The world from my window

There is a dancer here (he looks like a clothed  kouros  statue), leading the line and swirling around rather daintily. His long ringlets sway and he is the centre of attention, just as he likes it. I attempt to capture this young man's image with my camera but the battery packs up and he is consigned to ancient history. So we will have to make do with what the camera saw before it stopped working. Not quite a kouros , but equally impressive. This is our first panegyri of 2014. It's held on New Friday, in the week after Easter, up on the monastery car park in Paleokastritsa, on Corfu's north west coast. There's a bus taking people up the hill. We wait patiently for it to return and then fifty Greeks turn up from nowhere and barge right in. It's standing room only so we forget about the bus and walk up the road. It's not so bad. We can see the bright lights and hear the familiar music of the Skolarikis brothers. They look at least twenty years o...

That's about it. Love Maddie x

On the night of Good Friday - or Great Friday, as the Greeks call it - it is raining. We join the 'mourners' at the back of the village church. Everyone is given a brown candle. The soft light glows. The priest and his chanters are at the front, where pride of place is Christ's epitafios , covered in red and white carnations. The service has been going for at least an hour-and-a-half, with people coming and going, small children crying and an American told to be quiet after engaging in idle chit-chat at a time when people are meant to be solemn. We leave the church, following the epitafios , and wind our way up through the village, the American taking a call on his mobile phone saying he can't speak because he's in a procession and then proceeding to talk for five minutes about someone who is in hospital. I share Sofia's umbrella as the noisy Yank goes on ahead. Up at the at the cemetery church, we walk through the door and out through the other si...

On this day, the holiest of holies in the Greek Orthodox calendar, the mournful toll of a bell from the village church sweeps across the rooftops and drifts down into the valley. Tonight, there will be a slow procession from the church in the plateia and up through the winding alleyways, through the middle church of St Paraskevi, in one door and out through the other, and then up to the top, the cemetery church where the candle-bearing villagers will stop for a while to talk to their loved ones who are long gone now, and in their graves. This melancholy ceremony is called the epitaph and takes place all over Greece as Pascha week nears its climax. At the head of the procession in our village will be a representation of Christ's bier, decorated with red and white carnations and the occasional head of pelargonium. In Corfu Town, the epitaph procession is accompanied by the island's oldest marching bands, with appropriate music. It is a time for solemnity, a time for re...

  We were standing outside the church as the parade made its way past us, up through the streets of the old town. Corfu is a musical island. At religious and state events, its philharmonic bands are out in force, belting out stirring, sonorous music or something more sedate, depending on the occasion. Today, crosses made of palm leaves, sprigs of olive and flowers are tucked into the plumed and gleaming helmets of the bandsmen and women.   For it is Palm Sunday, when Corfu's patron, Saint Spyridon, is carried around the streets and alleyways of Corfu Town. Bay leaves are scattered outside the churches and crushed on the pavement when the saint passes by, flanked by priests and an armed guard. The bells ring out, clang out, all over town. This week, there will be more celebrations as Easter draws near. All weekend, there has been a magical feel to the old town, as musicians strike up here, there and everywhere, just when and where you least exp...

We walked past the bandstand on our way to the pictures, intrigued by a pair of plimsolls just hanging there. On arrival at the Orpheus Cinema, we walked in through the lobby, paid five euros each for our tickets and settled down to watch a film. It was James Bond and For Your Eyes Only . Unlike Mr Grigg, I’m not a huge Bond fan, even though I share a birthday with Sean Connery. All those scantily-clad women, machismo, male chauvinism and car chases leave me cold. And Roger Moore makes me cringe. But tonight I was prepared to make an exception. Because this particular motion picture, you see, was filmed on Corfu and was the last showing of the season for a new English language film club.  The previous week it was Some Like It Hot , one of my all-time favourites. But it clashed with something else so, sadly, Marilyn and Co didn’t get a look-in. Pity really. Still, nobody's perfect. For the first time, I actually enjoyed a James Bond film, seein...

Says it all really. That's about it. Love Maddie x

There is nowhere quite like it. But then, I'm biased. That's about it. Love Maddie x

In fields and patches of garden, there are old men and women hoeing the soil. Their work is back-breaking, but still they go on, breaking up the clods to prepare the earth for planting. Meanwhile, in the olive groves and on the roadsides, the wild flower spectrum tilts this way and that, with new blooms and blossoms to say hello to every day.   The day's sounds are strimmers, chainsaws, tractors and chattering birds. Swallows swoop, sparrows emerge, startled, from hedges and jays and magpies chatter in beneath the grapevines. The smell of pastitsada bubbling away in the oven of a village taverna mingles with the heavenly aroma of orange blossom. You can feel the heat on your back, the sunshine in your bones. It won't be long now before the fireflies are here. What a magical island. That's about it. Love Maddie x