Wet T-shirt contest? Watch Sophia Loren instead!

The film was loosely based on David Divine's novel by the same name, published in 1955, which presents as rivals an English archeologist and an impoverished Greek student.

 

This film was one of the top-earners in its days, mainly because in those years the public wanted exotic European location shooting and the film certainly does a good job of showing Greece and Sophia Loren who is ravishing.

It has a little bit of adventure, love story, and suspense, with the back-drop of Hydra, one of the most enchanting Aegean islands. The film might look a bit outdated to today's audiences, but it's fun to watch Alan Ladd and Clifton Webb in roles that don't require much acting.

Sophia Loren is perfect as the sponge fisher who discovers a treasure. In fact, the best excuse to watch again this long-forgotten film of the late 50s is to watch her. What a beautiful woman; what a sight for sore eyes!

If you're looking for a trip to another, more innocent era, click here.

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Closer to the Sun

 

With all things Hydra on my mind on this coolish autumn day, I found an online copy of George Johnston's "Closer to the Sun" at archive.org (create a free account, then log in and "borrow" the book) - a rare find indeed!

These semi-autobiographical stories of George Johnston and Charmian Clift's life on the island of Hydra (called Silenos in the book) make for interesting reading to those who've been to Hydra or want to know more about the Johnston's six years spent in the Greek islands.

Pollution, then as now, has been a problem. This is how "Closer to the Sun" begins: "The most important man on the island of Silenos was Dionysios, the public garbage collector."

Hydra in George Johnston's days

And it continues, "The garbage man ... was important every day of the year to one section of the town or another. For without his high-wheeled cart and his string of basket-burdened donkeys, and, most important of all, his goodwill, how was the rubbish of the town to be carted away in conformity with the proclaimed and printed order of Lieutenant Fotis, the police commandant, that streets, walls, and courtyards should be kept clean and all houses in a state of reputable whitewash?"

At the end of the novel, we discover where all the garbage went ... into the sea: "The Twelve Apostles made the last turn around the buoy, and its bow was lifting and falling now in a slow, graceful dance to the run of the clear gulf seas ... the wake of the boat had come in and slapped quick waves around the base of the rock chute, where Dionysios had been emptying the garbage down from the high houses in the pannier-baskets of his donkeys."

The one redeeming feature? Not so much plastic back then in the 1960s.

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Happiness on a stick

 

The old sofa on the verandah got a good workout on this sunny autumn afternoon while I sipped a hot cup of TWININGS vanilla-and-cinnamon-flavoured chai and listened to BBC Radio Dramas which I had previously saved to a USB stick.

Remember radio dramas? I do! I was fortunate enough to grow up when there was no television; when we would sit around the wireless in the evening, with the magic dial glowing in the dark, ready to navigate us around the world.

The radio drama was our entertainment then and, while I may be seeing it through sepia-tinted glasses, in my opinion it is superior to nearly every television series. The use of sound effects was truly amazing in its ability to conjure up vivid images and changing settings.

This afternoon I indulged myself in W. Somerset Maugham's short stories, such as "P&O", "Winter Cruise", "Rain", "Footprints in the Jungle", "Before the Party", "Flotsam and Jetsam", "The Round Dozen", "The Vessel of Wrath" and "The Tenth Man". Even the parrot found them interesting.

Oh, and by the way, don't believe everything you read on a cup: I felt quite the opposite this afternoon - it was happiness on a USB stick!

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I've just paid $10 for this DVD, but for you it's free!

 

With the nights getting longer (and colder), and the new fireplace not yet installed (although the chimney sweep came today to get things ready for the flue), it's either a book in bed or a movie at the end of the bed.

I'd just spent $10 on ebay for "The Missing Postman" before I discovered these clips on YouTube, so they're yours now for free! Great viewing and a wonderful alternative to all the depressing news on the telly!

 

 

As for any other movies you may want to watch, don't do as I do but look for them on YouTube first!

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Beautiful one day, perfect the next!

Click on image for a full panorama shot

 

Leaving the family home at the age of fourteen, and leaving the "Fatherland" at the age of nineteen to come to Australia, prepared me to pay week by week for the space I took up in the world, and to finally close my eyes in a rented house.

I was happy to wander the earth, to have only portable possessions, and to live in temporary dwellings. No family ties, no entry in the parish register, no attic full of grandmother's furniture, no family vault for me.

So what imp of perversity made me buy "Riverbend", this seemingly commonplace decision which shaped my life for the last twenty-seven years and seems to have determined my fate for the next twenty-or-so?

For what I had not realised at the time I bought this place was that it would begin owning me. I was lured into a sort of perpetual treasure hunt for this and that and something else to fill all the rooms, forever accumulating, and increasingly tied to, more and more possessions.

And then there is probably the greatest drawback of living in a small community - the lack of anonymity. Here you recognise everyone and everyone recognises you. We all meet again, and yet again. Endlessly meeting, the same people over and over again; endlessly meeting, the same conversations, yesterday, today, tomorrow; endlessly meeting, the same shafts of malice and spite, the same behind-the-hand sniggers.

As a close-by resident exclaimed when asked why he hadn't joined the others in the recent New Year's Eve firestorm, "I'd rather burn alive." Then there was the starry-eyed newcomer who during a neighbourly get-together blurted out, "Everyone here is so nice!", in response to which someone nearby stage-whispered, "Give them time!" As it turned out, he'd mixed up his pronouns and should've said "Give me time!"

Mind you, we are lucky, as we can pull up the drawbridge and drop the portcullis. We live on the edge of it all and on rambling seven acres, far enough from the ontological baggage of others so as not to burden us.

Our neighbour is the river. As the Rat said in "The Wind in the Willows",
"[I live] by it and with it and on it and in it. It's my world, and I don't want any other."

Indeed I don't! It's beautiful here; beautiful one day, perfect the next!

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"We'll Never Go Back."

 

Continue to read here

 

While reading the excellent book "Half the Perfect World - Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 19955-1964", I came across a reference to the above article in the Australian journal "The Bulletin" of October 1962.

To quote, "Charles Scriber - George Johnston's Sydney friend who, with his wife Ruth, had previously sent several flattering accounts of the Johnstons' island lifestyle on Hydra back to the Australian press - provided a fictionalised and by no means kindly portrait of Australian writers "Norm" and "Julie" who live on an unnamed Greek island. The story's narrator, Phil Stanton, focuses on Norm and Julie's unwavering commitment to the island, including Julie's oft-repeated refrain that provides the story's title, 'We'll Never Go Back'."

Someone in Australia recognised that the story was based on Hydra and sent Johnston a copy. He responded explosively, treating the story as an act of betrayal. When interviewed about this incident some years later, Scriber responded not unreasonably that "it is all right for George to write about others, but not for anyone to do it to him".

George Johnston and Charmian Clift may have pitied the poor mugs in Sydney - "We'll never go back you know, never go back ..." - but in the end they did go back - as I did, as we all did - because in reality we never quite integrated and our presence was resented by the locals while at the same time our ties with the homeland grew weaker.

 

 

We all still call Australia home!

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Downloadable study notes:
Australian Writers, Expatriates and the Greek Experience
A Journal for Greek Letters, Pages on Australian Society
Australians in Aspic: Picturing Charmian Clift and George Johnston’s Hydra Expatriation

 

It is a dark and stormy night ...

 

... and I want to be transported back to a time when both the world and I were still young - and decidedly warmer than tonight's "Riverbend".

Greece may still be envisioned by some as old guys in sheets wandering around the Acropolis spouting wisdom before somebody pours hemlock in their ear, but my guess is that they will change their minds after having watched Melina Mercouri do her stuff in "Never on Sunday".

The film is a mix of Pygmalion plus "hooker with a heart of gold", and tells the story of Ilya, a self-employed, free-spirited prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus in Greece, and Homer, an American tourist and classical scholar who is enamored of all things Greek.

Homer Thrace: She killed them. Medea herself, does she not say, “I killed my children”? Ilya: And you believe her? You don’t understand the women. Medea loves her husband, yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: Her husband is interested in another woman? Yes? Homer Thrace: Yes. Ilya: So she said to her husband that she has killed her children to frighten him, to get him back. Homer Thrace: No! Ilya: Yes. She gets him back, and everybody go away and everybody is happy and they go to the seashore. And that’s all! Homer Thrace: If I show you that everything that was ever written about Medea talks of her killing her children. If you ask 10 out of 10 people who saw the play and they tell you it’s true, then by simple logic. . .You’re a Greek, you should be logical. Ilya: Why? Homer Thrace: Because the greatest Greek of them all, Aristotle, invented logic. He said – Ilya: Who? Homer Thrace: Aristotle. . . Ilya: Aristotle! The one that the Captain said thinks men are everything and women are nothing? I don’t care what he said, Aristotle. Homer Thrace: It's extraordinary. Where do you learn all those languages? Ilya: In bed.

Both Greece’s film industry and the entire nation took centre stage when the film was released in October of 1960, and it led to massive increases in tourism and location-shooting there.

Some twenty years later, I lived and worked in Piraeus by which time Melina Mercouri was already a not-so-sprightly 64 years old. Piraeus was still as lively and, in parts, as bawdy as shown in this movie, but never on Monday when I went back to work in my office at # 3 Agiou Nikolaou to manage my Saudi boss's commodity trading and fleet of bulk carriers.

 

My office at red pin in centre of map: # 3 Agiou Nikolaou;
my apartment at smaller yellow pin at bottom of map: # 2 Voudouri
click here for GOOGLE Map

 

Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday A Monday, a Monday is very, very good Or you can kiss me on a Tuesday A Tuesday, a Tuesday, in fact I wish you would Or you can kiss me on a Wednesday A Thursday, a Friday and Saturday is best But never, never on a Sunday A Sunday, a Sunday, 'cause that's my day of rest Most any day you can be my guest Any day you say, but my day of rest Just name the day that you like the best Only stay away on my day of rest Oh, you can kiss me on a cool day, a hot day A wet day, which everyone you choose Or try to kiss me on a gray day, a May day A pay day, and see if I refuse And if you make it on a bleak day A freak day, a week day, why you can be my guest But never, never on a Sunday   Indulge yourself and listen to the soundtracks here

 

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"And everybody is happy and they go to the seashore." Some memories can get you through even the darkest and stormiest night.

 

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P.S. See also Armchair-travelling on a windy day

 

Ich denke oft an Piroschka

 

The tendency to look back contemplatively on one's life as one gets nearer to the end of it is a natural human instinct which I indulged in last night as I sat in bed, with two heaters going and the electric blanket switched on high, to watch the old German movie "Ich denke oft an Piroschka" (I often think of Piroschka). I had last seen it as a boy of 10 or 12 accompanied by my sisters, in a Sunday afternoon movie matinée.

The magic words "Mach Signal, Andi!" brought it all back for me. Memories of my own childhood and of the Piroschkas in my own life and the Hódmezővásárhelykutasipusztas I've been to! (Can I speak Hungarian? No, but I can be silent in several other languages!)

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P.S. Hugo-Andreas (Andi) Hartung's book with the same title is based on the author's student days in Hódmezővásárhelykutasipuszta in 1925 when he was 23 years old. Somebody visited the place in 1990 and wrote,

"Mit diesem Film verbindet mich eine Besonderheit. Ich bin 55 Jahre alt und hatte als kleiner Junge diesen Film gesehen. Er hatte mich sehr angerührt. Als ich 1989 das erste mal in Ungarn war, dachte ich an den Film. Zurück in Deutschland war mein Interesse geweckt und ich begann nachzuforschen. Der Film Piroschka ist basiert auf den Roman von Hugo Hartung, 1972 gestorben. Was nicht jeder weiß, Hugo hieß mit vollem Nahmen Hugo-Andreas (Andi) Hartung. Ich besorgte mir also seine Biografie, und richtig, es gab eine wirkliche Piroschka. Aber wo war nun das Nest Hodmeövasarhelykutaspuzta? Ich wusste es lag an der Bahnlinie des Nachtzuges von Oroshza und da gab es wirklich einen Ort, der Hodmeövasarhely hieß. Ich ging also 1990 da hin. Das war aber nicht der richtige Ort und so fuhr ich der Bahnlinie nach Oroshaza entlang und kam nach Szekuttas, so heisst der Ort heute. Ja ja ich weiß, heute weiß man das in Sekunden bei einem Blick ins Internet. Aber 1990 war da nichts mit. Ich hatte nur das Buch und meine Neugier und ehrlich gesagt hat die Sache dadurch das es nun jeder übers Internet weiß an Reiz verloren. Also da stand ich nun in einer Kleinstadt und wusste noch nicht, das dies der gesuchte Ort war. An der Umgehungsstrasse standen mitlerweile hunderte von Häusern, aber wenn man die alte Dorfstrasse befuhr kam man an alten kleinen Häuschen und auch an einem Bahnhof vorbei. Ich suchte nun nach jemanden der mir helfen konnte und ging zum Dorfpfarrer in der Hoffnung er hätte was gelesen. Aber leider wusste er, wie die anderen Dorfbewohner auch, nichts von einem Film "Piroschka". Der Film war nicht dort gedreht worden und Ungarn war im Ostblock und von Deutschland ziemlich abgeschieden. Ich klärte ihn mit meinem Buch auf und er staunte nicht schlecht. Ich wusste ja, das Hugo Andi Hartung als Student 1925, also mit 23 Jahren hier gewesen war. Der Pfarrer schlug mir vor, nach einem der Ältesten im Dorf, dem Dorfschmied zu gehen, um ihn zu fragen. Der war nun sehr alt und damals, in 1925, 16 Jahre alt. Der erinnerte sich an die Sache denn ein Gast aus Deutschland kam damals wohl nicht so häufig vor. Er erzählte von den Beiden, Andreas und ...nein, Piroschka hieß die ECHTE Piroschka nicht. Er zeigte uns auch den Hof, in dem Hartung damals wohnte. Ein trauriger Anblick. Der Hof war völlig herunter gekommen und baufällig. Eine Schande für jeden Piroschka-Fan. Er gehörte übrigens damals dem Tierarzt. Der Bahnhof stand auch noch da, ein sehr schmuckloses Gebäude, zig Jahre Sozialismus hatten ihre Spuren hinterlassen. Der Bahnhof ist übrigens etwas größer als in dem Film. Ich erfuhr vom Schmied so manche andere Sachen, wie z.B. das "Piroschka" oben im Bahnhof wohnte, sie aber nicht die leibliche Tochter des Bahnhofvorstehers war sondern eine angenommene Tochter. Im darauf folgendem Jahr war ich dann wieder dort und brachte das Video von dem Film mit. Der Film ging durch das halbe Dorf.

Inzwischen interessierte dem Dorfpfarrer, der inzwischen mein Freund war, die Sache auch und ein oder zwei Jahre später gab mir der Dorfpfarrer dann eine frohe Nachricht. Er hatte die ECHTE Piroschka von damals gefunden. Sie wohnte etwa 80km entfernt von Szekuttas. Wir fuhren sie dann besuchen. Sie war inzwischen eine sehr alte Frau geworden die uns freundlich empfing und mit dem Pfarrer (er heisst Imre) auf ungarisch allerhand besprach. Imre übersetzte mir das dann. Zuletzt machten wir ein Foto von uns dreien und "Piroschka" schrieb mir was in mein mitgebrachtes Piroschka-Buch. So bin ich wohl einer der wenigen, der dieses Glück hatte. Ich fuhr jedes Jahr in den Ort und besuchte Imre. Dann kam die Nachricht, das Piroschka gestorben war. Tja, inzwischen ist alles anders, ich war rund 8 oder 10 Jahre nicht mehr dort. Mein Freund Imre schrieb mir, es gibt seit kurzem ein Piroschka-Museum. Meine Nachforschungen haben sich also gelohnt. Tja, das war die Geschichte von Piroschka und Andi (Hartung)."

 

Whatever happened to Margo?

 

People are always asking me what happened to my sister. I am pleased to report that Margo is still full of beans and that our lives continue to be as entangled as they were during those halcyon days on Corfu."

So wrote Gerald Durrell in November 1994 in his preface to the book "Whatever Happened to Margo?", written sometime in the 60s and discovered gathering dust in an attic by Margo's granddaughter.

From the book's dust jacket

What a remarkable find! Not only will the new tales of Gerald and his animal antics delight Durrell fans the world over, but Margaret Durrell, completing the literary family trio, is a wonderful talent in her own right.

To read this wonderful book, now long out of print and nowhere else available, click here, join www.archive.org - it's free! - and "borrow" it.

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"The more you eats the more you gets."

These actors made it into a movie; successive governments turned it into reality

 

A peculiar thing about the Puddin' was that, though they had all had a great many slices off him, there was no sign of the place whence the slices had been cut.

'That's where the Magic comes in,' explained Bill. 'The more you eats the more you gets.

Cut-an'-come-again is his name, an' cut an' come again is his nature. Me an' Sam has been eatin' away at this Puddin' for years, and there's not a mark on him.'

Although written as children's literature in the middle of the First World War, Norman Lindsay's "The Magic Pudding" has become something of a political commentary on many Australian attitudes and institutions.

Both Labor and Liberal have been giving away huge slices whenever there was an election looming. And the Liberals have done so again during this coronavirus crisis.

Slice One was $750 to all who were already on some sort of welfare.

Slice Two was another $750 to those who had already got Slice One.

Slice Three was a doubling of the so-called JobSeeker payment, commonly known as the dole, to $1,115 a fortnight.

The Fourth Slice was a hugely generous JobKeeper pay-out of $1,500 a fortnight until the end of September to anyone who has had a job before this corona stuff started, regardless of how little they had earned previously.

All this runs into billions and billions of dollars which will put this nation's taxpayers in debt for several generations to come, but some small relief was in sight: the Federal Treasurer got a call on Thursday night from the Treasury Secretary saying that, due to some unexpected miscalculations, he's found $60 billion down the back of the couch.

The Society of Puddin'-Owners should have been jubilant but instead of welcoming this improvement to the country's financial fortunes, these Puddin'-Owners turned Puddin'-thieves are pressing the Treasurer to keep on paying this "extra" money out to other "deserving cases".

Spend, spend, spend! "The more you eats the more you gets."

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The full Durrell

 

After having watched the full Durrell series on DVD, I ransacked my library for everything Durrell and found twelve books by Gerald Durrell - the youngest Durrell who wrote about everything zoic! - and two books by Lawrence Durrell, a little-known, "Stiff Upper Lip", and what is still his best book, "Prospero's Cell".

 

The Garden of the Gods, Gerald Durrell returns to his family island ... Corfu

 

I think I start with Lawrence's "Prospero's Cell", subtitled "A guide to the landscape and manners of the island of Corcyra." Corcyra, of course, is Corfu, and everyone who visits this enchanted island should've read it.

"Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins. All the way across Italy you find yourself in a landscape severely domesticated--each valley laid out after the architect's pattern, brilliantly lighted, human. But once you strike out from the flat and desolate Calabrian mainland toward the sea, you aware of a change in the heart of things: aware of the horizon beginning to stain at the rim of the world, aware of islands coming out of the darkness to meet you. In the morning you wake to the taste of snow on the air, and climbing the companion ladder, suddenly enter the penumbra of shadow cast by the Albanian mountains--each wearing its cracked crown of snow--desolate and repudiating stone. A peninisula nipped off while red hot and and allowed to cool into an antarctica of lava. You are aware not so much of a landscape coming to meet you invisibly over those blue miles of water as of a climate. You enter Greece as one might enter a dark crystal; the form of things becomes irregular, refracted. Mirages suddenly swallow islands, and wherever you look the trembling curtain of the atmosphere deceives. Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder - the discovery of yourself."

Durrell’s choice of title - "Prospero’s Cell" - is partly explained in the book through the character of Count D. whose orange grove is the site of many memorable conversations in which Durrell participates. The count, who shares Durrell’s self-exiled status and resides in a sumptuous, rotting villa with dilapidated green shutters and filled with tarnished silver and antique Venetian portraits in moldering frames (perhaps a symbol for the literary tradition Durrell would help shatter with his multiple points of view narrative technique), contends that Shakespeare drew his model for his island from Corfu and may have even visited there.

 

To read a sample, click here

 

To support this theory, the count supplies several geographical, meteorological , topographical, historical and etymological arguments which might indeed be plausible enough. Claiming to have reached a certain detachment from the tempestuous passions and appetites of youth, he identifies himself with the figure of Prospero, after all he too is an exiled, widowed, aristocratic Italian in decline whose bedroom is full of well-thumbed philosophical tomes. Thus, in one sense, the title "Prospero’s Cell" celebrates Durrell’s friendship with this enigmatic character, one of the four persons to whom the book is dedicated, while corroborating his theory identifying Corfu as Prospero's isle.

 

Wonderful BBC Arts documentary from 1976, taking Lawrence Durrell back to Greece

 

I wish I had read this slender book before I visited the island twice in 1984 during my short eighteen months in Greece. Now I'll have to make do with the book's mere 130 pages.

If you are looking for a book with the ability to lift you out of your armchair and the winter doldrums and transport you to rugged white cliffs, sparkling azure seas and the tug of the sea breeze in your hair, then this is what you've been waiting for.

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To read any of the following online books, first create an account with archive.org - it's free! - then log in and "borrow" the book:
The World of Lawrence Durrell
Gerald Durrell : The Authorized Biography
Through the Dark Labyrinth : a biography of Lawrence Durrell
Selected essays on the humor of Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell - A Critical Study
My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell  ===>audiobook
A Zoo in My Luggage, by Gerald Durrell
Birds, Beasts and Relatives, by Gerald Durrell  ===>audiobook
Catch Me A Colobus, by Gerald Durrell
The Ark's Anniversary, by Gerald Durrell
Fauna and Family, by Gerald Durrell
The Whispering Land, by Gerald Durrell
Marrying Off Mother, by Gerald Durrell
Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons, by Gerald Durrell
Two In The Bush, by Gerald Durrell
How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist, by Gerald Durrell
Rosy is My Relative, by Gerald Durrell
The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure, by Gerald Durrell
Keeper, by Gerald Durrell
The Drunken Forest, by Gerald Durrell
Encounters with Animals, by Gerald Durrell
The Mockery Bird, by Gerald Durrell
The Overloaded Ark, by Gerald Durrell
Durrell in Russia
The Talking Parcel, by Gerald Durrell
Three Singles to Adventure, by Gerald Durrell
The Stationary Ark, by Gerald Durrell
Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell
Menagerie Manor, by Gerald Durrell
The Bafut Beagles, by Gerald Durrell
The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories, by Gerald Durrell
The Amateur Naturalist, by Gerald Durrell
Mountolive, by Lawrence Durrell
Island Zoo: the animals a famous collector couldn't part with
Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell
Justine, by Lawrence Durrell  ===>movie
Clea, by Lawrence Durrell
Bitter Lemons, by Lawrence Durrell
The Dark Labyrinth, by Lawrence Durrell
Poetry, by Lawrence Durrell
The Tree of Idleness and other Poems, by Lawrence Durrell
Key to Modern Poetry, by Lawrence Durrell
Key to Modern British Poetry, by Lawrence Durrell
Whatever Happened to Margo? by Margaret Durrell

 

Lunchtime at Riverbend on a cold and windy day

Click on image to enlarge

 

And what better way to warm up than around an all-fired-up "Steamboat", a.k.a. "playing with food", with two of the nicest people in Nelligen who are making their way across the river (by car across the bridge, I might add) as I type.

If you haven't experienced the magic of a "Steamboat" yet, it's a Chinese cooking tradition whereby friends and family sit around a table and dip thinly sliced meats, seafood, and vegetables into a boiling broth.

They only need a few seconds' cooking time. Little steamboat baskets are used to fish cooked items out of the boiling stock. For those who are more adept, as soon as the lid is off, it becomes a chopstick free-for-all. It makes for a great meal, and it's social, interactive and a lot of fun.

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Ian Grindrod, OBE

The sagacious - or should that be salacious? - Ian on his 70th birthday in 2005

 

Happy birthday to a person who is smart, good-looking, and funny and reminds me a lot of myself. 😜 Remember, Ian, birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that people who have the most, live the longest!

Of course, at your age you can still chase women, but only downhill, because now even your birthday suit needs pressing. As for the birthday cake, please get a fire permit by ringing 4474 2855 before you light it!

In absentia, I raise my glass of Pino More, made from an anti-diuretic hybrid grape which reduces the number of trips people of our age make to the toilet during the night: To a friend who doesn't look any older than the day we met! And to my optician, who fitted me with rose-coloured glasses!

 

Our special birthday message to our special friend Ian Grindrod

 

Three cheers to Ian Grindrod and his well-earned OBE (Over Bloody Eighty!)

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Life after the Durrells

 

What are we going to do after we've watched the entire twenty hours of "The Durrells"? As you know from my previous post, I bought the full collection on DVD, and we're now into the last one, Series Four, just enough to get us through next weekend.

A wonderful collection to watch, and a wonderful re-collection of my own memories of Greece. Alas, in a sudden fit of totally misdiagnosed "homesickness", I gave it away in April 1985 after just eighteen months.

It could've become eighteen years - and longer, in fact, as my Saudi boss in Jeddah was hoping I would retire in Greece! - but after almost twenty years as an "expatriate", it seemed the right thing to do to return to that wonderful place in my rose-coloured imagination, Domesti-City.

And as we all know, life in Domesti-City is notoriously drab and dull, so here's to "The Durrells", served with a fresh Greek salad, crunchy bread slathered with tzatziki, and all washed down with a bottle of retsina.

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P.S. "The Durrells" are right now (11 April 2021) live-streaming on ABC TV - click here. Unfortunately, viewing is restricted to Australian audiences: