Medical Morning

Alex and I had a medical morning.

Last night, while sparring in Tae Kwon Do, he kicked someone who used his elbow to block. Elbow connected with instep, and Alex was worried that he had broken a bone in his foot.

Although I knew that there is not much that can be done for him – he was walking, albeit painfully, and he said that some movements made him feel sick – I said that I would take him to the nearest private hospital, Iasis, for an x-ray after dropping Sophia at school. I didn’t want to face the bureaucracy of the General without Best Beloved to smooth the way.

So at 7.30 this morning, we rocked up to Casualty under the sign ’24 Hours’. Casualty was empty. We went around to reception and I explained our mission. “Oh, you’ll have to wait half an hour or forty-five minutes”, said the receptionist. “Staff aren’t here yet.” Alex and I discussed waiting or checking somewhere else, and the receptionist helpfully said: “And we’re closed between noon and four!”

“What,” I asked her “happens if someone needs an emergency x-ray at lunchtime?” She didn’t understand.

I called Evangelismos (another private clinic), but their radiography department wasn’t open until eight, either. We opted for the General Hospital, and I checked my wallet to make sure I had the ‘Poly Techni’ card, the card that says that as a family of at least four children we are entitled to free state medical care. Only problem was we are not pre-registered at the hospital for any care, and previous experiences of the State medical system did not bode well.

“Prepare for a Cultural Experience!” I told my son.

“Beats school,” was his answer.

We drove to the General, but could we find parking? One would think that in designing a new hospital for a mushrooming town fifteen years ago, the architects would have made enough parking spaces, but no. We parked on the street 300 metres from A&E. Once in the door into the empty department, I said to the nurse under a sign marked ‘Triage’: “ I need an x-ray for my son; he thinks he’s broken his foot.”

“This boy?” she said. “The one who’s walking?” But we filled out the forms, showed our poly techni card, and almost immediately were seen by a doctor who poked the lump on the side of Alex’s instep, grunted, and motioned down the hall to the x-ray department.

More forms. “Can you tell us how long we’ll be waiting?” I asked the receptionist. “Not long,” she assured me. “There’s just one ahead of you and then they’ll call you.”

We sat on the slatted wooden benches and looked around the crowd.

Most of the patients were older people from the villages. Neatly dressed, well groomed, and bearing themselves well. None looked ill; there were no emergencies here, just routine visits requiring endless waiting on the hard chairs, a gossip with neighbours and friends from previous visits. There was some good-natured grumbling about how ‘we could die in here in turn waiting to be seen’, but by and large people waited quietly. An electronic counter on the wall proclaimed ‘Your turn’ but the number space below was blank. A hand-lettered sign on the wall notified us that if we missed our turn for any reason, we would have to reregister. People kept coming in, going to the desk, signing in, sitting down. The room grew stuffy.

Lise’s mother-in-law arrived for her weekly check-up, immaculate in her widow’s black, gold cross on her chest, each grey curl in place. She recognised me and we chatted for a while but I found her rapid Paphos dialect too fast to follow properly and she smiled and turned to the man at her side who was from the same village – but not before inviting me, with the infinite hospitality of the Cypriot villager “To come some time with Lise and drink coffee with me at my house.” I assured her that some day I would.

After an hour Alex went to the desk. “Can you tell me how long I’ll be waiting, because I’m missing school?” The woman shrugged. “God knows.”

An elderly woman emerged from the corridor leaning on a stick. “I was the first,” she announced. “They’ve only just started on the queue down there.”

“Mum, let’s go,” he said. “You won’t be charged because although we’ve signed in, I haven’t had a procedure, and this is just a waste of time!” I looked around at the handsome, patient faces in the waiting room and had to agree with him. We weren’t retired with nothing else to fill the day, but I hated to leave the foot unattended.

As we walked across the parking lot, Alex winced again. “Maybe we’d better go to Evangelismos,” he said. “They’d be open now, and where the doctor poked me, my foot really hurts.”

A young man in blue scrubs was behind the desk at Evangelismos A&E. He took Alex’s details and an elderly doctor made a quick exam. “Might be broken,” he said. “X-Ray’s down the hall.”

We didn’t wait at all. The Bulgarian technician took Alex straight in and, spotting Alex’s uniform quizzed us while we were waiting for the pictures about Alex’s school. We had to wait a while for the radiographer to confirm no fracture, but chatted with the receptionist – who turned out to be a paramedic friend of SH who taught my Emergency Care course last year, and also the man who took such good care of my friend Angela when she had a mini-stroke last year. Angela had sung his praises to me several times: how patient he was with her, and how reassuring. I was glad to be able to pass on her thoughts.

I dreaded the bill. Private hospitals have a reputation for charging the proverbial arm and leg, but the doctor waived his fee, and when he heard that we have only in-patient insurance, the receptionist charged us only for the x-ray and the bandaging. We paid only 44 Euros – less even for when SH brought me in in the ambulance during the course for a dicky heart after a hornet sting.

Alex tried to weasel out of returning to school but I wouldn’t let him. I did let myself off the gym, and three and a half hours after I’d left the house, walked in the door to face the breakfast dishes.

Postscript: Rescue Horse

I called Animal Welfare this morning to see how our patient was doing and if the owner had shown up. The receptionist was brusque: "No, the owner never claimed the horse and the horse had to be euthanised. One of her back legs was broken and she had massive internal injuries.

I was very sad. I had been worried about her breathing and the possibility of internal bleeding, but I hadn't realised that her leg was actually broken, although she had been so reluctant to walk.

Poor Lady. There she had stood, parched and patient for so many hours, and in such pain. And there she would have died if we hadn't taken care of her and called the Rescue Service.

I'm sure that this cycle of tragedy is not finished. It began about six years ago when a man lost either his son or his grandson in a tractor accident. He became depressed, moody, and eventually homicidal and murdered two people at the coffee shop in Choletria. The man whose wife was killed can't bear to live sober now and kills a horse -- so far. If he regularly drives that drunk it won't be long before he kills someone else or himself.

The police know, the family knows. No-one does anything about it.

Rescue Horse

Zenon’s tenth birthday party was planned for Saturday afternoon. He wanted Best Beloved to do a souvla, he wanted a cake with DragonballZ from Zorba’s, and he wanted a crowd of friends over for games that included water balloon paintball and three-legged races. So we complied, planned, invited his friends and their parents, and prepared for the day.

At about 10, Best Beloved went out to buy the souvla meat, and as soon as he came back I left to collect the cake. As I passed the turning to the dam, just past the end of our road, I noticed a horse standing by the side of the road.

“That poor thing!” I thought to myself. It stood hunched in the blazing sunshine, its head hanging. As I drove down the road I wracked my brains to think whom it belonged to: there are few horses in Cyprus, and I thought I knew most in the neighbourhood. “I’ll take it some water as soon as I get back, and I’ll call Yianni (a friend who keeps racehorses in a nearby village), he must know the owner.”

Resolved, I continued on the cake mission, and a moment later my phone rang. It was Best Beloved: “Did you see the horse?” I told him that I had, and what I had decided to do about it. “Keep Yianni out of it for now,” Best Beloved advised. “It got hit by a car last night and the police are looking for the owners. When you get back, we’ll take it some water together.”

The cake collection was completed in record time, and back at the house Alex and I filled eight four-litre bottles with water, put them and a big bucket into the Land Rover, and headed toward the horse, stopping to pick up Best beloved from the field en route.

Close to, the horse was smaller than I thought – only about 14 hands – and standing awkwardly, tied to a boulder with a rope, chain, and too-large head-collar. She was resting a back leg, a gaping slice carved out of her side midway between hip and shoulder. Blood still trickled down her matted coat, and the flies clustered hungrily.

As Alex and I approached with the bucket and water bottles, she lifted her head and whickered, moving painfully toward us and plunging her nose deep into the bucket. She drained four litres in a gulp, so I gave her some more and more and more. After four bottles, she slowed down and I decided to wait before she had any more in case it made her colic.

She allowed me to stroke her nose and examine her wound: her shoulder was bruised, and her stifle, and I went around the other side to see if I could see any other injuries. There were none visible but a slightly swollen fetlock on her near hind leg. While she had some more water we discussed what to do and Best Beloved filled me in on the story as he knew it.

Billy had been drinking at the Cousin’s Café until late last night, and one of his companions had been the man from Choletria (the next village up) whose wife had been murdered last year by the man who had lost his grandkids and his mind in a tractor accident five years earlier. This man spends his life now in a bottle, and when he left at two in the morning (after Billy had gone home) instead of going up to his house, he inexplicably turned south – and hit the horse broadside. He returned to the Café with a broken windshield and an incomprehensible tale. Then went home.

At some time in the morning the police came, tied (and left) the horse and breathalysed the driver, finding him still well over the alcohol limit. Billy was trying to find the owners of the horse.

We called Yianni who said that he was working thirty miles away but would come with painkillers at about five. We called other people in the village, but nobody knew the horse or the owner, so we finally called Paphiakos Animal Welfare, the only people in the country who do large-animal rescue and who are fortunately just down the road. They said they would be with us in half an hour. Meanwhile the horse downed another twelve litres of water

They were as good as their word. Half an hour later two men pulled up with a trailer. “Still no word on the owner?” they asked. And when we said that the matter was in the hands of Kouklia police, and that we had advised the Boys in Blue that we had called the Rescue Service, the lads went into action. Examining the horse gently, they tried to lead her forward, but she rolled her eyes and refused to move until they put a rope around her hindquarters. They half-lifted her up the ramp into the float, and securing her head-collar set out for the animal surgery in Kato Paphos.

“Well, that’s the drama of the day over with,” I said to Best Beloved as we rolled up to our house.

“The party hasn’t started yet!” was his reply. “Sixteen ten year-olds are descending on us in a couple of hours…”

And so they did – with their parents and their old clothes. And a good time was had by all.

Marcos, the son of our former land-lord, broke the piñata with a brilliantly placed swipe, and showed his practical side and engineering skills in building towers with balloons. The teams drew in the paintball water-balloon war, with Kay’s little Marios switching sides like a demon. And we never got to the three-legged race. The souvla, hoummos, salad and spuds, cake, jelly, and baklava were cleaned up with just enough left-overs for Sunday lunch, and people began to trickle away at around seven-thirty – tired, happy, and full. The way that people should be after a good party.

I will call the Rescue Service next week and see how our Lady is doing. I did think about trying to adopt her if her owner doesn’t show up, but we have no place to keep a horse properly and no time to build one, so I’ll keep that idea in fantasy land and refrain from mentioning it to my children.

Making Flaounes

In the run up to Easter, every self-respecting Cypriot housewife on the island prepares her flaounes, her eggy-cheesy Easter pastries. In this, unlike in most Cypriot traditions, I am no exception.

I hated flaounes when I first tasted them. I found them too hard, too goaty, too salty; I had to lie when I wrote articles for the in-flight magazine about the delights of Cypriot Easter cuisine. ‘Yuck!’ I thought. ‘Who in their right mind could really call these delicious?’ For the first few years of my wedded bliss, I sureptiously dumped my mother-in-law’s offerings and played ‘dumb foreigner’ when asked if I had liked them.

Then, dread day: nine-years ago, Best Beloved asked me to make them. ‘Because my mother always makes them with raisins and I prefer them with hash-seeds!’

(Before you rush for the phone to call the Drug Squad down on me, let me mention that hash seeds are a traditional part of Cypriot cuisine: my father-in-law remembers being fed them as a small child for their soporific effect, and the area of riverbed below the village was given over to hemp production – mostly for the making of rope. These days, the seeds are denatured – adding a crunch to the dish rather than a buzz to the brain.)

I tried to get out of the baking project, but Best Beloved was insistent, and I do love him, so I pulled out The Taste of Cyprus by Gilli Davies, and together with Kay, got to work.

The recipe was surprisingly simple – a basic pizza dough encasing a mixture of special flaouna cheese, halloumi, eggs, mint – and of course the hash seeds – for the filling. Kay’s Cypriot husband likes raisins, so we made two batches.

They were delicious. Soft, un-goaty, just the right balance of salt and egg. They didn’t sit like boulders in my stomach, sending up fumes every quarter of an hour for the rest of the day like all the ones I’d ever eaten before. ‘Not quite the traditional Cypriot taste, Manamou,’ Best Beloved said. ‘But tasty, none the less. And with refrigeration these days, we don’t need ones that will last forever like they did in the old days.’

This year the Little Ones helped me – kneading the pastry, mixing the filling, and rolling out the discs of dough. We made a batch yesterday using flaouna cheese from Best Beloved’s goat-keeping Auntie, and I have another kilo of cheese for a batch next week.

Καλό Πάσχα!

We've Taken Out The Trees -- or moved them around...

For the last fourteen years, we have cultivated a variety of trees on our two plots of land: the one near the main road has had up to 230 peaches, nectarines, apples, mangoes, guavas, pomegranates, figs, and mixed citrus – as well as supporting my 300 square metres of mixed veg, and the plot where the house is was the site of our olive grove. But the arrangement was full of inherent difficulties, and after taking a series of very deep breaths, Best Beloved and I have some changes wrought.

“How would it be,” he asked me late last autumn, “if we took out the olives from here, transplanted them to the field, took out most of the soft fruit trees and apples, turned the field over to olives and vines, and brought all your vegetables up to the house?” I looked at him as if he’s proposed a trip to Saturn, but quickly saw the wisdom behind his thinking.

Newly planted vines where we took out the trees six years ago.

When we originally planted the fruit trees, we had roughly thirty-eight each of nectarines and peaches, about twenty mangoes, and about sixty apples.

For the first few years, the care and the yield were insignificant, but once we began to harvest big crops, the workload vaulted: sheet mulching each tree for weed suppression; checking and spraying for aphids in the spring; strimming or tractoring the weeds between the trees; thinning, picking, and marketing the fruit – and turning what didn’t sell into jams, preserves, and jellies; pruning the trees in the winter; and looking forward to doing it all again.

Because Best Beloved is away for half the week, much of the work on the trees fell to me, or to the ladies that I hired, but it was an endless headache made worse by the fact that the market for organics was so small that nearly half of what we produced was simply unsellable. The mangoes went as fast as we picked them, but we would be left with 1000 kilos of apples to pick in August, and the prospect of selling them at .25 per kilo was heartbreaking. In recent years we have let most of the crop rot.

Six years ago we took out half of all the trees except the mangoes and life became easier.

But at about that time the neighbour slightly up-slope began producing summer alfalfa – meaning that he watered about three times a week and all his run off went to watering our weeds. More work, more cost.

I’m not as sprightly and resilient as I was in years past, and I hate trudging along in the sun spraying sulphur and copper from a heavy backpack sprayer. I bought lighter sprayers, but they all broke, and last year I dug in my heels so Best Beloved took over all of the heavy work.

Meanwhile, half of the vegetable production had moved up to the house – in the 100 square metres opposite the olive patch, so I was dividing my time between to areas of vegetable production. The olives were trucking along nicely, but on land better than they needed. And although we realised that we needed a change, I would never have thought of something as radical as Best Beloved proposed.

I grabbed at his idea, and ran with it. But he backed off. I nagged: “You have to let me know before I start pruning!” I told him. “I don’t want to start the work and then have you cut the trees down…”

“But it’s a huge job, Manamou,” he temporised. “And with the chainsaw broken, and no digger driver that I really trust…”

So I dropped it. If we do it, I thought, we’ll do it. If we don’t, I’ve practically written the trees off anyway.

Then everything happened fast. The chainsaw came back from the menders, the weather warmed up, and suddenly apple trees were falling in the field and the store of firewood was growing exponentially. Leo and Best Beloved worked like Trojans and one day last week only twelve apples and six each peaches and nectarines remained among the stumps.

Scene of destruction -- soon to turn into olive grove

plus vinyard, far lower maintenance crops than fruit

trees, and crops requiring far less water, meaning

less incidence of weeds.

“Can you pick up my vines from the Department of Agriculture?” Best Beloved phoned to ask one day. And a week later they were newly planted in neat rows on the patch that we had cleared six years ago.

The digger came Thursday and spent a day dragging out stumps and making new holes. We tried burning off the trimmings but they’re still too green.

The olive patch needs a deep ploughing to break up compacted clay and a few truckloads of goat manure and organic matter, and it could be ready for a summer planting but I want to think about it and try a more sustainable design than just rows and drip irrigation. Permaculture has always fascinated me, and although I have never taken a design course I am learning more about it and trying to apply its basic principles to my agriculture.

Former olive grove, slated for permaculture organic vegetable plot.We have kept a border of olive trees around the outside, and plan to underplant with native shrubs as well as aromatics like lavender, rosemary, rigani, and thyme.

So it’s all happening! Watch this space, faithful readers, to see what comes next.

They’ve Taken the Trees

Yerouskippou was never a particularly beautiful village. A few kilometres to the east of Pahos and slightly inland, it straddled the main road between Limassol and Paphos with a few handsome Neo-Classical buildings and a higgledy-piggledy collection of later shops and dwellings. Traffic always choked its plateia, and the Church, in a hideous attempt to enlarge its space available, tacked a twentieth century addition onto a Ninth Century masterpiece -- though it's quit difficult to find a web picture of the extension: most shots are taken from a flattering angle that excludes it.

But once the Municipality ‘took matters in hand’, everything went from bad to worse. First we endured more than a year of roadworks and diversions. (I say ‘we’ because we were living in Yerouskippou at the time and a ten-minute journey to town sometime morphed into a half-hour odyssey.) When the roadworks were completed, the new street plan became a nonsensical nightmare of no-left and no-right turns, zebra crossings that force drivers to stop in the middle of intersections, and at least one road that becomes one-way (the wrong way) just before the main road, forcing law-abiding drivers to reverse. For the first weeks of this daftness, demented traffic wardens ran thither and yon, gesticulating and even swearing at recalcitrant drivers. But they have long since given up, and Yerouskippou drivers cheerfully make illegal turns, mount the pavement, and park all over the street.

When the revamped plateia was unveiled early last summer, my heart sank to my sandals. In place of the scuffed but cheerful, well-shaded hodgepodge of kafeneia, shops, Turkish (oops, gasp, no, sorry!) Cyprus Delight factories and other miscellany, stretched a gleaming expanse of white marble and sandstone, shaded at intervals by concrete structures – mercifully stone-faced – with bizarrely curved roofs of Perspex and steel. And hardly a tree in sight. The old clump of cypresses still stands at one end looking a little like a poor relation at an upmarket wedding, and a few saplings have been carefully inserted into breaks in the marble, but the old broad leaved ficuses are gone, and any other greenery that dares intrude gets ruthlessly sprayed or pruned out of existence. One wonders who will be able to sit on the scatter of benches between June and October – even the hardiest of sun-worshipping British tourists -- the kind with skin like well tanned leather, a sprinkling of illegible tattoos, and necks and wrists encrusted with chains usually spotted chain-smoking on a sun lounger clutching a beer -- would be fools to try.

The stalls, shops, and factories on the non-plateia side of the road are all now directly open to summer’s murderous glare, and the absence of dust-filtering greenery means that tourists hoping to see the church frescoes or buy some ceramics, baskets, or Delight, get lungfuls of

particulate into the bargain.

A similar affliction has struck the promenade of Kato Paphos. Around the harbour, pines and ficus remain, but the newly renovated seafront parade has been resurfaced with dark grey granite cobbles and only a few tall scraggly palms shade the benches which could be a delight.

Imagine… late afternoon in mid-July, the thermometer stands at about 35C… you’re a tourist… you leave your room for an après siesta dip at the Municipal beach, and with wife and child stroll the promenade. You stop for an ice-coffee and take-away treat, then continue your stroll to a shaded bench that overlooks the water. You slurp and lick contentedly, people watching and taking in the view to the harbour. In the middle-distance, brightly painted caiques head seaward for an evening’s fishing, and overhead a flock of birds chatters their last song before dusk…

All that could be possible in five years if the Municipal crews get planting now. Meanwhile, keep dreaming.

Billy Had a Little Lamb

My Brother-in-Law (we’ll call him Bill), holds and important position with regards to security here in Paphos. He wears a quasi-military uniform complete with beret, bloused trousers, and spit-shined boots. He often carries a sub-machine gun, and has perfected a macho swagger.

Recently, however, he has acquired a hobby with a more pastoral bent.

Some thirty chickens arrived a fortnight ago, complete with three or four roosters, and several brace of ducks. They have taken up residence in his front yard and were recently joined by two lambs – no doubt destined for the easter souvla, but meanwhile enjoying their transient freedom in the lush orchard.

Bill gives every visitor the tour. He snagged me last week and led me into the orchard, rhapsodising on the virtues of livestock among the trees: “They loosen the soil and fertilise it. They kill the weeds, they eat the bugs, they lay tasty, golden-yolked eggs…” He showed me an Italian vegetable grinder that he’d picked up cheap from a restaurant that went bust. “I make their salad every morning with vegetables left over from the supermarket at the end of the road. Other than that, they eat some grain, drink some water, and add a nice living touch to the place, don’t you think?” I murmured something appropriately positive, thinking that I, the organic farmer and permaculture aficionado of the family, needed no convincing as to the benefits of free-range livestock in a smallholding.

On Sunday afternoon, shortly after the sheep had arrived, I walked past Bill’s house on the way to help Best Beloved sort out the irrigation of his new vines. The orchard is below the level of the road, and trees obscured most of my view of the menagerie. I could see Bill – but only from the waist down – pacing his plot, hands behind his back, once-shiny boots treading a path between the olive and citrus trees, peering into nesting boxes and checking the level of the drinking water with a thoroughness and gravity that I had seen him bring to his usual occupation. I watched him for a moment, staying hidden and listening to him muttering to himself and talking to the chooks.

When I reached the vineyard, I reported my sighting to Best Beloved. “On the count of three,” he said. “Billy has a little lamb…” We let rip at the tops of our voices, the slightly altered words: “Billy has a little lamb, a little lamb, a little lamb. Billy has a little lamb, its fleece is black and white. And everywhere that Billy goes, Billy goes, Billy goes, every where that Billy goes, the lamb gets in a fight!” We were laughing too hard to hear his unprintable reply.

The Littles often break into song now as we pass his house; “Old MacBilly had a farm, ee- eye ee-eye oh!”

His family are not the only one to tease Bill. Alex is doing work experience with him at the moment and says that he is the butt of constant leg-pulls at work. “He was talking about marksmanship today,” Alex reported. “Saying that he used to be able to knock out a fly’s eye in the dark at fifty paces but now he can barely see the fly, and one of the lads under his command said softly ‘Too many free range eggs, didn’t you know that golden yolks destroy your vision?’ They don’t give him a break.”

Best Beloved and I have bets as to how long this new interest will last: Bill is not known for his stamina at maintaining new projects on the domestic or agricultural front. “A month or two, Manamou,” my husband said. I voted for a little longer – at least until the hot days of July make sleeping through the day required for all male Cypriots. Unless Sil (my sister-in-law) gets involved – then Paphos will have a permaculture centre to envy.