I know I said it before, a year ago and possibly even the year before that, but I say it again – April is a yellow month. It’s almost that, by its colour, it is welcoming the spring sun: beneath the olive trees and the grape vines there are carpets of yellow and helianthus, freesia, crocus, ranunculus, narcissi, forsythia and the wild sage are in bloom and a tree laden with quite spectacular furry yellow berries as big as marbles that I don’t know the name of.
On TV back in England we used to watch a documentary programme called Arena. There being nothing worth watching on Greek TV at the moment we put on an old tape and a recorded Arena programme came up. It was called ‘Caesar’s Writers’ and really it was a tribute to Sid Caesar but it was most interesting in that there were ten writers of television comedy of the fifties (and sixties?) such marvellous shows as ‘I Love Lucy’ that used to have us all laughing away and every one of these writers was Jewish. Not a goy in sight and here they were, all old men reminiscing about their younger days and still cracking jokes. Now isn’t it interesting that all those rednecks out in the boondocks who are so anti-Semitic probably watched and enjoyed the programmes these men wrote without even thinking of them being written by Jews. This is all apropos of what I wrote a few Blogs back. My computer has just informed me that “who” in this context, three lines up, is wrong and I should have written “that.” Now my mom who was a teacher taught me that a thing is a that but a human being is a who. “The cat that sat on the mat.” “The boy who stroked the cat.” Also that things are “hung” but human beings are “hanged.” Rules might change but I will never get used to writing “that” when I know it should be “who.” It’s ingrained.
Mom, teaching in a boy’s junior school, used to tell a lovely story about one day having to take a scripture lesson because a certain teacher was off ill, so she decided to combine it with her art class and told the kids they could draw or paint anything they fancied as long as it was something to do with the Bible. I’ve told this story in my autobiography but not many people would have read it so I repeat it. Anyway, it would appear that one of the boys was familiar with Millais’ painting “Christ in the house of his parents” a beautiful painting which he had tried faithfully to reproduce adding a bit of authentication as over the top he had written “J.Christ and Son, Limited, Carpenters.” Well for a ten year or however old he was it’s quite logical when you come to think of it. If Jesus’ surname was Christ then Joseph’s must have been too. I presume Mary had she been mentioned would have been Mrs. Christ.
Is it our imagination or is air travel becoming more and more unhygienic? When any of us flies back to Crete we invariably go down with something nasty like a vicious cold or a virus infection. It’s all that recycled air I suppose carrying other people’s germs. I really do hate flying. And now I learn that certain strains of virus (brought back mainly from India it seems) are totally resistant to any of the antibiotics available. Life gets more complicated and more dangerous by the minute.