I remember being very jealous of my cousins who had these amazing toys that we were never given. I must have been about five years old, and I palmed one of the small shiny toys into my pocket at their house and delivered it safely to the darkness of my cupboard when I got home.I…
Conversations Inside a House
To get inside No. 45 Kakouri you have to use a big village key to open the door that lets you enter a tall ceilinged hall with a bathroom on the left, a kitchen in front and a narrow staircase separating the kitchen from the dining room on the right. The hall is not really…
Conversations while Looking at a House
No 45 in Kakouri lies on the southwest comer of the intersection of a small tar back road from Tripolis to the bigger village of Levidi and a road that goes up into the village and down into the planes to the even smaller village of Simiades, in the shadows of the tallest mountain in…
Conversations on Directions
My father always drew a distinction between a house and a home. The former was a shell that was never filled with love or tradition; the latter was filled with family, love, tradition, happiness and sadness. As Zorba the Greek might have paraphrased: “A home held the whole catastrophe”. Before Greece started its cadastral records…
Conversations with Myself, Part 1
In 2006 I visited my father while he was holidaying in Greece. Holidaying is probably not the right word. He went there to live. He was absorbed in the village life, loved walking through the agricultural fields and spending time in the market town, going to the banks, sorting out business issues with his lawyer…
Conversations with Saints
All Greeks celebrate name days. This is the Saint’s Day of the saint of the Orthodox Church whose name they hold. Some Saints have easy names and days to remember, while others are more obscure and as a final resort there is an All Saints Day to cover those names not having a specific Saint.…
Conversations with a Deaf Teacher
As I page through the year book of Germiston Boys High School 1954 I can smell the old classrooms. I can smell the hundreds of pines trees, the needles carpeting the ground below and the narrow tarmac that leads up to the school gate. A metal palisade, between tall red brick columns. I dreamt of…
Conversations on Coffee
Tea and coffee. I have written about tea, and have mentioned my father’s black instant coffee in the early morning. Greek coffee is different. Foreigners who have had a cup always warn of the sludge that lies waiting to choke you in the bottom of the cup. Greek coffee is Middle Eastern. They make the…
Conversations on Small Change
When my father had to travel with someone to a meeting he would ask a standard question: “Do you want to travel in my old new car, or in my new old car?” It was a Mercedes W123 200 that had a few hundred thousand on the clock. It was bought second hand (or third or…
Conversations about Ward Rounds
My father and I often started out opposite but ended up in the same place. When he finished school he started pharmacy at university. After a year, he left that and changed to a B. Comm. His main business was building. When I finished school I started civil engineering. After two years I changed to…
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