Mining the Diaries 97: Greece
205A Anniska Apartments, Kardamili, Greece20th May 2022
After yesterday’s cloudy start, today dawned bright and clear. The first rays of the sun breasted the mountains and picked out the white houses on far Messenia; light flooded the street at eight o’clock. Eleni hosed down the steps and the terrace and laid the dust on the street.
After breakfast I wrote some more of the Mani Memories memoire for an hour, struggling with dates and events in the 1980s. I walked down to the Plateia for coffee to clear my mind. The waitress remembered me and smiled, ‘Double espresso?’ That was nice, but actually I wanted an Americano; I ordered carrot cake too. A passing fire truck sounded its siren to the surprise and delight of two sloe eyed toddlers. Tables filled with English and Norwegian jazz buffs here for the International Jazz Festival, founded in 2014.
It felt like a morning for idling. Along the main street I dropped into Equinox, the most intersecting of the shops – art materials, art works, books (Mani in English, Greek and German) and a little gallery with a library for sitting reading with a tea or a coffee from Kalamaki across the road. I thumbed through a glossy volume of photos by Nellys: sculpture and monuments; none of her more contentious stuff, the nudes on the Parthenon and the proto fascist lauding of the racial continuity of the Greeks since antiquity. I bought a small book of photos by Silvanus – sombre figures emerging from candle-lit shadows – he was a monk, took up photography in Kalamata and is now a photographer in Athens. Silvanus was the Roman god of the forests. At Iridia I bought a glass dish, a slumped bottle marbled with amber, cyan and malachite, to complement the clear glass piece Nina and I bought on our third visit here.
Back at Anniska, a violinist and pianist were practising in the bar. A blonde, curled on a sofa, murmured phrases of lyrics. It was all sketchily fragmented. On the terrace their music blended with the breeze in the trees and the sea washing the rocks below. There was a certain melancholy to it: perhaps I was ready to go home.
When they had finished I turned to trying to write about Nina as a person. It should have been easy, yet I found it difficult to capture her subtlety and complexity, to make it both loving and honest.
After an early supper I strolled down to Belogianni Beach for the sunset and the Jan Inge Melsaeter Quartet playing at Gialos. TC, T C Hawkins ‘God’s own travellin’ blues man’ and Vietnam veteran from New Orleans, put a lifetime of experience into ‘All of Me’, ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down’ and a stunning personal interpretation of ‘Summer Time’. The bright hard light of the sinking sun cast long shadows.
A last glass of retsina, left over from Lelia’s, sitting on my balcony to end the day. The headland across the bay was black under an orange sky shading up into a crepuscular blue. Inland the hills fell into shadow dotted with lights twinkling below the silhouette of Agia Sophia. The cone of Mount Elias caught the last light.