A fond farewell to Scalpay School

Last Friday, I took a trip over to the Western Isles to attend an event celebrating 134 years of Scalpay School – and to mark its closing at the end of this term.

There’s something very strange about stepping over the threshold of your first ever classroom after an absence of nearly forty years. Structurally, the room looked just the same. The colours are brighter now (yellow, green and white instead of light grey and dark grey) and every available wall space today is busy with words, pictures, projects.

Home again, home again

I'm aware this blog gives the impression we're still in Greece, but that is not the case. We got home on 15th April after making  a smooth and speedy journey.

PING-PONG AND SALSA DANCING

Tinos isn’t a particularly big island (resident population about the same as the Highland town of Tain) so I’m astonished to discover there are 71 men signed up for the Tinos Winter Table Tennis Tournament (try saying that quickly), one of whom is Sam. If you’re a bloke, the place to be on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday nights is the ping-pong club. Sam played his first match of the tournament last Saturday. Bad luck, he was drawn against one of last year’s finalists, a fellow who travels regularly to Athens to compete in club matches. Okay, so he lost, but not too badly, and there’s still a chance he’ll go through to the next round if he beats the other guys in his group. Let’s hear it for Scotland! Who says I’m averse to showing some national pride?

It’s worth pointing out that there is a distinct lack of anything resembling pub culture in Tinos. It simply doesn’t exist. Civilised coffee drinking with friends and family in pleasant cafés, yes (such as my latest haunt, the newly opened Halaris Art Café). But going out to get blootered on the weekend? Nope. And why would you anyway, when you could be playing ping-pong? It’s free. It’s a sport in which middle-aged men with beer bellies can obliterate the youthful competition. And it gets you out of the house THREE NIGHTS A WEEK.

Feeling the need for a little change of scene myself, but careful not to clash with ping-pong, I’ve got my third Latin dance class this evening with the incredibly elegant and terrifyingly bendy dance instructor, Georgia. We do rumba, salsa and cha-cha-cha on Mondays and Wednesdays.

A short word now on cultural differences. Max was unwell a couple of weeks ago, plagued by headaches, so we took him to the children’s doctor in Tinos. She wanted to check his neck for any stiffness, so she asked him to say no.

Max: No.

Doctor: No, not like that. Say no.

Max: Uh…no?

Doctor: No! Make a no.

Doc then demonstrates how people say no in Greece: upwards tilt of the head, roll of the eyes.

Doctor: Got it?

Max: Tilts head and rolls eyes towards the ceiling.

All of which makes perfect sense now we know what’s been going on. You go into a shop, ask for something obscure, like fish fingers, and the person behind the counter rolls their eyes at you and glances at the ceiling. You think they’re being dismissive or they reckon you’re a crazy foreigner. But they’re just saying NO! The Greek way. It’s a revelation. (The whole ‘no’ thing is made even more complicated by the face that ‘yes’ in Greek is pronounced ‘nay’.)

While listening to Max’s chest, the doctor did what doctor’s do and asked him to breathe in and out. I guess it was a direct translation from Greek (or more likely Latin) but she asked him to ‘inspire’ and ‘expire’. Technically correct, but I’m relieved to inform you that the boy didn’t expire on command and is now fully recovered from a bout of sinusitis.

Michael and Max have left their Greek school now and for the remainder of their stay in Tinos are having private lessons in Greek language and history from Professor Takis. Takis is an expert in Greek ethnology but lost his teaching job last year due to government cuts. Since then, he has been working in the local computer shop. Last week, the shop closed down suddenly and Takis no longer has a job. Lots of local shops have closed down since we arrived here.

A day out, some fishing and a sand beer belly before the weather turned stormy:

So the weather really did turn cold (relatively speaking - nothing compared to what's happening in Serbia and even the north of Greece) and we had a string of power cuts and some stonking electrical storms. The beach has rearranged itself again and is very different from the stretch of shore we first saw back in October. All sorts of strange rock formations have been uncovered by fierce southerly winds. People here get quite depressed here when the weather is bad. Greek women always manage to look classy no matter what the weather’s doing (maybe it’s the shades?), but many of the men appeared to have raided their grandpa’s clothes closets and were sporting days of stubble growth. For extra warmth?

Festivals keep the islanders’ spirits up through the winter months. Carnival is happening in ten days and a festival of lights took place recently. For a small place, where people are really feeling the pinch, there is an admirable amount of enthusiasm for public events.

Some of you have been wanting to know how I’m getting on with making myself memorable to the Bin Dude. The truth is we haven’t seen him – or any of the scaffies – for some time now. They’re on strike. And I don’t blame them. But there is quite a lot of rubbish piling up here and there. The feral cats are having a field day.

And finally, some new artwork by Flora and Sam. One of the pictures is of Flora by Sam. Another is of Sam by Flora. But can you tell which is which?

Bin lorry algorithms

It’s back to the blog after a few weeks of family festivities and the pleasant inertia of school holidays. Our bin men are also back to work and we’re trying to work out when they are most likely to turn up. Like most things in life, the answer is raising more questions than the question itself.

The VW Beetle-driving, Peruvian-woolly-hat-wearing Bin Dude responds by politely telling us ‘sometimes on a Wednesday, usually on a Monday, never on a Tuesday and occasionally on a Saturday.’ On Tuesday morning, the bin lorry arrives, a schedule-shattering enigma. We’ve seen it sail past the end of the street without stopping, empty some bins and not others, empty the bin three times in one week then fail to stop by for a fortnight. It’s a mystery we feel can only be explained by the Bin Dude himself in the form of an algorithm difficult for him to explain and even harder for us to understand. Argiris has another take on it: ‘If he’s thinking about you when he drives past your house, he’ll empty your bin.’ I’m actively working on ways to make myself memorable to the Bin Dude.

Friends and family amaze us by being together enough to send (and bring with them) Christmas presents from far and wide. We are now considering heading home on a container ship to accommodate all the toy cars, sticker books, tambourines, t-shirts and new socks, not to mention the ‘all seasons’ golf umbrella from Phoebe and Will which Bill and Caro left behind and retrieved several times on the journey between Auchencairn Central and Athens International Airport.

Flora and Hector make their stage debut at the Greek nursery Christmas panto. None of us are quite sure what's going on, but there's a lot of cleaning activity with dusters and mops.
Stellar performances from the wee ones.

We decide to give ourselves a Tinos Christmas present and choose a hand-painted icon. It is a Madonna and Child pose known as ‘the sweet kiss’. We like it a lot.

Kicking myself for forgetting the camera, we see Santa arrive in Tinos on 31^st December. He is riding a donkey and accompanied by the Tinos brass band. He gives every child, regardless of age or gender, a football and pelts us with sweeties, quite hard. It’s a mounted chocolate attack by a man in a badly fitting red nylon suit, scary and exciting at the same time, just like Santa ought to be.

I’m finding it disconcerting and lovely to experience spring in winter. Tinos is green; there are long-eared lambs and black and white goat kids everywhere. Farmers are preparing terraces for planting crops and fields of lush grass and alfalfa are growing. A couple of stormy days and I start thinking, this is it. Winter. It’s got to be. And then the next day dawns sunny and blue.

The big boys and I decide to spend a night in Syros. Half an hour on the super-fast ferry from Tinos and we arrive in what was once the capital of Greece. Syros has a distinctive Italian/Venetian feel to it: a theatre; a posh mayor’s building; a marble-flagged square occupied by cheerful skateboarders; cool graffiti; and… a cinema! We are devastated to discover that Mission Impossible 4 starts the evening we leave and that Friday night’s showing is Happy Feet 2. We decide to give Happy Feet a miss and M & M spend a blissful couple of online hours in the company of YogCast. Our room in Syros includes a colour-changing bathroom shower that goes from blue through green to red and back again. All I’m missing is a BeeGees soundtrack. It almost feels wrong, like I’ve woken up in Twilights disco in Stornoway with nae claes on. Michael has never given his ablutions so much attention. By the time we catch the ferry back to Tinos, we feel as if we’ve been in the city and lived a bit.

M & Max are shocked they only have two months left in Tinos before they fly to Slovenia to spend some time with Tommy. They are excited about the arrival of new visitors marked on our calendar: Eileen, Hugh and Sophie in February; Jill and Bev in March. Max continues to take pictures of household objects to good effect. Here is a fridge magnet illuminated by a ray of sunshine and the bottom of the washing up liquid bottle:

Sam and I are alarmed that half our time here is gone and there is still a great deal to do on the creative endeavours front. But not so much to do that we can resist a Sunday afternoon in a taverna in the mountains with Katerina and Argiris, eating tsatziki and Tinos sausage, drinking local red wine and generally having a good old time.

Happy New Year.