Skyros equinox.
Cast off old ties that bound me
I will live anew.
Last week's 'Writers' Lab' group produced fantastic prose and poetry, covering the full range from moving to hilarious, culminating in a fabulous evening of personal readings on their penultimate night. (Thanks, Beth, for the haiku.) And thank you all for the immense pleasure of watching nine fascinatingly diverse personalities, all strongly individual, combine with mutual respect and good humour.
My Skyros session is right at the end of the season this year, and I've found some things unfamiliar though some things unchanged: Juicy Bar still plays seventies songs while we spread ourselves in the afternoon sun and Aegean waves gasp their huge yoga-breaths along a beach of soft sand the colour of thick honey. Bougainvillea and jasmine still garnish whitewashed alleyways, feral cats still pause to pose. Old ladies in black, apparently all cloned from the same ubiquitous postcards, still greet us with Yasous as we clamber the cobbled paths that cats-cradle the huge rock of Skyros. And it's still summer here, though the locals predict winds of change. Watching the sun rise beyond Brooke Square and set below Atsitsa bay, it's still easy to feel that perhaps this is all you know, and all you need to know...