The world from my window

It's ten days into the new year and ten days since I've blogged. I'm ashamed of myself, I really am. I hope all is going well for you so far in 2014. Me, I'm abstaining from alcohol this month and still struggling with writing my book about our year in Corfu. Should I be humorous, like Peter Mayle in A Year in Provence , or navel-gazing like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love ? I just have to be truthful, I guess, and tell it like it was. An amazing, incredible experience but tempered by heart wrenching and unexpected homesickness. I have so many notes and photos to put into some kind of order. But bits of our big, fat Greek gap year write themselves, like the wonderful landscape and the warm, generous villagers who became like a second family to us. The climate, the blue skies and the food. Ah, the food. Oh how I love those Sunday lunchtimes of tasty, succulent roast pork in our local taverna. Or stifado next door or the best big beans in the world at the old...

Up at the plateia, the mandolins did a sound check to Zorba's Dance. Children tore around the square's twin trees and toddlers bobbed up and down on bended knees while devoted mothers and grannies looked on. Old men sat outside the kafenion, clacking their worry beads, gazing out at the scene unfolding before them. The butcher arrived in his van with two crates of souvlakia as the barbecue began to smoke. The wine and beer and Coca Cola was flowing and plates and plates of souvlakia, oily roast potatoes with aubergines, chicken and peppers kept arriving on our table. 'You want wine? I bring you wine,' said an important villager, who wandered down the road to his house to bring back a fancy decanter of his home made brew, his own feta and green olives.   'Why do they keep giving us all this?' said our children, who are staying with us for the week. 'Shouldn't we be paying for it?' Mr Grigg was happy. What with the children buying tw...