Greetings from Mykanos.
Or maybe it should be ‘Greetings from Animal Farm’.
We don’t have any pigs here, although we do at Rancho Grande, but we are awash in avian inhabitants including geese, turkeys, ducks, guinea fowl and chickens, quite apart from the huge number of colourful birds that nest and live in the surrounding trees and bougainvillea.
The regular Canadian tourists have gone home now that the northern winter is over. Having produced and prepared their offspring for the journey, they fly nonstop across Central and North America back to whichever maple leaf signifies home, which is very impressive as they are about the size of sparrows, although much more brightly coloured.
Our domestic feathered friends breed right here, and ‘family’ has become the catchword as the geese hatch their goslings, the turkeys their poults, the ducks their ducklings, the guinea fowl their keets, and the chickens their chicks. There is constant movement to and fro as families roam the gardens, sometimes grazing, sometimes changing ponds, sometimes seemingly just getting some exercise, protective parents ushering and overseeing the little ones. Only the ducks are restricted to their own section and pond, as they were making too much of a meal of the little tilapia we grow in the ponds, which are for our consumption not theirs.
Tragically we have not just gained new family members but have lost one of our most precious … Mafeluchis. Daughter of Pispirispis and somewhat distant, but amiable, girlfriend of Torsalino, she followed him into the next world courtesy of the same disease, which was leukaemia. The day after Adriano returned from Europe she stopped eating and went rapidly downhill. It was as though she was waiting for his return before she allowed herself to succumb. She was born in our bed in Rancho Grande in 2011, and died in our bedroom here at Mykanos.
So now, Pispirispis is the only cat in town, which is exactly how she likes it.
We have since learnt that two of the most common causes of death for cats are leukaemia and FIV, the feline version of HIV. We didn’t learn this from the vet or from the Animal Planet but from our most recent visitor, Byron, a young scientist approaching the end of his six month solo trek from Tierra del Fuego in Chile, at the extreme southern tip of the continent, to Punta Gallinas in Colombia, the northernmost tip of the South American mainland.
Byron is the 24-year-old son of friends Clare and George who live in Athens. We have history. I worked with Clare in London many years ago. In fact, Clare came on Adriano’s and my first official date back in October 1985. It was Sunday lunch at Varnom’s restaurant in Islington, and Clare acted as interpreter as Adriano had no English and I had no Spanish. Thanks to her good work all that time ago, Byron got to enjoy G&T’s, Adriano’s cooking, and days spent photographing the birds that populate the front garden.
Byron was also the first visitor to see Adriano’s new studio here at Mykanos, which is looking so immaculate that I suspect it will be more gallery than studio, complementing his main studio at Rancho.
It all seems a long way away from terror attacks, Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May.
I always remember famed Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ advice to his successor. Elections are not won, he said, they are lost. More than a few of the powerbrokers and professional political classes can sympathise with that, and wish they had not taken things so much for granted.
We never do here. We just enjoy it one day at a time.
Love from him and me
Barry
