Athens Portraits: School run scramble

8am outside the local primary school.
The troops are gathering - and with them an entire support battalion.

Fathers zoom up to the gates on motorbikes with tots perched precariously on the back without the benefit of a crash helmet (but you’d better not even think of breathing a word about them being anything less than a devoted dads).

Mums heave bags packed to bursting point with books – the weight of which their little darlings couldn’t possibly shoulder (I swear those bags weigh more than the kids that have to carry them).

Grannies faff about at the baker’s shop across the road to make sure their little darlings are stocked up with pies and pastries (and enough carbohydrates to sink a battleship) to see them through the rigours of the school day.

And the cars – the cars!
Seen from above, the school gates would look more like a smashed open ants’ nest with the insects dashing here and there in a blind panic.

Vehicles swerve crazily into that parking spot (supposedly reserved for the headmistress) that ensures the sprogs will have ten paces less to take, oblivious to the hooting honking bottleneck of cars, delivery vans and buses backing up behind them. Alarm lights flash in imagined justification for total disregard of the law of the road or common civility. And on most mornings, a shiny white and blue police car is abandoned in the middle of the road – not to get things under control, but so the local Constable can deliver his son and heir safely to the playground.

This morning, a spanking new, flashy red Ferrari drew gasps of admiration and awe from pre-pubescent boys as it drew up and stopped ON the pedestrian crossing. The long-suffering lollipop lady (or crossing guard if you prefer) tried - in vain - to shame the greasy middle-aged man who emerged from the swanky sports car, but he just ignored her and carried his child across the road to the school.

It’s dog eat dog on the morning school run scramble.

I guess it’s only to be expected that the start of the school day should be a raucous affair. But, in Greece that it’s not the kids - but their parents - that are the main source of the rumpus.

How’s that for teaching by example?

The Gallery: Meditation in Monochrome

Things get a little pensive and moody with the theme for this week's Gallery:
Black & White.

Removing colour from the formula draws attention to texture and contrasts in the way that might not be obvious to the eye when distracted by splashes of red, blue or green.

But I'm a sucker for colour, so I couldn't resist letting a little smidge of the stuff creep back for just one shot.

And speaking of other things I can never resist...

For more black & white images check out this week's Gallery at http://stickyfingers1.blogspot.com/2010/11/gallery-black-white.html

What's in a name?

Browsing through a road map of my homeland at the weekend, I came to the conclusion that there are some place names you could ONLY find in England.

It all started when a TV programme we were watching (imported from the BBC) mentioned a picturesque village in East Sussex called Diddling. Yes, Diddling - as in diddling the books, or perhaps even your neighbour’s wife if you’re very naughty. (Actually, it sounds like the sort of place the late, lamented Bambi Fancipants might have settled down if it hadn’t been for that unfortunate flying ice-ball incident this summer… but that’s another story.)

As I tried to explain to dear hubby, it’s nothing unusual. But he was not convinced. As Greek place names are almost always descriptive in a definable and identifiable way, he refuses to believe that certain place names from my homeland are anything more than yet more evidence of the incurable eccentricity of the English. Thinking about it, I'll admit that he may have a point.

Within just a couple of hours’ drive of where I grew up, you can visit such wonderful places as: Dorking (the ideal place to be a dork, I guess); Small Dole (where they admit that unemployment benefit is peanuts); Climping (how you walk when your new shoes have given you blisters); Crawley (as in creepy-?); Havant (as in ‘…got a clue’); Hog’s Back; Goring (think bulls); Gravesend; Foulness Island (the place where it’s cool to be foul); Braintree (which summons up a particularly gory mental image); Wittering (as in ‘stop wittering, Mandi’); Sway; Wallop (imagine being able to tell people you meet at parties ‘I’m from Wallop’?) and more than my measly road atlas can reveal…

But the truth is that we cannot hold a candle to some of the more 'out there' place names to be found across the United States. While the names of towns and villages in the UK are usually dictated by their history, the pilgrims who fled Europe and settled in America a couple of centuries ago had the luxury of picking their own place names.

In the spirit of those pious times, it was not unusual for a socially-ambitious Puritan to change his name from (say) 'John' to something far more impressive like 'Righteousness In The Face Of Adversity' Smith. So, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that the Founding Fathers came up with some (divinely?) inspired names for the towns and cities where they settled.

Perhaps the best-known - and certainly one of my favourites - is Truth or Consequences somewhere in Nevada, but there are many others great ones including Redemption, Submission or Limbo (imagine living in Limbo?).

One of these days, I really must get my act together and do that road trip across The States. Realistically, I’ll probably be in my dotage by the time I get round to it, but maybe being a loopy old dear will be well in keeping with my mission to collect the best and most eccentric place names I came across along the way.

And, after all, a country that boasts such deliciously existential road signs as “Gusty winds may exist” must have entire treasure-troves of surrealism to offer, eh?

Silent Sunday: Reflections

She came. She saw. But did she conker?

Ah, autumn.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, bringing back memories of shushing though piles of fallen leaves, rosy cheeks and frozen noses, and playing conkers in the school yard.

But did you know that the good old horse chestnut (a.k.a. conker) tree is NOT a native to Britain, but a migrant from... Greece and Albania?

And yet, somehow I can't see the Greeks embarking on the annual orgy of smashing your opponents' nuts (in the nicest possible way, of course) that generations of British schoolkids have enjoyed.

Time and time again, I have tried to explain the rules and reasoning of conkers to the Ovver Arf. He sits there patiently, giving me the indulgent look of one humouring a slightly dim but lovable child, while I try to convey my enthusiasm for scrabbling about in the wet grass to find the perfect shiny brown conker with which to annihilate my rivals' feeble offerings.

His demeanour is one of "OK, that sounds like the sort of thing you Brits would do. But why?"
To be honest, I don't have an answer.

It's just one of those things that is (or at least was) an integral part of growing up in the UK. No rhyme or reason is required - it just IS.

Just like he can't explain why Greeks traditionally fly kites on the first day of Lent, why Greek grannies tie a red and white knotted string bracelet round their grandchildren's wrists every 1st March, or why taramosalata (made from fish eggs) is allowed during the Lenten fast when both fish and eggs are forbidden.

But I digress - back to conkers.

For the unitiated, to play the game first you must find to take a large, hard conker and carefully drill a hole through it. Then thread a piece of string through the hole and knot one end. Next, find your opponent - similarly conkered up of course. And then you proceed to take it in turns to hit one another's conkers with your own. This goes on until one is one is smashed, and the status of the winner is enhanced according to how many victories it has clocked up (one-er, two-er, six-er, etc.).

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. But it used to keep us occupied for hours.

Now, in these days of extreme Health & Safety awareness, I fear that conker fights may be a dying tradition. I have certainly heard of schools banning them (not for fear of shards of smashed nut flying into kids' eyes or bruising juvenile knuckles, but in light of possible nut allergies).

But I hope that despite the new age of precautions, and the twin siren calls of TV and games console, the autumn air in my homeland still fills with the sound of horse chestnuts cracking against each other.

As for me, I'm off to the Greek countryside in search of a conker tree in it native habitat.

I may be some time.

The Gallery: Before & After

This week (or perhaps I should say last week as I'm running a little late) Tara over at http://stickyfingers1.blogspot.com/ has set us the theme of 'Before & After' for The Gallery.

I thought long and hard about this and although I was sorely tempted to post pics of Kidling Grand at about 18 months (doing a kinda Charlie Chaplin impersonation with a big cheeky grin, Grandpa's shoes and a shoe horn as a walking stick) juxtaposed with the nearly 14-year-old reality of today (trainee oik).

But in the end I decided to be a little more ego-centre. Or perhaps I should say hair-centric.

I don't know about you, but the state of my hair is perhaps the biggest factor in how I feel about myself. On those (sadly rare) good hair days when everything falls into shiny, happy place, I feel so much better about the bags under my eyes and the spare tyres gathering around my middle section.

On bad hair days, one look in the mirror can reduce me to a quivering heap of insecurity that no amount of sassy make-up or drop-dead outfits (not that I have any) can change.

So, I was in a very good mood when I walked out of the hairdressers yesterday, having transformed this:

(BEFORE: a rather apologetic looking random barnet)

to this:

(AFTER: much happy, and sassier, I hope you'll agree.)

So, at least until my hairdresser's magic wears off, you can call me Your Royal Hairness.

Transplanted!

My experiences as a transplanted Brit that has re-rooted in Greece make up some of the material that feeds the varied waffling that makes up this blog. I'm keen to read the experiences of other ex-pats who have settled far from home, so have connected with a few other transplantees through their blogs.

To make things easier for me (I'm know, I'm lazy), I have created a collection of some of these blogs, hosting their posts (and including links to their blogs) in a single collective site which I have called http://transplanted.collected.info

Why not pop over and take a look - and if you like what you see, go to the individual blogs featured to get in touch with the writers.

And if you have any ideas for other blogs we could or should add to the feed, let me know!