I had such a horrible dream last night…my hair had fallen out at the top and in its place was a hard white crust. The only solution was to have my head cut off. This was done and I looked like the guy with the globe on his head, and I had no senses and was panicked because I couldn’t get down to the beach unaided.

We have been such trippers this week, weathering the thunder and lightning to revisit Kyrenia and when we arrived the sun shone and all was idyllic. We were enchanted with the sea and the boats and had lunch of kleftico and beer in the sun.

We posed prettily on the castle ramparts and

read all the history of marauders throughout ancient history. Christianity came around 43 AD,  then the Byzantium period followed after the division of the Roman Empire, followed by Richard the Lion Heart, the Knights Templar and then the French. The Venetians got it around 1489. We trudged around the castle seeing maps of how the walls changed depending on who was ruling at the time. I could have sat for Mastermind after all the guide books I devoured, but sadly my brain has a serious problem with recall. Now, was it the Ottomans or the Venetians that did this or that, and do I really care?

I did care very much when we visited St Hillarian castle, built high on the rugged peaks surrounding Kyrenia.

Now there is a castle worth writing home about. It reminded me a bit of the Albigensian castles of southern France. Walt Disney used it as a template for Snow White’s Magic Kingdom.

I so love the trivia and the stories written on the walls, particularly one about a bad French king called John and his wife Eleanore. Half of the charm is in the translation and I so wished I had written it down, but the gist of it went like this:

King John became weird and bad.  He enticed his friends up to the royal rooms where he pushed them out of the window to their deaths. Eleanore was very upset. She tricked him by ordering his manservant to kill him and she finally got her revenge????? It was all very intriguing and maybe I should try and find a proper account!

I did love the ancient wreck in Kyrenia Castle. So amazing to see an old boat that had sunk 389 years BC.

We saw the original cargo and photographed one of the 400 amphoras, 9000 almonds and the old pine wooden boards that had so much lacquer on it that it protected it from Mediterranean wood-boring maggots.  It must have been so fantastic to be that sponge fisherman who first espied it in 1965.

We took some time to visit the Bellapais Abbey. So peaceful and elegant and as we walked about there was Gregorian chant-like music filtering across the buildings.

I found a plinth to pretend to be Aphrodite, and a suitable pose for John to venerate.

I was telling him we could find a ruined stone somewhere and I should stand on it nude. He thought it would be just hilarious if he ran away with my clothes and drove off. I was not amused. Maybe we are spending too much time alone.

After the Abbey we sat and drank apple tea under The Tree of Idleness,

and then bought some pretty blue lamps from a rather disinterested old man.

I had so lusted after these lamps in the Souk in Doha, but they were so expensive and the rogue selling them swore they were from Isfahan and he had personally gone there to get them. Here, they are two a penny and quite cheap, all made in Turkey. I intend hanging them next to the blue and white Persian rug I bought with a month’s salary from my time in school in Doha.

Yesterday we ate lunch in the sun in the old walled city of Famagusta.

It is such an impressive place and full of spectacular ruins. I loved the ancient streets and the mighty city walls, the pussy cats and my first introduction to a Brandy Sour. I can tell you it won’t be my last!

But this week has been sad as well. John’s mother died at the grand old age of 97. She was tired and wanted to go, so it was a blessed relief. He will go to the funeral next week, and I shall stay on here, guarding the frozen fortress of our apartment.

The other death was a schoolboy friend, Bill Balfour.  I just heard recently of his death in November and it has really touched a nerve for I remember the boy who gave me my first kiss. He had carried my school bag home. Those were the days of chivalry, and he put it down, leant over and I felt a soft flutter against my lips and he was off, all in a skelter of red-stockinged legs. I ran up to the house, boasting to all who would listen! And linked to him is Davey Jones of the Monkees. It was all of that time, the summers of ’67-68 I think, when we would rush in to the dining room on a Saturday night to ogle the TV and watch the silly antics of the new band: ‘I’m a believer’, ‘I wanna be free’, ‘Last train to Clerkson’ etc. I loved those years at Newstead, in Crieff. Well I think I did, I seem to have happy memories. So it is farewell, for the lights have gone out for those special people and we must just remember.

There will be more things to see next week, more culture to absorb, and hopefully the latest jigsaw to finish.

We don’t intend going to the south of the island until our last week here, so we should be experts in the north by the time we leave.

In the meantime, we offset the beauty of the wild flowers, the blue sea and the five fingered mountains with a nightly episode of The Sopranos. A quick reality check! Then, of course, this is followed by a battle to the death over the backgammon board. I wonder how Napoleon passed the time during his exile?!