Epistle from Cyprus IX - 9th January 2007

Ah the new year. Just time for a short epistle. A time for resolutions and new starts. Time to make a clean breast of things. Confession is good for the soul and all that so let me get on with it.

The following confession may come as something of a surprise to some reading this after all I have said in previous notes. Some will gloat and rub their hands and say he is only getting what he deserves after all that bragging. And that may be true.

Cyprus is cold in the winter. Very cold. Let me clarify. Yes it is still warm. Today for example it was 18C (64F) but as soon as the sun goes down it gets cold. Then to make matters worse Cypriot houses are not designed for the cold. They are meant to be lived in when it is 35C. They are large and airy with high ceilings exactly the opposite of what is required in the winter.

During the afternoons I sit and bask in the sunshine safe inside full length windows. Yet all the time I am waiting for the moment when the sun goes down and the house becomes cold enough to preserve meat.

Heaven knows I have tried to warm up the place. I have two gas fires, numerous electric heaters, even the air conditioning turned up to 26C and all is completely useless.

The house has an open fireplace so I ‘obtained’ a large supply of wood and logs thinking to sit by a cosy log fire. All I succeeded in doing was smoking myself out and ended smelling like a Manx kipper. Despite the cold I was forced to open all the windows and it still took 3 days to get rid of the smell of burning.

A man with a lampshade on his head watching TV and trying to keep warm.

There it is out in the open. You can enjoy the schardenfreude and I will enjoy the catharsis.

What a lovely word: ‘catharsis’. And now I will use it as often as possible as I now know the Greek origin which is Καθαρός (katharos) meaning clean or pure.

It has become apparent during my halting efforts to learn Greek that there are very few Greek words in English. Those that did slip through tend to be restricted to medical and scientific text books. Anthropology, gynaecology, paediatrics, gerontology, dendrochronology are but a few. Definitely not the sort of words that come up in regular conversation. Even when I do recognize the word the pronunciation is usually quite different. If only I had been told at school that a dodecahedron was actually a thothekahethron it would all make so much more sense.

Enough for now.

Happy New Year

Χρόνια Πολλά (Chronia Polla)