I have lost none of my old friends in Kambos but have two new best friends. There is Manos who runs the ouzeria who has helped me change a car wheel in the pouring rain, tried to fix my strimmer and is always there when help is needed. Whatever I order, and it always centres on a healthy cabbage and carrot salad and a couple of sticks of diced pork, the bill is always 10 Euro. However I juggle coffees or an ouzo for me or someone else, the bill is always the same. With a breakfast of oats and milk I really could live here for twenty quid a day.
I just spotted a large lizard sitting on the steps up to the Greek Hovel. I think that is unwise since olive harvester T’s best pal Doggy is a frequent visitor these days and would have it for breakfast. The spring is bringing everything out and so I am hoarding snake repellent canistors and starting to put them up around the house. But there are less threatening species out there.
All around there are signs of life after a long, cold winter here in Greece. It is 19 degrees here and the snow on the mountain tops is clearly melting before my eyes. Hence the dry river which one must cross to get up the Greek Hovel is now, as you can see below, a babbling brook. Little streams are appearing from nowhere keeping the roads wet although the puddles on the mud track are shrinking with every day. Everything is green with flowers of many colours springing to life. Sadly they are not the only things springing to life.
It is T shirt weather today at the Greek Hovel but my late Uncle Christoper Booker would have been delighted were he to gaze up to the high Taygetos mountains above us. Chris loved the Mani.
During my Greek break, Joshua has careful instructions abiout watering the ooodles of plants we planted as seeds in pots just before I left. Three types of Chillies, some marrows and two types of tomato are, I hope, starting to grow in my relatively warm office building. With a following wind they will move out, first under cloches, in May and then into already prepared beds up near the fruit bushes in early June. Next up, on my return, potatoes which are now chitting, beetroot and radishes.
It is that time of year again. As you can see below the weeds have been cleared from around the fruit bushes and the three raised beds of strawberries have also been weeded out. I have expanded the fruit bush empire with the purchase of four swamp blueberry bushes. Joshua loves making blueberry muffins and thinks I should make blueberry ice cream but historically our blieberry harvest has been dure. Here’s hoping that the new variety delivers.
In my day job when I expose a stockmarket fraud and I have exposed hundreds of them with the first such takedown in 1992, some folks say well done and some even thank me for warning them and so saving them money. But there are always some who bat for the fraudsters and insist that it is my hurty words that have taken down a “Great British Company” or Neil Woodford . Some folks even go the extent of hiring paid goons to threaten, menace and harass me to shut me up, as I showed here the other day. There are similarities with my work exposing historic sexual and physical abuse at my alma mater, Warwick School.
The kids were messing around and ended up being late for school this morning. As they dithered and procrastinated knowing that there will be no sanction at all for being late for anything I tried to recount the punishment at Warwick School when I was a boy. Not the sadistic abuse but the official punishments: am I misremembering?
The three most important folks living in the first village over the river Dee in England, well important to me, are my in-laws and Phil Parkinson the manager of Wrexham and the EFL Championship Manager of the Month. Three promotions in 3 seasons, possibly on track for a first ever four in four, an FA Cup run not seen since 1997, folks here think Parky does not need a bridge to get into Wales, he can walk on water.
Coulter’s law states that the longer it takes the mainstream media to report the identity of the perpetrator if a mass shooting the less likely it is that the perp will be a white male. As we consider the killing of eight and wounding of twenty five in Tumbler Ridge Canada that law needs to be adapted.
Israeli athletes are booed and harassed at the Winter Olympics, anti semitism is rampant across the West, it is now deemed legal un the UK to chant Death to the IDF or to break a Policewoman’s spine for Palestine and this is almost entirely due to the idea that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Tume and again myself and others served up data showing this was nonsense but the BBC and the GroupThink insisted otherwise. Perhaps, today, they will listen to Hamas.
These days Private Eye just sucks liberal establishment cock with lame jokes about Donald Trump and is about as funny as dishwater. But this front cover from 2011 is superb, it is offensive and funny, what satire hould be. I do not know if my uncle, Christopher Booker, was involved in it, but it is comedy genius.
While stressing that she is a Mancunian, the Labour candidate in the forthcoming by election in Gorton & Denton in fact comes from a place in Greece which is home to one of my favourite spots on earth, the bridge at Arta which contains the remains of the daughter of the man who built it.
There are two types of teachers I have exposed from Warwick School. I started 14 years ago with sadistic bastards like Geoffrey Eve who inflicted physical abuse on we boys, including me. Then I moved onto the paedophile teachers of whom six have so far been identified. Today I name a 7th who has already been convicted.
One of the worst elements of the Warwick School paedophile scandal concerns music teacher Charles Watmough. Not only was the school informed about what he was up to but the Police received a complaint in 2018, interviewed him under caution and then did not take the case forward. At the weekend I published details of a sixth victim HERE but in the wake of the trial of Paul Stainsby and Warwick’s partial ‘fess up to historic sexual abuse HERE the floodgates are bursting. Another OW has been in touch.
