Recycling in Cyprus

It's just over ten years since the 'Green Dot' company introduced recycling in Larnaka (and elsewhere in Cyprus). We were a little dubious at first, but it's been extremely efficient. Every Monday evening, two large and noisy trucks drive around our neighbourhood, collecting the two different kinds of roadside recycling: the paper and card (in a brown bag) and the PMD (plastic-metal-drinks) recycling, in an almost clear bag.  Sometimes they come as early as about four o'clock, sometimes as late as eleven o'clock, but they come by every week. Even on public holidays. 

It took us a few years to work out an efficient method of storing the things we planned to recycle, as we don't generate nearly enough to put out a bag every week. But in the autumn of 2014 we started using a chest of drawers in the kitchen rather than simply piling things in an overflowing trolley behind the freezer: 

It's been moved since then, but the principle of putting the PMD and paper recycling in two separate drawers has worked so well that we still do that over six years later. 

A few years ago we also placed two different coloured dustbins outside, one for PMD and one for paper. This enables any guests to put out recycling easily, and means that if our PMD drawer starts to overflow before there's enough to fill one of the sacks, I can put some of it in the blue bin. It also means that some of the advertising junk mail can go straight into the brown bin without ever entering the house.

Then a year or so ago we bought a crate to take the glass recycling. That isn't collected from the roadside; we have to take it to one of the green containers that can be found in various places. We usually remember to take it when we go to Metro, but not always. It generally takes a couple of months to be anywhere near full. 

I now put out recycling for collection on the last Monday of each month. So this morning, in between rain showers, I filled the two bags from the kitchen drawers and the outside bins:

The PMD sack contains tetrapaks (squashed to almost flat), cans, a few plastic containers and some metal trays or lids.  Putting it out once a month means the bag is fairly full, but not overflowing.  The paper one is fuller than usual, but I don't think I put any out at all in October, so that's probably two months' worth. 

A few glass items had found their way into the PMD drawer, so I moved those down to the outside crate.  This is what we've used in November: 

It looks as if there's plenty of room for December's bottles and jars, which is just as well as we forgot to take the crate when we went to Metro last week. 

And if anyone is wondering whether our roof repairs held in this morning's rain - the answer is a resounding 'yes'!  Most of the rain was quite light, but there was a heavy downpour for about five minutes, and although I watched carefully, not a single drop appeared on our stairs.  It remains to be seen whether that will stay true in high winds, or in rain that lasts longer than five minutes. But it's a great improvement and we are extremely relieved. 

Advent Sunday

I can remember having an Advent calendar as a child. It was usually a cardboard affair, with a scene of the Nativity, or shepherds, perhaps, in bright colours, sometimes with glitter.  We opened one little window each day during December, with the final one being the 24th, usually - Christmas Eve - with a larger window, and a manger scene. It used to puzzle me why that didn't appear on the 25th until I realised that, of course, Christmas Day is no longer Advent.

I used to love my Advent calendar. Sometimes we had a family one, and took it in turns to open the little windows, but at least a couple of times I had one of my own. I knew what was coming, but I loved the anticipation, nevertheless: the reminders of the background to the Christmas story, leading up to the Nativity. 

By the time my sons were small, Advent calendars had become more secular. We tried to get 'religious' themed ones, but it was quite difficult. Advent calendars were more likely to have jolly Santa figures, or Christmas trees - a countdown to Christmas, certainly, but really nothing to do with Advent.  At least once someone gave us one with chocolates inside, which seemed even more of a bad idea, giving extra sugar to children who were already excited about Christmas coming. 

Nowadays, of course they have become almost entirely commercialised. It's possible to get Advent calendars with all kinds of gifts - with beauty products, or wine, or even cheese samples.  This, for instance, is a site that recommends the 'best' Advent calendars for 2020: I looked at the first few entries in the gallery, and the least expensive was over $30. 

Advent is a Latin word for 'coming', and is used to indicate the arrival of an important person or thing. So I suppose it makes sense for those of a non-religious persuasion to think of it as waiting for the arrival of Santa Claus. Which is all very well for children, but those expensive Advent calendars with perfumes or wine are not intended for the young. I suppose they have become an excuse for yet more spending in the festive season - and this year, with so many shops struggling, it's perhaps a good way to make money at last. 

Of course, most years Advent doesn't actually start on December 1st. And unlike Lent, Advent is not a fixed length of time.  There are four Sundays in Advent, so when Christmas is a Friday, as will happen this year, the fourth Sunday of Advent will be December 19th, and today - November 29th - is the first Sunday of Advent. 

In the Anglican Church, which is in our background and where we're now established again, Advent is the start of the church year. We were wished 'Happy new year' this morning in the church service.  The cloths on the table - and the clergy stoles - had changed to purple, and there was an empty scene under the table, waiting for the Nativity scene.

Naturally - it's traditional on the first Sunday of Advent one of the songs was 'O come, o come Emmanuel'. It's much loved by many, but I admit to finding it a bit dreary. On the other hand, I really like the more modern 'Christ be our Light', which was another of today's songs. 

There was a new Advent service sheet too, and an Advent wreath, which just about shows on the left of the photo above, in the middle. It has four candles, and the first one was lit today.

All symbolic, of course, and not everybody appreciates symbolism of this kind. But I find it helpful, and I like the progression of the church calendar.  In Advent we think about the first coming of Jesus, the one that is celebrated in Nativity plays and Christmas carols, but we also think about the second coming  - the end times - something that feels all the more real towards the end of this extremely difficult year. 

At home we don't currently have any purple candles, and I haven't seen any in the shops. I was thinking of buying a red one for Advent, but I couldn't find one I liked. Most candles in the shops currently are scented, and I really dislike candles with scents. They're not good for cats, either. But we had an unused white candle, so I put away the green one that's been on the table since we stopped using ceiling fans,  and started a new white one at lunch-time today: 

And as an aside, not relevant to Advent, today also happens to be a very important day in my family: my father's birthday. So my brother arranged a family Zoom call - the first time we've done this, though we plan to repeat it regularly - and it worked extremely well. 

More images of autumn in Cyprus

Two weeks ago exactly I wrote a post with a few images I associate with Autumn in Cyprus.  Some fruit, a cat bed, a cloudy sunset, and a few fallen leaves in our side yard.

Since then the temperature has dropped somewhat; this morning I switched the thin duvet, which we started using just two weeks ago, for the warmer one. We're both wearing long-sleeved warm sweaters or jackets all the time during the day, not just in evenings. I have put both my pairs of summer sandals through the washing machine, and put them away for the winter. 

And this morning I went out for a short walk on my own (since my friend Sheila is self-isolating with her family, hopefully just for a few days, after a Covid positive contact). I don't walk along the Salt Lake trail when I'm by myself, but today I did go through what we think of as the main part of the park area.  And since there was nobody to chat with, I observed the trees and foliage rather more than I normally do. 

The first thing that struck me was how green everywhere was looking:

It might look a bit brown to those from rainier climes, but a month ago the soil was bare, other than a few hardy weeds.  Now there is grass springing up everywhere.

Most of the trees are evergreen; many are pines, of course, but there are others which aren't pine, but still don't seem to lose their leaves. 

As I walked around the local streets, on a meandering route home from the park, I did see some evidence of plants that were changing colour, although they look brown and dead rather than red or orange:

And there are citrus trees all over the place too. When we first saw these, twenty-three years ago, it was rather exciting. We had an excellent orange tree and several lemon trees in the back garden of our rental house, and it felt very odd  - and thrilling! - to pick fresh oranges and lemons. 

Now, though we no longer have any of our own, we take them for granted.  The new season oranges and lemons are coming into the shops now, along with the satsumas I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Trees like this are so commonplace that I tend to forget what a novelty they are to visitors from places that don't produce citrus fruit. 

And then, as I was almost home, I finally spotted a climbing plant that actually looked Autumnal.  Possibly it's meant to look this way, and those are bracts rather than leaves changing colour - I know very little about plants - but I liked the way it looked anyway: 

It's been good having some Autumn weather - too often Larnaka moves from Summer into Winter with very little in between. Tomorrow is Advent Sunday, and December starts on Tuesday. Today is supposed to be windy and rainy, although the sun shone for most of the morning and even now it's dry, albeit rather greyer. So we still don't know if our roof repairs have stopped our ongoing leaking! 

Restrictions for the first half of December, island-wide

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the latest restrictions on travel, shopping, meetings etc in Cyprus. These were introduced in the hope of curbing the sudden increase in Covid numbers. Limassol and Paphos had stricter regulations than the rest of the island, but the only new thing that affected us was not being able to do any shopping before 10am. Which, in the scheme of things, is no more than a minor inconvenience.

Unfortunately, the number of new cases testing positive each day has remained in triple figures, mostly between 180 and 260. That's a lot when the population is only around one million. Equivalent to around 14,000-20.000 in the larger Western European countries, and they've had much stricter restrictions over the past month. 

Here's how the overall case number chart is looking for Cyprus now, in bar chart form: 

It's not good. 

Part of the reason for the increase in positive cases is that testing has been increased quite significantly over the past couple of weeks.  But if the cases weren't there, they wouldn't be found. Many are asymptomatic, of course, which makes it harder to find them, particularly when people are casual about isolating, and reluctant or even unable to divulge all their contacts. 

On a global scale, Cyprus hasn't done so badly:

Compare, for instance, to three of the worst-hit countries in the European areas:

(To read the statistics, you probably need to click the images to see them rather larger)

The significant figures are the total cases and deaths per million. The worst European country is Belgium, with nearly 1400 deaths per million. Of course different countries calculate statistics somewhat differently, and one has to take into account the age and general health levels of the populations. But those are unlikely to be significantly different in countries such as these. 

Still, despite having done reasonably well overall, the recent increase in numbers in Cyprus is very concerning, and all the more so because the health system is beginning to struggle, as more and more people are having to be treated in hospitals each day.  A bar chart of the deaths doesn't look too bad - most days it's just one or two people, the majority with underlying health conditions. But each death is a tragedy for the family concerned. And the trend is not encouraging:

So, on Wednesday the health experts met with government advisors, and various scenarios were discussed, though no details were released at the time. Today there was another meeting, and the new regulations were announced shortly after 1.00pm. 

Road restrictions to Limassol and Paphos have been lifted. The case numbers in Paphos have apparently improved, and limiting traffic to and from the cities was causing major traffic jams as well as a logistical nightmare, with everyone eligible to go to these towns needing to be tested for Covid first. 

However, the entire island has a new, stricter set of regulations from November 30th-December 13th, in the hope of reducing numbers significantly. One that is going to affect us and our friends is:

Curfew from 21:00 until 05:00

That stops people having long drawn-out evening meals together (particularly Cypriots, who often don't eat until eight or even nine o'clock), and it will prevent us from our regular evening get-togethers for board games with friends, usually twice per week. But it's another minor inconvenience in the cause of preventing spread of the disease. 

A slightly surprising new restriction is: 

Restaurants to be open until 19:00 with the exception of take away and delivery.

Many restaurants don't even open in the evening until seven o'clock anyway. And even if one goes to an all-day restaurant at six o'clock for an early evening meal, it would be quite rushed to finish and be out within an hour. So this essentially stops people eating out in the evenings. 

We were also surprised to see this:

One person for every 10 s.m. for shops.

It had been one person every 3 sq m, as far as I remember. This is going to make it more difficult to do any shopping - and we didn't think there had been any cases of people being infected via shopping. Hand sanitisation and mask-wearing have become 'normal' in shops, and people are pretty good at moving out the way of other customers, and keeping a couple of metres apart most of the time. 

Other restrictions - the closure of gyms and casinos, public transport to operate at 50% capacity, and so on - don't affect us personally.  And, again, they're irritating to those involved, but in the scheme of things not a huge problem, particularly if it's only for two weeks.

We had expected a reduction of the number of people allowed in private gatherings in houses, but that's still set at ten. It doesn't even have to be the same ten people: there's no 'bubble' system operating here. We could theoretically invite eight people over one day, a different eight people the next day, and so on, leading to nearly fifty close contacts in a week. 

We don't do that, of course. We normally see our closest friends a few times each week, and a limited number of other people.  But we were expecting some reduction in the numbers allowed for private gatherings, as those are where the transmission of the virus is most likely. Masks and distancing are not required or even expected in private gatherings, possibly because it simply wouldn't happen here. 

As for what will happen from December 14th onwards, that will depend in part on the epidemiological situation. But according to this article on the Kathemerini site (right-click to translate, if necessary) they hope to return the curfew to 11pm rather than 9pm, and to allow restaurants to open until 10.30pm again.  Between December 23rd and January 1st, they plan to allow 15 people in private gatherings rather than 10.

Christmas is inevitably going to be very subdued this year. Maybe things will start to get back to normal in the spring: there's been some apparently encouraging news published about vaccine trials. But according to the Lancet, the results haven't yet been peer reviewed.  There's a concerning phrase in that article:

"How well the vaccines work in older people or those with underlying conditions and their efficacy in preventing severe disease are still unclear."

If the vaccines don't make any difference to those most at risk, then it's hard to see how we expect any semblance of normality within the next few months. 

Shopping at Metro (and the froutaria)

At the end of last week, I wrote about a shopping trip to Lidl, and the disadvantages inherent in going there, as so many items are inconsistently stocked. So, in the interests of balance (and also because I'm beginning to run out of topics to write on...) I thought I'd write about today's visit to Metro.

Metro is the supermarket that we liked best when we first moved to Cyprus twenty-three years ago. It was the closest to where we lived, and seemed to be the friendliest. It's the only one that hasn't changed hands in the past couple of decades, and it's still our favourite. It's only a couple of kilometres from where we live, there's plenty of car park space around it, and the shelves are nicely laid out. They are not too high and the aisles reasonably spacious. There's a good choice of products - and, unusual in Cyprus nowadays, we don't even have to put a coin or token into the supermarket trolleys to use them. 

We normally shop on a Friday, but Richard's busy tomorrow morning so we decided to go today. And while it wasn't yet urgent to go to Metro, there are rumours of more Covid restrictions to be announced tomorrow. So I thought we might as well go this week rather than next week. Since we only go around once a month, with brief forays into the local small Achna Discount mini-market most weeks, I made a list of the things which I knew were best value at Metro. 

It was less crowded than on a Friday; everyone in masks, of course, and being careful to 'physically distance' around the shop. And we found all we needed, plus a few extra things on special offer that would keep.  And then, as we were about to join a checkout queue, I spotted a rare and unusual delicacy: dark chocolate Bounty bars! We first discovered them in UK airport shops, and have brought many back to Cyprus. But of course we haven't been to the UK for nearly a year, so we ran out of our dairy-free Bounties many months ago. There were seven on the shelf, so - rather selfishly, I suppose - we took them all. 

Hopefully there were others in stock elsewhere. And if not, maybe their rapid disappearance will encourage Metro to stock them again... 

I don't think we're extravagant in our tastes, but it still surprises me how much more we typically spend in our monthly Metro shop than we do at the fruitaria over the course of a month.  Our bill did include five bags of cat litter (almost 20 euros) which should last us about six weeks. But even excluding that, our food, mostly store cupboard ingredients like rice, oats etc, came to 80 euros, for what didn't look like a vast amount of food. 

Part of the problem, of course, is the refrigerated produce: protein food such as meat and eggs, and the vegan equivalents of processed meat, cheese and yogurt. 

The variety and quality of dairy-free produce has improved vastly since we came here, but even though some of the 'cheese' was on offer, these are essentially luxury foods.  

Dairy-free Flora and our favourite bread flour were also on offer so we bought extras of those:  

And some frozen peas, which immediately had to go in the freezer when we got home. We've tried many varieties of frozen peas since moving here, but unfortunately the cheaper ones are somewhat tasteless and lacking in texture. The only two brands which we really like are Findus and Birds Eye, so we usually get a kilogram or so of whichever of those is the least bad value. 

Since the weather is somewhat cooler than it was, we were able to go straight to Achna Discount for a few other things that are better value there, leaving the cold and frozen items in a bag in the boot of the car rather than rushing to put them away.  We always get coconut milk and grape juice at Achna, for instance, and Lady Jane's wet food. 

We also bought some paper towels and toilet paper - and that lot all came to a little over 18 euros. 

Then over the road to the froutaria for a week's supply of fruit and vegetables. Or not quite, since we still had a few apples and carrots, a couple of sweet potatoes, a large courgette, half a head of broccoli and plenty of garlic from last week. 

This fresh produce took up almost as much space as the food from Metro, but cost us a grand total of 15 euros. And since we'd parked by the fruit stall, which offers crates of slightly older fruit and veg at ridiculously low prices, I also spent a euro on some fresh peaches, rather surprised to see them at the end of November:

I will probably stew and freeze most of them. 

As I said above, I don't think we're particularly extravagant in what we eat, but neither are we deliberately frugal. We eat chocolate, we use cocoa, and buy grape juice, all of which are considered (by some) to be non-essential. We eat chicken two or three times a week, and fish - which is surprisingly expensive for a small island nation - once a week. 

In addition, we don't visit a lot of different shops to find all the best offers, and we mostly choose what we eat for nutritional reasons as well as enjoyment and taste. Brown rice and wholewheat flour are (usually) pricier than the refined equivalents, but we like them better. And since they contain much more nutrition, they are healthier, and thus actually better value in overall terms. 

When people ask what the 'cost of living' is in Cyprus, it's impossible to give a figure, in part because there are such differing views on grocery shopping. We've known of people who use a lot more beans and lentils than we do for their protein, and spend no more than about 100 euros per person per month.  We've also known of people who buy ready-meals, or sauces in jars, and good cuts of meat, and might spend 250 or more euros per person per month. And that's not taking into account any take-aways or eating out.

I miss popping into the froutaria first thing, to buy just a couple of days' worth of fruit and veg, but doing everything weekly is probably more efficient. And it's always such a relief to have everything put away, and know that I won't need to do any more shopping for at least a week. Richard likes shopping, but I really don't. 

Signs of new life along the Salt Lake trail

With over six months' worth of drought, from the end of April until the middle of November, the scrubland along the Salt Lake trail was looking very dry. Some plants survive the summer - they have done so, probably, for centuries, acclimatised to the heat, gaining their moisture from the air, or from deep in the ground. But the ground was brown and bare. 

Two weeks later, after two major rainstorms, there are signs of new life alongside the trail. 

This is something I still intuitively associate with spring, despite twenty-three years living in Cyprus. We did, after about ten years, learn to buy bedding plants at the start of November, rather than April or May. Petunias, busy lizzies and similar flowers are blooming now, and should continue to brighten the winter months until they die off when the heat appears again around June. 

So it really shouldn't surprise me that seeds sprout and grass appears as soon as the rain does. 

Looking closely, though, there appear to be two different kinds of grass.  One, coarse and irregular, is set back a bit from the trail.  But there also looks like much finer grass sprouting more closely to the edge.  

I don't recall it happening like this before. Or not so suddenly, anyway. It seems unlikely that someone would have sown grass seed, although that's what it looks like. Maybe it's happening so rapidly because this year the onset of rain has coincided with the temperature reducing somewhat, making an ideal environment for the grass to grow. 

Repairing the Roof

Anyone who has followed or popped into this blog over the course of the past decade and a half will probably have come across mention of our roof leaking. It's not uncommon in Cyprus to have areas where heavy rain leads to dripping through the roof, and we're thankful that it's only ever been above the stairs. Since stairs don't generally have carpets here, it's annoying but it doesn't take long to mop it up afterwards.

And if you haven't come across any of those posts, and/or are interested in seeing some, this post from 2009 was all about rain, with a photo at the end of our cool box and a yellow bucket strategically placed to catch the drips. In our first few years here, we had two or three people come to look at the roof.  One or two broken tiles got fixed, and suggestions were made, but in the end the regular response was along the lines of, 'This is Cyprus. Roofs leak.' 

The problem was that it got worse each year, or so it seemed. Then in 2010, a couple of Richard's sailing friends took a look at the roof, and discovered a hole, and also a large amount of pigeon mess which was making the rain bounce in an odd direction. I wrote in this post about how they cleaned the mess away, and sealed the hole. And it definitely helped the problem that winter.  

But a year later, there was more torrential rain, and once again our roof leaked. I wrote this post, illustrated again with a photo, except that by then we had moved from a yellow bucket to a blue one. In 2014, we had some loft insulation installed, and another hole in the roof was fixed. And so it went on... each year, we expected rain through the roof when the wind was high and the rain was heavy.

So it wasn't any surprise that it happened this year, when it rained - except that it seemed considerably worse than last year's. Out came the cool box again, although this time it was accompanied by a large empty paint pot. 

But I had to remove photos from the walls, something I hadn't had to do for some years. And it seemed that the rain was coming through in more places than previously. We realised it had been a while since the roof was last cleaned, and we knew there was a lot of bird mess up there. So we called our friendly roofing guy, who eventually came at the end of last week, with another guy, to check the roof and fix whatever problems they could find.

It was important that they came on Friday, as heavy rain was predicted for last weekend, and our roofing friend told us he'd been asked, urgently, to look at two other roofs as well that morning. 

It turned out that there were more problems than just an excess of bird mess. Richard had asked if something could be done to make the problem less severe in future, possibly by moving some of the pipes on the roof. Since I didn't go up there (and have no wish to do so) I didn't entirely understand, but it all sounded like a good idea. 

However, when they moved the pipes, they discovered an entire area of the roof that had never been sealed, with some wood that was rotting away. 

And when they'd replaced the wood and sealed the area, they went over the whole roof carefully. They discovered a couple of broken tiles which they removed and replaced. Here are the broken ones:

I think the roofing guys expected to be here for about an hour, but in the end it was nearly three hours. Thankfully it hadn't started raining, so after cleaning up they hurried off to the next job, hoping to fix another roof before the predicted rain.

Except that it didn't rain. There was a bit of lightning and thunder in the distance, but not a drop of rain. On Saturday evening we had maybe five minutes of light rain, but not the kind that would have leaked through. On Sunday it stayed fine and sunny. 

I don't think I have ever before heard Richard express a wish that we could have some really heavy rain - not because he likes rain, but because we would really like to know if this latest repairwork has actually fixed the problem, at least for this winter. 

There's rain predicted for later this week, and Saturday, so maybe we'll find out then:

Or maybe it will be another fine weekend.  Perhaps fixing the roof is the equivalent of going out with an umbrella, and ensures that it won't rain after all. 

Re-reading and Re-homing of Books

As I wrote in a post nearly two weeks ago, I have a somewhat overcrowded shelf of books which I haven't yet read. I just stopped typing to count, and there are thirty-eight of them. That includes five for the reading group I mentioned in that post, and three or four from my birthday earlier this year, or possibly even last Christmas. 

The rest are almost all from the St Helena's monthly book sales, some of them bought as long ago as November 2018. At fifty cents a book, it's very tempting to pick up all kinds of books I might not otherwise think about. If I decide I don't like them, I can donate them back the following month... or year, or whenever I get around to reading them.

What I didn't mention is that we also have about 3,500 books, most of which I have read at least once, in various locations around the house. And since I have some favourite authors whose works I like to re-read regularly, I try to intersperse around three or four new-to-me books with six or seven old favourites. 

I'm told I started reading books when I was about three or four. My first favourite books were by Enid Blyton (as was the case with most of my generation in the UK). For all her many faults in style and attitudes, she engendered a love of reading in many thousands of young children. By the time I was about ten or eleven, I had a couple of hundred books of my own, and during my teenage years I used to spend most of my birthday or Christmas money on inexpensive Armada paperbacks, which were popular in the 1970s, often on special offer during the January sales.

There wasn't much 'teenage fiction' in those days; I still re-read my older children's fiction (Malcolm Saville, Elinor M Brent-Dyer, Noel Streatfeild, Louisa M Alcott etc) and I also began reading 'grown-up' fiction when I was around twelve or thirteen. At school I discovered Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. My father introduced me to PG Wodehouse, my mother introduced me to Gerald Durrell, and my aunt, who worked in a bookshop, introduced me to Georgette Heyer. These are still amongst my favourite writers. 

It wasn't until I was in my mid twenties that I came across authors like Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy, and the whole world of so-called 'contemporary women's fiction'. I gradually collected some, many bought second-hand or given to me for a birthday or Christmas if I requested them. When I like an author, I try to collect all their works. 

By the time we had moved all our books to Cyprus, I had around two hundred volumes of 'my' fiction, mostly character-based saga novels, light Regency romances, contemporary fiction, some Christian fiction, and some oddities like Terry Pratchett's 'Discworld' series.  We also had perhaps a hundred biographies, two hundred or so Christian non-fiction books, a hundred or so of Richard's fiction (thrillers, spy fiction, and so on) and around five hundred children's books, mostly from my childhood and teens, and the ones given to our sons. And some general non-fiction, of course: dictionaries, reference books and so on. 

However, I'm not entirely sure how the 1200 or so books we had on our shelves around twenty years ago have managed to multiply to nearly three times as many. But we are finally running out of bookcase space, and - more worrying - of places to put new bookcases. I hate getting rid of books, though I don't mind passing them on to other people who I know will love them. So, until recently, when I need to make space in 'my' bookcases, which are in our dining room, I have moved a few more down to our guest flat. 

I've been keeping track of all my reading on GoodReads, LibraryThing and my book reviews blog for a little over twenty years, and in that time I've apparently read 2171 books.  That's not very many.  Since the boys left home the amount has increased, and I'm aiming to read 120 books this year, though I'm a bit behind schedule at present.  

But I worked out that if I read 120 books per year, and simply re-read all our book collection, without anything new, it would take me 30 years to finish. Now I'm not going to read Richard's books (around 1000, including both sailing and thriller-type fiction and some of his theological and missiological books) and I'm not going to sit down and read reference books, of which we have many. 

Even if I just include 'my' fiction books there are probably well over 1000 of them, and there are some I want to re-read at least once a decade.  I read some non-fiction too, and there are some of my children's/teenage books that I like to re-read regularly. In my planned ten books per month, I usually aim for one Christian non-fiction, two or three new-to-me-books, one or two re-read children's books, and five favourite authors from 'my' fiction whom I'm re-reading. Sixty per year. 600 in a decade...

Thus I don't need to keep more than about 600 of 'my' fiction. And that's about the number I have on our dining room shelves.

So for every new book I read, and want to keep (and probably re-read eventually) I can move a book to the guest flat. Of course it doesn't quite work that way; usually I fit more and more in the gaps until I have no room at all, then select a dozen or so to take downstairs. That's what happened on Saturday, although I was more ruthless, and removed thirty books from the shelves. 

They were so squashed together that I spread them out a little.. I blew off some dust, too, and cleaned the shelves properly.  They do look cleaner, but while there are now one or two slight gaps, it doesn't look as though thirty books have been removed.

Then I looked at the guest flat shelves.  The bookcases are becoming over-full. And since guests usually only stay a week or two, they don't need many hundreds of books, so it finally occurred to me that I could actually pass a few of the guest flat books to the church book sale. A radical thought. There are books down there which I know I will never read again. There are some which I have never read at all. There are some I don't recall ever having seen before... 

I found about thirty books which I plan to give to the book sale. Here's a selection, two of which are duplicates of books we have elsewhere, some of which I read and didn't like, some of which I read and thought were okay, but I won't read them again, and at least one of which I am quite certain I have never seen before. Indeed, when I went to remove these books (and the others I found) from my GoodReads and LibraryThing catalogues, three of the ones I didn't recognise weren't there at all. Maybe books breed when I'm not looking. 

Or maybe a guest bought a book at the airport, read it, decided they wouldn't read it again, and left it behind. If that's the case, I just hope they won't look for the book when - in some futuristic post-pandemic world - they visit us again.

Muffins or cupcakes?

Our two years in the United States (1992-1994) made us somewhat bilingual as far as British/American words and phrases go. On the whole I use British phrases - a lift rather than an elevator, trousers rather than pants, car boot rather than trunk, and so on, although I don't necessarily even notice when friends use the other versions, or when I read them in books. And with globalisation, and popular culture, and of course having had several good friends from the US, there are some words where find myself adopting the American usage. 

So, for instance, movies and films are pretty much interchangeable, in my mind. I use both words, for variety, if I'm writing about one. And I realised recently, when asked a question by an online friend, that I use the word 'cupcake' to describe small cakes (often iced/frosted) in cases, whereas, growing up, I would have said 'fairy cake', or possibly just 'little cake'. 

And then there's muffins. 

As a child, I knew muffins as bread-like flattish things, a bit like crumpets, which would go in the toaster or under the grill, and could be eaten with butter. However I had almost forgotten they existed until we heard that, in the United States, they are known as 'English muffins', because their 'muffins' were baked items that resemble cupcakes - or fairy cakes - in appearance, although they tend to be larger, and can be savoury. 

Nearly three decades later, I haven't seen an 'English' muffin in years, and now use the term 'muffin' to refer to the American items. I've seen them in supermarkets (in the UK), and even in some restaurants or cafes, sometimes referred to as 'American-style muffins', but sometimes without any adjective at all. 

I mentioned on Friday that we had bought some silicon muffin pans. This led to some discussion with our friends about the difference between cupcakes and muffins. Apart from the fact that muffins can be savoury and are never iced (or frosted), what is the essential difference between, say, a chocolate cupcake and a chocolate muffin?  The fact that muffins are usually bigger isn't an essential difference, since one can buy 'mini muffins', and there's no reason why one shouldn't make large cupcakes. 

I knew that muffins tended to be denser, but it's been a long time since I actually made any. So today, as our friends were coming for the every-other-Sunday games afternoon and shared  evening meal, I decided to try out my new muffin pans. I checked various books and found a couple of recipes that sounded rather good, and for which I had the ingredients; one with oats and cranberries, the other a triple chocolate muffin recipe. 

I made the cranberry one first. The recipe involved putting the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl (flour with quite a lot of baking powder, oats and brown sugar, then mixing in the cranberries), then lightly beating eggs, oil and quite a bit of milk together, and pouring them in. The instructions said to stir with a metal spoon until just mixed, not beating or over-mixing. So I did that, and divided the mixture between the twelve muffin pan holes, and put them in the oven at 200 degrees. 

As I wanted to cook the chocolate ones fairly soon afterwards, I had to take them out of the pans while they were still warm, which wasn't a great idea; I knew they were meant to be left in silicon pans until cold,  A few of them did break slightly, but seven of them came out perfectly, which is good as there were seven of us eating together in the evening:

The recipe was quite different from a basic cake recipe - flour was the main constituent, and the only fat was 6 tablespoons of oil. The sugar content was fairly low too. Mixing the wet ingredients into the dry ones is typical of cakes such as gingerbread, but mixing only until JUST combined is unlike any cake I've made - and I've baked a lot of different recipes over the years. 

The chocolate muffin recipe started with melting 175g dark chocolate with some butter (I used dairy-free spread, of course), and again the amount of butter/spread was very small, only 50g, whereas there was 275g flour plus 50g cocoa in the dry ingredients. And, again, egg and milk were added (dairy-free milk for us as we don't use cow's milk).  And chocolate chips. 

Here they are, out of the oven:

And here are the seven I put out for the end of our evening meal:

They were good, I thought, quite dense and a little chewy; not as sweet as cupcakes, and more filling, though that might just be because of the size. A basic cupcake would have equal weights of butter/spread, sugar (usually white sugar), flour (usually white flour) and egg,  with no extra fluid, whereas these muffins had more flour than anything else, mostly wholemeal, and a significant amount of milk. 

The addition of cranberries or chocolate chips could work in cupcakes, of course, as could using wholemeal flour, and brown sugar, and there are many varieties of cake, some of which don't use any kind of butter or spread.  But I think I now have a better idea of the difference - and on Googling to see if there's anything official, I found this interesting discussion.  Many of the points made are similar to the conclusions I had come to, and one of the experts states that muffins are technically a form of 'quick bread'. 

I have made muffins in the past, using cupcake-size pans, with cupcake cases (since I only had metal pans) and recalled that the muffins tended to get stuck to the cake cases far more than little cakes do. So using these silicon pans is a great improvement as they mostly came out very cleanly, and of course there were no paper cases to dispose of. 

Flamingoes!

Just two days ago, I wrote about the Larnaka Salt Lake. It's an interesting area not just because of the salt, but because it's home to thousands of flamingoes over the winter. There weren't very many on Thursday morning, and they were rather a long way away.

But this morning, there were lots. Several hundred, at least. We reached the Airport Road end of the trail, and could see quite a group of flamingoes, close to the edge of the lake: 

Nobody is supposed to go any closer to them than the trail, as they could be frightened away. And I rather wished I'd taken my camera rather than just being equipped with my phone. Still, zooming in slightly, even though not high quality, does make some of the flamingoes fairly clear. Even if they still just look like pink blobs, they are at least pink blobs with long legs.  The water isn't deep, so they were standing in their usual spread out groups, making quite a bit of noise. 

No maximum group size, masks or social distancing required for flamingoes! 

These weren't the only ones on the lake - here's another zoomed out shot, showing many others, further away. It was supposed to have been raining yesterday afternoon and most of today, so perhaps they arrived in anticipation, only to find a pleasantly sunny weekend: 

As we watched, the long line in the distance started moving. Apparently one flamingo had decided to head in the direction of the group nearest to us, and the others followed... 

There's a notice board at the end of the Salt Lake trail, explaining some of the history of the place, along with some of the mythology (albeit expressed as history), in both English and Greek: 

Here's just the English part which might be clear enough to read if you click the photo to enlarge it. It doesn't say how the salt was harvested or cleaned, but it does explain that the flamingoes eat tiny pink brine shrimps that grow in the lake during the winter. When this source of food is gone (usually around April or May), they fly away to another lake in Cyprus, or back to Africa for the winter there. 

Shopping at Lidl

 Lidl supermarket, an international chain, has been in Larnaka for ten years this month. When we first visited, lured by some enticing advertising, we weren't all that impressed. By that stage we had got into the habit of doing one major grocery shop per month, at Metro, and in between times I would pop to the local discount shop, or the fruit shop. And it was clear that while Lidl had some products at excellent prices, the range was too limited for our regular needs.

However, in the past ten years we've been there quite a few times. Their advertising brochures arrive most weeks on Saturday, and while I throw most junk mail straight into the paper recycling, we usually browse the Lidl one. Richard has bought some inexpensive and reasonable quality tools there, and we've bought a few appliances, too, when they're on offer.  

We like their coffee beans, although we haven't been able to find any for some months now. And there's the biggest problem: we understand that the 'special offer' products, often connected with a specific country or culture, are only available for a short period. But they also have regular products, which are sometimes there, sometimes not. They always have some basics - sugar, white flour, toilet paper etc - but there's no guarantee of any particular brand, nor of some products. 

This week's catalogue showed some silicon muffin pans, something I'd been thinking about for a while. I have plenty of small cake tins, but sometimes I want to make bigger cakes, the ones generally referred to as muffins (or American muffins, as the muffins I grew up with, known as 'English muffins' in America, are rather different). These muffins pans weren't going to be available until Thursday, so we knew from previous experience that we needed to go first thing on Thursday to have any chance of buying any.

Of course 'first thing' is actually mid-morning now, since we're under 65 and in good health, so we can't go to shops before 10am.  But shortly after that hour, we headed to Lidl, armed with a short shopping list of things we would be running out of in the next few weeks, and which we have previously bought there. 

I was pleased to find that there were still plenty of muffin pans, albeit at the bottom of a box with various other silicon cookware. We pondered buying four, but decided that two would be sufficient; it's not as if I make muffins all that often. I just like to have the option. 

I didn't hold out much hope of coffee beans, which is just as well as there weren't any. On the other hand, there was a good amount of a Columbian ground coffee that we tried a while ago, and which I liked very much. We can't find Fair Trade ground coffee here, but at least it has the symbol for Rainforest Alliance.  We bought three packets, which should keep us going for a while: 

I didn't hold out much hope of finding my current favourite peanut butter, as there wasn't any last time we were at Lidl, but I was pleased to find that they had it in again. It was even on special offer, reduced by quite an amount. So I picked up two jars:

Chocolate - thankfully the basic dark chocolate is usually excellent value, and is the one I use for cooking. It's dairy-free and UTZ certified, so we're happy to buy that regularly. Perhaps six bars was a tad extreme, but I doubt if we'll go to Lidl again before the New Year. 

The only pasta we generally buy is wholewheat spaghetti, and that's something Lidl usually has in;  one 500g pack lasts us around five months as we're not great pasta eaters. Lidl is also also a good place to buy dried chickpeas, which are useful for many things. Both products were on my list, and I was pleased that I managed to find them both, even though the store shelves regularly change, presumably to encourage people to look around the entire shop in the hope of finding what they want.

We also bought some battered cod and some salmon, but I put those straight in the freezer when we got home, so didn't take photos. But I couldn't find any mayonnaise; for several months Lidl stocked our favourite brand, but I couldn't find any this time.  Nor could I find raspberry jam, something I dislike having to buy, but since we can't get raspberries here, I can't make it.  

The other thing we bought was a pack of sharp knives. I managed to break the tip off my favourite sharp knife just over a week ago, so when I saw that there were some knives on special offer at Lidl this week, I thought we might look at them. I hadn't realised that they would be in a set of four, but at €6.99 for four, we thought them well worth getting. Ernesto seems to be a reasonable brand, and they're guaranteed for three years. 

The other thing we bought was a small poinsettia plant. We like to have one each year, coming up to Christmas; our living room table by the window seems to be an ideal place for poinsettias, and they last, usually, at least until Easter. November is a bit early, but we know from experience that they can be harder to find, higher priced and less attractive looking if we wait until December. 

So, once again our visit to Lidl was something of a mixed experience. A couple of very useful non-food purchases, a few random food items that were good value... but we'll still need to go to Metro next week for groceries that we can't buy at Lidl. 

I know some people boycott Lidl; their policies for workers aren't great, and they don't score well on many of the ethical categories. However, we try to buy products with some kind of ethical labelling, and don't usually go there more than five or six times per year. 

Larnaka Salt Lake

Having known about the Larnaka Salt Lake for twenty-three years, now, and walked along part of it probably 100 times or more each year since 2013, I tend to forget that it's quite unusual. Lakes, after all, generally have fresh water. I know there's a famous Salt Lake City in the American state of Utah, but it's only since knowing about our local salt lakes that I realised there was an actual salty lake there.

We've had two heavy rainstorms so far this month.  The first one didn't appear to make any difference to the level of water in the local Salt Lake, but after the second major rain, it did look as if it were rather fuller. 

Those white bits near the water's edge are patches of salt.  Today, we walked a bit closer to have a look, as yesterday's warmth and sunshine had evaporated some of the 'new' water, leaving quite a bit of salt exposed: 

Here's what it looks like rather closer: 

And here's an even closer view of one bit:

It looks very dirty.  According to various sources, salt was harvested each year up to 1986 - I hope they cleaned it and re-evaporated it before marketing it. But since 1986 it hasn't been legal to use or sell the salt, which is probably just as well. 

Another wide view although the white salt looks rather pink in this photo:

That's possibly because the sun was properly rising at this stage: 

We walked a little way back along the sand, but it was quite boggy in places, so we pushed our way through the shrubbery to the trail. And we think we saw a few flamingoes.  This photo doesn't show them at all:

But in this one, where I used the camera's digital zoom, I could just about make out a little line of pink, right in the middle.  It's hard to spot on this smaller version, but if you click the photo to enlarge it, you might see it too. 

As the level of the lake increases, there should be more flamingoes arriving. Possibly as soon as next week, as there's a lot more rain predicted for this weekend. The flamingoes come either from Africa or from the Middle East, or possibly from both general locations, and it always amazes us how they seem to know instinctively when there's enough water to come back, whether it's late September or, like this year, mid-November.