It is no good embracing our itinerant way of life if you are the reclusive type. Your job is other people and your house is their house. But there is a spectrum. Get yourself sent to Mongolia and I’ll wager your job will only be the other people you get in Mongolia. You’ll be kissing goodbye to family and friends for the duration. They would have to think a lot of you to haul themselves all the way to Beijing and then trek over the Steppes of Central Asia on a camel or what ever it is you have to do to get yourself to Ulan-Bator. But Cyprus? At first you think it’s the dream posting. A job with content on an island with ancient history, mountain scenery, sun, sand and sea….! But soon you realise that all your nearest and dearest, and your not-so-near and definitely not-so-dear, see it exactly the same way and are collecting up travel brochures before you have even called in the packers.
At first it was great fun because we had not ourselves seen, say, St Hilarion, more than about half a dozen times, and so we were still at the stage where we were happy to take his mum or my brother or the friend of a friend from Camden Town or even the bloody secretary of state up all the way up to the very top without wanting to push them off. We thought nothing, the first few times, of whizzing down to Paphos to pore over the delightful mosaics and the tombs and the Baths of Aphrodite, snakes and all, with whoever it was whose whole life had been building up to that moment. Their pleasure was our pleasure and all the more so for the fact that we very often ran into the Andersons, or the Davises, or other friends also wearing their tour guide smiles.
A few years later we have come to regard the impending visits of guests with modified rapture. You see, if you are the visitor here you have just the one experience. If you are the visitee that’s half a dozen times, in possibly quite quick succession, that you ingest far too many calories in restaurants, absorb far too many burning rays of sun and almost certainly imbibe far too many units of alcohol………
And you stay the same (apart from getting fatter, burnter and drunker) but the guests vary. You have the kind who let you lead your life, treat you like a hotel, borrow your car and only turn up for a quick breakfast progress report every third day. (9/10) Then there are the ones who are so utterly dependent that all normal life is suspended as you drive them miles over Cyprus scrutinising every archaeological site and thanking God the Crusaders only built three castles. (2/10) Then there are the kind who despite being complete intellectual heavyweights with Nobel prizes etc elect to leave their brains at home for the week and take up residence on the nearest sun-bed, refusing even to look at you until their skin has turned from Naples yellow to burnt umber and preferring to take your word for it about the beauties of Kantara or Kakopetria. (5/10)
I must say we are having fun with the ones we have got at the moment, Richard and Katharine.(10/10.) I am not saying we are jaded but when you have guests who leave you feeling they have been the ones showing you the island it is something to cherish. Richard has brought Marc with him and Marc has been a great bloke to have around when it comes to shedding bits of light on the place. Especially Famagusta. I have been there before, but I never realised that this strange, once beautiful place – its old walled city eerily dilapidated and the surreal “new” one of Varosha, wrapped in the barbed wire and suffocating vegetation of its 1974 time-freeze — was, at the end of the 13th century, and thanks to a lucky combination of actions taken by the Saracens and the Pope, briefly the richest city in the world.
Go on… stand within the walls of Famagusta now and try to imagine it as the Richest City in the World. A place where the well-heeled ostentatiously ground diamonds at their banquets to season their food, and thought nothing of sprinkling rubies as table decorations. A place where the daughters of merchants out-bejewelled French monarchs at their weddings. A place where prostitutes were as wealthy as their clients. Aha! Maybe this is what Shakespeare was writing about when he referred to the “unhatched practice made demonstrable here in Cyprus” that “hath puddled his clear spirit”. Anyway as we looked towards the steps of the Cathedral it was Richard and Marc who helped us to imagine St Bridget of Sweden standing there berating the Famagustians for their immorality– yes, and just as easy to imagine them all laughing into their beards as soon as her back was turned.
I wonder if you know our Marc, by the way? Marc Dubin? He wrote the Rough Guide to Cyprus and really, he has a golden pen. And he fits neatly into a bag. Richard always brings someone like him along. I remember Paul with great affection (Northern Italy; Blue Guide) and Kristiane was great company (Belgium; Explorer Guides) We would say to each other things like “Hey, Kristiane says the Shrine of St Elefterius merits a detour…”
Well…Happy Sunday. And as you read this we will be relaxing in an idyllic-sounding place near Episkopi that Marc recommended …
