Fun in Paphos
HOLIDAZE – the absence of last week’s column was due in part to a much-needed break with the fam in Paphos. Heading west for the second time this summer, we decided to go the Paphian Bay Hotel. Nice place, quiet, peaceful but let down a little by the quality of evening entertainment.
There is nothing more annoying than seeing a musician stand in front of a pre-programmed keyboard pretending to play live – when in fact the machine does everything – rather badly. Never mind it’s the price we pay for automation and technology.
Paphos was nice, welcoming and still possessing that quirky element. Where else do you see those old wooden buses, painted bright yellow with ‘Fun’ written all over them! Reminds me of the vehicle my dad drove in the late 1950s – only then it wasn’t so entertaining.
OROKLINI – my first job, at the tender age of 14, was working part time in a bakali/grocers down Kingsland Road, in Dalston. It was the mid-1970s and I wanted a Saturday job to satisfy my fascination for vinyl records. Andreas Solomou, the owner, was a very wise and philosophical man, and it always amazed me that he ended up behind a counter cutting yams, selling fresh curek and weighing haloumi. Anyway, Andreas always told me about his village. Then known as Voroklini. I think the ‘V’ was dropped in the first Clerides term when Lachia became Latsia and Hirokitia ended up sounding like some rare skin disease.
Andreas and wife, Christina, are now retired in Oroklini and I recently visited him for a coffee. As speculative as ever, he told me a few stats on his village. Just five years ago the village had 2,500 residents. It now has 7,500 due to the building and land sale boom there. In what other village in Cyprus are people permitted to build five-storey blocks on hillsides – which were once home to shepherds and their flocks?
I also heard another tale of a villager some decades ago, with a large family, exchanging a piece of barren uninhabited coast line for one pig. Back then a pig meant a lot to a big family. Today the same piece of land is worth 1m Cyprus Pounds!!!
STILL SMELL A RAT – and it must be said it is a big one. While everyone scuppers around seeking scapegoats and excuses for the tragic Helios 737 plane crash, the question still remains, why don’t the company and all the politicians, ministers and governments involved tell us the truth. Shareholders and people with conflicts of interests, are all trying to wash their hands of it. Even the church had shares in Helios it appears. The facts still remain covered up and it is regrettable on the part of both the Greek and Cypriot governments that the real story has not been told as yet.
CLOUD CUCKOO LAND – every year, just like the flamingoes, Greek Cypriots from all corners of the far flung planet known as earth gather in hotels and speak on topics of overseas Cypriots. Correction, every year for many decades, most of the time at these very elitist gatherings very little knowledge has been shared on the plight and condition of overseas Cypriot communities.
Instead what we have had is lots of talk on the unsolvable (if only we tried a little harder) Cyprus ‘problem’. This year we are informed the tide is turning. Post referendum, it’s almost like some people feel history began again on April 24th 2004, leaders and governments around the around the world are ‘seeing the light’ and agreeing with our own government on the matter.
Amazing then that PM Tony Blair’s current policy on Cyprus is more or less an endorsement of Turkey’s leading nowhere policy of non-recognition of Cyprus. It’s nice living in cloud cuckoo land, we can all pat each other on the back and say how wonderful it is in our own little comfortable ethnic world.
AND ON A SIMILAR NOTE, the government informs us of its new ‘diafotisi (enlightenment)’ campaign around Europe. Seems like Europe is finally realising what a visionary President Papadopoulos actually is. In actuality, millions more will be spent on trying to convince people that we are the only right people on the planet and every on else is totally wrong.
‘There is hope’, a voice from the not too distant future beckons, the problem, unsolvable as it seems now, will be dealt with in 2011. That’s when Cyprus will join the EU big league by holding the EU presidency. Of course this may mean another, one or even two more terms of our beloved President/Ethnarch, and by then our multi-party sham of a system (after all every one of them is on the take, every one has a conflict of interest) will resemble an overdeveloped Goebbelian nightmare with one leader leading one nation full of golf courses and empty 5 star hotels. Zeig Heil!
