Monday 4th January 2021 - Sorting and When Was The Last Time?

With no more books in the pipeline and with the weather hardly being conducive to being in the garden, I have been able to start sorting our roof space. This is something I have been meaning to address for the past couple of winters but with family memorabilia and paperwork, brought back from my parents to stow away, creating some additional space has now become a necessity. It’s going to take a time deciding what to keep, what to throw away, and what to set aside for the village yard sale which with the current Covid-19 situation may, like last year, not take place. When we travelled to Greece, I used to keep a daily diary in notebooks covering our walks etc. I asked myself, what was the point in keeping these, our last visit was in 2009 and as we have no plans to return to Greece it is unlikely we will want to use them as reference. They were due to be shredded, that was until I opened the pages of a couple of notebooks and found they contained so many memories there was no way I could not destroy them. In years to come we may wish, in conjunction with our photos and videos, to relive those trips. I have however, decided to yard sale the books I used when learning Greek. Thumbing through the exercises completed as homework, in particular an essay describing our stay at a monastery, I found I could read them but as for composing another essay on a similar line and be grammatically correct, well forget it. As they say, use it or lose it. Having said that; I do write as much of my shopping list as I can in Greek, but this only uses nouns and not grammar with verbs and tenses etc.

We have been trying to remember when was the last time when it has not rained some time during the day, but we can’t. The ground is completely sodden. Testimony is; the puddles on the car park and the areas where you can see vehicles have got stuck in the mud. While walking on the beach you can see areas of fresh cliff falls, nothing major that warrants informing the Coastguard but definitely worth continued monitoring. The weather has been particularly unpleasant today with icy showers and a keen easterly, which will no doubt strip the beach of sand. Well, it is winter so we shouldn’t expect much different, should we? But there are signs of better weather to come with spring bulbs pushing up foliage through the rain soaked earth and primrose flowers braving the elements.