400euro for heating oil, 162euro car tax! It’s no sooner in than it’s out. One thing I can say is that, unlike England, where one dreaded the post landing on the mat because it invariably included utility bills one couldn’t pay which meant going into overdraft at the bank, here fortunately we have never been in that situation and, I think I might have said this before, one looks forward to the arrival of the postman and is disappointed if no letters arrive. They are of course getting fewer and fewer with everyone turning to e-mail to send messages and I have to admit it is a much handier option. One can write one line or twenty lines or more and you don’t have to worry about a stamp or the time it will take for the letter to reach its destination or wonder if it will even get there. Postage has just gone up again in Greece. It seems it has gone up by a couple of pennies every year and now stands at 72lepta. Last week we sent off a small package registered and it cost the equivalent of £7! But then everything has been increasing in price. Bottled gas went from 12 to 14 to 16 to 17 euro and now stands at 18. Next time we have to change it what odds it will be 19 or even 20. It is still a bargain though even at that price. I would have hoped that almost on my 79th birthday I would no longer have to worry about household accounts but there you are, that is the situation and I am only thankful to not be nearly as badly off as so many. With the advent of cold weather some of the cooking can be done on top of the wood burning stove in the breakfast room. At this time of the year as the cold sets in we also get the last great flurry of flies before winter kills them off. The fly papers are choc-a-bloc. There is one species of fly though that isn’t tempted to commit suicide on a fly paper. These, and I don’t know what they are but I call them the squadronaires, do nothing but fly around and around, like a dog fight, and never ever seem to land anywhere. They also do their aerobatics fairly high up so are not a nuisance as is the ordinary house fly that buzzes around your ears, lands on your table, and pokes its nose into anything going, and they disappear each evening. The other creature that appears all over the house this time of year, god alone knows why, is the millipede and yes, I know I have discussed this before, and even looked them up on Google though I don’t remember now what I learnt about them. They’re only a nuisance if you accidentally tread on them and make a mess of the floor, otherwise they’re just there.
Yesterday I finished the rewrite of my novel “Angel” only now I decided to give him his full Italian name of Angelo. Again Googling I looked up titles with the word angel in them and there are many many many though, strangely enough, not one with that single word, not one that I could see anyway. So I guess that is my writing for this year. There is nothing else on the cards right now.