I enjoyed Edmund White’s autobiography “My Lives”. Actually I’m not sure enjoy is the right word for it but I can’t think what is. Not being remotely into S&M, my sexual tastes being more what an American student referred to as “vanilla”. I am no prude but could have done without the graphic details of Mr White’s sexual peccadilloes, a mild word for what he got up to. What was more interesting are his thoughts on life and the people he knew, in particular writers, French and American, nearly all of whom I had never heard of. Unless the writer is a giant: Balzac, Dumas, Proust, Gide, Genet, Racine, Moliere, Flaubert, even Rabelais are names that spring immediately to mind, there are just too many writers, even too many good ones and, as old age creeps up on you – creeps? Gallops rather with time’s fiery speed, you realise just how ignorant you are, how little you know. I like White’s comment, “It’s interesting to grow old and to see how stories turn out.” In other words, looking back, what would have happened if? I also appreciate his comment about how difficult it is trying to learn a foreign language after the age of forty. Eleven years in Greece plus night classes for two years before arriving here and my Greek is still practically non-existent. Part of the problem of course is that, living in an English house and speaking English the whole time, despite being surrounded by Greek neighbours, it’s a case of use it or lose it. I should have done what Siobhan did when she arrived all those years ago. She ordered her Greek neighbours, everyone in her village of Gavalahori in fact to speak nothing but Greek to her so was forced to learn fast. There were hardly any expats there then but, with the proliferation of estate agents all selling “the dream” and get rich quick builders after spoiling the place, the Greeks eventually got to calling it Anglohori. The number of estate agents is now dwindling with the recession and builders going out of business. The bubble seems at last to have burst. There are concrete frames that have been standing for months, in some instances years, with no further work being done. I have no pretensions towards being psychic but when we were looking for a house we were shown one in Gavalahori I wanted nothing to do with, that gave me the absolute creeps the moment I walked through the door. Later I was told the story of this house. Evidently during the Turkish occupation, a young Turk took a fancy to the daughter of the house and approached her father with an offer of marriage, or so he said. The father, being a Greek, was not going to countenance his daughter’s marriage to a Turk but knew if he resisted he would simply be killed and she would be abducted anyway, so he told the Turk he would think about it and to return the following evening for a drink of raki and to talk which the man did, accompanied by two friends. They drank the raki, the evening got more and more boisterous, the Turks more and more drunk until finally they were so sozzled the father and his sons had no difficulty in hanging them from the beams in the kitchen and threw their bodies down a well. I only hope the Greeks had the use of another well but, knowing how it seems to be a national trait to act first and think afterwards, it’s quite possible they went without drinking water for a very long time.