Tuesday, December 29/2009

Christmas season wine and liquor sales still on, so while I go to the internet J walks over to Orphanides supermarket to stock up on our favourite of the local vins tres ordinaires, the ones that come in litre boxes - unexciting but perfectly drinkable, and, at the moment, going for 1.39 EU a litre (2.10 CAD or 1.54 GBP). We travel now with "the sticks" - small pieces of wooden dowling that enable one to hang the plastic grocery bags from them, thus grasping the dowels like handles instead of having the bags cut into one's fingers. A handy trick we learned a few years ago from Jim McGill.

We're reading Ingenious Pain, an astonishingly good first novel by Andrew Miller, set in the mid-18th century in England and Europe - rich enough it can only be read in moderate sized chunks. The reviewers have scarcely been able to find enough superlatives - "A true rarity: a debut novel which is original, memorable, engrossing and subtle" (the Guardian).

the evening news in English opens with a story about a Limassol taverna owner being killed by a car bomb. The interesting thing is that I do not immediately reach for my notebook. Car bomb killings, while not exactly common, are not unusual enough to excite much interest either. They are always related to underworld rivalries or - less frequently - family feuds - in other words nothing that would ever, except by the worst of bad luck, have affected a Cypriot family or foreign tourist innocently going about their business. All the same, it is an interesting cultural commentary. A car bomb is the essence of premeditated crime and doesn't seem to fall in the unthinkable category here. When did we last hear of one in Canada, or even in London?