Books and Good Reading.
Title:
Everday
Life in the Village:
Author: Michael Saunders. Everyday life in the village: The Review. Michael
Saunders is an Englishman who moved to Crete some years ago with his
wife, and now lives not two stones’ throw away from our own Webmaster
on the Rodopos peninsular. He writes a weekly column for the
English-language paper Athens News and a selection of those articles
make up this book, also published by the newspaper. This
new book fits neatly into the ‘veni, vidi, vici’ genre, but I do
have some reservations about it. I
enjoyed Michael Saunders’ book, ‘Ela’, which portrayed the Cretans
as dignified people – some good, some bad – with normal human
foibles, who usually extend hospitality and warmth to the strangers who
choose to live amongst them. My major criticism of this book is that the
locals appear here as caricatures – and the illustrations contribute
to the suggestion that the author is a sensible and decent chap tussling
with a load of rural mischievous half-wits.
As a former journalist, I can understand the temptation to write
amusing copy to meet a newspaper deadline, certain in the knowledge that
your fellow villagers are unlikely to be reading an English-language
newspaper published in Athens. I have to say that my sympathies lay with
the locals in a number of instances – like the occasion when Michael
decided to lop branches off someone else’s olive tree just so he could
park his car underneath! But
some of the stories are very amusing and entertaining. The arrival of
their furniture container from England struck a horribly familiar chord,
including the customs declaration about it containing no guns or drugs
…and the arrival of one huge container in a tiny village with no
reversing space certainly brings out the neighbours! I
laughed out loud at the tale of Michael and his wife digging dried pig
and sheep manure into their vegetable plot by the light of the moon, and
then watering it in so their neighbours did not know they had used both.
They had to pay the penalty of living with a foul smell, but produced a
bumper crop of vegetables. And a surplus of eggs from their chickens,
too, as Pauline, Michael’s wife, invests
in an incubator which produces more chicks every three weeks – until
they start falling prey to a mystery nocturnal predator. All sorts of
tricks are tried to outwit this beastie – the luritha – to no avail,
until someone comes up with the brilliantly simple suggestion of leaving
a light on in the chicken coop. Here
on Crete, a traffic cone is quite a rare find. And now I can reveal why
this is – Michael Saunders has been using them for immobilising his
chickens while he wields his axe! Ingenious, or what? Turning
animals that have become family friends into lumps of meat for the
freezer provides material for some good stories, with blood, guts and
cleavers aplenty. There is also a fair amount of hilarity and gore as
Michael helps sew up a piglet with a gaping wound and Pauline turns into
the equivalent of ‘barefoot vet’, dealing with a prolapsed sheep by
swathing its back end in curtain lining! I
offer Pauline sincere homage for trying to explain to a Cretan butcher
about beef suet for making mincemeat. I quail at the prospect and we
have to forgo the Christmas mince pies again this year because of my
cowardice!
Reviewer.
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