Room With a View

So, the building work next door has been pretty rapid and we now have splendid view from our South window in the bedroom, thus:


It's actually very interesting. As the day moves on and the sun makes his daily journey from East to West, the intricate play of light and brick becomes eternally mesmerising and completely fascinating.

(Not.)

Day 56 - Easy Meat

Good news: the mosquitoes are getting easier to kill.

The colder weather has made their movement sluggish and they are not the devils they were in the summer. Before they would zip, fly and tear around like fighter planes - now they struggle from perch to perch like a drunk man walking home.

Only a few weeks ago our night's sleep would be constantly interrupted by buzzing and biting. We would wake up in the middle of the night, exhausted from being eaten, and have to chase the elusive bastardos around the room with books, cursing if they jumped in time and whooping like American sports fans whenever one got splatted.

Now the whole affair is more nonchalant. If one buzzles past your face you can bang your hands together in mid-air and kill it that way - easy.

During working hours, Nicole has perfected the one-handed kill, where a passing mozzy is merely plucked from the air and crushed without the other hand ever leaving the computer keyboard.

You don't need a book any more. You can just walk up to them as they lie sleeping on the wall and finish them with a little one-inch punch from the heel of your fist.

In the background of our minds is the horror of summer but, for now, we are the dominant life-form in this house. Fear us, insects!

Day 27 - Checkmate For White

We’re both up early enough to launch the final assault on the painting. Feelings of purity flow though our souls as white paint eliminates all traces of colour.

Today’s stains to die: pink on metal banister, blue on a mirror frame, brown rust on the front door and bathroom shelf brackets.

It’s like winning at RISK – our favourite colour builds and conquers. Today we reached the point in the game where we know there can be no other winner but white. Sickly pink, suicide blue and dumper brown are memories of the old order. White is the queen now and her reign is sublime.

We agree that in the future, following this nightmarish experience, we will outsource all painting contracts.

Day 25 - The Void

Once we decided to come here from our old life in Glasgow we faced a decision regarding the possessions which filled our flat: whether to sell or whether to store.

We chose to sell and thus spent three weeks on eBay and Gumtree trying to get rid of our stuff. We whooped when the piano went for more than expected and we grumbled when the misers of the Milngavie car-boot sale sloped off with our best books for just fifty pence each.

As yet, we do not miss our objects, articles and things. The flat here in Kalymnos is not massive but it’s spacious enough, as it’s not full of stuff. After all, a human can only read one book at a time so perhaps the game is to read and dump rather than amassing. Chuck it in the gutter to avoid utter clutter!

So now the walls are white and there are precious few objects on the scene, the flat feels like a gallery. Nice – but complete minimalism does have its drawbacks. One item we could do with is an extension cord.

For now, our micro-short kettle lead and the gap between socket and worktop mean that the only way to get a cuppa is via the pictured arrangement of chair and paint pot. In fact, let’s keep up the chic mystique and call it an installation!

Day 13 - Dangerous Liaisons

In an attempt to use our oven and boil an egg, we nearly gas ourselves. After turning the hob on full, the knob comes away in our hand – but the gas keeps on a comin’. Bugger. Don’t panic; just turn the gas off at the bottle? It’s stuck and won’t turn. Bugger. As the gas swirls around us we start to panic.

Nicole runs around shouting and opening all doors and windows; Paul continues to fight with the gas bottle, and eventually wins. Somewhat shaken we ask Michael when the stove was last used, “God knows” he replies and tells us to calm down, relax; it’s just a little gas. Hmm… what side of the war were the Greeks fighting on again?

Michael also informs us not to worry about the fiery sparks when plugging electrical goods into the sockets dangling from the walls by the earth wire alone. He does, however, get very upset when he discovers that most of the octopus has been eaten.

A covert call will be made to a local electrician tomorrow.

We realise today that we are going to have to up the ante on our language lessons when Paul, trying to comment on the size of the birds in Michael’s trees, inadvertently tells him he has a large penis, and Nicole, concerned about Maria’s health, asks her when she is getting divorced.

Meanwhile, an ambulance has broken down at the wharf and is being pushed by one smoking paramedic while the other smoking paramedic at the wheel attempts to start the battered, white transit van with a red cross hastily painted on the side.

The sight reminds Nicole of a previous experience at the island’s hospital that involved an intravenous line being dropped on the floor, quickly picked up, and then rammed into a patient’s arm. This is probably the only NHS in Europe where the ten-second rule is officially part of the hospital legislation.

Day 7 - Death to The Sideboard

For days we have been waiting to get rid of the monster sideboard. It’s too big to get down the stairs. We can’t chop it into bits or throw it over the balcony because Michael insists on it’s sentimental value and has laid down the condition that the beast must remain in one piece, for storage, for some unimaginable future in which the poorly constructed, ugly, gigantic sideboard suddenly becomes more useful to him that the fairly tasteful modern furniture he has in his house.

Two days ago we asked him how, back in the 1970s, they managed to get the eyesore into the flat in the first place. He said it was raised by ropes, on to the balcony and carried through the window. So we have already decided that this is pretty much the only way to get it out again.

Problem is that we have a small collection of inadequate ropes and a total manpower of the two of us. Michael doesn’t like things happening quickly and keeps stalling, insisting that we need “strong men” and proper pulley gear to do the job. Left to him, there will be a string of excuses and it will never happen.

If we were to start the job under our own steam, Michael would rush from his front door, wave his arms, tell us we are doing it wrong and insist that we stop.
But a window of opportunity opens after lunch when Michael decides to go to Vothini, on the other side of the island to water his plantation of olive trees.
Within minutes of his departure we are both bent double over the railing, the awesome beast straining the cords from our grasp and then… we run out of rope. There’s still a foot to the ground and there’s no choice but to drop it.

The sideboard falls, we race down the stairs to inspect the damage and by a combination of amazing luck and the way that it falls into a pile of sticks, it’s OK. One of the legs has been knocked, so now it’s got two wonky legs. No big deal. We store the sideboard at the back of the yard and return to the flat to cackle insanely over how much room there is now.
Less is more!

Day 5 - Our Box Turns Up

Miraculously, our shipped belongings turn up only one week and two days after we sent them from Glasgow. It's miraculous because in the absence of street names or house numbers, the only address is Michael’s name, followed by the name of the nearest church. There is a postcode, but it is shared by all 15,000 residents on the island.


Dinner is octopus and onions, made by Michael. He is very proud of his cookery.


Later, we go for a walk and sit by the wharf in the middle of town. We reflect how nice it is to be able to sit outside at midnight in just a t-shirt and shorts (23 degrees C) and with absolutely NO chance of being harassed by aggressive drunks.

Day 4 - Filth

The flat is filthy. The inch-thick grime on the top of the kitchen cupboards has a vaguely green hue to its overall brown-ness. I scrape dark things from the oven.

We negotiate with Michael over the removal of furniture including a gigantic sideboard which could hold enough beer to get Chas and Dave pissed nineteen times.

It is the ugliest furniture in the world but Michael says it has sentimental value. If so then why is it stuffed away in the flat rather than down in his house? Eventually we agree to lower it out of the window tomorrow by ropes and have it stored at Kelly’s (empty) house in Brosta.

Paul removes branches from a large fig tree by sawing them off from our kitchen window so we can open our shutters and have some light. As Paul hangs out of the window with Nicole holding him by the legs, Health and Safety is but nostalgia.