Heatwave

Right now we are in the middle of a heatwave. Mid morning today it is 40 degrees celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) outside, and a fairly warm 36 (97 degrees Fahrenheit) inside the house with all of the doors and windows wide open.

We are now on about day 5 of this with the temperature not due to drop for another three days, and only then by about 4 degrees. For us the killer is that we have no air conditioners. Last week, as the temperature started to rise we gave in and bought ceiling fans for a couple of the bedrooms. We hoped that these would move the air and keep the bedroom cool at night. Well, last night it was 37 degrees just before midnight as we headed to bed. Overnight the outside temperature didn’t fall below 30 degrees all night.

The weather is being talked about with a mixture of bafflement and outrage. This is August weather! seems to be the chant of the moment. August holds a special place in the hearts of all Cyprus residents. The temperature and humidity are significantly higher, no surprise there, but people change much of their behaviour to deal with the heat. For some it is just too hot and they leave the island. Many offices and government departments close for a large part of the month. All building work stops and all tradesmen down tools. The end of July is a time to get jobs finished off, or cross your fingers if your new-build house is close to completion, because if it’s not done by the start of August then it’s going to be a long wait.

The locals cross the road to walk in the shade. People get up early to get shopping and other errands done by 10am, before it gets really hot, and then siesta for a few hours in the afternoon. Normally quiet and peaceful neighbours, including some of ours, invite family round and sit outside on the balcony or patio in the spot with the best breeze and drink coffee until 2 or 3 am when the temperature drops. Whole families head to the beach for a day, or the whole weekend, complete with the obligatory plastic chair. The chair is essential … it is taken out into a foot or two of water and positioned carefully. Granny, fully dressed in her ankle-length black widow’s dress, is then led out into the water and sat on the chair. She will sit there quite happily all the day, cool at last.

But that is August weather and this is still June! According to the press one person died on Monday and a number more ended up in hospitala yesterday. We retreated to the beach – not to get a tan but because the sea breezes usually drop the temperature a few degrees. We spent the day alternating between enjoying the shade of the beach umbrella and the light wind and swimming in the sea.

At six pm we finally came home and wilted on the breezeless patio just waiting for this to break. Our entertainment for the evening was watching our, Cypriot, neighbour installing an air-con unit for the master bedroom – at 11pm. While he was perched on a step ladder on the upstairs balcony measuring and drilling fittings for the brackets his wife sat downstairs in the garden, tapping her foot with impatience.

Reading the reports of the weather in England just makes our weather seem even more strange. Hopefully only a few more days of this, for us and for them.

Sailing the Atlantic

The plan when we moved here was to downsize our life, including our expenses. Reducing the household income by 90% in exchange for not having to work tends to focus the mind like that! That said, there has always been a budget line for holidays and we always intended to get away from time to time, in a frugal sort of way.

So, how did we end up spending two weeks sailing across the Atlantic on a five-masted luxury cruise ship? Ahh, well it’s a story that involves Mandy, a website offering last minute cruise deals and a late night sign-up to their newsletter by her alter-ego The Reverend M.

Neither of us are “cruise people”; we used take holidays in remote Scottish cottages in November where there’s no mobile phone signal. We’re not really “different port on each day” sort of people, we like peace and tranquility and a quiet life. We’re also not keen on the idea of of having to have dinner with pre-assigned strangers, neither of us is that fond of having to make small talk with people we don’t know. And we are really, really not “charades on the aft main deck at 11am” sort of people.”

But wandering through a website Mandy found a cruise company that only has sailing ships – yes, they have engines too but aim to travel under sail for as much of each trip as possible. And so we chuckled and said if we were, ever, to take a cruise it would have to be on something like this.

And, then we saw that they have open dining programme where you can have dinner just as a two-some or with as many other people as you like. And, ohhh, look twice a year they reposition their boats from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean and vice versa. 14 days of uninterrupted sailing with no ports, no excursions, nothing but the motion of the sea.

But of course this is 5* cruising and isn’t cheap, even for an oddity like a well priced repositioning cruise.

Remember Rev M’s late-night sign up to a late deals newsletter?

The newsletter dropped into Mandy’s mailbox, along with a dozen or more random offerings she gets each day. A quick skim spotted the name of the now notorious cruise line “if we were ever to go on a cruise … “. A further look showed that they had a late deal on the West-East repositioning cruise, sailing in two and an half weeks time. The price was nice, actually the price was fantastic but of course that would just be one part of a trip. We would need a flight to the Caribbean, a flight back from Western Europe, hotels at both ends ….

From Wednesday evening, when the email arrived, to Saturday morning Mandy sat at her desk and searched and researched and cross-referenced and plotted. “It’s just an intellectual exercise” she said. “I just want to see if I could make it work”. She routed us from Cyprus to Frankfurt to London to New York before on to the Caribbean all to minimise costs. She tried to make use of BA AirMiles, American Airmiles and any other loyalty scheme we had left over from our corporate days. She read travel websites and cruise discussion boards to get the best hints and tips.

By Saturday evening there was an air of exhaustion and defeat in the house. The only way to make this work was an expensive, but obscure, routing through Germany which would use Airmiles but would leave us with less than two hours to touch down in Barbados and make it to the boat, and only then if the flights into and out of NY were on time. All of the possibilities were made more complex, and more expensive, by the fact that the Cricket World Cup was underway in the Caribbean.

We were just about to give up on this “intellectual exercise” when Mandy frowned, muttered I wonder … other ship … earlier sailing … and disappeared back to her desk.

An hour later we had a plan that involved the crossing with a week earlier on another ship from the same line. When offices opened the following day we had bookings for a cabin and direct London – Barbados flights, on Airmiles.

Of course we only had one week before sailing, and two days before we had to leave home but, apparently we thrive on these challenges and intellectual exercises!

Dolores

I mentioned a while ago that we had, unexpectedly, become involved in a project that was taking up a fair amount of time. We decided for a number of reasons that it wasn’t right to continue for another year in the same roles so we formally stood down a while back. Having now handed over to our successors we are free again!

This has some real upsides; we will actually be in a position to take part in some of the project events rather than just managing them in the background, we’ll be in a position to start looking for somewhere else to live, and we won’t have to work with Dolores. The importance of that last one has become increasingly apparent of late.

Dolores has a reputation for being keen to become involved in groups/organisations/events. Sadly, many of them seem to have taken a turn for the worse with in-fighting, back-stabbing and general unhappiness.

The handover was a little fraught. Ian is still smarting from being accused of plagerising some documents he produced “Yes, I recognised that text you used, a friend of mine wrote it.” said she.

Mandy bit (through?) her tongue when she was told “Well, you may have done things this way but it isn’t right and will be changing from now”.

By the time she came to software theft “Yes well, we’ll borrow this licenced software from another group to replace the thing you created” there were only raised eyebrows. We had Dolores-overload.

Some time ago we picked up a publication that she edited, just as she was stepping down as Editor. The back page is devoted to thanking people who helped during her tenure but begins with the following paragraph;

I was really going to use this page to have my say and retaliate to the two members who have great delight in making my life hell for the last two year but I’ve changed my mind. I’ve included in this issue an article on “some things I’ve learned” and refer you to [it]. I’ve learned … that when you plan to get even with someone, you are only letting that person continue to hurt you. So I’ll just do what my lovely Grampa taught me – ignore people like that – they can’t help it.

On reflection, I think that we can live without being on the same committee as Dolores ;-)