A note about my summers.

My summers are very different from my winters.

My winters? They are quiet times. Free of social activity. Isolated for the most part. My winters are filled with reading and writing. I do some freelance writing, I do some fiction writing. Sometimes there is travel. Sometimes there are friends over for the weekend. Sometimes there is some activity outside. Sometimes there are DVD marathons. Sometimes I think that time stands still during my winters.

My summers? In short they are very busy, very social. There are people about. They want things. They want information. I try to give it to them. They want food. I must serve them. My partner and I run a summer business, there’s a restaurant and a place for people to camp. We are not business people. We don’t have the gene. If there is a gene for business-sense. But he inherited this place, this land. And now I am here. In the summertime we create in a different way. We build on what others have built before us. It’s a family business. There are trees and plants growing now that were once planted by people who came before us – Panos’s father and mother. They are no longer here, but the trees are here, the plants are here. The last pine tree that Panos’s dad planted exhibits awesome health and growth.

This family business demands hands-on work. My hands only knew about pens and paper and keyboards and turning pages in books. Since I arrived here my hands have learnt to do many things. They are versatile hands. They are the hands of my past, my ancestors; they are the hands of my future.

My summers are physical. There is physical work to be done. My mind hibernates during the summer. I remember the first summer I did this. My head hurt from being stagnant. Does that sound snobbish? I don’t know, but it did hurt. The mind has nothing much to occupy itself with, when one is cleaning, or taking orders, or serving food. Conversation? Conversation only scratches the surface of things here. People gather here to pass the time, they don’t want to stop time, to pause and dwell on things, they want the time to pass, not slow, not pause, not stop.

We opened the taverna last weekend. Today the World Cup kicked off. The men (the regulars) have managed to catch a reasonable television signal down at their campers and so we are alone with a new Loewe 32” television set. I have no idea who is playing. Panos is sitting at a table in an empty restaurant. I am inside the restaurant, at the computer, opposite him. We look at each other. We smile at each other. We shrug and laugh. We know what we are saying. We don’t need to say it. I can hear the commentator, but only when he is excitable, which he is almost constantly. The tele-drone comes in waves. Well, that’s a cliché. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. I think my vocabulary is shrinking. I’m sure it is. Sometimes I’ll read something I wrote years ago and wonder who eloquent that person was. Could it have been me? It is surely improbable.

I’m too tired to analyse this now, though it’s all I think about. There is a lot to say about my shrinking vocabulary. Another language is usurping upon my English. Two discrete vocabularies are at play, though at times they do overlap. The English are grateful for having borrowed so many Greek words. The Greeks hate the idea of having borrowed their alphabet from the Phoenicians.

The mosquitoes are nervous tonight. Κουνούπια, in Greek. I check the etymology in the dictionary. It comes from the ancient κώνωψ. That’s good to know. Continuity.

Mosquitoes. I spelled it wrong. Without the final ‘e’ and had Word correct it. MS Word underlined the word in red, as a teacher might have done years ago when red pen was still used in correcting papers. I remember that, at least for a while, red was out and other colours were in. I liked to use green or purple when I was marking. But that was many years ago. My memory of the way words are spelled is also shrinking. This is the oddest thing, as I write in English daily. I may not speak it daily, not out loud, though there’s always a dialogue in my head – English in the main, sometimes Greek. The fact that I don’t speak it out loud may well account for the fact that the Greek, which I do speak daily, is gaining ground. But what of the writing? What of written English? Why is that disappearing? Why is there constantly a word just out of reach?