A really hot day 25C for much of the time, so keeping a cool breeze flowing through the attic was essential. With atmospheric pollution level much reduced by less aerial traffic, weather warnings of high ultra violet levels were issued, so I needed to exercise in the shade as much as possible.
Everything slows down in the heat and the days pass more slowly. I am really missing going out for a long walk. I'm bored with walking around the house in circles. It's trying my patience and Clare's!
I'm roughly half way through transcribing my Greek travel journal now. We've started hitch-hiking around Crete after several days spent on island beaches in the Cyclades and have been befriended by an olive farmer called Yanni Motakis in Platanes in the middle of Crete's north coast. Through him we were introduced to village life and fiestas, and to traditional Cretan music.
Co-incidentally as I was getting to this passage there was a radio article from a BBC correspondent in Crete giving an account of the importance of this unique form of music and song. I wanted Clare to hear this, but failed to find it on BBC Sounds. Instead, I found an hour long documentary made by the same woman, related to the article I'd heard. What a treasure! I tingled all over as I listened and wrote.
It took me back fifty three years to the profound educational experience of spending time with Clare as the only guests in a rural Greek village community far from existing tourism, and the hippie trail emerging at that time. I learned that Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were among youngsters who hung out in the Matala cave houses of the ancient Minoan port of Gortys, a bay with a beach we didn't go to when we hitched from Heracleon to Platanes.
We returned to Platanes for a three week stay in the summer, and stayed in touch with Yanni for several years. It was difficult as he had so little English and my Greek was more New Testament than contemporary. The next time we returned to look for Yanni was thirty years later. We met his nephew Niko, who told us over a glass of raki that he had died ten years earlier. All we were able to do was visit his grave and express our appreciation for the influence of his hospitality on us when we were still discovering the kind of adults we wanted to be.
His legacy has certainly been a great blessing to the local economy, as he drove the development of land he owned for the benefit of visitors in the seventies after the fall of the Colonels' junta - the Motakis Holiday Village bears the family name. The olive press where I bedded down for the night is now a discotheque. The once deserted shore behind the long beach is lined with apartments and frequented by package tourists from all over Europe and further afield.
It might not have occurred to Yanni at first that anyone might be willing to pay to stay. He was just interested in people from other places, and several of our friends who followed us backpacking in Crete, visited him in passing. He never married, his mother was widowed early with ten children, and he took his duty seriously as the eldest son, making friends with many people instead. I wonder if we'll ever return to Crete, now that the world we helped to remake as we grew up is turned upside down by this pandemic?
In the evening, I started reviewing my time in Ibiza and making notes, as I have to write an end-of-stay report to write for the diocese, and this stay was not only my longest spell in Spain, but also the most different from any other, with lots to think about and learn from, as the 'new normal' becomes a context for mission and ministry in way we never thought of before.
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