January 2016

Two months on from writing most of the below and nothing much happened except that I visited hospitals as directed by appointments made for me within the NHS. I created yet another Christmas in the house that has been home for the last sixteen years. I cavilled at creating the family mythology for the umpteenth time but how could I not? How heartless could I be to deprive my dearly beloved of the passive enjoyment of my exertions? It helped to pass the time as did some mindless Christmas employment. Then I went to war inside my head: should I or should I not stay for New Year? I stayed, partly out of my own passivity, partly out of fear that the New Year I imagined elsewhere might not live up to fantasy. Well, it could have been one of two things: better or worse. Actually of no consequence either way since disappointment has become a condition to process and absorb according to its level of intensity. Generally it doesn't kill but it wrenches the soul. New Year was unspectacular: I drank the bottle of cheap champagne that I received as an afterthought from my husband the day after my birthday. No one kissed me though the frogs were active in the pond due to the mildness of the season. By staying I became ill. Being ill made me unable to leave. Staying didn't speed up recovery. So, once again I packed my bags and assumed my nomadic status, somewhat without enthusiasm and a degree of dread at staying in a horrible cheap room. Probably that had prevented my departure, too. Now I'm sitting awake in bed confused by tiredness and a two hour time difference. I needed to sleep by seven in the evening; in England I am not in the habit of going to bed by five in the evening. I told myself it would be ok and I could still wander out for a drink later but I fell asleep for seven hours. I did not know I was so tired. My shoes are stacked in the wine rack and I feel slightly sickened by the sweet smell of cockroach spray. Twenty four hours of being here has persuaded me that a quick slap of a flip-flop is a better solution to the latter problem, although it is a lot more disgusting to dispose of dismembered and disembowelled cockroach than the sprayed variety. They don't take the hint quickly when they've been sprayed but shuffle off trailing some dust and turn belly up as a surprise find later. The spray accumulates in the room as a sickly miasma which is slowly poisoning me instead. Attempts to drown cockroaches in the toilet are also a failure. They thrash around frantically for a while, then reason sets in and they swim calmly to the edge of the water and climb back out. I haven't seen them do this but they don't stay in the water. This leads to the added hazard that they might just stay lurking under the toilet seat. As they have a habit of scuttling out suddenly this could lead to cardiac arrest on the pan. Stacking my shoes in the wine rack is unnecessary but it seems like a tidy thing to do. I makes me feel good to make use of an ugly and superfluous bit of furniture which was randomly placed in the middle of the room when I arrived. The washing machine rather grandly provided in the bedsit is too wide for the gap between the wall and kitchen unit. Obviously several residents have felt frustrated by this and tried to stack it in the space provided, judging by the gouge in the wall, but it just won't go. So it is stacked at a right angle to the end of the kitchen counter, leaving a squarish gap in the corner with the in and out pipes stretched across the useless gap to the right of the washing machine. That leaves just enough space to the left of the washing machine to stow the unnecessary wine rack between the washing machine and the built in wardrobe which is a Cypriot obsession and usually disproportionate to the size of any room. The wine rack is a sort of mini counter which had a long rectangular top. At some point in its life it must have provoked someone to saw off a sliver of the counter so, not only was it ugly to begin with but it now has a pentagonal top which means it no longer can be placed against any straight wall without either leaving a gap at the back or presenting a misshapen profile at the front. Stashing the wine rack in the gap makes it slightly less offensive, though it protrudes just enough to say "hello, I'm still here". It's not very likely that in my solitary existence I would acquire either a wine collection or sundry liqueurs to offer guests so stacking my shoes on the crenulated wire array seems the best solution. The washing machine is an extravagance. I want to know what bedsit dweller stashes so many soiled socks and underpants that warrant a washing machine. The sun here shines three hundred and sixty days a year and a quick hand rinse of any garment will see it dry and sterilised on the washing line in a couple of hours. I would have swapped the washing machine for a kettle. I had to boil water in the frying pan for my first few hours. It's quite difficult to pour water into a cup from a frying pan and impossible to fill a hotwater bottle. I arrived on a Wednesday which is early closing day and meant all practical shops were shut. I found one charity shop open where I was able to buy a quilted bedspread with only a couple of melted patches. The orange valance frill is a good colour match for the plastic chair in the room and some of the green stripes blend with the circular plastic wall clock. I was glad of the bed cover, else I would have spent the first night wrapped in jumpers and jackets. I bought a battery for the clock and it now noisily crunches out the seconds but I am incapable of finding my mobile to know what the time is. The bed fortunately had a fitted sheet with only a tiny cigarette burn. There were a couple of pillows, one of which even had a pillow case with an orange stain. There was also a cockroach and some black hairs. I washed the sheet in cold water as my arrival time did not coincide with any of the three hot water periods of the day. It is 3.40 in the morning and there are people screaming all over the city. It is something they do. I probably wouldn't be able to hear them if the door to the balcony was closed properly but it is temporarily off its hinges so it pulls to at a slight angle to the perpendicular. It has also been installed the wrong way round, so that stepping onto the balcony means squeezing between it and the end of the balcony rail; if it opened the other way one could just step out. Someone needs to tell door installers that a door can be hung either way. The toilet door at home was hung like that by the DIY enthusiast who ruined the rest of the house. Every night visit to the lavatory entailed being trapped between the door, the wall and the top of the stairs with the possibility of taking a wrong step and tumbling down a full flight. We live in difficult times confronted by many choices and hanging doors the right way is just one of them. The neighbour lady is quiet at this hour, fortunately her sleep pattern must be regular because sunlight causes her to step out of her front door and abuse the world at the top of her lungs. At first I thought she was responding to a particular provocation and felt the need to be very abusive in response to that, but as the minutes and then the hours went by and her invective didn't diminish in any way, I realised she just disapproved of all sorts of things and needed to vent her feelings. I don't understand much Greek but I think in her opinion a lot of things are whores or whore related. Maybe she just likes the word. In her own way she is enjoying the sunshine. The balcony is a really nice aspect to the rest of the crummy bedsit. It sports a washing line and has a clear view of the sea. I don't know why a cupful of blue glimpsed between wallscapes should seem superior but it's enjoyable. It speaks to the amoeba that remembers its erstwhile home. Or to the pirate raising his raiding standard. Considering how built up the neighbourhood is, the balcony is surprisingly private, no one overlooks it from any direction. The houses have been built in so many different orientations that, by chance, none face towards the balcony and it is unobstructed by any other high wall. That, and its curvature round the building give it an aspect of 270degrees and most of the winter traverse of light. The view is of slanting shingled roofs, partial courtyards and untidy streets, and more roofs in the distance. Yesterday I bought a kettle and now I can enjoy safe tea making. I am really annoyed at how much I paid for the kettle because in the very next shop I saw the same kettle at half the price. So now I am determined to enjoy the tea I make. I bought a broken bedside table in a charity shop. I watched for many minutes as the man tried to refit the lampshade. I could have watched him for quite a bit longer. I got him to reduce the price. I did not tell him that I would not be using the lampshade as I needed an adequate bulb for reading. Last night I turned the room around completely. Flushed with enthusiasm after stowing the wine rack I knew there had to be a better layout to the room than the way I found it, especially as the air-conditioning unit directly above my pillows was a place that cockroaches dropped out of. I also wasn't a fan of the aerial cable and extension cord draped across the bottom of the balcony door. I imagined a scenario in which I caught my foot on the wires and then somersaulted off the balcony because I fell onto the balcony rail through the tight gap of the door. As the door was unhinged and uncloseable I was not convinced by the shoelace that tied the door handle to the bedknob. The landlord explained at some length the variations on this: bedknob meant a locked door whereas the shoelace could also be used to anchor the door to a balcony rail to stop it from swinging in the wind. This meant getting out onto the balcony in an even tighter contortion by having to squeeze under the shoelace as well as manoeuvering the inside out door. The aerial cable led to the TV which was on top of the giant fridge freezer. It is nearly 5am and someone has left their room and dragged a heavy weight down the stairs. I do not know if it is the same person who has a hacking cough. In the course of moving the TV/fridge installation I broke the set top box thing which was dodgy to start with. First I snapped a pin on the video jack, then the unit stopped working altogether. I don't yet know if this is a tragedy as the set tops only receive limited Greek language TV with occasional English language documentaries that are repeated regularly. Not having an internet connection is worse. Internet in the middle of the night is a must for the committed insomniac. I moved the fridge to the other side of the door so that it wasn't necessary to trail the power cord across the bottom of the balcony door, and cockroaches from the airconditioning unit would in future fall first onto the tv, then onto the fridge. I wonder why the bedsit needs an enormous fridge freezer? I am trying to imagine the tenant who would need to steal a trolley from the supermarket in order to convey so many frozen food products. As it is, I am hiding my food in there from the cockroaches. In the last place I stayed my enemy was ants, millions of them. But it was a hotter season and ants are the cleanup crew of summer debris: dead insects and sandwiches in backpacks. They came out of tiny crevices in the walls. Any fragment of food of any kind was irresistible to them, as was my laptop keyboard. Hundreds of ants played hide and seek up and down the keys savouring some old spilt coffee stain. Putting a bag down unwisely meant that I would carry around a whole ants' nest until I got nipped and realised that I had passengers. By turning the bed through ninety degrees I made room for the broken bedside table lamp on the table. The table is almost beyond describing; I do not know what it is or why it exists. It has a single fat leg which serves as the pivot for three teardrop shape stacking table tops; if they were all opened out they would form a three fingered claw. I cannot imagine the room in which this would be a desirable accessory, a small Cypriot bedsit perhaps. I've closed up all the levels and brought it alongside the bed. Most things are ok placed on it, even cups of tea manage to cling on but not pens. Pens roll because when all the table tops are stacked, their weight sags off the horizontal. WHO designed this thing? WHY? At some point in recent history Cypriots, amongst their many cultural achievements, discovered the fitted wardrobe. Rooms in a lot of Cypriot houses can be quite small but not the fitted wardrobe which is often big enough for someone to live in. Any room in which a small unattached wardrobe would serve is suitable for one of these monstrosities. Very often they come with elaborated doors and handles and cannot be ignored. They stretch from floor to ceiling and are often more solid than the room itself, might even be holding up the ceiling. In theory they are storage spaces. The top shelf of the fitted wardrobe in this room is kind of too high for me to reach and I definitely can't see what's on it unless I take a good step back and do some craning. Since Cypriots are not a tall race this is daft. When I've stopped using the wine rack to store my shoes I will be using it as a ladder.