We live outside the village and our social relations are patchy. Take yesterday. In the evening we walk down the track with a bottle of wine to Herbert’s house. Six o clock and Venus is bright white over the bay. Nearby in the sky, another planet, Jupiter maybe. The fire is burning in the grate of Herbert’s tiny living room and he graciously finds us an English language news channel on his TV. He usually watches Austrian stuff, naturally...............

The other day, one of the two cats that live under the wooden house came trotting along the terrace with a Hoopoe in its mouth. Now, if you’ve never seen a Hoopoe, and they are hardly ever seen in England, it’s a pigeon sized bird with a curving bill, a long crest on its head, which it often erects on landing, and bold black and white stripes on its wings and tail; a bird such as a small child might draw, or Edward Lear...............

Now, homecoming, returning to your own place after an absence is supposed to be a rewarding experience. The first twenty minutes following our return the other day to the wooden house, after spending a few weeks in the UK, was beset by an unlikely series of incidents..................

Mani, where we live, is that middle finger of Greece pointing south toward Africa, a strange country of rocky headlands and deserted tower houses. In the past, the Maniots had a reputation as brigands and bandits, and the whole peninsula used to be known as Kakovouna, the bad mountains, or the land of evil counsel. The chief occupation of the maniot families seems to have been feud, and these feuds were not merely quarrels, but shooting wars, vendettas, which could persist through generations...................

Last week we spent an evening at Ismini’s house. Ismini is 66, a Greek colleague of Linda’s at her school and a native of Kalamata. She has been reorganising her house, moving furniture, going through old papers and books, and is in a mood to reminisce..............

One of my favourite buildings in Kalamata is the elegant colonaded pile which currently houses the Odeio the ‘musical conservatory’, as the new tourist guide rather grandly puts it. It lies in the old town, up a steep street of stone steps, below the castle, behind the big church of Ipapandi (one of several names for the Virgin) Big palm trees grow in its shady courtyard and from the high ceilinged rooms within, you can often hear piano scales, the sound of a soprano voice or the creak of a beginner’s violin.........................                  

Twenty kilometres north of Kalamata lies the town of Meligalas, a dusty rural settlement like a hundred others in Greece. The name Meligalas translates roughly as milk and honey, but in truth it’s a melancholy place. A mile outside the town stands a big concrete cross erected in the early 1970s, when Greece was being run by a military junta................

hanasis died a few weeks ago at eighty-odd. His dapper little figure was a familiar sight around the village. He was deaf as a post and amost always alone, an isolate. During the dark years of the German/Italian occupation (1941-44) and afterwards, it seems that Thanasis, who can only have been a very young man at the time, was an informer. The houses of suspected communists he had denounced, were burned. Our neighbour Niko says there were deaths, shootings..................

Funerals in Greece are very different from funerals in England. When someone dies here, little black edged flyers go up on walls and telegraph poles, giving the name of the person who has died and the time and place of the funeral. In our village it’s always the same little cemetery. I guess these little notices must go up very quickly since burial usually follows within a day or two of death.................             

One evening, a couple of weeks ago, as I am driving into Kalamata to do my weekly stint of private teaching, I take a call on my mobile phone from Dina, our neighbour Niko’s unmarried daughter. The signal is bad so I stop the car and stand on the windswept road by the sea with spray erupting a few yards off. Dina tells me, in Greek, that her mother died at lunchtime. My Greek is limited and I am not sure I have understood properly...............

I guess Christmases abroad are always going to be weird. For a start, in Greece they place a good deal less emphasis on Christmas than they do on Easter, or even New Year, though we happened to be in a big toy store in Kalamata (Jumbo) on Christmas Eve and it felt pretty much like the commodity fest we remember from the UK...................

To an English person, brought up with some notion of decent reserve, a concern not to blow one’s own trumpet, Greece can seem like a nation of experts and heroes, the men, that is. Modest, unassuming Greek men are rare creatures.................

The living room of Niko Abramis’ house in the village, or more properly, the only room, save for a tiny kitchen and a sort of lean-to at the back, is a long narrow affair. It used to be two rooms, I realise as I am putting up a new wooden ceiling to hide the underside of the ancient concrete roof, though you can still feel a difference between the two halves...............

Up in the Taygetos foothills, near the empty monastery of Agios Giorgos, where a stream bed passes under the road and ancient walnut trees grow, lives Giorgos, his wife Maria and their three hundred goats. Herbert and I drive up the hairpins in our respective trucks from the coast to collect goat shit, siegenscheisse in German, fuski in Greek. The manure from goats is widely regarded in Greece as the fertiliser of choice............

After the first September rains, new shoots begin to push up: wild crocus, cyclamen, iris. New grass hazes the terraces and Niko the shepherd lets out his sheep from the concrete pen where they have lived on hay for the summer, to graze. We get thunderstorms too, in the autumn. A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the night, we had a serious storm, several hours of torrential rain, the sky flickering daylight bright, stupendous thunder and the rain absolutely roaring on the roof of the wooden house..........

We seem to meet a lot of people here in Greece whose stories make you gulp, whose lives have been affected by events in the wider world, by history. At a birthday party in the hills above Kardamili recently, I fell into conversation with a grey haired Israeli woman, Ala. We talked about Cyprus and she told me about Palestine, where she had lived for many years in a house built by a millenarian group from Germany in the last century who had come to Palestine to await the day of judgement. Ala’s parents were Polish Jews who fled the Nazi invasion in 1941. ...........

The village of Megali Mantinia stands on the rim of the Rintomo gorge, a vast canyon cutting into the heart of the Taygetos Mountains. During the hot days of summer the balconies of the houses which hang above the gulf, catch the cooling airs....................

We live in Mani, that peninsular of southern Greece which thrusts down into the Mediterranean Sea towards Africa. Traditionally, Mani is divided into two parts: Outer Mani in the North and inner Mani, the bony tip of the peninsula. The little coastal resorts of Kardamili and Stoupa are to be found in Outer Mani. Both places attract large numbers of English holidaymakers in the summer, mostly families, and the whole coast thereabouts boasts hundreds of holiday houses and apartments..................

As I was walking through the village the other day, Niko called me over to the junk filled shaded space across from his house, where he hangs out with his cronies. They were discussing electric drills. Niko is thinking of buying a drill to which he can attach an agitator, so that Frosso, his ailing wife, can stir the big milk pan more easily when she is making cheese. The family make a lot of cheese from their sheep, for themselves and to sell. ...................

Donkeys appear often on Greek picture postcards and tourist bumf, and there are still a few actual donkeys to be seen in rural districts. Our neighbour Niko usually comes down for his routine cup of coffee on his donkey, particularly now that his chest is getting worse and he finds it harder to walk back up the long hill to the village. The donkey stands above the house munching whatever it can find and farting loudly, while Niko drinks his coffee. Until a very few years ago, he and his family used donkeys to bring out the full sacks from the terraces during the olive harvest...........