Driving into Glossa this morning I spotted Mrs Drosakis tending to the shrine beside the fire hydrant so I stopped the car and waited for her to finish what she was doing before opening the car doors to offer her and her bags a lift. It must be 23 months now since she tearfully told me that her husband, Nikos had died suddenly and unexpectedly on Boxing Day. For her life goes on, old people here do not slow down until their health forces them to. She still walks out from the village carrying things in bags on a stick over her shoulder for much greater distances than many young people would ever consider walking, though she will always accept a lift. I admire her enormously.

Today she told me that she had been gathering “horta” (weeds) and she had two large bags full, both attached to her stick. Another fail in my everlasting attempt to get a candid photo of Mrs Drosakis with her bags-on-a-stick over her shoulder. One bag was for her and her sister and the other was for “the kids”. I am not sure who “the kids” are in this instance. Perhaps she and Nikos had children, but I have never seen nor heard any mention of them. Our builder calls us “the kids” yet we are older than he is so it's an interesting term of affection. Perhaps it simply means people you help out once in a while.

I digress, she had been up early, walked a couple of km, collected two large bags of carefully selected weeds and now she was heading back into the village where she would distribute the weeds, make lunch, and then later go out to pick flowers because tonight is the eve of St Nikos. I do not know whether she treks all the way down to Loutraki for the full church service there and then all the way back up the hill afterwards or if she has a personal little St Nikos shrine or if she puts flowers on her late husband's grave. She speaks at a rate of knots and I have some difficulty getting all of it, but interrupting to ask questions is not on the cards.

We spoke about the olive harvest and the pruning and collecting the timber and whether we have an open fire or a log-burner, and whether we will be here for the entire winter, and then we had reached the village and I dropped her off at Dimitri's supermarket where she needed to pick up some bits and bobs before making her way home through the twisty little streets of Glossa.

This photograph is the view from the shrine beside the fire hydrant. A lot of money has recently been spent doing this house up, I wonder if it is for AirBnB purposes. This is the house which owns the church of Agia Triada you can just see peeking through the trees to the left of the house. That is the church with this unfortunate floor, which no doubt has not had money spent on putting it right.

Completely unrelated but heaps of fun!