Well, here’s my last Blog for January! Soon it will be Easter and then, before you know it, Christmas will be around again and you will wonder where the year went. Another beautiful sunshiny day though still a bit on the chilly side but that’s easily remedied; just add a few more layers. Before the advent of central heating when houses on the island were cold and damp that was all the Cretans did – just put on another pullover. We have been watching “Tales From The Green Valley”, the series that purports to demonstrate life on a Welsh farm in 1620, and absolutely fascinating it is too. I mention it in relation to the cold because last night’s episode was January. There is an episode each month of the year. The farmhouse must have been very much like Cretan country houses until very recently except that most Cretan ones would probably have been even smaller. Kitchen fires would have been the sole method of heating. It’s strange here to see men of the older generation walking about the village wearing full winter garments in late March because winter isn’t officially over though the day might be as hot as an English summer’s day. I suppose there is a Cretan equivalent of cast ne’er a clout till may be out. No one has been able to tell me whether that is the month or the plant.
I remember so well the very first January we had here all of twelve years ago when, driving from Kalives into Vamos, we stopped to admire the view, the snow on the mountains chiefly and I sat at the side of the road and said, “Hot hot hot,” and have been sent up about it ever since. As we had left England so cold, so wet, so grey, so miserable, here I was sitting in glorious sunshine and had every reason to say appreciatively, “Hot hot hot!” The mountains at the moment are heavily blanketed with snow right down to the foothills and look quite beautiful. The first weeks of winter were so warm we wondered whether they would look like this. On first arriving in Crete, Chris and I spent the first night in a delightful little hotel overlooking the Venetian harbour in Xania and them, for a few days, until we had beds made and the house became habitable, we stayed in a holiday apartment in Kalives right on the beach – and that at night was cold! This house had no bathroom and no indoor toilet so you had to march across the courtyard (umbrella if it was raining) to go to the loo, the door of which wouldn’t close. That was chilly but at least you could admire the view. It did have a flush toilet but no cistern so had to be flushed by means of a bucket. When we had the extension built it was pulled down and I came back from a shopping expedition in Xania to find I had no loo. A temporary one was hastily put up and, in the process, the builder tried to find the old cess pit with no success. Where all those years and years of shit went to is still a complete mystery. The new cesspit was dug out and a friend, looking intro it, remarked “You could have a million shits in there!” and, as far as we know it is still working perfectly. I was reminded of this by the Green Valley programme when they had to rebuild the privy yards from the house and do it in flurries of snow. What I wanted to know was – what did they do in the ten days it took to do it?