The UK is in the grip of deep winter; snow, ice, plummeting temperatures and Douglas is due to fly out today but Gatwick is closed so he obviously won’t be flying from there. Hopefully he’ll get a refund on his cancelled flight. He has booked another from Heathrow as an alternative. Hopefully that one won’t be cancelled as well. Meanwhile here in Crete we are having spring like weather. Last night I didn’t even bother to light the wood stove or turn on the heating it was that warm. But it’s an ill oboe nobody blows good. The worry is that all the nasty little things that should have been killed off in the cold are thriving. Does that mean a real plague of mozzies this summer? Also with no snow on the mountains, what about the water table? We haven’t seen rain for days. Still it’s early days. Maybe our winter is yet to come.
There are of course, in this warm weather, still flies around, especially those strange little creatures I’ve mentioned before that fly around in circles but never seem to land anywhere. In high school we had an Afrikaans set book called Die (pronounced dee) Skarlakin Eskadril, The Scarlet Squadron, all about a secret squadron stationed in what is now Namibia. I don’t know why it was there or how the story evolved but I still remember the title after all these years and the little flies going around in circles invariably remind of it. Tenuous connection I know but that’s how the brain works I suppose. Another Afrikaans set book was called Toiings, all about a black man of that name, and I still have that in the bookshelf. Why? I must have carted it around for fifty odd years from address to address, but why? As an eight year old in boarding school I read a book called Lost On The Prairie all about a little boy like me of course, far from home. It had me weeping buckets I remember and I have always wondered if I would ever find a copy again. Every secondhand bookshop I go into I look for it but, alas, so far obviously without any success. It is nineteenth century in the Henty tradition although not one of his. The nearest I’ve got to it was in Perth, Australia where in a bookshop I came across a reference to it. But that was it. Now there are no secondhand bookshops near for me to search so I doubt whether I will ever find it again. Another of my favourite books at the time was The Sea Hawk by Rafael Sabbatini and I remember later on I was terribly disappointed when I watched the Errol Flynn, Flora Robson film of that name which had no connection with the book. But there you are, there is no copywrite in titles. We have the film on cassette and what a lot of old codswallop it is.