Eating out has been a fun part of settling in and getting to know people in these first few weeks. And there are also a number of local dishes which we’ve been sampling between us involving slow cooked lamb, tender pork and spicy meat balls. But the infamous dish is a ‘Mezze’, which I believe means a mix of lots of dishes. This is ideal for newcomers because you get to try out some 30 dishes in small portions and have a little of everything shared with everyone else on the table.
According to two expert local diners who treated us the other night, some restaurants try and fill you up with lots and lots of dips and pitta, then very few main dishes…and of course, as they explained, “Not everyone likes dips!” So, the other night we ventured out to a quaint local restaurant in a nearby village renowned for serving the best ‘Mezze’. It was not a lot to look at from the outside, just rough square tables, with blue and white check table clothes and little wicker and painted wooden chairs on the pavement by the road. But inside it opened up into a rustic scene, with wooden barrels and other recycled items made into furniture, a huge curving wooden bar and pieces of driftwood arranged into art forms hanging from ceilings and walls. We later discovered the owner, whose grandfather had started the restaurant, was a painter in his spare time and many of his highly original artworks hung along the walls, from faces and scenes painted on planks of crumbling wood to a clock build into driftwood with a 3d boat at its base.
The owner then came and sat down beside us, asking us which dishes we would like to have for the Mezze…a long list of mysterious names were reeled off, which he wrote down and made notes on and then disappeared with a smile into the kitchens. What followed was a whole lot of food! Starting with dips and salad, then meats and mushrooms and marrow balls and…it carried on. It turned out the key was to eat slowly and our hosts had given the owner special instructions on this. “But make sure, Cigar, Cigar,” he had emphasised at the end of the ordering. I was slightly puzzled, would cigars follow the meal? I like a cigar as much as the next woman, but it was unusual to order them with the food – I’d rather wait for the brandy or whisky…

The real meaning of “cigar, cigar,” or “siga, siga” emerged as the courses continued to arrive. Of course, it meant ‘slowly, slowly’…so the waiter was urged to bring out the different dishes more slowly in order for us to enjoy the meal, take our time as we ate and chatted and ate some more…
Had we tried this? No, not had any of that yet, another flavour and texture to experience…we had filled our plates several times over and although it had all been delicious, I was relieved to see the arrival of what looked like fruit salad, with big chunks of melon perhaps. What’s this now? Ah, this is the lamb with potatoes… Oh dear, more meat and then another dish that wasn’t fruit salad either, it was the slow cooked pork. It’s a very good job there were some big eaters on the table that night. We left very full, but happy. The fantastic thing about the Mezze was that the meal was so much more than just eating, it was sharing stories, passing the food around, making sure each one had tasted all the dishes and everyone was having what they needed. This was so much better than sitting down to a rushed main course, to be eaten quickly before someone jumped up from the table to get on with whatever they were doing before – probably back onto the computer. Here there was time for conversation and enjoying being there with one another, giving each other time, ‘siga siga.’
We have had another Mezze since that evening – more of an official engagement. The setting was beautiful, on a pier surrounded by the sea at night, but the hotel food was not a patch on the little village restaurant, either in quality or quantity. My very own ‘Good food guide to Cyprus’ is on its way…

It’s a constant mystery to me why my Needlework ‘O’ level is a source of ridicule to the rest of the family. Unlike Maths or English it is either seen as a poor qualification or used against me when a tear on the tent can’t be mended easily or a button pops off at an inconvenient moment. So there are comments like – “Needlework ‘O’ level? Well, I’ve got my ‘sewing machine driving license’ ha, ha!” or “But I thought you had a degree in needlework!”
Despite all of this I did bring my sewing machine with me, because like Mrs Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you never know when you’re going to need it. As it turns out it was this week.

Tonight I am off to the summer ball. It’s a bit sad, because a month into arriving here and I have been abandoned by my husband, who has disappeared to the UK on a ‘conference’ (yes, that’s what I thought!). So this evening I go, like Cinderella, unaccompanied to the ball. Except, I’m not going to look anything like Cinderella because it’s fancy dress and it’s a ‘Heroes and Villains’ theme. This brings us neatly back to the sewing machine – how could I create the necessary accessories for my costume without it?
What to wear? What to be? These questions were solved fairly quickly by seeing what I already had in the house… or what someone else had infact.
Found: 1 cowboy hat, 2 pairs of cowboy boots, 1 yellow check shirt, 1 red neckerchief, 1 leather belt, various jeans and sorts of denim options…. job done. I’ll be a cowboy hero then – infact a cartoon cowboy hero – Woody, from Toy Story. All I needed to complete this was a cowhide waistcoat and a gun and holster.

‘Adventure One’ begins as we head off to the notorious material shop in a secret location in a nearby town in search of cowhide….or something similar. This journey took us through the amazing network of little back streets, with dusty shops of all kinds and simple street bars and fruit stalls and hundreds of plain mainly single-storey buildings in terracotta and beige.  Junctions weren’t obvious and the main road was hard to distinguish. Everywhere was dust blown and dry. We eventually turned right as the buildings thinned out and a massive mosque loomed in front of us. In contrast to the poor and dusty buildings around it was gleaming in the sunshine with two peerless white towers reaching into the blue morning sky. Behind a dilapidated warehouse block was the entrance to the Aladdin’s cave of material shops, inside it was quite dark, which we later discovered was due to a power cut. Rolls and rolls and more rolls of material were packed into a massive warehouse from floor to ceiling. There was even a mezzanine floor above also lined with more bundles of fabrics and quilts. Some rolls were stacked upright, others in piles on their side and there was every conceivable kind of material you can think of from Sanderson look-a-likes to sofa upholstery fabrics and draylon, to nets of every colour and shade, bright coloured cotton curtain fabric in spots, stripes, floral or animal print and even some Turkish rugs rolled in one corner. If we were looking for plastic coated fabric there was a wider selection than I have seen anywhere or if you were into making soft toys there was fur fabric galore.

The shop owner appeared around the corner of one corridor of fabric rolls as we both stood open-mouthed taking in the vast array of materials towering above us. Tall and slim and with a cigarette draped from his fingers, he was dressed in a dark blue vest and open shirt and gave us a happy grin, shaking both our hands. I explained I was looking for cowhide and he beckoned us to follow…a few minutes later I had two rolls to choose from and it was job done for 5 euros.  It seemed incredible that like those people with awfully messy desks, in the chaos of the material stacks he knew exactly where to find the design I’d asked for. Was there a system, or did he just have a very good memory of where he had put things?

After a minor fight with the sewing machine, which seemed to have some technical issues to do with bobbin winding which I won’t go into, a little black and white waistcoat has been created. Cinderella you shall go to the ball! And although I go alone, I have warned my absent husband, that if I find another Woody I’ll be sticking with him for the evening – what are my chances?

I’ve been to some strange places, but this week must be one of the weirdest. We went to the beach, that’s not weird…but this was a bit of a different beach. After parking by an unremarkable hotel we followed a trail of people down a little path between two scruffy buildings. On one side there were a lot of signs with images of soldiers and a camera crossed out. The beach opened out to an absolutely stunning golden sandy expanse, with palm leaf umbrellas in rows, and beyond these a sparkling turquoise sea, framed by a strip of rocks in the distance, which the waves were gently crumbling against. The beach curved slightly to the right and a spur of sand reached out into the bay. A group of boys were taking it in turns to run straight off the beach and summersault into the water. It was a typical holiday scene. Almost.

Settling ourselves down on the sand, and creating shade with an umbrella, we gazed out at the travel brochure view in front of us. But behind us was another story. The scene at our backs was a stark reminder of the conflict that still rages in Cyprus. A tall green wire fence was the beach backdrop and beyond that hundreds of bombed out crumbling hotels looked bleakly out to sea. An abandoned construction crane was visible between two partially destroyed buildings. Some of the hotel names were still legible, with various letters hanging down sadly out of line. Most of the front of the buildings had gone, so you looked straight into room upon room, just the same, where people will have holidayed in the past and enjoyed the same crystal sea view. On the far right there was a concrete lookout tower, where uniformed soldiers with guns occasionally appeared and they could also be seen with helmets and binoculars silhouetted against the bright blue cloudless sky.

There is something rather chilling about basking in the warmth of the sea, feeling the sand between your toes, and yet never able to forget what is behind you and what stories lay buried in the rubble.

Later in the afternoon we picked up our flippers and snorkels and headed into the water towards the line of rocks. The sea was like a warm bath and I saw plenty of fish, one was as long as my shin bone, completely white with a very long pointy noise, which was basically most of its body. I’m going to call that a Pinocchio fish. To be honest we weren’t looking for fish because we wanted to see ‘Dude’. Finding Nemo lovers  – you know who I mean. After a lot of time spent adjusting and readjusting my mask, so that it wasn’t full of water, I eventually began searching properly. Apparently the mask was too wide for my face – which is good because it proves I haven’t got a fat face! We had been told turtles like eating the sea grass, so I was concentrating my search where I’d spotted grass waving at me from the ocean floor. I also tried a little singing, through my snorkel. This was because whales and dolphins like to sing, so I thought turtles might like it too. I was humming a bit and calling out his name, just in case. It came out rather gurgled, but it seemed to do the trick because it wasn’t long before I spotted a lovely little turtle, a bit bigger than a large pizza, just below me. He was flipping along, dipping down to take mouthfuls of grass and then paddling his way up to the surface for a breath. He didn’t seem bothered by us. And continued to appear from different directions in his search for ‘grass’ – ah Dude – it makes sense.

It may be a weird place with a poignant story that lives on, but the turtles are a beautiful sight and they will take us back.

Wood pigeons were my morning wake-up call at home in the UK, amazingly they have followed me here, but joined by rather a lot of other birds and crickets – well they might be crickets. With fields all around and pine trees opposite, flying things are busy going here and there. But the crickets make it sound like a jungle. They are so loud and make a noise a bit like the buzz of electric wires, although I never see them… Well that’s what I thought, until the other day when I was lounging somewhere in the sunshine (a very rare occurrence, of course) and I felt something on my leg. Looking down I saw what looked like a massive piece of tree on my leg, grey-brown and alien-looking. I didn’t scream (just quietly whispered something under my breath) and shook my leg, it didn’t move. It wasn’t dead because its antennae were moving scarily. I had to flick it off in the end and it flew onto the path. It was probably as long as my hand, so maybe it wasn’t a cricket…I think they are green and not so large. It reminded me of a heavily armoured stick insect. We had a battalion of those in a tank for a number of months, until the children got tired of them. We couldn’t give them away, no one else wanted them, and so in the end I emptied them into the privet hedge in our garden in Catterick. That sounds a bit like a Simon Mayo confession…what will have happened to them? Could they have weathered the Yorkshire winter and adapted into hardy locusts that will eventually feed on privet hedges? And are our privet hedges now under threat? But that would be a good thing, surely, and therefore my evil dead should be forgiven!

I’m not a member of the RSPCB but the birds are a bit of a concern. There’s been talk of air rifles and other lethal weapons, a stuffed owl to frighten them away and all manor of unsuitable ways to stop them using our gazebo as a toilet. They do make a lot of mess as they sit on the electric wires across part of the terrace, where they like to chat, sing a bit, relax and to be frank crap… Someone is getting very upset and even though he isn’t having to sweep up the mess, clean down paths and wash patio furniture, he is the one planning awful ends for these poor little birds. The other day we heard the locals catch them in nets and cook them. In fact a restaurant we went to recently had a special dish set in the middle of the table from which a group of diners were spooning out large dollops of what looked like a kind of stew. You could hear them laughing and joking, drinking and making crunching noises…someone asked them what they were eating. “The birds…” they said, smiling and crunching some more…”delicious.” The crunching noise was – you guessed it – the little bones in the small birds! Help, I must find out the name of this dish and never order it.

I’m not sure what offends me so much about eating sparrows and small birds, as I will happily cook a chicken. Eating and crunching small bones is a big part of it, but it also seems a bit like eating rats and mice… like them birds eat a lot of junk and they really are a bit like skin and bone, so to me eating them would be akin to eating worms and beetles – one step on. And however much we see celebrities choking their way through a meal of disgusting looking insects on TV, it can’t be healthy or Tescos would stock them.

Time to sort out some meat for the BBQ – and I’m not cooking it unless I’ve seen the wrapper and checked it against my list of edible food.