myself with the observation that the shrouded corpses in its web seem to be wasps...

Chillies & Stuff.

Wednesday 11th


It’s been hot and humid for a couple of weeks now, not the usual dry heat, and lately the sea has been as warm as bathwater. Now I know that’s a description somewhat undermined by misuse since you don’t tend to walk into the bath wincing as the water level reaches your genitals, but in this case it’s true. The water is the temperature of bathwater that’s been left for a while, lukewarm, but near the shore, where the waves are meeting the hot sand, it often feels like someone has turned on the hot tap. If you swim any distance you can feel yourself starting to sweat. Just floating about in the waves or lying sprawled across a lilo seems the option most people are taking.

Another result of this heat, perhaps in combination with someone cutting a couple of trees down in the land directly in front of our house (pictures above – note the rubbish, which is something you never see in the tourist brochures), is that we’ve had some visitors. Having done my 2,000 words yesterday, then us having gone to wet ourselves first on the outside then on the inside, we returned here. Whilst then heading to water the garden I noticed something black and curly lying on the garden wall and wondered what it was, a twig, bird crap, maybe a crack I hadn’t noticed before? It turned out to be a little snake. To me this was good to see – just an enjoyable bit of wildlife to observe. Caroline’s reaction to these animals is slightly different, being of the mildly spooked ‘I ought to be scared of this’ kind. I tipped it off the wall into the weeds below. Then, this morning, I noted her opening the patio doors rather cautiously. I thought this was about snakes until I saw the scorpion folded up on the floor. It then unfolded, stretched out to about an inch long and made a dash for our sofa. I got the bugger with a teaspoon. Yeah, I like wildlife, but we tend to prefer to share our house with geckos only.

They have chilli plants here on Crete that are quite beautiful, especially near the end of the year when the chilli colours range from green, yellow, orange, red, white and purple. These are mostly used for decoration rather than gustation. It’s weird that here’s an island with a climate in which it is possible to grow every herb and spice under the sun, yet Greek food is bland. Having previously grown chillies from seeds brought from England I decided last year that I would next grow these colourful Cretan chillies. We first gathered some large chillies from a nearby village called Vori, then a Dutch woman called Honi gave us a branch of small chillies torn from a plant in the garden of the property she was renting. I removed seeds from the ripe chillies on all of these, dried them and stored them away. This year I planted them, and ended up with so many plants I supplied them to five other people and also left a box of them in the Gecko Bar for yet others to help themselves to. Anyway, here’s the result:

Above I mentioned the Dutch woman, Honi. She used to run the Status Bar in Makrigialos, but last year she left the keys and buggered off, also leaving, allegedly, numerous debts. The bar is now closed. I also mentioned the Gecko Bar. The proprietor has been trying to sell the lease and now it is closed. She closed it in July to take some time off for her ‘tennis elbow’ to heal a little. It is still closed and now her arm is in plaster – probably the result of trying to single-handedly manage a bar that could stay open for upwards of 12 hours i.e. closing time would be when the last drunk staggered out. Both these bars have struggled in the present financial climate simply because they are not owned but rented and, understand this, the rents are all year, tourists aren’t. There’s a big similarity here with the British pub, in that the breweries make their money more from rents than beer sales, steadily turning over publicans foolish to maybe remortgage a house to finance a refit and pay rents that profits are simply not covering. Turning optimists into cynics. Here it’s Greek owners rather than breweries.

Friday 13th

On Wednesday, after having polished off 3,000, I felt quite justified in visiting what has become our usual haunt this year, the Revens Bar, first for frappes, then for a swim and later for a miso kilo aspro krasi or a half kilo of white wine. As is usual with me I order stuff in Greek no matter what language the one serving me speaks. On this day Yorgos was leaving the running of the bar to Kostis, whose English isn’t great. As he delivered our usual of a miso kilo I then said to him, ‘Sto melon milou ta synithismena parakalo’ which I thought translated as ‘In the future I say to you the usual please’. He looked at me in puzzlement and in broken English said, ‘You want some melon?’ I said no and tried to explain what I thought I had said with, so Caroline tells me, my face turning increasingly red with embarrassment. He came back five minutes later with a plate of water melon and honeydew melon on ice. So much for being a smart arse. In retrospect I realise it’s something like leh-o or lego for ‘say’ and I probably should have stuck a tha in there for ‘will’ or ‘shall’. I’ll ask Yorgos about that, and ask him to explain to Kostis that I wasn’t demanding a perpetual supply of melon with our wine.

Monday 16th

Zero Point is coming along nicely though I have to admit to not achieving my 10,000 words last week. I’ve also learnt from Julie Crisp that the edited typescript of The Departure has been sent, but is still sitting in some DHL store room at this end since the petrol strike. Caroline is keeping her mobile phone on ready for a call from the delivery man, but nothing yet. What else? The temperature here is high. Right now as I write this at 10.30 in the morning it is 30 in the shade and still climbing. Oddly, it has again been hotter up here in the mountains than down in Makrigialos – the sea breeze, even though from the South, makes a big difference. However, down there the sea is still like a bath.

Tuesday 17th

The temperature yesterday down in Makrigialos was 37 in the shade with the sea being whipped up by a constant wind. When I went in I thought it was cold, but that was just the contrast I was feeling because when I did my swim across from Revans Bar to the harbour my body adjusted and it again felt like I was in a bath. This is one of the things I’ve discovered from living in such a hot place; very often it’s not the temperatue on the thermometer that’s important but contrast, whether there is a breeze and humidity. I’ve shivered and wished for a jumper in 26 degrees because we drove down into it from a mountain temperature of 30, I’ve poured sweat in a temperature of 28 yet felt quite fine in a temperature of 32 because it wasn’t so humid and I’ve sat outside to cool off in the breeze even though the thermometer read 27 inside and 28 outside. Then there’s acclimatizing to all this. You certainly know you’re acclimatized when you find yourself, as we did back in May, sitting at a table by the beach wearing jeans and a jumper whilst just a few yards away people are sprawled out in bikinis and swimming trunks. Anyway, the overall temperature for Crete today is predicted to be 40 in the shade, so I think the jeans can stay in a draw for a while yet.

2,000 words done yesterday and Zero Point has now passed the 50,000 mark. I’ll see if I can polish off another 2,000 today before we head down to use the Internet (Tuesdays are Internet day).

Further note: I did.

Cretan Update.

Off to a pretty good start the week before last with 10,240 words done over four days. The following week started a bit crappily with lots of running about after shopping on the Monday (and finding nothing delivered because the delivery trucks have only just been fueled up again). On the Tuesday I managed a desultory word count of 1591, but this was mainly because I was re-reading stuff, shuffling bits about and basically getting my head around where I want to go with this.


Wednesday 4th

I got on a roll today with 3,000 words bringing the total to a spit away from 40,000 and I’ve even got a good idea of how I’m going to end Zero Point. I’m also very much enjoying tying things in with a future that’s already there, so to speak. Those of you that have read the Owner stories in The Engineer ReConditioned may remember the proctors, those humanoids that did the Owner’s bidding? Well, I’ll not give too much away, but they’ve got to put in an appearance at some point in the Owner’s ... history. Maybe very soon, or maybe in the next ten thousand years (snigger). Then there’s other things to consider, like an Alcubierre Drive...

Thursday 5th

Warming up with the first paragraph above and now this. A certain amount of distraction getting in the way what with the temperature in the high thirties and the sea down in Makrigialos being the temperature of bath water, but I will persevere...

Hey, it occurs to me that I might try doing a few more video clips from here. Well, I’ll try one and see how loading from Revens goes. It is noticeable that when someone comes in and starts that kind of heavy usage (usually the downloading of films from the Internet) Yorgos’s Internet radio goes off and everything starts getting a bit slow. So, to that end, how about some interesting questions from all of you posted in the comments here. Do be warned, however, that if it’s a question I’ve answered ad nauseum before I’ll be giving it a miss.

Tuesday 10th
 
Good start to the week this week too with over 4.5 thousand words done to today, Tuesday.

Cats and Dogs.

Some random thoughts on this subject...


Living in another country, and in a small rural village like Papagianades, really forces you to think about some stuff. With our English soppy-about-pets and disconnected-from-reality attitude to animals, some things come as quite a shock: the casual cruelty, the killing of cats and dogs and the seeming hatred some Greeks have of these animals. But then reality starts to impinge and you start thinking.

Some Greeks keep dogs, or cats, or both and generally can’t afford vet bills, frequent flea treatments and, most importantly, the hundreds of Euros it costs to have these animals neutered. The result of this is boxes of puppies dumped outside supermarkets, or bags of kittens dumped in ditches. It’s a kind of cowardice, it’s not taking responsibility – another result of which is unwanted family pets dumped at the side of the road. Maybe some will find my attitude harsh, but I feel a pet owner has three choices: give it a home, find it a home, or kill it quickly and cleanly.

In our village there are three people who feed the stray cats: one feeds about 21, another feeds 12 whilst yet another feeds about 30. I learnt this from one of our neighbours, Yorgos. He keeps a patch of land in the village on which he grows fruit trees, and I’ve always wondered why the ground underneath is bare. Why not grow melons, cucumbers, tomatoes and, in fact, any of the crops that grow here so readily? He doesn’t grow these things because the seeds, seedlings and adult plants are forever being uprooted by the numerous cats using his land as a litter tray. He understandably is reluctant to eat melons smeared with cat shit or lettuces that have been pissed on.

You have to consider how a gardener feels when one of the constant pleasures of his job is soil smelling of cat piss and fly-blown cat shit on his hands. You also have to consider too how numerous often hungry cats, and dogs, will mix with free-range chickens. How does a Greek who has kept chickens all his life, and lost many of them to stray cats and dogs, regard such animals? He and the gardner will see them as stealing food from their mouths and destroying the product of their labour. They will quite probably come to hate such animals and quite likely pass that attitude on to their children. They will demonize them, calling them dirty, smelly, food stealing flea-ridden disease carriers and, to a certain extent, they will not be wrong.

Consider the attitudes of various city dwellers across the world; those who feed pidgeons, and those who consider them to be flying rats. Consider residents and sometime residents of Britain’s coastal towns; those who view seagulls as beautiful flying creatures and part of the atmosphere, and those who have to clear up the detritus of torn-open bin bags, whose roofs get wrecked by nesting gulls, gutters blocked with stinking detritus and whose cars regularly wear a layer of guano.

In Britain we poison and trap mice and rats because, well, they’re dirty smelly food stealing flea-ridden disease carriers yet, there are those who keep them as pets. The first version are vermin, the second are not. I was once asked by someone what a weed is, to which the reply is that it is a plant growing in the wrong place, not producing what you want or doing what you want it to do. Isn’t it logically the case that the same question posed about vermin should receive a similar answer? How else do we make a distinction? Should certain animals have a get-out clause based on their cuteness and cuddlyness, their asthetic appeal?

Ask yourself: why does a cat have more of a right to live than the substantially more intelligent animal we regularly turn into bacon?

One final thought occurs to me about the situation here. Why do we not have a similar attitude to such animals in Britain? Even fifty or more years ago, though the attitude was closer, it was nowhere near as strong. The answer, maybe, comes in two parts: climate and human population density. We don’t have problems with large breeding populations of strays because there’s very little room, amidst 60 million people, for such populations to grow without being spotted and dealt with and, frankly, most of them end up as road kill. Also, year on year, a lot less of them survive the winter than do here.

Talking to various people about other places across the world I have to wonder if it is a truism that hot poor countries have a bad attitude to cats and dogs because they survive and breed like vermin, and because the people there simply cannot afford them.

Potatoes

Let me give you a piece of advice. If you ever find yourself in Crete, in need of food, and a Cretan offers you potatoes from his garden, snatch his damned arm off. In the supermarkets here the potatoes are good, better than those from British supermarket – you’ll have no problems with watery roast spuds or rubbery baked spuds. However, the garden varieties here are how you dream of potatoes, how you remember them from your childhood. When baked the skins are crispy, the interiors fluffy, prepared in any other way they are superb, and they really taste of potatoes! Just saying.

Fuel Strike

With the car’s fuel guage registering three-quarters of a tank we took Caroline’s parents to the airport. Over ensuing days we took one trip to Sitia and two trips to Makrigialos, on the last of these my intention being to fill up the petrol tank. There was a queue into the garage we normally use (the cheapest) so I drove on past. No hurry, really. Big mistake. I soon learned why they were queuing.


During a further necessary trip to Sitia (Caroline uses a dentist here to have her teeth cleaned – one hour of teeth cleaning as opposed to the British NHS ten minutes then out the door). The car was getting near to sucking fumes so I thought it might be an idea to stick 10 Euros worth in from one of the more expensive Sitia garages. One I passed was open, but I would go in one of the next two. They were both closed. After the dental visit we headed back home then subsequently to Makrigialos. Our station was closed, little paper signs up on the pumps with the word Telos on them, which means end, ending, close, which in turn means here that the tanker drivers have gone on strike again.

So now we were in Makrigialos and not entirely sure we had enough petrol to get home, or rather, do a round trip to home and to a garage again. I took a walk up to another station there and thankfully found them to be selling something. I got the car and drove up there, putting in €20 worth of Super 100, the high octane stuff for older cars at a cost of €1.75 a litre.

I don’t know why the tanker drivers are on strike – I don’t have enough Greek to follow the news on TV. I’d like to think they’re objecting to the ridiculous business-killing tax on petrol here, but I doubt it. I do know that the the lefties have a lot of power here and that they’ve been kicking up a big stink about the government measures to try and get Greece out of debt. The dockers, who across the world seem controlled by Bolsheviks, have been butt-fucking the Greek tourist industry by stopping tourists getting to their ferries.

Most likely this is about the driver’s pay, the taxes they have to pay on it, their inflated pensions and early retirement. When things get tough the unionists take the opportunity to kick everyone else in the teeth. Here is a chance to strike a blow for the cause and push everyone further along the road to the socialist utopia.

All of this of course raises other spectres. Two days of strike and service stations are empty. How long before the shops start emptying? Which lefties are going to get the knife in next, maybe the power workers, water workers, the post, other truck drivers, water? And will I receive the Peter Lavery edits of The Departure anytime soon, since the typescript is coming via DHL?

Here on Crete, as well demonstrated by Caroline’s recent trip down into the village and subsequent return with a gift of a big bag of potatoes and a melon, people aren’t going to starve in any great hurry, but I have to wonder how similar scenarios would pan-out in Britain, with its 60 million supermarket dependents. I have to think too about things like the Hubbert Peak, all the problems in those areas of the world where most of the oil comes from. Our civilization is like a car: take out the fuel and it ceases to be any use at all.

Update:

I’ve just been apprised of the reason for the strike and it is this: Greece is full of closed shops. The problems we had with the electricians here was due to one such closed shop; the registered electricians in Greece have to pay something in the region of €750 every two months for the privilege. The truck drivers, it turns out, have to pay a ridiculous amount for their life-time license – I’m told its €250,000 – and they are understandably pissed off that under EU rules such closed shops are not allowed, and must themselves be closed down. So, how was the strike ended? Under Greek law the drivers can be conscripted into the army in times of emergency with the result that if they strike they can be imprisoned and have their trucks confiscated. This is what is happening, slowly, because some of the councils that are supposed to issue the paperwork are not complying, and many of the truck drivers are in hiding, so the papers can’t be served on them. I rather think this is going to get ugly.

Jerry Bauer

I recently received an email from one Jonathan Bauer, a relative of Jerry Bauer, who has died. He was the guy who took that first photograph of me you’ll see in older copies of my first books (to the left here). Jonathan asked if I could write a note to be read at Jerry’s funeral. I fear I missed that ... deadline, but here it is for you.


It's been eleven years now since my photograph session with Jerry Bauer, so please forgive some hazy recollection. This was all a bit odd to me since I'd only just been taken on by Pan Macmillan and couldn't quite accept that readers might want to see a picture of me. Caroline and I met him where instructed at Temple underground station then I believe went off to a cafe where he bought us coffee. I can't remember if it was at the station or in the cafe where I saw his well-worn cameras, one loaded with colour film and one with black and white. I wondered why he hadn't gone digital, but obviously these were the tools he was used to. He led us off into the streets around Temple, favoring litter-choked alleys where I could pose as the mean and moody hard-ass SF writer. I felt like a complete tart and slightly embarrassed, folding up the collar of my jacket, dipping my head just so, noting people wandering past and gazing at me in puzzlement as they wondered who I might be. Whilst all this was going on we chatted to Jerry. Caroline was fascinated to hear stories about him photographing Julie Christy and (I think) Dirk Bogart. When he casually mentioned another SF writer he'd photographed, Robert Silverberg, I repeated the name, slightly gobsmacked. He reacted enthusiastically, 'Do you know Bob?' he asked me. Erm, not really. The previous names mentioned just sailed by me, but Robert Silverberg was a legend. Later, about the time we parted, he asked if I would like my photographs touched up. I said no -- I didn't want to frighten anyone when they actually met me.

Sorry to hear about your loss. Jerry knew I was nervous and quickly put me at ease. Seemed like a nice guy.

The Winds of Crete

So, Caroline’s parents came here for eighteen days and, a day or so before they arrived, the wind started blowing. Crete is famous for its winds – there’s a book with the title The Winds of Crete (one of many I read about three years ago). The wind did not really let up for most of the time they were here so we got sand blasted on the beach, the sea was chilled (a little) and swimming any distance a pain because of the spray in my face. Up here the bead curtains rattled continuously, the shutters banged and chairs perambulated around the terrace. We jokingly told Gerry and Myrtle, when they were going, to take the wind with them. They did, because it stopped the very next day.


As we drove back from Iraklion airport the wind had turned very hot, along the south coast road it was cooler to drive with the windows closed (without air conditioning) since on occasion what came down off the mountains and through the window felt like the draught from a furnace. The next day it was completely still in Papagianades with the temperature rapidly climbing into the thirties. Driving down to Makrigialos was odd, because we drove into cloud and then out of it into a muggy southern breeze, and the sea down there was rough, but warm. Today (Monday 26th) as I write this, it is still again, the noise of the wind replaced by the racket of cicadas and the temperature climbing.

It is annoying that I’ve chosen this very time to set my nose back to the grindstone, but I’m a man of my word and I will do 2,000 words today despite the temptation to abandon this computer and sit out on the terrace sipping frappes. This blog, now, is essentially a warm-up (take note of that all you would-be writers).

Okay, some more pictures for you. The first here is of a plant purchased with money given by Myrtle and Gerry so we could get something for our tenth wedding anniversary (anyone got a name for this?). It grows somewhat like a banana so I put in this large pot until it has thrown up some more rolls of leaves whereupon I hope to divide it then transfer it to the two pots you see sitting each side of the ruin doorway (also bought with that money).

The other plants, presently growing in out outside sink, are a gift from a British couple here (thanks Martin and Vicky). I’d been supplying various people, including them, with spare plants I’d grown and Martin came back with the offer of these tobacco plants. I first assumed he meant tobacco flowers, but no, these are the real deal. I was a little bit wary until discovering that it is not actually illegal to grow tobacco, not anywhere, not even Britain (I think). I guess the assumption of illegality stems from (excuse the pun) those other plants that often end up inside a rollie paper. All I need now is some way of finely shredding these...

Update
Well, it seems Gerry and Myrtle took only the North wind with them. On the second day it was perfectly still in Papagianades, but as we drove down to Makrigialos, we encountered an oddity in July: a great mass of cloud halfway down. At the beach we found rough seas blown in by a South wind, which was obviously encountering an air temperature difference higher up to cause those clouds. Then, on the following day, rough seas still and part of the beach has gone missing.

Revans Bar

Just to show you where I'm sending these blogs from, here's a few pictures of me in the Revans Bar in Makrigialos:

And here's our genial host Yorgos at the same bar which can be found here at http://www.makrigialos-holidays.gr/ I feel obliged to add that he has two rooms for rent above the bar (what I'll do for the chance of a free beer).

Happy holidays!

Chair Addiction.

The image here is courtesy of Sue Carpenter, an SFX reader on Crete (who also got a letter in the previous issue). Thanks for this, Sue.

It is nice to see Tor doing a bit of advertising – something I never saw for my first six or so books. I also noted, when in Britain, how small Tor sections were appearing in book shops across the country.

Still not writing much yet. I’ve no real excuse: visitors never put me off on previous occasions, nor did building work or some of the traumas that accompany living here. I guess, because I’m so far ahead, I’m just being lazy, taking a holiday, but be assured that you’ll still be getting your fix every year. Next Monday I knuckle down again to my 2,000 words a day.

So, after rescuing that first chair I seem to have acquired a bit of a chair habit. Caroline told me that she would quite like a few of the traditional kafenion chairs for up around the ruin and, being the skip diver that I am, I saw a couple in a local tip and immediately grabbed them. I completely disassembled them and out of them am making one complete one. Just a little bit more work to do...

Here also are some further random pictures of the garden, Jim of the excellent breakfast at the Lithos on Makrigialos harbour and my father-in-law revealing his inner alien.

The Chair

Well, the dog I couldn’t fix, but the chair here I could. You have to remember that before I became the big famous author (hollow laugh) I worked in numerous jobs and acquired various skills. I’m also the kind of person who finds something broken and has to try repairing it, hence three restored bikes, loads of mowers (for when I was self-employed and running around cutting grass) and numberless other bits and pieces, including furniture. Also, I once had a job as a skip lorry driver, so that gave me access to all sorts of junk to play with.

This chair had been thrown into one of the roadside dumps up here in the mountains – where rubbish is heaped then basically dozered off a cliff (recycling here means getting on your bike again, if you have one). It is precisely the sort of chair we wanted for our terrace here but found to be ridiculously overpriced. I pulled over, took one look at it and decided to have it. This then entailed my three passengers cramming in the back since the only place it would fit was the front passenger seat. Then I drove home with only the three available gears since the edge of the chair was in the way of the gear stick.

Lots of the trim was coming off, but that was just a case of wood glue and clamps. The bottom was broken out, two of the front to back struts snapped and the thick piece of bamboo running crosswise snapped away at one end and all the binding missing. First I replaced those struts, using lengths of a wooden curtain rail I had here – for one of them I necessarily had to drill a hole in through the front to get it in place. I then drilled in through the side to fit a dowel down the centre of the the bamboo (you can see the dowel protruding in the first picture). The next day I replaced all the missing binding. I used lengths of broom (the plant, not the thing you sweep up with, first flattened between thumb and the shaft of a screwdriver, then wrapped round with wood glue and clamped into place. Stain and then varnish followed, then the cushion you see bought from a local supermarket for 10 Euros. I’m very happy with it and it is very comfortable. I just need the previous owner of this chair to dump three more of them!

Bits.

Here’s Owen Roberts take on Orbus: http://unwritable.blogspot.com/2010/06/orbus.html

Not much writing being done here at the moment. Caroline’s parents are staying with us, building work has recommenced, Mikalis having returned from Germany and announcing that he’s now getting divorced from his wife of twenty years (there’s much more to her visit to hospital I mentioned previously, like, a hundred anti-depressants), and I still want to kill the neighbour’s child (who we don’t see because he’s in hiding).

Here’s some more pictures from our garden. If any of you know the names of these succulents then please let me know.

Sent by Mobile

Here's a picture sent by mobile ... can anyone read the note above?

Get Slaughtered.

I can’t remember whether or not I’ve commented on Karin Slaughter books before, but I certainly will now.

In need of distraction I picked up Skin Privilege and started reading. I guess, after recent events, what I didn’t need was a story that started off with someone being sprayed with lighter fuel and set on fire, but I continued reading. This book is one of a series of books featuring the characters Sara Linton (pathologist), Jeffrey Tolliver (boss cop), Lena Adams (junior cop with attitude) and I zoomed through it in a day. The story and the pace are more than engaging enough even though I often felt the overpowering need to get hold of some of these characters and slam their heads together. Having read numerous previous books featuring them, I’m starting to find their angst a bit tiring, and the entire format a bit tired. I think this is a danger in police procedurals in a limited setting with the same characters ... any book in fact ... which is why it was great to then pick up Fractured. To me this was the much better book. The main character in this, Will Trent – a dyslexic cop – has appeared before (Triptyche?) and is much less irritating. Excellent book – again I polished it off in a day and now look forward to getting started on Slaughter’s latest, Genesis. And I have to add that despite the adverse comments above, if you haven’t read these and like this sort of stuff, you should read them all.

Greek Notes.

30C in Britain and Caroline’s dad, Gerry, texted to say he’s looking forward to coming out to Crete to cool off. Today Caroline texted him to let him know that we were sitting outside at 9.30 in the evening in a temperature of 33C.


Expats here from ‘up North’ express their delight in eating mushy peas and deride our southern (Essex) indifference to the dish. Henceforth I’ll inform them that ‘down South’ we eat fresh peas, whilst ‘up North’ they’ve grown accustomed to sloppy seconds.

A noticeable effect of the feeling of alienation some expats get is how they often become less cosmopolitan, more nationalistic and also more parochial in attitude about a place they left behind. Ah, drinking pink gins on the veranda to dull the pain, crying about the lack of chip shops, Heinz Beans and a Tesco’s down the road. I tell you even the old home country accents seem to get stronger.

‘Siga-siga’ is an expression frequently used here. It doesn’t mean ‘you smoke too much’ or ‘do you want a cigar?’ but ‘slowly-slowly, take it easy, stop your rushing about’. It’s one I often encounter when struggling to say something in Greek, or when sweating to get a job done, or hurrying somewhere. It’s also an attitude that results in that common occupation here of ‘waiting for the Greek worker to turn up’: the carpenter to measure up for furniture, the guy coming to lay tiles, the one coming to repair the roof, and now the one to measure up our ruin for windows and doors. You get it in some restaurants and bars as you wait interminably for a drink or a meal, gritting your teeth and telling yourself it’s just the easier slower lifestyle of the Greeks. And its an expression that now pisses me off.

Hey guys, if you want your mobile phones, your 4x4s, your flat screen TVs and your laptops then I suggest you take your ‘siga-siga’ and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Yes, I know you think that the English, the Germans, the ‘xenos’ here have money trees in their gardens, and so you charge accordingly, but that’s just not the case. The money is the result of a basic incomprehension of the ‘siga-siga’ ethos. You make money out of constant effort, not from the rip-off.

Why is Greece bankrupt? Because the corrupt government either trousers money it hasn’t got, or pisses it up the wall on ‘projects’. It’s not really much different from Britain or any other country in the EU, or America for that matter. It’s just a lot closer to the cliff edge.

House of Suns -- Alastair Reynolds.

I finally got round to reading this (I really needed the escape) and enjoyed it immensely. Mr Reynolds also got double royalties from me due to my increasingly disfunctional memory – I bought one copy through either Amazon or The Book Depository, and then picked up another in Waterstones.


It has everything I want from him: huge concepts played out on a vast stage, enjoyable characters, gobsmacking technology (bollocks to nanotech, he goes straight for the jugular with femtotech) and a great story extending across aeons. I particularly liked the way, at one point, that he sneaked around causality. Some might think, with his adherence to the galactic speed limit, that he’s made a rod for his own back as far as story telling goes. It strikes me that a consequence of him limiting himself to sub-FTL travel is that the stage expands to somewhere approaching its true size. What Reynolds does best is give some sense of the true scale of what lies out there. Maybe that’s something difficult to achieve without spending years peering through a telescope and letting the vastness of what you see settle in your bones.

I’m probably speaking to the converted when I say, ‘Highly recommended,’ since most of you reading this blog have probably already read this book.

Footnote.

The character Purslane in this book received a hologram of an emerald beetle. I can’t find that particular section at the moment but it sticks in my mind because this bugger landed in Caroline’s lap only a week before I started reading the book.

The interconnectness of things? Just the inevitability of human brains full of experience and knowledge interfacing with large books full of ... experience and knowledge.

More Greek Stuff

We have a guy here who used to be a social worker in Britain and therefore accustomed to dealing with the socially challenged (scum). He expressed some concern about the boy up here in our village, opining that the kind who set fire to puppies as children tend to become even bigger shitbags when they become teenagers. I think it a given that most teenagers are shitbags – they have the total self-regard and lack of empathy of children combined with hormones, pre-adult bodies and, nowadays, a huge sense of entitlement. But I understood what he meant about us not wanting to set ourselves up as targets when this boy turns into the village hoody. I don’t think we need to be too worried.


It goes back somewhat to my previous post. In Britain, if a child was to do something like this, he would have done something completely outside of accepted mores. It would be an act of rebellion and a rejection of ‘society’, and regarded by most as something he should be locked up for. Here, with many adults hating dogs and having grown up in a time when if you hated a dog few people would object if you strung it up from an olive tree; here where many adults find setting fire to a puppy amusing, his biggest crime was not checking to see if the puppy had an owner before torching it.

It is also the case that this child, and his two brothers, are generally just boisterous boys. They play like boys did a number of decades ago in Britain before computer games, and TVs in the bedroom. They take the rubbish down to the bins, collect food from the veg delivery man and collect loads of wood – we often see the youngest labouring up and down the steep paths here with a heavy wheelbarrow. They work in their parent’s large vegetable plot, help with the olive harvest, are polite to us and bugger off when we tell them without any danger of one of them pulling a knife, and they get a belt round the ear when they do something wrong.

The problem here is that the casual cruelty we have seen is not regarded as something terrible. And I fear that the child concerned was just trying to be an adult – using an accepted method to drive off a stray dog and thus protect the family’s chickens.

Incidentally, going back to that dogs ‘strung up from an olive tree’. A recent case in mainland Greece actually resulted in prosecutions. Three dogs were strung up all together with the same rope, or wire, their back paws just touching the ground so as to prolong the entertainment.

Stress Diet:

Over a period of ten days I’ve lost about 8lbs. Stress, anger and lack of sleep certainly burn off the calories. Seeing an animal in pain is an appetite suppressant, and the smell of burnt fur, burnt skin, Betadine antibiotic commingled with with a hint of putrefaction certainly puts you off the meat course. Enjoy your lunch.

Some Greek Learned:

I believe Gamoto kakos apovrasma translates as ‘fucking evil scum’. I was going to go for ‘bastard’ rather than ‘scum’ but whilst my Rough Guide has that word as keratas my dictionary has it as nothos or palianthropos and lists keratas as ‘cuckold’. I tend to feel that it’s the Rough Guide that’s wrong because it contains so many mistakes. Opening it at random I get the standard one: anafero for ‘mention’ when it is ‘I mention’, again totally ignoring the verb endings I’ve mentioned before: anafero, anaferis, anaferoome etc (again the disclaimer: I’m no expert so correct me if I’m wrong).

No Happy Ending.

So, despite all the shit that has hit the fan this week the work on the ruin is looking good. All the ‘sovar’ or rendering has been done inside, the plumbing is in and there’s actually running water up there now, the electrics are also in and the ‘karistoo’ path has been done down the side. Last week, before the puppy incident, we visited a window shop to get some prices and later a guy stopped off to take a look at the work. He was another that Mikalis had put us onto and I warned him that if the price was a piss-take I would be saying, ‘Oshi’. As it turns out we were pleasantly surprised. The price was high, but not rip-off. We had already checked what it might be by looking at wooden windows for sale on the Internet in Britain, then adding extra for the shutters and the fact that these would be made to fit. It seems that very shortly it will be time for tiling, and then going out to buy things like toilets and sinks.

Thursday 17th

So here we are precisely one week after the subhuman child nearby set fire to a puppy. ... You know, I write the words but they keep seeming ridiculous to me. They are the kind of words you use metaphorically or in analogy: ‘He looks so pissed off you’d think someone set fire to his puppy’. Anyway, getting back to that child; what is subhuman or, more precisely, subnormal? In Britain, when a child does something like this, the reaction of 99% of people is disbelieving horror. An army of child psychologists and social workers would be on the scene to deal with this problem child and his problem family. But I’m pretty certain that’s not the case here.

In the evening last Thursday, after Mikalis and his crew had gone, the child and his little brother finally ventured out. This was not a good move on their part since, at that time, Caroline was out watering the plants, and she of course went after them and started having a go at them. Shortly after this, three men turned up, possibly relations or friends of the family, at which point I joined in (I was tending to avoid the kids as my reaction would not have been verbal). I explained to the men, ‘Vazi fotia se mikro skilachi’ which is, ‘He set fire to a puppy’. One of the men laughed then stopped when I said, ‘Oshi ha ha ha ha’ and he saw my expression. I also at one point had the little brat concerned by the throat so I guess they figured I wasn’t happy. I thought the laughter due to the man thinking, ‘Ah, the Englishman is no good at Greek and has said something silly’. Now I don’t believe that.

Ever since we arrived here three years ago, when we go shopping in Sitia, we stop for a giros and a frappe in a Greek fast food place. The wife in the family that runs the place likes chatting to her English customers and I’ve learnt some useful words and phrases from her. This week I went shopping whilst Caroline stayed home to look after the puppy. I stopped at the fast food place for takeaway giros and as usual got a cheerful, ‘Ti kanis?’ which means ‘How are you?’ but translates as, ‘What do you do?’ (I’ll figure it out one day). Rather than reply, ‘Ime kala,’ or ‘I am well,’ I replied, ‘Then kalo,’ or ‘Not good’. The woman asked me to explain, which I did, both in Greek and English. There could be no misunderstanding. Her reaction was precisely zero then, when she turned away to work at something on a nearby counter, she looked to me like she was smirking. As he handed over my two giros her husband, however, could not have been clearer. He was laughing, with tears in is eyes. He then asked me, ‘Spirito?’ squirting an imaginary plastic spirit bottle – sold in all the shops here – towards the ground. Perhaps he had misunderstood. ‘Neh,’ I replied, ‘Yes’. ‘I love that,’ he said, obviously carried away by the hilarity of it all. I snatched my order from his hand and left. In retrospect I wished I’d asked him how amusing he’d find it if I shoved his head in his chip fryer.

A little thought later and I realised something. Long straight burns on the puppy’s back had puzzled me. I now realised they were caused by the long thin streams of spirit from the squeezy bottle. Most likely the person using the bottle lights the tip first then uses it as a mini flame-thrower. Something else occurred: there’s a picture of a badly burnt dog in the Gecko Bar – someone collecting funds for its treatment. This, I reckon, is a common occurrence here and, quite probably, the mountains and ruins are littered with the bones of dogs that have died in agony, saturated either with burning spirit or hot oil (Mikalis’s first assumption). And now I see that to these people, a boy doing such a thing is just acting precisely as it has been raised and to his parents is just normal.

I asked Mikalis if the people of our village probably think we are crazy, and he didn’t hesitate when he replied, ‘Yes’. A lot of the old people of the village have known starvation and when dogs are in competition with humans for food they’re going to lose. They keep lots of free-range chickens too and I perfectly understand their dislike of strays wandering into the village, I also think that in these circumstances it is perfectly acceptable for them to shoot any dog that is a danger to livestock. I don’t, however, understand the fear many Greeks have of dogs – a phobic reaction with elements of hatred and disgust in it. And this was a small puppy. It would have run in terror from the massive chickens here. It probably ran up to the boy, wagging its tail, waiting to be petted. It probably followed him about while he went to get his bottle of spirit and light the spout. Plain ugly cruelty; plain joy in seeing an animal in agony.

Back to the puppy, because I guess some of you reading this will want to know. It is eating, drinking and manages to wander about a bit. The rest of the time it is crying in pain when trying to stand up or lie down, or sleeping. It still manages to wag its tail, surprisingly. In retrospect, however, I wish I’d picked up the nearest rock the moment we got hold of her and put her out of her pain, rather than have put her through this last week.

No Happy Ending, Wednesday 23rd.

Too much, in the end. As some of the puppy’s skin started to fall off I hoped this a sign that it was healing. More and more fell off and the creature ended up in much more pain. I knew, as it lost all the skin across its stomach, that the skin on its back would go next. It would probably lose 50% of its skin and even if it grew back it was doubtful there would be any hair on it. A dog with exposed skin on its back on Crete is never going to be able to go outside for long. It also stopped eating and its suffering was such that we knew it could not go on. We said we would take it to the vet in Ierapetra to have it put down – an hour and a half to two hour drive away. Mikalis said no and took it the 15 minute journey to his home to put it out of its misery. He, or a friend of his, had a gun.