On my outward bound journey from theWelsh Hovel I brought 25 kg of books in my hold bag and in my computer bag. It was a bit of a pain. Going back to Airstrip One on Tuesday I shall be carrying 15 kg of Greek Hovel olive oil and …
The South Africans tell us, as do US and EU authorities that the Omicron variant of covid is really not very harmful at all. And what is more they have data which supports this as you can see below. As Omicron started there the South Africans have real data. This was dismissed today by one of the doom-mongers advising our wretched Government as merely “anecdotal.” But it is not, what you see below is hard facts. What can be dismissed are claims by the experts who always get it wrong, such as Professor Pantsdown Ferguson,that 75,000 of us will die from this variant by the spring. Ferguson has a track record of forecasting which, over many, years is unbelievably consitent. He is always wrong. Yet Boris Johnson et al do not look at facts on the ground, hard data, they believe the“experts” who ignore this hard data and their ludicrous predictions.
You think the Aegean is always blue, calm and warm? Think again. I took harvester B to visit the house of his hero Paddy Leigh Fermor in Kardamili. We peered over the walls and I told a few stories and then wandered around a tourist town which was dead. There was just one place to eat andf we both enjoyed a cold cheese and spinach pie. The beach at Kardamili has no sand just stones at one end and rocks at the other. The near end ( stones) is normally accessed across a dry river but it was in full flood so we accessed further along, driving past the Police station of which I have such unhappy memories. At the far end by the rocks, the sea was raging, as you can see below. Hardly flat and blue.
The dry river runs through the valley beneath the Greek hovel and you must cross it to get up here. It is just beneath snake hill. It is almost always dry but as the storms lash Greece it is filling up rapidly. The photos below were take at 3PM today and the water was six inches deep at the crossing point. Since then it has absolutely bucketed it down with rain, almost non stop. The wind is also howling. Up in the mountains where this river starts the rain is even heavier. In a few minutes, harvester B and I will head into Kambos for supper. I suspect that it will be rather deeper now. And by the time I have to take B to catch a bus in Kalamata to start his way back to Airstrip One, at 7 AM tomorrow, God only knows.
A few years ago a chap in Kambos and his mate killed two men from Kalamata and dumped the bodies over the old bridge across the gorge that comes down from the mountains to the sea, about three miles from here on the way to Kalamata. The new road has a new bridge but you can still access the 1960s bridge as did the murderers. The gorge is normally dry but the view today was of a gushing river with the water fighting with itself to get over the rocks and down to the sea.
Day four and five of the Greek Hovel olive harvest saga will be written up over the weekend. Tonight it is Friday (day 5) and I am back at the hovel. Our work in the groves is done. Tomorrow the plan is to take harvester B to Kalamata for his pre-flight covid test. There are three Omicron cases in the whole of Greece whereas tonight the Daily Mail suggests that it is running rampant in London. So why test B (and also me on Monday) to keep Britain safe? Can anyone explain the logic of this?
It was the last day of the harvest for R&S who had to start the day with a trip to Stoupa for covid tests. That left myself and B starting proceedings in glorious sunshine and laying mats along the side of the house facing up into the mountains. The three trees here are well fertilized, in the way that only a man can do, and are better than most in this very poor year. But the day started badly with a wire into one of the clamps on the twerker’s battery coming out. Luckily..
The joke among the three harvesters here, each paid nil, was that every time they missed an olive on the tree they were twerking and I spotted it, I fined them a Euro. At the end of their stay I’d present them with their bill. It was, of course, a joke. But then harvester B stumbled on something on the internet.
After admitting to Nicho the Communist our day one harvest of 3-4 bags, we at least started day 2 with a full quota of four harvesters following the arrival of B. His passport photo makes him look like a strapping member of the Waffen SS but he is in fact a charming fellow who speaks a lot more Greek than I do. Once again, the weather was unhelpful.
It stopped raining by eight and by nine it was dry enough to put the mats down and go into battle. Heroic harvester K from a couple of years ago would have been proud of me. I worked out how to charge the battery and get the twerker working, to lay out the mats and we kicked off on the six trees nearest the house where my special man fertilizer seems to have ensured there is a decent crop. My business partner Nicho the Communist has again warned me that he will kill me if I chop any branches so it was twerking only. Well I say that..
I reported yesterday that my first guests, R &S, were due to arrive that evening. I hoped that neither were vegetarian or non drinkers as many folks in sophisticated London are these days for that is not what we do here in Kambos. It is like not owning a gun, it is unnatural, freakish. As I feared R is a non drinking vegetarian.
For the avoidance of doubt I pray that it is neither but I fear that one or both will, in some “progressive” part of the degenerate West be first normalised and finally legalized. Maybe not in my lifetime but in that of my kids I fear that it is inevitable. Meet Dr Allyn Walker who until recently was a lecturer at Old Dominion University in Virginia and likes to be referred to by the pronoun “they”.
Gosh she is amazing. In a recent competition this 22 year old swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania managed a time of 4 minutes and 35 seconds putting her 12 seconds ahead of the next competitor and racking up the third fastest time in US college history. And until recently Lia was a nobody swimming in her college second team. Just how incredible is that? And Lia managed this without any performance enhancing drugs. Amazing.
Having arrived in Kalamata after eleven last night, I was jolly glad to have booked a hotel in town rather than trekking out to the Hovel. After a warming Metaxa in the lobby while I answered emails and I lugged my two heavy bags to bed. On the way out to Greece I now take 25 kg of books to stack the shelves here, on the way back i shall take 15kg of my oil (I hope) and 3 kg of wood ( I shall explain that later).
The husband of our great leader, Carrie Antoinette, has said that he will tell us all on December 18 whether he is going to cancel Christmas or not. He says this on a day when the WHO, normally bedwetters and scaremongers themselves, confirm that across this planet nobody at all has died from the Omicron variant of Covid. In contrast 1.8 people per second die from all other causes.
