Last week, mostly

I was reading......

The Island by Victoria Hislop. Well what can I say? I was swayed by the jacket notes, one of which was "A moving and absorbing holiday read....-Evening Standard". Hmmm, to me it was one of the saddest and most depressing books I have ever read, not the light-hearted, escapist drama I like on my holiday. True, the author had researched her subject thoroughly but almost 400 pages of life in a leper camp and only 60ish about anything else was just too heavy for me.

I was listening.....

to the sound of sparrows in the tree outside my window fighting over ripe mulberries, the putt-putt of little fishing boats across the bay, the plink-plink of bazouki music in the tavernas, Notis Sfakianakis, the trill of Cetti's warbler, the blur of itinerant trades people, the drone of the bees over the thyme bushes, the nightingale in the trees by the stream, the frogs in the evening and lots, lots more.

I was eating.....

fish, fish and seafood. We had hake, sea bass, gilt-head bream, black bream, big prawns, anchovies and crayfish. My best meal of the trip however was a Veal Chop. Not the pale, flabby, cruelly-produced stuff we used to get here (and avoided) but a rich, meaty, textured meat with a bite which comes with age, what my butcher of 25 years ago used to sell as Baby Beef. Toasted over charcoal, sprinkled with oregano and sauced with lemon juice it was exceptional.

And another thing, we didn't have a single frozen chip in the whole two weeks. Ok, yes, we had Fried Potatoes (chips to us plebs) but these were hand-peeled, hand-cut, hand-fried in veg oil until they were perfectly golden and crispy. They were all different sizes and some odd shapes but what the heck, they were great!