What are the best friends on a rainy afternoon? A good book. A cup of tea. A plate with home made cookies. A cat cuddled in your lap. Or a dog softly resting his paw on your knee. Little things in life that add together to create the perfect scenery on a grey autumn day. A good book can help you escape the rain-blues especially when it talks of Greek islands soaked in the sun, of fragrant herbs and pine trees, of warmhearted people and whitewashed houses, of golden honey and diligent bees. Especially when the book takes you far, far away…
I chose the book “Falling in Honey: Life and Love on a Greek Island“ written by Jennifer Barclay to introduce KTG’s new category “Books”. Enjoy!
Prologue
There’s a bee on my arm. I’ve gotten used to having bees around, hovering in the flowers and basil bushes, sometimes coming for a curious look in my kitchen when I’m working with the doors open. I can’t see or hear my nearest neighbors in this valley, but I like to think of it as a buzzing place…
Inside the honey factory, Pavlos removes the wooden frames from the hives. “I’m just the worker!” he says, but without the worker bees, there’d be no honey. The frames are like hanging folders in a filing cabinet, and each holds an uneven slab of honeycomb. The best ones are almost covered in sealed wax cells. Pavlos takes a heated knife and skims off the outer edge of wax, releasing the clear golden liquid. It gleams as it pours off thickly. “Here, taste,” he says, and hands me pieces of oozing soft honeycomb.
It amazes me that it’s ready to eat straight out of the hive, this perfect food full of goodness—it needs nothing from us. What we’re doing here is just releasing and gathering it, cleaning it and putting it in jars. The actual making of honey has all been done by the bees. As Pooh Bear said to the bee: the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.
The smell of warm honey is intoxicating. It’s thirty plus degrees outside and the hives were standing out there not long ago, the bees happily coming and going, blissfully unaware. When there are flowers in the fields, the bees can fill up a honeycomb in as little as a week.
“Here, take some more,” says Pavlos, scooping up spoonfuls of honeycomb onto a plate. My hands are getting sticky.
“This honey is made from herbs, votana, flowers that are healthy for your body, and thyme. We don’t use any chemicals.”
Tilos has always been famous for its herbs that grow wild everywhere, and its mountainsides are mostly empty except for tiny chapels, goats, and beehives. Pavlos and his family grow a lot of food and are passionate about never using chemical pesticides or fertilizers in their gardens and fields: it’s not only bad for you, but for the birds and the bees as well.
As each frame is opened up, it is slid into a compartment in the centrifuge, which will extract all the honey. When all the compartments are full, the machine is closed and starts spinning.
It circles to the left for a few minutes, to the right for a few minutes, slowly at first to protect the delicate honeycomb from breaking as it empties. If you were on one of those fairground rides that spin you round, you’d be saying: that wasn’t too bad, was it? Then it starts to the left again but fast this time, causing the honey to start pouring, thick and caramel-colored, into the vat. And then it stops and spins fast to the right, at which point if you were on the fairground ride you’d be thinking this was a bad idea.
But it’s only a bee or two that was on the ride, having been asleep perhaps in one of the honeycombs, and now they’ve fallen in the honey and are perhaps thinking, “But what a way to go…”
Short excerpt Chapter One
“I am looking for a Greek island.
If I were going on my own, maybe I’d just take a backpack and trust to serendipity. I’ve fallen in love with so many islands over the years just by hopping on the next ferry: islands that smelled of herbs and pine trees, whose villages had whitewashed alleys overhung with magenta bougainvillea, stalked by cats and chickens. Islands where pigs roamed on the wild beaches and cows wandered through the ruins of ancient hilltop castles; where people gathered in the village square at least once a day to gossip and play backgammon; where the hills were filled with olive trees and thyme and dropped away to a deep sparkling blue.
Once, island-hopping with another traveler, we’d arrived on the night of a big local festival. All the rooms were booked up, but sometimes you could sleep on someone’s rooftop. It had been too late to ask permission, and I was slightly nervous the next morning when I heard a window opening by our heads, expecting a sharp telling off. Instead, we got an amused “Kalimera! ” or good morning, and a coffee and biscuits.
Later, we found a room to rent at the back of someone’s house; our landlady, Eleni, gave us plates heaped with ripe fresh fruit from her garden every day. In the mornings I had a coffee and homemade biscuits on the balcony with her, and one day we went to help the family with the grape harvest. We followed stony tracks all over the island, accompanied by the sound of birds and crickets, but mostly to the empty beach where Eleni’s mother used to go when she was courting. As the sun was going down, we sometimes stopped at a farm where a jolly man would fill up our water bottle with slightly fizzy homemade wine that we sipped on the way back to the pretty port, and we sat on the quayside watching brightly painted fishing boats bobbing in deep blue water, their nets laid out to dry.
The spontaneous hospitality, the color, the traditional, rural island life, the shimmering blue sea, the sheer, sunny beauty of it all—that’s what I’m looking for again.”
From: Falling in Honey: Life and Love on a Greek Island or How a Tiny Greek Island Stole My Heart (Summersdale UK, March 2013; Audible audio download; Sourcebooks US, March 2014)
Buy the book on Amazon.co.uk by clicking here
See what others have said about the book here:
About the author
Jennifer Barclay grew up in a village in the north of England. She blames her family for getting her hooked on travels in sunny places, a school teacher for helping her fall in love with Greek language and culture, and a newspaper ad for luring her to adventures in Greece after university. She now calls the Greek island of Tilos home and works as an editor and writer. She has also published “Meeting Mr Kim: Or How I Went to Korea and Learned to Love Kimchi”, written for various magazines, and blogs about life in Greece.
Meet Jennifer Barclay at her two blogs www.jennifer-barclay.
A wonderful read. A winner of a book.
glad you like it. thanks.