My mother’s father was a baker. I have his first name, Basil, but a different surname. His was Moutsatsos. He comes from a beautiful seaside village on the eastern phalanx of the Peloponnese, from a village called Velanidia. The story goes that during the invasions by the Spanish fleet the villagers would all run down…
Conversations on Blessings
My father would always say we should count our blessings. We always had to go to church on St. John’s day, 6 January, when the priest blesses everyone in church with Holy Water from the Epiphany sprinkled with a sprig of Sweet Basil. The heady mix of a summer day in South Africa, incense, candle…
Conversations about Divides
The Corinth Canal divides Attica from the Peloponnese. It is over 6 km long, hewn into solid marble. It was dug at the end of the 19th century. When we first crossed the canal in the late sixties there was a single railway bridge of metal framework and a concrete road bridge with a single…
Conversations about Levels
My father was a firm believer in technology and psychology. When we were close to finishing school we were subjected to a battery of tests at the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) for a whole day. Doing tests and answering questions asked by young psychologists. The CSIR was at the bottom end of…
Conversations about Failure
My father started primary school at the White Only Alberton Primary school. The school was two roads down into the valley, in the alluvial plain of the Natalspruit, 5 avenues from the Union Cafe. He started school as an immigrant’s son. The school has had a colourful record after educating the white youth of a…
Conversations about Banks
My father always had various banks as tenants in his buildings. They were good anchor tenants and signed long leases.IN the early days of building societies he also had one or two of those as tenants, and was appointed chairman of the local board of the Prudential Equity Building Society and later a director of…
Conversations on Theft
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…
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