Living in Cyprus - May 1998
22nd May:
There’s no end in sight to the postal strike, apparently - in fact it’s an overtime ban but as all the Post Office workers were doing lots of overtime, the unsorted mail is piling up higher and higher. Every so often they do get at a bit of ‘old’ mail and deliver it, but a lot of things are still waiting. It’s a real nuisance, and the workers have little sympathy from the local people who stand outside the Post Office swearing and getting very angry any time it’s not open when it ought to be.
Meanwhile
it’s been getting a bit warmer here although, surprisingly, we had a
lot of rain about a week ago. We thought it would help the reservoirs,
but according to the papers it’s not made a lot of difference, however
it does mean everywhere looks green again and of course our garden
needs mowing once more. There are more weeds than grass and the ground
is very bumpy and uneven, but we’ve been able to borrow a strimmer.
Keeping it all short makes it look reasonably tidy, and the weeds that are indigenous, kept short, are greener and grow better during dry conditions than ordinary grass so we’re not particularly worried about having a nice lawn! Although we’re allowed to use a hose pipe within reason to water trees and flowers, it wouldn’t be acceptable to use a sprinkler on the grass (and as water is metered it would work out expensive anyway) so we might as well encourage whatever grows naturally without much water.
Anyway it’s not yet unpleasantly hot although during the daytime I keep out of the sun. It feels like a warm August in the UK, really, and not yet humid either. Everyone says it’s been the most unusual May but I’m not complaining!
Our lemon trees have finally finished producing but as lemons in the shops are still selling at 30 pence per kilogram I’m still making lemonade; it’s so much nicer than bought ‘squash’ although it still horrifies me to have to use so much sugar. I make 4 litres of concentrate using 60 small (or 40 medium) lemons, and 2kg sugar! That lasts us about a week to ten days, depending on the weather and how many guests we have.
Our loquat trees have also finished - they had rather a short season and my parents were here right at the height of it, which was nice. For about ten days they were delicious straight off the trees, but after that started to shrivel up on the tree. Now we have mulberries, but as one of the trees has white mulberries I don’t feel inclined to make jam from them - as one friend said, it would be like spreading glue on toast! The other has white tinged with purple, but cooked they look sort of inky coloured. The taste raw is OK, not very exciting really. Strawberries grow here, but I’ve not seen a hint of a blackberry or raspberry or anything like that, so we hope there will still be some around in July in the UK!
We’re hoping to book flights to the UK for the boys and me this week; Richard will check with the agent as there are a vast number of options, but it was best to wait till about now apparently. We’re aiming to be back some time very early in July (Tim’s Cubs here has their last day on June 30th which he wants to go to). The boys hope to be in Birmingham until at least July 22nd as that’s when term ends at St Francis School,and Daniel wants to go to as many ‘leaver events’ as possible.
We haven’t arranged exactly what to do after that, or what dates to fly back. There’s a conference in the mountains here starting on August 10th, but we’re not sure if we’ll go to that or not - if not, then of course we have more flexibility. The boys would quite like to do another cricket course at the Warwickshire ground, which is very close to my parents’ house, so we’ll see what the dates are for those - the courses were just a week, usually the end of July or early August.
Home
education seems to be going well now we’ve got into the swing
of it; Daniel has covered the first year of secondary school English
and maths now with ease and seems to be becoming much more confident
and relaxed. Tim says he wants to be in a school definitely by the time
he’s secondary age, but as we don’t know for sure whether we’ll be here
or back in England by that stage there’s no point planning too far
ahead.
Talking more to friends with children at the junior school here makes us increasingly glad that the boys are not there. Children in the school seem terribly pressurised to get ‘good grades’ so they have lots of dull repetitive work and homework (which the parents have to explain anyway, as the teachers don’t really teach anything!)
A friend at Church says that every afternoon he spends about two hours working with his daughters on their maths and teaching them things they didn’t understand in the school - it really seems rather pointless having them go to school at all, and they don’t seem to like it there. There aren’t even any after-school activities or clubs. Anyway I don’t mind because it’s given us the opportunity to try out home education and we’re all finding it enjoyable and most interesting, so it’s worked out for the best.
31st May:
The mail 'go-slow’, alternated with day strikes, lasted over a month. We were told there were over 6000 bags of mail waiting to be sorted throughout the island, and were a bit concerned that some bills didn’t arrive. However the dispute seems to be settled now, and we’re slowly getting the backlog.
Weather here is getting gradually hotter, although thankfully it’s been the coolest May for a long time, ‘only’ about 30 degrees during the daytime at most. It’s not yet too humid either although we’re told it’s going to get worse. And actually it’s been much cooler than 30C some days. Our house has high ceilings and marble floors so it stays reasonably cool, helped at times by fans and by shutting shutters and opening windows trying to catch the breeze and avoid the sunshine.
The boys and I are going to be back in the UK for just over a month, while Richard travels to various meetings in Egypt. We’ve finally booked our tickets, remarkably inexpensively, with Rumania air (Tarom). We fly into Heathrow on July 3rd so the boys ought to be at school for July 6th, and able to be there for the last two and a half weeks of term. They’re very much looking forward to it, although I wonder if it’s going to be traumatic all over again.
Every time we’ve had guests we’ve spent a fair amount of time at the beach, but now there are tourists covering almost every square inch, and of course it’s extremely hot during the daytime so we tend to avoid it, except sometimes late afternoon. This week and next week there are market stalls and fairground rides right along the sea-front as Cyprus celebrates the Festival of Kataklysmos - apparently that literally means ‘deluge’ and is celebrating Noah’s safety from the flood (the ancient town of Larnaka is built on Kition, which traditionally was founded by one of Noah’s grandsons).
However it’s also the Greek Orthodox Whitsun/Pentecost, which is a week after ours, as their Easter was a week later this year. We went for a walk on Sunday evening along the sea front and were amazed to see the dozens of stalls, lots selling Cyprus sweetmeats and nutty candy etc, and all the traditional ‘junk’ toys and tourist attractions. Apparently they’d only just started and by this time next week we’ll barely be able to move along the pavement for visitors.
There are other beaches but we have to drive to those. We don’t actually have a car but can borrow any of three work vehicles nearly any time we want, and just pay a small amount per mile. That works out pretty well, since most of the time we walk everywhere, or Daniel and Richard cycle. A lot of people have mopeds or motor bikes but we’ve not been tempted by one of those! I decided against having a bike as I find them awfully uncomfortable, and Tim is still rather a liability - he wobbles and hasn’t very good road sense, so we have to take him to a large park to practise his riding.
The mulberries are ripe now: one white tree and one black, so I experimented with apple and mulberry jam - I’m not quite sure what else to do with them. The white ones look horrible, like plump little caterpillars! We have pomegranates which are beginning to swell now after the most glorious red flowers for the last couple of months, and should be ready in the Autumn. I don’t know what we’ll do with them; we have four trees and I don’t suppose we’ll eat that many raw, but I don’t think they can be cooked.