An Octopus in My Ouzo Read online

  Praise for An Octopus in My Ouzo:

  'A seductive evocation of Greek island life and an honest exploration of what it means to try to live differently. An Octopus in My Ouzo is about diving into the unknown and staying afloat, even when the enticing blue waters of the Aegean become clouded and choppy.'

  Lizzie Enfield, author of Living With It

  'Poetic, touching, enlightening: Jennifer's very personal journey into Greece's deep heartland will give even the most couch-bound armchair traveller itchy feet.'

  Anne Zouroudi, author of The Mysteries of the Greek Detective series

  'Romantic, sun-drenched and mouth-watering... a true feast for the senses.'

  Emma Woolf, author of Positively Primal

  Praise for Falling in Honey:

  'exquisite descriptions… One way ticket to Greece anyone?'

  Wanderlust magazine, four stars

  'wholly brilliant… Jen fills every page of her personal journey with sunshine, humour and self-reflection. We were sorely tempted to ditch the job and join her'

  Heat magazine, five stars

  'remarkable story… moving book'

  Daily Express

  'splendid story… find the inspiration to give yourself a gift that might change your life'

  Huffington Post

  AN OCTOPUS IN MY OUZO

  Copyright © Jennifer Barclay, 2016

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Jennifer Barclay has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Summersdale Publishers Ltd

  46 West Street

  Chichester

  West Sussex

  PO19 1RP

  UK

  www.summersdale.com

  eISBN: 978-1-78372-799-5

  Substantial discounts on bulk quantities of Summersdale books are available to corporations, professional associations and other organisations. For details contact Nicky Douglas by telephone: +44 (0) 1243 756902, fax: +44 (0) 1243 786300 or email: [email protected].

  'But isn't it a bit dull at times?' the Mole ventured to ask.

  Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

  To go among the Greeks you must be just a little mad.

  Gwendolyn MacEwen, Mermaids and Ikons: A Greek Summer

  About the Author

  Jennifer Barclay grew up in the north of England in a village on the edge of the Pennines; she left for Greece after university, lived in Canada and France and the south coast of England before moving to a Greek island. She works with books as an editor and agent and writes occasionally for newspapers and magazines. She has previously written Meeting Mr Kim and Falling in Honey, and her blog about daily life is at: www.octopus-in-my-ouzo.blogspot.com.

  Photo by: John Ageos Daferanos

  Note

  It's difficult to find a perfect system of spelling Greek words in English letters, but in general I've spelled words pretty much as they sound, except where it would look too unusual. So for example, Yorgos, because that's how it's pronounced, not Georgos.

  Male Greek names usually end in -s when they are the subject of a sentence (Yiannis) but drop the -s when you are addressing the person (Yianni!) or they are the object of the sentence (talking about Yianni). For simplicity, when I'm writing in English, I've used the -s form throughout, except in speech. I have added an 'h' to the endings of some words just to make it clear that the final syllable should be pronounced.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 – A Place Unlike Anywhere Else

  Chapter 2 – You'll Go Crazy

  Chapter 3 – Finding My Island Feet

  Chapter 4 – Black Ribbons and Driftwood

  Chapter 5 – Dancing Through Doorways

  Chapter 6 – The Seahorse

  Chapter 7 – Forces of Nature

  Chapter 8 – Normal Service Will Be Resumed

  Chapter 9 – The Austerity Diet

  Chapter 10 – Sunshine After Rain

  Chapter 11 – Darkness and Light

  Chapter 12 – Death and Life

  Chapter 13 – Perfect

  Chapter 14 – Escape from Paradise

  Chapter 15 – Emptiness and Experience

  Chapter 16 – Big Week

  Chapter 17 – Turning to Summer

  Chapter 18 – Red Tape and Red Mullet

  Chapter 19 – Endless Afternoons at the Beach

  Chapter 20 – Rat on a Hot Tin Can

  Chapter 21 – The Cheese Thief and the Rabbit

  Chapter 22 – An Island Wedding

  Chapter 23 – Winter Sunshine

  Chapter 24 – Nectar for Christmas

  Chapter 25 – Life Will Never Be the Same Again

  Chapter 26 – A Happy Household

  Chapter 27 – People Who Care

  Chapter 28 – Wild Beauty

  Chapter 29 – Investing in Freedom

  Chapter 30 – Learning to Live Small and Think Big

  Chapter 31 – Small Worlds

  Chapter 32 – Tilos Devil

  Chapter 33 – Life on a Greek Island

  Epilogue

  Food for a Greek Island

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Not so very long ago, I fell in love with a tiny Greek island. I had often dreamed about Greek islands, and wanted to see if I could find a way to live there – and I did. It was a bumpy journey but I ended up in a little house surrounded by fields and mountains and sea, next door to a place called the Honey Factory. I had my dream life. This book is about what happened when I started to live the dream.

  It is tricky to write about your neighbours on an island that's a few miles long by a few miles wide. I don't want to get into trouble or cause people problems. Let's say that some of the details are made up and some of them are true, and you can judge for yourself. In my previous book, Falling in Honey, I changed the name of my friend Dimitris to Manolis and a few details of his life for privacy's sake, but he later said he wished I'd used his real name. So here, he's Dimitris.

  Various anecdotes have appeared in different form on my blog, which I named An Octopus in my Ouzo because it sounded funny and Greek. This is a book about breaking the normal rules of life, and muddling along in a culture you half-understand. Putting an octopus in ouzo would be taking that to a colourful extreme, and I'm not necessarily endorsing the practice (unless the octopus so chooses) any more than I would recommend falling in honey.

  I've tried to give a taste of the people, the culture and the flavours of a Mediterranean island all year round. This book is also about what it was like for me to reach out for everything I wanted. It's about real life, and really living. And how I began to learn to live small and think big.

  Escape with me to the sun and the heat, light and colour, hills scented with herbs, the blue seas and blue skies of a wild island in the South Aegean.

  Chapter 1

  A Place Unlike Anywhere Else

  The midsummer sun seeps into the stone walls of my little house over the course of the day. The house looks grand from across the valley, but half of it is unfinished. The part I live in is one tall room with a wooden platform for the upstairs. When
I arrived two months ago in April the nights were cool, but now in late June the bedroom is stifling. I move downstairs, where the window at the back of the house catches a breeze across fields from the Skafi valley, and another window faces the village clinging to the middle and lower reaches of the mountain. Lying on the couch, I fall asleep looking at the lights of the village and the stars above.

  I wake up in the early morning rested and content, and am gathering up the sheet and pillow when I see a pale yellow scorpion on the armrest. More amused than alarmed since any danger has passed, I take a picture for fun to show friends, then wrap the scorpion in a blanket and remove it to the garden. Dimitris responds with a message:

  'Be careful about scorpions, because you are used to walk barefooted. If by mistake to step on one, the influence of the poison lasts about 24 hours. Also, turn the cups in the wrong side if you do not like to find one of them inside and drink it. Sometimes the scorpions like to hide in to the cups. They like the humidity and there is the danger to boil with the tea.'

  I do walk barefooted as often as possible; I don't tell him it was actually right by my pillow. I probably had a lucky escape.

  I've known Dimitris, the high school headmaster, since I came to spend a month on this island two years ago. He loves to give advice, some of it very useful, but I try to figure out how a scorpion would hide in a cup. If the cup was empty, you'd see it – and if it wasn't empty, surely the scorpion would drown? There must be some truth in it, but I'm the ultimate sceptic when it comes to received wisdom. Still, I thank him for his warning in the afternoon when I run into him at Eristos beach. He picks up his wetsuit and psarondoufeko, spear gun, and slowly makes his way to the sea to go fishing for octopus.

  This kilometre-long stretch of pebbles and sand that I had to myself in spring is now dotted with tents in the shade of the tamarisks, but the beach is still mostly empty. I spend an hour diving into blue water and lying on the sand in the sun, letting the warmth sink into my bones and clear any aches from sitting at the desk, then walk back through the valley to my house. It's next door to a storeroom and workshop filled with equipment for extracting honey. Back when I was in England and arranging to rent it, the owners referred to it as the 'honey factory'; I liked the idea of living at a honey factory, and told people that was my address. When I arrived, I was pleased to confirm that life was sweet living next door to the honey factory. It took me a couple of months of living here to realise that lots of people on the island make honey and the name on its own is meaningless – the family in reality just call it their apothiki, meaning outbuilding or workshop. The man who came to deliver a truckload of my belongings – boxes marked carefully with 'The Honey Factory, Megalo Horio' – simply rang a few people to find out who I was and where I lived. But by then the name had stuck.

  Megalo Horio, while its name means 'big village', is a small settlement of white houses with blue shutters and doors, none quite the same, each facing a slightly different angle, hemmed in by a cluster of pine trees on the otherwise rocky slopes of a steep hill. Above are strewn the remnants of stone walls from earlier centuries. The ruined castle set into the sheer rock summit was mostly built by medieval knights during the crusades, but the entrance is from the ancient acropolis when a temple of Zeus and Athena was here. That's the view I look at when I wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night.

  I approach my house along a dirt track in an old riverbed; the valley is known as Potamia. A fence all around the property keeps the goats out, and the gate is a haphazard affair of wooden planks and bits of wire, next to a piece of ancient marble masonry. The house was newly built from the ruins of an old one – I am the first to inhabit this new version. The garden, which was bare earth when I arrived, has a disused well and what seems to be an old grain mill or olive press with a round weight that would, until a few decades ago, have been pulled by a donkey around the flat stone circle.

  Below the apothiki is a trough for making wine, and inside are old clay beehives that look like chimney pieces alongside the new wooden ones, the big refrigerator for cleaning the hives, plus thousands of tools that Pavlos uses for fixing this and that. Piled up outside is more such paraphernalia. Nothing gets thrown away. On a small island where you can't just go out and buy things instantly, you never know when something old might come in useful. This might spoil the view a bit, but it fits with my recycling and re-using ethos.

  The house once belonged to Pavlos' father, Pantelis, and now belongs to Pavlos' son, Delos (a short form of Pantelis – in Tilos, people tend to follow the Greek tradition of naming children after their grandparents), who rents it to me; but it's Pavlos who planted the rose bushes around the edge of the garden. I've planted rocket and tomatoes and courgettes; the melon seeds I put in the ground on a whim one day, after eating melon in the garden, have also come up and are bearing fruit. I notice something has been taking little bites out of the courgettes, and there are stalks where some tiny sweet melons have been very carefully nipped off. Since we don't have anywhere to buy garden supplies, I have an idea to protect the melons using kitchen scouring pads, opened out into silver netting. Improvisation is necessary here.

  The drone of a michanaki, a motorbike, signals that Pavlos is on his way up the hill. He comes from the village every day to potter around the workshop and his own vegetable garden in the field below. He's a retired electrician, compact and wiry, with a slightly sad and bemused expression permanently on his face, and eyes that light up and gleam when he sees you. He switches off the engine and walks up the steps to the house with a handful of dark plums.

  'I'd have brought more,' he says, 'but I didn't have a bag with me.' I thank him profusely, and he lights a cigarette, then asks, 'To kouneli irtheh?' Did the rabbit come?

  I say I haven't seen it today.

  'Ercheteh ti nichta,' he says – it comes in the night. I imagine the rabbit stealthily tiptoeing into the garden wearing a black mask and a swag bag. Pavlos has been threatening for a while to shoot the pest and stew it into a hearty stifado. He finishes his cigarette then heads down to his garden, where I can hear him breaking up soil as I eat a couple of just-picked plums.

  In T-shirt and shorts, I make some coffee and open my laptop, log on to the office server and go through my emails. The important thing for me is that this rural outpost comes with an internet connection so I can work. This is the plan, one that makes my situation a little different: I'm working full-time from home but I get to take extraordinary lunch breaks.

  In the evening, the wind has dropped and it's hot even downstairs in the house. I pile quilts and blankets and pillows outside on the rough terrace, grateful to have no neighbours to witness my unconventional approach. I fall asleep in the fresh air, under the stars, listening to the high-pitched call of the Scops owl as well as the intermittent drone of the refrigerator in the apothiki. I wake in the early hours to see the moon straight ahead, so full and dazzlingly bright that it illuminates the sky and bathes the garden in silver light. I'd never have noticed this if I'd stayed in the house. Eventually I turn over and fall asleep again until the bees are buzzing around the basil and courgette flowers, the cicadas are revving up and sun lights the mountaintops all around.

  Like many people who come to Greece on holiday, I often wondered if I could live on a Greek island. After university, I taught English in Athens for a year, and spent weekends and vacations on Crete and Santorini, Mykonos and Hydra and other islands. But the pull to find a career, to have the freedom to do more with my life, drove me farther afield. I've loved to travel and live in other countries; but at times when I've been without my own home for a long while, I've felt a need to settle and a longing to be back in Greece. Now I have years of experience working with books – as a literary agent in Canada, a freelance editor in France and a publisher in England – and I decided it was time to try working from home on a Greek island. It took me a long time to be comfortable saying: I can do the job, but I don't fit into the box.

  My bos
s in England offered me a freelance contract, and a colleague found me tenants to cover the mortgage for the little flat I'd bought: a reasonably solid base with which to make this risky move. I love freedom and adventure, but also need some stability. I earn far less money than I used to, but my rent is low and it's not possible to spend lots of money here. My needs are simple.

  I count my blessings that I've got myself into a situation where I can be outdoors more, and the countryside is on my doorstep. When did I start to notice, I wonder, that exercise outdoors in nature grounded me and made me happier? Over the last few years when I lived near the south coast of England, if I needed a pick-me-up I would always cycle a few miles north of town and then walk up a hill in the South Downs topped by the outline of a prehistoric fort. But it was usually only on weekends, or on rare summer evenings when the weather was good and I still had the energy after work. Here in Tilos, I can sleep under the stars, and be at my desk (barefoot, but who's to know?) first thing in the morning, ticking off items in my diary. And both work and life feel better than ever. That's the idea: to live a better life in lots of ways; eat local food; spend more time in nature.