The world from my window

It is morning on Nikiforou Theotoki Street in Corfu Town and someone is playing a clarinet. They're high up in one of the tall, Venetian buildings and practising their scales, the notes rising slowly and then falling again, up and down, up and down. The smell of garlic wafts down through the street from the Restaurant Rex. It's early September and the shops are full of cut-price summer sandals, on sale now that the season is coming to an end. A new pair of shoes is just what I don't need, having bought a pair of shoes every week for the last six weeks as a bizarre way of coping with my grief. Mr Grigg shares a surreptitious rice pudding with Gorgeous George and then he meets Eleni on her fruit and veg stall. A friend in the market is better than money in the purse.   'Why you been away so long?' she says. Back in the village, a swallowtail butterfly flaps by and lingers, lazily, on the cerise bougainvillea that spiders its way along the front of the ...