I love the Scops owl; small enough to sit on a human hand - about 5” high - with a hooked beak and expression of utmost ferocity, it clearly has no idea that it is not as impressively fierce or as romantically Gothic as its many cousins.


...Meanwhile, Igor, the white dog next door on the goat-and-chicken smallholding (equally unaware of how small and, in his case, fluffily unimpressive, he is) opens up, newly surprised by it every night.

...Just visible behind the spoil heaps of rubble, bags of cement turned into boulders by several long, wet Ionian winters, rotten floor boards, discarded white goods and bits of the last girlfriend but three’s car that he cannot, yet, bear to part with, the house is nearing magnificence and — who knows? — completion.


...But, he explains, the most recent girlfriend chose the colours and now – to live with the pain of memory or face the considerable labour of repainting the whole thing?


...My terrace garden – formerly a shady bower under the ancient olive and fragrant lemon trees, hidden from the world - is now a sunlit open space, overlooked by goats, Igor (yip) , my elderly neighbours (wave), and the young Albanian family who have set up an alfresco sitting room furnished with the ubiquitous white plastic chairs, on the hillside above me. There they wave and, of an evening, roast lamb (or, I hope, goat) and, on special occasions, sing very long songs into the night.