Pruning time

It's almost a different place now with the temperature now up to and even exceeding 20 degrees, although having said that it's cooler today with light drizzle making things a bit damp. Never mind that gives me an excuse to stay in and do the blog and also try and sort out some old photos for Sher in Canada which I promised a couple of weeks ago.

It's been a very busy week, our Landlord and his wife departed back to Olympia last Thursday with promises of accommodation for us if we would like to take some time out in southern Greece, which I'm sure we will be taking him up on as the Penepolese is somewhere where we have been promising to go for some years years now. An area steeped in history and natural beauty and also another box ticked in our travels.

On Friday I went out on delivery with Jorgos while Sandra helped Mantha in the Kafenion. He takes me to the most fantastic rural properties you can image, you would never find them if you didn't have insider help. While delivering at one guys place I noticed he had a couple of rabbits running about in a pen attached to a wriggly tin shed of very Heath Robinson construction, it turned out when I asked that there were seventy Rabbits all being raised for the pot, they looked very happy and well taken care of though and it was a pleasure to see the old man posturing at my interest in what he was doing.

Before he went home I asked Spiros if I could prune all the vines which surround his fathers house below us and try to get them back to something like production. (See before and after pictures which the before doesn't do it justice, also where you can see my car in the last picture all that ground in front and right down behind the car was four feet high with rubbish) Because all the vines are growing up over scaffold frame works ten feet high around the house to provide shade Yanni he is incapable of even getting to them never mind doing the pruning. They were in a right state and it has taken three days of solid graft to get them all back and also to tidy up the land at the front of his house which was covered with a myriad pruning of bushes and trees probably years old as some were rotten. I have now made all the waste wooden material into fire sized pieces and stacked them neatly against a wall for him ready for to burn on his open fire if he feels the need. I suspect however that he will leave them there forever as they had obviously not been touched for years when they were strewn around his garden (you can lead a horse to water...). I have now started parking my car in the garden below the house instead of at the roadside so we have both benefited from the general tidy up. When I had finished and enjoying a well earned Mataxa and Coke on our balcony, I heard this "paw paw paw, kalo, polu kalo, para poly kalo, moo pethia moo pethia" (something like good, very good, my children...) repeated over and over again below us, he just couldn't believe the improvement, Yanni was almost in tears with gratitude at what I had done, it made us both feel rather emotional, what an honour to be considered his children from someone we have known hardly six months!. We went down to make sure he was OK and 89 years old you just never know, and he insisted that he would take us down to one of the Kafenions in the village for a drink, dear old fellow. It was a cafe we had not been in before just at the bottom of our road in fact we didn't even know it was a cafe. They made us very welcome and although as usual there was no English spoken we managed to communicate fine, in fact they even complimented me on my Greek which absolutely made my day.

Out on a walk on Tuesday Sandra and I called in at another Kafenion in the village where she had been three weeks before with Yourta our Landlords wife. I got talking to Lakki a friend of ours from within the village and he told me there were eleven Kafenions in Assos a two Tavernas which for a village with a population of perhaps six or seven hundred people is impressive, it just goes to show what the people do most of the time, drink coffee or Tsiperou and play cards and backgammon, there really is no wonder that the Greek economy is in the state which it seems to be. Anyway again we were very well received at this cafe so I suppose it must be incumbent on us now to visit all the rest to ensure that the "Brits" are not showing any favouritism.