Day 41 – Reflections on The Olives

It's like running the marathon, only to fall 10 metres before the finishing line.

After seven days of hard labour, and after loading up the car with 15 sacks of olives the night before, we sleep in and miss the boat to Kos to watch them being pressed into olive oil. Doh!

Oh well, there's always next year. No wait. There won't be a next year because we'll have a very important meeting to attend next November somewhere in the world.

The news arrives from Kos that we have 50 litres of fresh, organic olive oil to survive on for the coming year. We reflect. Well done us. The pain and complaining temporarily forgotton.

Let’s try really hard and take some positive learning outcomes from our week-long olive-picking experience. Let's look for deeper meaning.

The harvest has taught us:

1. Never underestimate a tree. Although a tree may look quite small, the likelihood is that it in fact GIGANTIC, with LOADS of branches and MILLIONS of fruits.


2. There is no such thing as “olive green”. There are loads of different shades of green to be found on an olive tree.
3. Plumbling and indoor toilets are a good thing.

SHARE YOUR WISDOM (PAIN)
Have you ever experienced a week of agricultural and learned something?

Day 40 - We Hate Agriculture

The final day of olive picking - at last.



There was a thunderstorm last night and some of the olives have been struck from the trees by hailstones. We can still get the olives but it means picking them out of the mud rather than off a branch. Michael says, "Now I know how the poor farmers feel when their crop is ruined by the weather."

We point out that it's a matter of a couple of kilos of olives and seeing as how this is his hobby rather than anything remotely resembling a livelihood, he probably still has a way to go to understand the pain of being wiped out by the elements.



Meanwhile, we now have the tiniest understanding of the pain of the farm labourer. That's seven days in the field, taking a sniff at the world of agriculture and neither of us likes it. We are tired and we are bored. Where is the art? Where is the glamour? The moment the last olive is picked, we pack up and leave immediately - there are no happy songs to celebrate the end of harvest, we just want to get the hell out of there.



So, while Michael hoses off the dirt from the last olives that had to plucked from the mud, we turn our backs on the plantation and troop off back to town, trying to forget fields and trying to remember cafes and conversations, heavy traffic and shopping, and other city-style comforts.



The countryside: it's nice for a day trip...



OLIVE SUMMARY

7 days

3 labourers

300 kilos picked

60 litres of oil (expected)

Day 39 - Couldn't Eat Olive Them

We’re up at 8.00 and leave at 8.30, as planned. We go to Vothini and pick olives again for the sixth day in a row. What began last week as an amusing diversion has become actual agriculture, the kind that peasants do.

For God’s sake, both of us went to good schools – this is not how things were supposed to turn out.

Put it this way: if we’re still living in Kalymnos next year then we will take our holidays at this time. There will be an unavoidable meeting somewhere far away. We will be booked up. We’ll be getting our hair done. There will be an excuse.

STATISTICS: Today we picked a total of 87 kg in about 8 hours. We have now completed 37 trees out of 44. We should finish tomorrow.

Day 38 - Sacrifice

As detailed yesterday, we have no warm clothes. When we moved from Scotland, these were all left behind in the belief that Greece would be warmer than it actually is. Now it turns out that we can’t sleep because we’re so cold.
In fact, falling asleep would be easy if it wasn’t for the fear that our dormant bodies’ temperatures might drop to cryogenic levels and we might never wake up again.


The only solution: break some funds and buy warm pyjamas. Things are not cheap here and, owing to our budget, we need maximum warmth for minimum dollar. This means compromising on style.


Nicole ends up with ill-matched fleecy pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, of various patterns and colours. The catwalks of Paris can wait.


Paul, as you can see, winds up in the kind of costume preferred by alcoholic wife-beaters from British housing estates, circa 1984. The only things missing are the accessories: sovereign rings, can of Kestrel lager and the Kensitas Club cigarettes. Terrifying.


OLIVE HARVEST UPDATE
By the way – today was day 5 of picking olives. We started at noon and picked 38 kilos in 5 hours. We have now completed 27 trees out of 44 and the novelty is wearing thin. We decide on an earlier start tomorrow – let’s get started at 8.30am and get this finished in two days.

Day 37 - Freezing

We wake up beside each other, Nicole shivering to keep warm, Paul already horrifyingly frozen inside a solid block of ice, a silent scream forever etched on his face.

The temperature drops and we are re-learning the meaning of winter. Our first floor flat is made from concrete and has no ground floor – it’s effectively on stilts - so when the North wind blows, it gets right under our floor and turns the flat into a fridge.

All of the fleeces, jumpers and thermal underwear that we accumulated in Scotland failed to make the final cut when we packed to come here. They were too bulky and, hey, Greece is hot! Now we suffer.

The key factor we failed to consider was that nearly our entire winters in Scotland were lived indoors under the spell of central-heating. The only time those bulky, woolly items came into play were for the odd walk in the country or once-a-year snowball fight in Kelvingrove Park. How jolly.

The shops, cafes, cars, pubs and houses where we really spent our time were all heated to a comfortable, uniform twenty-one degrees. It is entirely possible that living in the city made us forget what seasons are.

Now we have moved to Greece, where there is plenty of air-con but no central heating. Its understandable: it was so hot here this summer that the country literally went on fire. But that was August and this is November so, for the next few months, we’d better put a jumper on.

What’s it like living in a hot country? We don’t know – ask someone from Scotland.

OLIVES UPDATE

Number of olives picked: millions

Number of olives still to pick: billions

Day 35 - Fatal Snake Attack

We walk to Vothini to pick (more) olives. The monotony of harvest is broken in the afternoon when one of the guys selling vegetables from the back of a pickup suddenly pulls up outside the plantation and starts shouting "Fithi, fithi!" which translates as "Snake, snake!" Turns out that he has partially driven over a snake which is now suffering in the road. We go to the gate to see the reptile dazed, but getting ready to slither off. The vegetable salesman has different ideas and backs up his truck to roll over the snake a second time. Then, with the help of Maria giving him directions, he rolls his fat back wheels backwards and forwards over the creature's body three times more, just to make sure. Finally, he rests the full weight of his vehicle right on top of the snake's head just to make absolutely, definitely certain of a kill. This is all done without much excitement, and when the vegetable salesman rolls his wheel away and he and Maria are satisfied that the snake's twitching is only reflex action, they nod their approval of a job well done and no more is said. He drives off to sell vegetables and we go back to work. The scaly corpse of the snake is left in the road and opinion is split. Nicole thinks the serpent could have been dangerous and it's a good job the veg guy came when he did. Paul and Michael think that the snake was harmless and should have been left alone. The truth is, we don't know whether it was dangerous or not. Can any experts out there tell us from the picture exactly what animal died today?

Day 34 - A Pickin Good Time

It’s harvesting time again. Today we head to Michael’s olive plantation to pick olives and have them pressed into tasty organic olive oil. The trees are heavily pregnant and about to drop.

The true realities of farming dawn on Nicole when she realises there will be no bathroom facilities. This produces a mild shock, exacerbated by the working track-suits and trainers required for the job. Not one to enjoy dressing down, Nicole attempts to maintain some sense of glamour and insists, as a bare minimum, on a splash of lipstick and perfume, at the somewhat bemusement of Paul and Michael.

We take the coastal, nerve shattering cliff-top drive to the orchard on the West side of the island, and get to work. The sunshine beats down and the car radio serenades us with Greek melodies. At the first tree, we each start in a different position and work in a clock-wise direction. Michael instructs us in the technique for collecting: slowly picking one olive at a time and being careful not to put any leaves or stems in the collection buckets, as it will make the olive oil bitter.

Fine we think, not knowing any better, after all it is only going to take three days according to Michael.

Time marches on and 11.30am rolls into 1.30pm - lunch time. The good news is we have collected twenty-five kilos of olives between us. The not so good news is that it is all off one tree.

Michael is very relaxed about the situation. However, we are slightly concerned at the size of the task at hand and cut our lunch break short to get started on the next tree. We work non-top picking olive after olive until the sun goes down at 5.30pm, by which time we have cleared less than three trees.

There are fifty two trees to be picked!

At this rate, we calculate, it will take twenty-six days to finish the job. However, despite the naked, raw facts of the situation, Michael still insists that it is a three-day job. We can’t quite follow the algorithms used in his calculations.

No bother though: whilst our old office-based lives seem light years away today; Nicole has surprisingly discovered that she enjoyed the day’s labour; Paul always thought he would, and we can always adjust our business research plans.

So, exhausted, we head home to get an early night’s sleep, ready for another day in the field tomorrow.