This is Cyprus...

6 min read 2022-05-23 20:02:00

Introducing... Dustin!

No, Dustin is not a new cat, nor any other animal. Neither is Dustin a lodger, or a guest or a new family member. Not a human one, anyway. But an

5 min read 2022-04-10 00:57:00

So it's over two years since the pandemic started. Case numbers are still fairly high in Cyprus, given that the population is not much more than a

4 min read 2022-03-06 22:31:00

January, as I described at length, was mostly taken up with Covid. Not that I had it seriously, thankfully, and Richard never did catch it. By the

8 min read 2022-01-24 22:14:00

Continuing the post I wrote ten days ago, about being ill, confusing test results and voluntary self-isolation. I was reassured by comments telling

9 min read 2022-01-11 20:19:00

On Monday January 3rd, we went to look for a new small upright freezer for our guest flat. There are several people booked to stay there over the

4 min read 2021-12-24 23:20:00

As has become a tradition, I'm writing a post on Christmas Eve to wish a very happy Christmas to anyone who might read this. I don't suppose I'll

5 min read 2021-12-08 01:01:00

An anonymous comment on this blog reminded me that I had not written here for some time. I was a little shocked to realise that it has been almost

1 min read 2021-09-13 21:26:00

I wrote in my last blog post about our complicated preparations for travelling to the UK this summer, with about ten days to do considerably more

1 min read 2021-09-02 17:07:00

We usually - in the pre-pandemic days - travelled to the UK at least once per year, sometimes twice. All our immediate family members live in England

1 min read 2021-07-15 01:05:00

The ground floor of our house is a separate flat - it was the house that was originally built on our plot, before the owners extended upwards. Since

1 min read 2021-05-19 20:59:00

It's a bit of a shock to realise that my last post was early in March. Time seems to expand and contract more randomly than usual in these

10 min read 2021-03-02 21:22:00

We have new curtains in our dining room. It sounds so simple. But somehow things are never quite as easy here as one might expect...Way back in

5 min read 2021-01-16 02:58:00

It's only three weeks since Christmas. That's easy enough to calculate, of course, but it feels like much, much longer. December - when we were still

3 min read 2020-12-24 21:38:00

I have written a post each year for the past decade on - or close to - Christmas Eve. So as Richard is currently carving the turkey, with the doors

4 min read 2020-12-10 02:41:00

Although Advent started on November 29th, I wasn't quite ready to start thinking about Christmas preparations until December started. Well - other