Chaos

Milou, the young dog we look after occasionally is back for a short visit and it's a bit manic here. All the cats apart from Joyce have decided that being in the house with a crazy dog is not a good idea and are sulking outside. Joyce is sitting determinedly on the back of the sofa looking at Milou with great disdain and every now and then swiping at her with sharp claws. This sets Milou off on a barking frenzy which in turn starts the other dogs off. I am sitting on the balcony with a cold beer trying to ignore it. Difficult. Thank goodness we don't have neighbours to complain about the noise.

                                           Joyce pretending dogs don't exist

Hide and seek

Some of my chickens lay where they're meant to - in the nesting boxes and then there's a group of naughty hens who (despite having had their wings clipped) fly into the garden and find secret little places to nest in. So we play a daily game of "hunt the nest". And then once we find it and take away piles of eggs they promptly find somewhere new, and so the game continues. I've just found the latest one. There is one very angry hen out there now complaining dreadfully that they've been discovered!

Last class

Today I taught my junior class for the last time. I've been teaching them for three years and they have been funny, smart, naughty, challenging but overall incredibly rewarding and I've learnt so much from them. And hopefully they've learnt quite a lot from me. After three years they are all pretty confident English speakers and their favourite game is I Spy which they try and persuade me to play with them whenever they get bored with grammar lessons.Here we are all together before we went to buy ice cream.

The hanging chair

When we moved here almost 5 years ago some friends who were leaving the island gave us their old  hanging garden chair, they had had it for many years and it's been patched up and taped together many times and until it finally falls to pieces we will keep hanging it up in the summer. It's the kind of chair that people just gravitate towards and then sit in, gently swinging back and forth with a dreamy look on their face. Unless you are Clara in which case it's a fab swing! This year I decided to make new covers for it and have used a beautiful piece of fabric from a shop in Maine called On Board Fabrics. The chair is also extremely popular with the cats but to avoid all cat type accidents the cushions will be brought in at night!

Gardener's Delight

The garden is at its best this time of year, the roses are amazing and their smell takes me right back to England. We have a bottle brush bush which gets bigger and bigger each season and seems to attract all the honey bees on the island.

 In just a few weeks the temperatures will climb and the only things that really thrive are the geraniums. So for everyone who thinks that Greece is too hot ( you know who you are!!) why not visit us in May and enjoy our garden glory.

Stranger Danger

With the arrival of summer comes tourists. For the next few months our quiet forest existence will be disturbed. Not by the visitors themselves, but by the vociferous barking of the dogs as they catch sight of strange people enjoying a peaceful ( until the dogs see them) walk in the country. Carter's bark is as huge as his size and Nancy has perfected an extremely piercing terrier yap. Barking is accompanied by a couple of laps of the balcony where Carter usually falls over due to his clumsiness and the slippery tiles. The whole episode usually only lasts a few minutes and then peace descends once more. Until the next time.

May Day

A beautiful sunny morning today with the sea looking like milk. Standing on the balcony and listening on the radio to the weather forecast for the British bank holiday made me realise why we chose to live in Greece.

It's May 1st and that means barbeques, picnics and being outside. Everyone puts flowers on their cars and there's a real holiday feel about the island.

We ate an enormous amount of barbequed food with our friend Father Avraam and his wife Evgenia. If he wasn't a priest he'd be a chef, he LOVES food!