Tales from the Gael

We seem to have spent a lot of the time walking along the beach. The weather is hot now, and it is all very glorious. The sea is the colour of dark blue opals, and on Sunday we came across what seemed to be an abandoned hotel or resort.

 White villas in luxurious gardens, a ‘moonlight bar’ sitting out by the sea, and we wandered around wondering what had happened. Was it a casualty of the 1974 invasion? Had the owners gone bankrupt? We wished we were millionaires or had even an iota of knowledge of how to run a hotel. All just delicious daydreams. Walking back along the walkway, I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by a metre long black snake darting out from the shrubs. Aaaaargh. It may not have been poisonous, but it could have caused a heart attack! Now, I will have a renewed respect for the odd bushes in the countryside that might serve as nature’s ‘facilities!’ We later learned that the resort is for the workers of the local Casino. Lucky croupiers!

On our walks we have befriended a couple that laze outside their campervan parked by the sea. They spend idyllic days, sometimes cycling, mostly sitting admiring the sea and slicing up beans and feathery greenery. The man introduced himself as being a Cypriot, he is in his 60s and has long grey hair, a complexion the colour of toasted almonds and the most gorgeous grin. He fled Cyprus in 1974, and has lived the past 30 years in London. Now he works making TV programmes and lives in a house in Guzelyurt with the sweetest grapefruit trees in his garden. We were presented with two each. ‘I like to get away on Sunday and drive up to this coast and stay here with my love (and he leaned over and took his partner’s hand), and relax until Thursday then we go back for work on Friday.’ Aaaah.

These pictures were taken in Kyrenia, when we went to visit the house in Bellapais where Lawrence Durrell wrote his book, ‘Bitter Lemons’.

We took a notion to visit some properties for sale, and were quite bewitched by Mehmet (our estate agent) who spilled all the owner’s secrets as he showed us around. The poor lad that was selling the very plain, traditional village house in a large plot of land had come home to find his wife in bed with the neighbour. He had punched the bedroom door and the wardrobe door in rage, but Mehmet gossiped away in front of him, assuring us that all would be fixed. The guy just wanted to get away from the village and buy a flat in Famagusta. I am so glad he didn’t understand English.

Today we were to go back and have another look… but the phone just went and Mehmet was rushed to hospital last night. So… maybe life in a Turkish Cypriot village is not to be our fate after all. I did love the fields, the mud brick walls of the garden, the distant Kyrenian hills… but the house was rather reminiscent of a Scottish But n’ Ben. If only we could have had the second house with the arches on the same piece of land.

Now that was stunning but needing hundreds spent on it. We discussed it with our TV programmer friend on the beach, and he said, ‘You must live now, my friends, plant some grapefruit and I will visit you next summer!’

But now we are all packed up, the sheets are drying as I write, and soon the taxi will be here to take us to Larnica. We plan to visit the southern part of Cyprus before heading back to Edinburgh next week. I will head off with a black eye. I didn’t realise John had shut the glass door to the balcony last night, and I marched bang into it. Tears but no blood!

We have woken up to no water, and no electricity. This is quite a reality check and stops the idle dreams of owning an isolated shepherd’s shack in a field of yellow flowers.

We are creatures of a modern time, and I am not ready for the truly rustic life. I read that travel makes you aware of two things: loneliness and time, and I can vouch for both, as well as foreign ruins and a feeling of being pushed to the forefront of a long procession of footsteps marching over the same rocky paths.

The sunshine has brought us out and about, like lizards on a sunbed, and we have had the mixed pleasures of meeting with fellow ‘Brits Abroad’. A friend recently recounted a time when he was in NZ sitting sipping a beer in Paihia in the North Island. Some holiday makers fresh from their cruise were at a table next to him. They were obviously feeling the rush of excitement of meeting a fellow country man. A Margo-look-and-sound-like brayed across, ‘Which part of England are you from?’, to which my friend replied, ‘The best bit, it’s called Scotland!’ to which Margo and Jerry, sniffed and turned back to their ‘whaite waine’.

We went out to the restaurant by the pool on our complex the other night and met ‘Brits Abroad’. They were like Del boy and his moll. I shouldn’t mock, but all the conversation revolved around money and how rich they were, and how he has built 9 holiday apartment blocks and blah blah blah. Wife (Sylvia) seemed very nice and friendly (Essex girl), but got drunker and drunker and more and more boring yapping on about her daughter’s education (yawn). She said all the expats here have a drinking problem… I can see that! Then she asked me if I believed in open marriage? I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and she said ‘free sex’. I looked at Del Boy and his missing 3 front teeth and almost laughed out loud!!!! So funny. A little Russian kid toddled over to our table and wouldn’t leave Del Boy alone. He looked at her quizzically and said, ‘Are you mine?’ Ha ha ha!!!!

I think my Del Boy is of a different sort of “Brit abroad” to the Margot and Jerry (Good Life) type. Isn’t it strange how we use TV characters as the common currency of reference?

And Bill, nice Bill. He and his wife come out three times a year and motor about and enjoy the sunshine and ambience. He startled us by recounting how he had a heart attack just past Boguz and went straight into a field and knew nothing more till he woke up in a hospital in Famagusta! I always think of him when we pass ‘Bill’s Field’, and hold on to the steering wheel really tight!

Yesterday we drove up the panhandle of the Karpaz Peninsula. It was all very beautiful, the countryside verdant and dotted with tall yellow flowers and carpets of dog roses, cyclamen and anemones.

We called in to a café in Yenierenkoy and there met a retired English couple selling second hand books. The coffee was awful. John was enjoying his Turkish little demi tasse, but I fed my milky long life synthetic Nescafé to the plant beside me. That was when Peter strolled down the street and leant on the café rails, rather like a cowboy tethering his horse at a saloon, and befriended us.

We asked him all the usual questions. How was he enjoying living in Cyprus full time, did he like the little town, did he garden blah blah blah? It was then he launched into his story.

He and his wife have rescued 5 wild donkeys. They (the donkeys) were starving, at death’s door, and ugly and bony. Somehow they (our new friends) procured a field with a shelter, and delivered them from the bullet that would certainly have been their fate if they had been left any longer in the wild.

The donkeys soon started to recover and it wasn’t long before their particular personalities began to show. Also one had given birth a few weeks after the rescue, so then there were 6.

They decided to call the old blind one George. The two frisky lads they called William and Harry, the middle aged ugly, bony, horsey-faced one, Camilla, and the young bony horsey-faced one, Anne. The new baby was called Bertie. I don’t think this couple are royalists somehow.

Anyway Peter went into great detail about the food they have to procure from the market, (end of the day beetroot and cabbages, old carrots and apples etc.) as well as muesli if you please… quite the royal rations. I would have thought a few nuts and hay would have sufficed.

All this fine dining had turned the little pack into sex fiends. William and Harry with the aid of Blind George had a ball gang raping Camilla and Anne. Poor Camilla’s haunches were bald and cut with the hoof abuse, and it just could not go on. Even Blind George was not averse to having a go, but he took such a long time lining one of the girls up, by the time he was ready she had walked off. Peter decided to get them all castrated, it was a kindness.

So now only baby Bertie is full of the joys of spring and like all baby animals everywhere he bounces about on all fours.

Peter meanwhile was shaking his head at the way his world has changed. From a quiet life in England, he is now never off the road, begging for hay, procuring vedg and visiting his donkeys. The money we spent on the books we bought would of course go towards the donkey fund.

On the way home we decided to call in and visit the royal donkeys. It was funny, they were charming and fat and healthy. We looked into their big brown eyes and tried to distinguish which was which.

Apart from chatting up the people we meet, we did visit Kantara castle, built high up on the hills, with panoramic views of the north and the east side of the island.

I could imagine being an archer guarding such an impregnable fortress.

It was all very amazing. But I was more taken with the wild cyclamen growing in the clefts of the rock.

Another ‘old ruin’ was the monastery of St Barnabus. The poor man was stoned and burned to death, and his body thrown to the sea. Later his friends rescued his remains and took them a little to the west and buried him in a tomb under a carob tree. He was later discovered 400 or so years later, and on the site a monastery was built.

Nowadays it is used as an archaeological museum, with some very amazing pots and pans dating back to the 11^th C BC. We climbed down into the tomb, and I lay down on the hard rock carved into the cave. I felt a little like Juliette. It was actually quite creepy.

So all in all, we have had an interesting few days. By the way, the globe artichokes were delicious. I made the lemon aioli. We had them with fish roasted with grated ginger and broad beans fried in olive oil and garlic. It was all so Elizabeth David. I do love her recipes – they are a must for this Mediterranean way of life.

Tonight we are going out to eat at a Turkish restaurant. The speciality is Meze (short for Mezedhes), which means we get a little of everything. Apparently you get about 30 courses. Now that is what I call a meal! I think it should be an experience to be savoured, though knowing me; I will be so hungry I will probably horse down the first 3 and then not be able to eat any more!

We are off now on our bikes to Iskele. Sludgy coffee for John and peppermint tea for MOI!

I have just finished reading Lawrence Durrell’s book ‘Bitter Lemons’, written in 1956, and it covers the uprising of the Greeks against the British here in Cyprus. I am so ignorant about this country and only know about the 1974 invasion by the Turks, and so this whole visit has been an education. For anyone wanting to learn more, I believe a book called ‘The Genocide Files’ is a must. For now though I am bewitched by the idyllic days that are unfolding with the springtime. On our way down to the sea we passed a field thick with cyclamen plants and fragile anemones. It was like a tapestry or Turkish carpet, and then we come across a splash of poppies. Apparently the anemone flower blossomed on the ground where Aphrodite shed her tears after her lover, Adonis, was killed hunting for wild boar.

We haven’t hired a car for these last 2 weeks and instead have been marching about on foot or cycling. The weather is hot and the countryside is ablaze with yellow daisies, and the little caterpillars have been blown hither and thither, and we find them on the beach, valiantly nosing their way into the sea, or crossing the paths from one field to an identical one on the other side, and the crested larks swoop down for a mid-morning snack before spiralling up into the blue for a better view.

It is all so rural,

and our walk to the village of Iskele takes us through the fields of corn and flowers and I have had to come down from my high fallutin’ ways of running out to the co-op for all my needs, and accept the gnarled carrots and sad looking mushrooms that are on offer here, and just buy what is in season. It seems it is  artichokes at the moment, so tomorrow I am going to try and cook one. I thought I would make some lovely garlicy aioli to dip the fleshy ends into.

I had been feeling a little low and thought it was due to a lack of meat, as my supply of B12 is now depleted, so all in all, I was like a lion needing to kill a zebra. We marched through the fields with a sense of purpose, and found a butcher shop with lots of chicken and lamb (too fatty). I asked for meat for steak, so the young lad sharpened his knives and made a great feat of slicing and cutting and so on. We left with 7 pieces of steak for the grand price of 30 Turkish Lira (about £12). I cooked it up, with onions and roasted red peppers, and cut potatoes into wedges and roasted them in a pool of olive oil and lemon juice. The aroma was wonderful and I was like a happy lioness licking my lips. Well… it was all so disappointing. The meat was tougher than leather (I imagine) and we had to saw each piece into slithers in order to swallow it. It might have been a zebra for all we know, or maybe a relation??? Ginger or Merry Legs or even the Black Beauty himself. Last night I made a witches’ cauldron of onions, the remaining steak, mushrooms, garlic, carrots and blood red wine. It was delicious. Energy levels have arisen and all is now well in the kingdom of  ‘The Gaeldom’.

The afternoons have been heavenly, we lie by the pool, and I watch John sideways through my dark glasses as he edits ‘The Highland Rocks’.

I keep an eye out if he frowns, or his lips twitch to suppress a smile. He has 10 more pages to go, and so far so good. Then of course, he has to correct it all on the screen. He mutters crossly at all my bad stage management, and choreography. But I think I have the thumbs up!

We have been watching the BBC series ‘I Claudius’, made in 1976. It is very dated and almost like watching live theatre, rather than a TV film. The story however, is fantastic and there are some brilliant performances. I felt we needed to get updated with all the history and it makes our visits to the ancient sites so much more meaningful. I am so shocked at all the poisonings and murder that went on in the Royal Court. We have just watched the episodes featuring Augustus and his evil wife, Livia, and now Tiberius is in power, but tonight Caligula is due to take power, and in the wings waits Nero… Oh my! I can’t wait for 8 o’clock – that’s when we have ‘show time’!!!

And now, I must get on with the day – all dressed up and made up like a lady. Old habits die hard.  I remember a former colleague of mine, Liz Pritchard, who was the peripatetic Music Teacher when we lived up in the West Highlands, saying to me how one always must maintain personal standards. She herself lived in the village of Sheildaig, miles from all her schools. Each day she travelled to Dornie, Glenelg, Inverinate, Kyle, Plockton and maybe even Kyleakin on Skye. When she finally got home at night, she would cook her dinner and set the table with silver and crystal and lovely place mats. ‘So easy to let oneself go, and start eating off a tray,’ she said. Quite.

I am off to cycle to the shop to buy some wrinkled up beans with mascara and lipstick firmly in place. Standards are NOT dropping here.

I am marooned here alone for a few days. John left yesterday for his mother’s funeral, so I have a few days to contend with and only shank’s pony with which to explore. I shall march through the fields and admire the early irises and venture to the beach for a walk by the sea.

The weather has definitely warmed, and it is better to be out than in. Also thank the good Lord, the Renoir puzzle is complete at last….it was a nightmare.

Last week we drove up the ‘pan handle’ of the NE of the island, past yellow sands where turtles come and visited the monastery of Saint Andrew.

It was ancient, built in the 15^th Century, and it was said that St Andrew guided a sea captain, blind in one eye to the shore. They were in search of fresh water. St Andrew gave the captain a drink, and immediately he got his sight back. Nowadays pilgrims from all over the place visit and pray for health cures. They leave small replicas of eyes, ears, hands or hearts etc. I prayed for John’s headaches, as most of his days are blighted and his eyes on that particular day were all scrunched up. I wanted to leave a head, but didn’t get round to buying a doll and lopping off its head for the purpose.

I was incredibly moved in the church. For some reason it made me cry, and that is not normal for me, as for years now I have found it difficult to shed a tear. I seriously believe my tear ducts have dried up. I do cry when I hear the Queen though.

I met a middle aged couple who had driven 350 km to come to the monastery to see Saint Andrew. They were carrying the largest candle sticks I had ever seen. They were all wrapped in brown paper. They lit their candles, then, making their way around the icons, kissed each portrait as they went. I remember people did the same in the Lavra Monastery in Kiev. They kissed the coffins containing the mummified remains of the monks. I so envy their faith. Anyway John woke up the next day, headache free.

The following day we decided to visit the 1001 shop. It is an amazing emporium of plastic. It sells literally everything and we had a ball. What a hoot. At the checkout we were like contestants from The Generation Game. We had bought a spirit level, a rasp, two Chinese pin cushions, a garlic press, some butcher hooks, bike lights, a bottle of whisky, oranges, and I can’t remember the rest. The whole thing came to about £30!

We explored the ancient ruin of Salamis which is just down the road from our apartment. John was quite tetchy paying for the ticket, thinking he was going to see a couple of columns and was suggesting we just peer over the wall. Oh my! What a surprise. We found a city dating from 11thC BC…it was so rich and beautiful, with theatres and baths and fish markets (with basins still intact for cleaning the fish…personally I thought they looked a bit like urinals) and a temple to Zeus.

There was a Roman road, and mosaic and steam rooms with under floor heating.

I have been still living in my dream world of being beheaded, so you can imagine I was quite shocked coming into a courtyard full of headless women. (sounds like a song from the Eagles…or was that ‘faithless women’?)

I decided to add colour to the ancient stones, and jumped up on a plinth and did my thing, and John was clicking away like David Baillie. I was so mortified, for around the bathhouse came a bus load of tourists. They were OU students or something like that, for their lecturer started spouting and I had to meekly get off my plinth and skulk away. They probably thought I was just too frivolous.

I have grave concerns about my figure. So much for slimming and eating raw carrots and getting slim for Sheila’s wedding in April. I have discovered the joys of Dolma, eaten in a restaurant just within the walls of the old city of Famagusta, and if I could, I would have licked my plate. Oh the joys of lunch in the sun. I ate stuffed Jerusalem artichoke, stuffed onions and stuffed courgettes. If I hadn’t been driving I would have had a brandy sour, but instead John enjoyed a beer and promptly fell asleep as God intended!

We also ate out at a fish restaurant that actually sits out on stilts above the Mediterranean. We went on a night when the moon was full, and the waves were washing just below our table. The fish was fresh, covered in lemon juice, salt and pepper, the salad was mainly tomatoes and when we said, no, we wouldn’t have coffee or desert, the waiter brought us two lemon puddings anyway…Oh my goodness, they were so good.

I decided to give my orange jumper that I knitted for £5 last year an airing. I posed beside some oranges at a Friday Market in Iskele, and totally blended in.

It was there that I met my down fall. Baklavas. I saw the pastry, I saw the honey and nuts and I knew my gall bladder would erupt, but I ate it anyway. The first time was OK, but the second brought the burn. I should have known better. When will I learn?  Still the offending organ is supposed to be removed later this year anyway.

Today it is hot and sunny, and I might go down to the pool and read my Nancy Mitford. Love her irreverence and wit, and she gives such a peephole into a species and life long gone by.

‘…the inside of the motor was like a dry little box, and we splashed down the long wet shiny roads, with the rain beating against the windows, there was  a delicious cosiness about being in this little box…….

‘I love being so dry in here,’ as Lady Montdore put it, ‘and seeing all those poor people so wet.’

That was from ‘Love in a Cold Climate.’

The local English newspaper, which I buy when I manage to find one, is very good for politics, about Turkey mainly, about politicians with unpronounceable  names, and I generally skim the gist, but I was quite arrested by these headlines, ‘Family wants limbs back as patient is laid to rest.’

Sevket Cavdar was Turkey’s first quadruple-limb transplant patient, but sadly his body rejected the new appendages. The donor, who had also donated his face for another transplant had died in a traffic accident. 54 doctors had worked on the two operations, and were pleased that the face patient was stable and is expected to be woken this week. The family of the poor donor requested their son’s arms and legs back, I think quite rightly. They should go to rest with the rest of him.

All this going on, all these feverish forays in operating theatres, and I am busy praying to a saint in an ancient church to help John’s head. I’m not even a catholic, not that that matters. I would buy a big candle and light it if I believed it would help in a cure. Didn’t the woman just want to touch Jesus’s robe? Her faith was enough.

I contemplated all this in a lovely restaurant where we stopped for coffee. It was called Sea Breeze. Unfortunate name. Makes me think of bathroom cleaner.

But now, it’s the pool and Nancy Mitford!

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?!

The sun is setting and I am sitting with a white wine at hand, a Moroccan chicken in the oven, and John Lee Hooker singing in the background.

Outside, the fields are green and dotted with bright yellow flowers, a marvel as a result of excessive rains, and over the way the Mediterranean laps the shore. Northern Cyprus, a new land to me, a contrast from anything I have known before. I am keeping an open mind, as it is dusty and poor; the Turks may be the victors after the 1974 invasion, but in contrast to the more affluent south, the roads and lack of signs, I would say that they may have conquered the land but their way of life is perhaps more stunted compared to the rest of Europe. Early days and I have no right to make judgements, albeit naïve.

John and I drove to Famagusta this morning, then got totally lost in a myriad of fields, laid out like I would imagine St Paul might have seen them. We saw plots of cabbages, roughly ploughed land ready to sow, chickens, cherry trees, and smiling  ladies in colourful head scarves  waving at us as we passed.

I suffered several bouts of whiplash as John braked hard on the sleeping policemen, until we finally found our way back to the more ordered metropolis of the university town of Famagusta and had lunch in the sun and watched dusty cats stalk about.

Matt’s (John’s son’s) apartment is fine but seriously cold at night. We arrived in the middle of the night and when the taxi dropped us off we were a little jaded by the temperature in a flat that is NOT built with insulation, heating or fitted carpets… I was so cold, and the tiled floors were like an ice rink.

I refused to wash, and when I eventually did (after 48 hours) and  turned the shower on to hot and discarded my jeans, they just about walked by themselves to the washing machine! But the days are glorious… hot and sunny, and we tramped through a field to buy some bread and eggs and were stunned to find our own private butterfly nursery. We just missed stepping on millions of caterpillars huddled together, awaiting their metamorphosis. Magical.

We are to be exiles here for seven weeks and no doubt we will make a few road trips, if our horrible little hire car makes the journeys! The motley crew that took our money and grinned with big teeth as we drove away are no doubt swilling their profits as I write… Hmmmmm. Tomorrow is going to be a trip into the unknown. We have a Turkish map, showing us roads to a fort and monastery on the North coast of the island, and we plan eating egg sandwiches overlooking the Med, before finding our way down to Nicosia, then back along the meandering tracks to Iskele.

In the meantime we have the oranges, pomegranates,

 hot water bottles and my old faithful kangaroo slippers!

Beautiful Edinburgh and its burgeoning crocuses and snowdrops must wait, and the cares of tomorrow must wait, till this day is done.