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...........

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............