The water is pumped from a sterna which collects the copious winter rains but now it’s vibrating wildly and in the suspiciously hot smell I envisage a disastrous island conflagration known to have started right here.


...My British friend remarks, wryly, that it could be a metaphor for Greece but my Greek friend says if Greece is the pump – what and where is the brick that makes everything run smoothly?


...In ancient Greece water was collected in run-offs to underground flask-shaped storage to prevent evaporation in the searing heat of summer, but our island reservoir, heedless of millennia of experience, is a vast, open, shallow bowl, offering the maximum surface to the sun..


...Currently I’m enjoying the ritual by which the sterna - a system adequate since ancient times but unable to meet the demand for daily showers and a washing machine - is filled from the town water via a long and potentially lethal hose across the dusk courtyard.


...Every time I think (smugly) my rather basic Greek is catching some crucial political discussion on a bar television, the words winning, losing, former glory days, discipline and national respect, turn out to mean the boys in blue.


...Next door is the long derelict olive oil soap factory where the goddess of fertility, Ceres – here, a Ceres bearing a branch of olive leaves, not corn – still stands over the boarded doorway, looking calmly out to sea.