People say that if you want to see the Greek landscape at its best, then you must come in the spring, and it’s true. Under the olive trees lie carpets of white marguerites studded with red anemones, and we can find a dozen different species of wild flowers within a few yards, though we don’t necessarily know what they’re called. Linda found bee orchids near the house, and a woman from the village, Giorgia, taught her to recognise horta, the edible greens that grow wild on the land and wild asparagus...........

It is my birthday today (59, if you really want to know) but it’s also almost exactly six months since we arrived in the empty olive groves in the baking heat, when all we had by way of amenities was a water tap wired to a tree. The house building project has gone pretty smoothly really, though I did fall off the roof in the early stages and crack a rib, which slowed me up for a week or two...................

Birthday bulletin. 8.15pm. Feb 16. Sitting at the table, writing by the light of the diminutive solar powered lamp, with my birthday present bottle of Mythos Hellenic Lager in front of me and listening to the wind outside as it roars like a train out of the mountain. Niko popped in before it got dark with his ancient Russian shotgun over his shoulder like some antique Maniot ruffian.............

The land we own is steep, the terraced side of a valley overlooking the sea. Olive trees grow on the terraces and we have about two hundred of them. We begin harvesting the olives in January and the whole process takes us some weeks, depending on the crop. Linda and I do it ourselves so it’s not quick.........

Once the olive harvest starts in December, the sleepy landscape takes on a new life: knots of people moving about on distant terraces, the raw sound of chainsaws. Beneath the trees, capacious olive nets begin to appear, like fragments of patchwork and the sound of voices carries clearly across the valley. White smoke rises from the bonfires of branches.............

The expats, the other people from England who moved here, have an interesting network. There are networks of Germans too, and a group of Dutch people we hear, and there are bound to be others. You can see why they develop, these networks. EEWApart from anything else, it’s so much easier talking in your native language..............

I thought I would write something about the wildlife in southern Greece, though perhaps I should say at the outset that I am no expert, and I have a tendency to take an anthropomorphic view and to interpret what wild creatures do as if they were really human beings in disguise. Take dung beetles. ...................

Our nearest neighbour, or at least, the person who owns the land which gives on to ours, is Nikos Abramis. He has the terraces above us on the valley side.Nikos, who is seventy, cultivates his olives - he has a thousand trees around the district - and he is also a shepherd, with a flock of fifty or sixty sheep........

Megali Mantinia stands above steep olive terraces about a kilometre from the blue bay of Messinia. The foothills of the Taygetos Mountains rise behind the village. On August afternoons it bakes, and a kind of somnolent silence hangs over the landscape. The only things that move are the ears of a donkey as it stands in the black shade of an olive tree............