Blogga-rhythm

 

Friday 11^th November and my parents arrive in Tinos, all the way from the Western Isles. They step off the Penelope into glorious windy sunshine which quickly evaporates over the next twenty-four hours to give way to gales, much like you would expect in Harris at this time of year. The ferries are cancelled. The shutters rattle through the night. We make the best of it, going on day trips in the van and getting the Scrabble and Monopoly (the name a lesson in Greek in itself) out in the evenings. Grandpa bankrupts everybody in Monopoly. Michael plays Scrabble with careless abandon yet still manages to win, much to the chagrin of those of us who live our lives according to the dictum, never give away a triple word score. Especially not to your children. If you do, you will weaken their moral fortitude and upset their sense of right and wrong. Possibly forever.

Eventually, the skies clear and the Tinos weather reverts to its default setting: sunny and windy.

 

First day at school, and Max falls foul of one of my stuff-everything-away-in-the-first-bag-that-comes-to-hand van tidying moments. He opens his schoolbag in class, expecting to find the usual assortment of pens, pencils and jotters but discovers instead hundreds of pipe-cleaners massed into one big clump the size of his head, a gift from Sam’s mother to keep the kids busy in the van on our journey across Europe. Mortified, Max zips up the bag as fast as he can lest his new classmates think this is what Scottish boys normally bring to school: pipe-cleaners, hunners of ‘em, every colour of the rainbow and then some.

English in the new school is easy, as it ought to be. Maths too, apparently. All other subjects are an impenetrable mystery to the boys, but even so, they are coming back each day with new Greek words. And not all of them swear words. Max’s Albanian classmate teaches him how to make convincing fake roll-ups using school paper and a bit of skilful colouring in. The teachers go on strike from time to time, but there’s no real inconvenience. Lessons are simply abandoned and the kids sent outside to play football until the buses arrive to take them home at the usual time.

Tinos is famous for its icon, the Megalochari, depicting the annunciation. The icon was reputed to have been buried beneath what is now the Church of the Evangelista on Tinos. It was dug up after a nun named Pelagia received visitations from the Virgin Mary to help her pinpoint its whereabouts on the island.

Getting ready for school one morning, Max receives a special visitation. We’re not sure who or what it is, but it appears in a bowl of Cheerios and appears to have a particularly cheery disposition. It’s remarkable, as good as Elvis-on-a-slice-of-burnt-toast or Mary-on-a-cheese-toastie.  

Hector celebrates his second birthday and Granny gives him a new toy car, a Mini Cooper. He loves it, drives jelly babies around in it and because he still has difficultly pronouncing the letter ‘c’, fondly refers to it from here on as The Mini Pooper.

With kids at school and nursery during the day, Sam and I are finally getting down to some work. I know from the clay and dust deposits on his clothes when he comes home that Sam is working on something in the marble studio. Either that or he spends the entire day sleeping on the balcony then slaps a bit of workshop dust onto his breeks before he cycles home. We try not to talk about ART too much. His or mine. Just in case the idea changes, which it often does when you embark on a new project, and the thing you end up with is an unrecognisable third cousin twice removed from the original idea. Best keep it to yourself.

After ten days of giving the boys extra maths and science lessons, taking Flora and Hector to the beach, doing a bit of sight-seeing and making Scottish pancakes,  Granny and Grandpa leave for Athens.

The wind drops to a whisper. The sea is creamy blue, small fishing boats making the most of the calm weather. I hang rugs and bedding out on the balconies, as everybody does here, sweep the tiled floors of the apartment and brush sand, vine leaves and fallen bougainvillea blossom off the steps.

Now that we are householders again, things feel different. I realise how much I enjoyed the novelty of van life: domestic routine pared down to the absolute essentials; the easy purposefulness of the road ahead; every day, new surroundings, a new challenge.

But then, it's easy to get nostalgic about things you don't have to cope with everyday. A family of chicken sellers are visiting Tinos this week. An entire Roma family living in a lorry, along with boxes and boxes of chickens for sale. Parents and kids live up front, the chickens are under tarpaulin in the back.  Working on the road a very different experience to simply travelling along it.

BEAUTIFUL TINOS

The last few nights in the van before we arrive in Tinos become increasingly challenging. Three weeks on the road and our air mattress (the one that didn’t explode) has gone a bit awry, ballooning up on one side. We take turns sleeping on ‘the hump’ but it’s not very satisfactory and I’m longing for a decent night’s sleep in a real bed. Flora and Hector have decided they prefer the air bed, hump and all, to sleeping in their own bunk bed. Four in a bed does not make for a restful night.

Our ferry to Tinos, the Theologos, takes about four hours in blissfully calm seas.
The ferrymen of Caledonian MacBrayne would have a fit the way the drivers start their engines and begin moving forwards before the ferry has docked. But this is still very orderly compared to our experience of catching a ferry in Montenegro. Everyone barges on like sheep going into a fank until the ferryman plonks a STOP sign in front of the vehicles. Of course, if you happen to be driving a BMW or Mercedes 4x4 and wearing designer shades, the traffic parts before you like the Red Sea in front of Moses.

When we disembark from the Tinos ferry, Petros and Annette are waiting to show us the way to our apartment at Porto. The main road wiggles down to the beach and there is our apartment, much closer to the sea than we had thought. ‘It’s very white,’ says Max. And so it is, inside and out. The kids are tired but we all feel ridiculously happy. We take what we need for the night out of the van and sleep better than we have for weeks. We can hear the sea, but we don’t see how close it is until the morning. It’s right there, little more than a stone’s throw away.

 

The beach at Porto is long and the bay is perfect for swimming. The locals are wearing puffer jackets and warm coats but our kids are in the sea, enjoying the sunshine. The lady in the mini-market up the road is worried we’re all going to catch our deaths.

Sam goes to have a shower and we hear a yelp of pain from the bathroom. We’ve all been getting little electric shocks from the taps but the shower is the best shocker of all. When we put the water heater on, the lights flicker and dim. Some go off altogether. Our landlord, Argiris, comes down and within ten minutes of arriving, he has an electrician here. The problem isn’t inside the apartment, it’s coming from the main cable into the house. An hour or so later, a man from the local electricity company shins up a pole outside the apartment and starts working on the spaghetti wiring. In no time at all, it’s fixed. Greece might be suffering severe economic problems, but I don’t think we could have got a hydro man out that quickly at home. Argiris is a man who clearly gets things done.

Petros, Annette and their daughter Katerina (married to Argiris) make sure we have everything we need. An oven arrives. A big fridge freezer. A washing machine. Dishes. We have the run of the downstairs apartment as well as this one. We feel extremely fortunate.

A couple of days after we arrive, Michael and Max begin to worry about school – or rather, the lack of it. We’ve had a few attempts at lessons, but it’s proving very difficult to give the big boys the attention they need while Flora and Hector are around. I am also feeling under pressure to finish my own work – editing a book on Harris Tweed for the photographer Ian Lawson. And Sam is keen to get down to Petros’ marble studio and make a start.

Sam and Annette visit the local school to make enquiries, and after traipsing around a few different offices, an arrangement is made to send Michael and Max to school here in Tinos. They start on Wednesday, 9^th November, and will catch the bus from the mini-market on the main road into town every day. The school day begins at 8am and finishes at 1.30pm. So far, the boys have managed to learn the Greek alphabet and count to twenty. All their lessons will be in Greek. Well, as they say, there’s no better way to learn a language than by total immersion.

The boys can’t help but compare their Greek headmaster to Mr Garvie back in Dornoch. Mr Garvie wears a suit and tie. The new headmaster wears a t-shirt and tracksuit. The new headmaster has a drinks cabinet and an ashtray in his office. Unlike Mr Garvie. As far as we know. The school is lovely – marble columns and plants everywhere and the children are friendly.

We discover there is a nursery about 10 minutes drive away from our apartment. I spend a morning there with Flora and Hector and they love it. A minibus stops at the shop in Porto every weekday morning to collect the nursery children and take them home again. Sam and I decide to enrol both Flora and Hector. Already, they can say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in Greek after one morning’s attendance at the nursery.

It would be fair to say that Tinos is a very windy place. The wind has been blowing pretty hard since we arrived and it’s forecast to keep blowing for some time. My parents arrive in Athens on Thursday evening and we have our fingers crossed for a bit of nice sailing weather for their crossing to Tinos on Friday morning.

STARRY ALBANIAN SKIES, Athens, 1 November

The border guards at Montenegro see us coming. A mile off. Our van, despite being fitted out with bunk beds, a sink, a cooker and a family of six, is apparently not a camper. It is a commercial vehicle. We try and argue our case, but the guard smiles knowingly and points to our vehicle registration document. Commercial vehicle. N1 classification. It says so, right there. We have to pay him 80 euros for a sticker with N1 printed on it so that everyone we meet on the road through Montenegro will know that contrary to all appearances, we are not a camper van but a commercial vehicle masquerading as a camper van. We kick ourselves for not updating the vehicle documents before we left home then move on to the next guard.

He sees us coming here too. Taking our passports and our vehicle documents, he tells us our insurance is invalid for Montenegro. Sam argues the case, but the guard is intractable and insists we must buy insurance from a company conveniently situated across the road from the checkpoint. If we don’t buy the insurance, he won’t let us through. We are in a quandary, but in the end we fork out. We feel like innocents abroad and determine not to spend another cent in Montenegro.

Just as we are leaving the border, I see one of the guards begin a vehicle inspection. As he bends over to take a look in the back of the car, the driver tucks something into the breast pocket of the guard’s jacket. The car is waved on. That’s how it’s done, then.

The Montenegran coast is stunning and a bit bling: lots of nightclubs and casinos; beachside apartment blocks; men sitting or standing outside cafés. When we arrive at the Albanian border, we pass through without any problems. Our destination is a Dutch-owned campsite about an hour’s drive away.

The first sign that Albania is different to every other country we have passed through comes with the road sweepers. No gully sooker machine here. There are women in headscarves with large brooms sweeping leaves off a new stretch of dual carriageway in the dark.

We arrive at the campsite at 10pm to find the metal gates of the campsite closed. A young boy runs out of the main building and welcomes us in Dutch-accented English before directing us to a suitable pitch. We can’t help but notice he is accompanied by a man carrying a shotgun.

I am suddenly conscious of how starry the Albanian sky is. Parked up on the edge of the campsite, I look out into the blackness. There are no streetlights but a lot of barking dogs. Walking across to the toilet block, I pass the night watchman sitting on a plastic chair and smoking a cigarette, his shotgun across his knees. The boys don’t want to sleep in the tent, and Sam ends up getting turfed out of the van. Again.

The morning dawns bright and warm and as soon as we’ve had breakfast, we make our way along country roads to the main highway. Here are a few of the things we saw on and adjacent to the Albanian motorway: horses and carts; cows tethered in the central reservation; cyclists coming the wrong way along the dual carriageway; countless old Mercedes’ full of people; children riding donkeys and eating crisps at the same time; haystacks; butchers slaughtering and selling meat on the verge; boys herding turkeys; a perplexing number of new or half-built petrol stations; men pushing wheelbarrows; and people. All along the main highway into Greece there are Albanian people walking, carrying suitcases, leading animals, climbing over crash barriers, selling fruit, hubcaps and plastic bottles of engine oil.

Every so often, a fast bit of tarmac ends without warning and we are driving on gravel. Nowhere do we see a supermarket. The potholes in the road are cavernous. A bread shop sells a few stale white loaves and a lot of bags of flour. This is a country in transition. Albania has applied for EU membership but I can’t imagine how this squares with the roadside butchers and the people who use the highway like a country road. We feel anxious for the donkey riders and the shepherds dodging the speeding traffic. Once this road is finished, it will be lethal.

Not long after discussing this, we come across an accident. There is blood smeared across the road and a lot of people standing about. We think a cow has been killed but we can’t be sure. A couple of hours later, we see an enormous wild pig hit by a lorry. There are dead dogs every few kilometres. The highway feels like a big, brutal thing seared into the landscape.

After queuing for an hour or so, we cross the border into northern Greece and spend the night in the mountains. We visit Meteora where there are monasteries and nunneries perched on the top of cliffs. My vertigo sees me lying on the floor of the van as we wind our way up the mountain, trying not to look. Sam takes Michael, Max and babies to the edge of the cliff while I lurk behind the van feeling pathetic.

By evening, we are in Athens, enjoying the hospitality of Ruth and Emilios Bourantinos. This evening, we catch the ferry to Tinos. It feels very strange to think of actually arriving.