viola's people watching blog
I had been stuck in the doldrums of zero motivation and the garden had been beckoning me. After our exceptionally hot and dry weather the garden looked miserable. I had intended to trim back the hydrangeas and cut off the woody branches from the roses and prune the herb bushes […]
I came to certain crossroads in my life, my cooking life, when I peered into the cookie jar and found only a couple of crumbs from the almond biscuits from Marks and Spenser’s. I couldn’t run out and get more because the store was in the middle of town and […]
My rose bush of little white roses, a hybrid variety, forced into domestication, to sprout flowers perfectly shaped and to blossom in spring and early summer…has succumbed to the call of its untamed beginnings. Under the Cretan sky with the frigid breath of the icy mountain ridges and the salty […]
Louise taught me one thing…be careful what you say or do in front of a toddler. They’re little sponges, they soak up everything and squirt it right back at you. She was 17 months when she flew in with her parents in July for the summer holidays. The parents needed […]
There we were Yiannis and myself at the inter-city bus station at Chania, waiting for the coach to pull in from Heraklion. My old friend Kim and hubby, all the way from Malaysia, were coming to stay with us after trotting around various places in Greece. We hadn’t seen each […]
The first couple of days this week…the Holy Week of the Greek Easter.. and the weather was acting up. It was chucking it down outside and the forecast was that it was going to be sullen and grey throughout the week and our pouting friend had forced me to stay […]
The moon had been waxing and waning in nebulous March skies…sometimes a shining crescent, hanging like a pendant and other times, lying like a cradle, suspended in the darkness, only to vanish behind an inky haze. But there was this one night when Yiannis walked in after concluding his business […]
ARTON, OINON KAI THEAMATA…OF BREAD, WINE AND SPECTACLE. It is what this nation of gods and philosophers is about and if you rub shoulders with them, you will inevitably be drawn into these pleasures of the flesh. We’ve just had…two weeks ago… `Apokries’…the last Sunday before Lent… when after the […]
We’ve had buckets of sunshine the last few days on these…`Alkionides Meres’ or Halcyon Days. Halycon is a kind of kingfisher that nests by the sea and lays its eggs in the frosty month of January. But nature in its mysterious ways, calms the icy winds and cracks open the […]
The whole town was sparkling with festive lights, quivering in anticipation of the New Year. Even the sailing boats and creaky fishing boats in the old port were strung up with twinkling lights right up to the top of their masts, shimmering in the dark waters. The Old Market building, […]