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.
My other NBF is a wild and hairy looking man who speaks less English than I speak Greek. I was ordered to cold shoulder him a couple of years ago when he hooked up with a rather glamorous Belgian divorcee. She seems to have disappeared, and he is now back among us. He drinks vast amounts and, without the Belgian who demanded huge wages for his services, he is happy for me to drive him up to my house and strim the snake fields for a fair wage.
This evening the wild looking man wandered in and handed over 20 Euro. I appear to have overpaid him last time and, rather honestly, he handed my cash back. We sat for a few minutes not communicating in our respective languages. He tried to tell me something about how he lived on a diet of bread, oil, cigarettes and alcohol but maybe something was lost in translation. He flourished a 1 litre bottle of oil and some stale bread he had brought with him.
Then another man burst in and pretty soon started shouting at my friend and making rude gestures which I understood well. He repeatedly shouted the Greek word for wanker and at one stage grabbed the bottle of oil my NBF planned to take home. Then he started using the word “vlacha”. Eventually it all died down. My NBF bought me an ouzo and I reciprocated driving him back to his hovel half a mile outside the village.
When Paddy Leigh Fermor first walked into Kambos as he recounts in “The Mani” he also heard that word vlacha and was confused. The Vlachs live in the far north of Greece, a nomadic tribe my father wrote about, hence his friendship with Paddy. There are no vlachs around here, in the far south of Greece. But as Paddy discovered the vlachs were shepherds and such folks were oft thought stupid so vlacha means stupid.
Before I left Manos pulled me into the kitchen where two enormous pieces of lamb, infused with garlic and thyme, were being prepared by his Mrs and a rather glamorous young lady, his god-daughter, he now employs. She had polished herself up for Easter and the great celebration is today. I thought of offering some observations about sheep in Wales where Manos knows I live but thought better with a young lady present and arranged to see them all at lunchtime for the festive meal.