A bay in the Greek Mani

My landlady has acquired a dog. Despite being all tongue, wuff and brain death, he is a lovable little chap. He runs around, stimulated by everything from a falling leaf to a running hose. And whereas our little community here consisted of dozens of cats wandering about on terra firma until a week ago, it now consists of dozens of cats perched on tree branches….with new dog on the block running from one to the other like a stage act balancing plates in the air.

However, the dog has one very unfortunate personality flaw: kleptomania. One of my beach shoes has gone missing. Nobody knows where it is. The shoe I mean, not the dog. This morning I caught him about to lollop off with my swimming trunks. Obviously, he thought it was a game. I didn’t. The crotch of the trunks has not come out of this very well. So I mentioned to my landlady that he was firmly in the frame for the shoe heist.

She gave the dog a damn good telling off yesterday. This morning, he arrived with this (left) – as what I presume was meant to be his canine idea of some sort of recompense:

As a replacement for foot apparel, it doesn’t really cut it. I mean, there’s no way I’d destroy a football in order to recreate a shoe. The puppy would, but that’s not entirely relevant.

Mind you – and I do realise this is something of a lateral leap on my part – maybe Fido just wanted to play.

Either way, we kicked the ball around together. And if nothing else, this allowed the cats to come down from the trees and get something to eat. Also, we made up – which was nice.

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The season is rapidly drawing to a close. After a week of dodgy weather, it’s now warm again, but most of the tavernas here will close within the next fortnight. Meanwhile, what we have seen is several minority invasions at one and the same time. The first of these involved tattoos, and reflects the fact that prices have dropped now we’re in the shoulder-months of the holiday market. They are (of course) all Murdoch-created British Underclass. The men have large biceps and fat bellies, the women have huge bums, and they all have foul mouths engaged for much of the time in swilling down as much alcohol as might be necessary to cause on the one hand comatose collapse – or on the other, violent psychosis.

The second invasion involves more bulk – but no tattoos, and thus no trouble. This is the arrival en masse of Europe’s Mobile Homes. I’ve been doing an audit of late (I am still a tedious researcher at heart) and I would call the international mix as roughly 40% German, 30% Italian, 15% Austrian, 10% Swiss and 5% French. None of these folks are what you’d call rich – we’re not talking Winnebago land here – in fact if anything they have that academic intellectual air of Thor Heyerdahl and his ilk in their prime: naturally tanned, skinny and with long male hair in the majority.

They do not read Kindles, they read books. None of these are by Dan Brown, and none of them are about the SAS, football, Codes, Memorandums, or thirtysomething women. They have titles like Die private Seite des Machthabers, and Matthieu Ricard: The habits of happiness. 

How often these days I feel ashamed of being English when I’m abroad.

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Much better in fact to look at the natural geography of these surroundings, for it is by any standards spectacular. While the fine weather continues, the shrub and Cypress-covered mountains of Messinia rise unfeasibly high into the blue haze of Autumn sky. When the weather is inclement, the sea blasts against the volcanic coast, and clouds collect to spiral around the peaks. Trust me, it’s awe inspiring. And whatever the weather, they once more explain to me why the Norse people share  mighty Gods with those of the ancient Greeks. You could imagine Thor hammering his way through a bad day in Greece as much as you could Aphrodite rising from the waters of a Norwegian fjord in summer.

For me, the mountains act as a barrier from the nutcase world outside.

But as my Dad used to say, “Buy in places with good weather and nice views, because they’re not making any more of them”. For this reason alone, the Mani coast is – I’m quite sure – Greece’s future Côte D’Azure. Looking around here, you wouldn’t know there was a property Black Hole in Greece. The planning rules are (thank God in her mercy) low-rise only, and have to be in the local stone turret architectural style. But speculative building is rife….and everywhere apparent. It’s all a bit hippy and pony-tail at the moment: and while for me that – plus the survival of local business culture – is a huge part of this region’s charm, it won’t stop the Super-rich from moving in before too long. It reminds me of Cadacques in northeastern Spain when I first went there in 1972. Today, Dali’s old haunt is on the A-list of the travelati everywhere. In 2022, so too will the Messinian Coast.

Who knows where or what realm I might be in by then. All I can say is that I am sorely tempted to buy a slice of it before (a) I die or (b) the new barbarian Goths destroy it.