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.