Scrubber. At Camping Koutsounari, our accidental home, there’s a laundry with these excellent washboard sinks that make determined scrubbing so much more effective. It’s attached to the women’s toilets. Of course it is. I’m sure I’m the first man in here this year and I might be the only one. For Greek men housework happens […]

Fantasy food. We often have a fantasy food conversation, dreaming, perhaps drooling, over what we’d most like to eat. It’s not just because our options have reduced to what we can cook. If there’s a top three Minty’s choice always involves pizza, currently she longs for chicken souvlaki. My 15 years living in Birmingham were […]

Living on Crete. When we arrived on Lefkada in November 2018 we had many conversations about living in Greece. How strange that 18 months later we effectively live on Crete, but not by choice. While it’s not by choice we have no objections. Climbing back onto my bike. I bought my Orange P7 at least […]

Minty convinced me to post a blog today and send some sunshine, and a semblance of normality, out to the world. Ierapetra. On Friday 13th as the grip of the virus tightened around Greece we arrived at Camping-Koutsounari a few kms outside of the fruit growing town of Ierapetra. Ierapetra looks rough, dirty, functional.  Unusually for Crete there’s […]

Amari Dam. The excuses have run out, it’s time to leave our Kalyves base. But let’s not get too adventurous eh? After 40 miles of gentle meandering through the hills we parked on the water’s edge at Amari reservoir. Ahead the highest mountain on the island, Mount Ida or Psilortis, towers at 2456m. It still […]

Vamos. The idea of restoring a house is anathema to most Greeks. Why do all that work? You could just let it fall down while you half build a new concrete framed monster in the garden that never gets finished. Yet high up a hill above our adopted home of Kalyves there’s the village of […]