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.

Bill's Guest Blog

It’s a good thing they’ve asked a guest blogger in because there’s stuff Anne isn’t ever going to tell you herself, not because she’s trying to hide it, but because it’s too close to her own nose to think it’s important, and because they’re a modest bunch anyway.

She’ll never tell you she gets up at 5.30 most mornings to get some writing done before another day of crazy demands kicks in; or that Petros refuses to hear Sam spoken of as a pupil, only as a professional. Each day Sam goes 5 miles to Petro’s studio for another day of chippety-chip, releasing captive image from marble block with remarkable sensitivity. M & M  join him there most days for a couple of hours after school finishes at 2.30, and are both carving extraordinarily mature images.

      Michael and Max with their marble carvings

But it’s still tough being part of a team of 6, each having different objectives – though everyone clearly shares the idea of getting the most out of their time in Tinos. I mean, Anne would like to get to the end of the beach to see what that little church is all about, it’s only a few hundred yards, but then Hector needs to make an in-depth study of the ripples in the first puddle when you throw a stone in, which means repeating the experiment about 500 times in the same puddle before moving on, so Anne hasn’t got to that church yet.

Actually Hector’s best thing is standing where sea meets land, totally mesmerised by the never ending, ever changing miracle of waves, and throwing stones with perfect timing to stop them, in a manner of which Canute himself would be proud. Whilst meanwhile Flora has been assigned the task by no less than God himself to inject PASSION into everyday life, to  not let anyone be fooled by the apparent banality of a jam sandwich or putting on your wellington boots, but to introduce true feeling into our simple tasks. If ever you are feeling lost and need to re-firm your connection with the Universe, then go hang out with Flora for a while.

Carvings are above every window to 'let in the light of God'        

Maquette by Sam

                                                                              

Madonna and Child above a fountain

Michael and Max are remarkable. They leave the house at 7.30 each morning, not because they are forced to (M & M, please confirm), but because they want to participate in peer life on the island, which in their case involves sitting though many hours of lessons that are all Greek to them, in order to join in the short, though many, breaks between classes when international communication affords them Real Education. Max can now say “I don’t want another ouzo” in Greek, and Michael can order a pork wrap with chips, ready-to-go.

This evening we all went to a café in town to hang out with Petros’ family, while M & M entertained us on accordion and drums with professional flair, and Michael fooled everyone by making light balls disappear into his mouth and re-appear out of his bum. Surely 10% off the ouzo for that?

None of which tells you what it’s really like here; for the very simple reason that if you really want to know, then you’ll have to come yourself, because there is no other way.

Praise be to Sam and Anne for their patience - and a Happy New Year to all !     Bill

Papa, F & H contemplate the waves                

                                                                       Pavement sign              

                                                        Nana and the team hunting a sand beetle

The eternal ocean

A DAY AT THE DOOCOT

Georges has invited us to spend the day with him and his family at a dovecot he’s made into a little mountain retreat among the olive terraces. We rendezvous with Georges outside his photographic shop/studio in town on Sunday morning so he can show us the way to the peristerioni. During the summer months, the family work long hours in their shop and restaurant, so winter is the time to be together in the beautifully restored dovecot.

Doocots are a common sight in Tinos, some of them big as houses, all of them decorated with the same distinctive circles and triangles that look like a face. Quite a scary face. They appear like totems amongst the terraces. The bird droppings collected from inside are used to fertilise the surrounding land.

 

The doves are long gone from Georges’ birdhouse. As well as rebuilding the surrounding terrace walls, he has transformed the inside of the building into the best mountain hideaway EVER. Upstairs, there are Tinos tapestries and paintings on the walls of the tiny bedroom, kerosene lamps, handmade chairs, an antique writing desk. Downstairs, if it wasn’t for the photograph showing a young Georges sitting proudly on his motorbike, it would be hard to tell what century we are in.

We drink Greek coffee and eat custard pastries outside while the kids play on the terraces. Paraskevi - Georges and Evangelista’s daughter – is three months older than Hector and capable of trotting along the top of the walls with ease, not in the slightest put off by the four metre drop to the terrace below. The little kids collect black olives while the bigger ones play cards.

Evangelista serves up a fantastic meal for lunch. The pasta is made by her mother in the north of Greece using wheat, oil and eggs from the family farm. After lunch, the boys entertain us with a bit of music. And as the sun starts to slip away behind the mountains, we go inside the birdhouse and sit around the open fire drinking shot glasses of raki. Can things really get any better than this?

A day earlier, and it is ideal beach weather. Hector cuts a fine figure in his wetsuit while Michael helps Flora get her confidence in the water.

Later, while Michael does some online tutorials in creating java script, Max, Flora and I walk over to the next beach up the coast. The week before, I’d been getting the boys to do a bit of science, reading up about different types of rock – sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic – mostly to help them understand how marble is made. And right here above the beach was a perfect illustration of the topic:

Christmas, it has to be said, feels very distant here. Perhaps it’s the weather. Or the increase in daylight hours. Maybe it’s the fact that aside from one specialist gift shop in town and a small table at the front of the supermarket, there really is very little evidence of the consumer side of things. Santa, we’ve been told, comes on the 1^st of January instead of the 25^th December and usually arrives by boat, although if the weather is bad, he’s been known to use a helicopter. He gives out presents to the children who go along to the pier to see him, which sounds very sensible and out in the open instead of all this sliding down the chimney and creeping about in the dark. It’s going to be a hard call convincing our lot to wait until the 1^st for their presents. But when in Rome…

Even with a vastly reduced number of toys and screen distractions, the kids seem to be managing to amuse themselves pretty well, though I did detect a hint of home sickness in the following drawing:

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.