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.