Thursday, November 17/2016

Meze dinner with Jane and Bill and Aylsa and Harry. Traditional Cypriot meal, though not one we have every year. Seems like infinite number of dishes - in reality about twenty - and highly carnivore. Begins with salad. Then sausage, chicken, pork, liver, kidneys, meat patties, grilled halloumi cheese, scrambled egg with spinach, mushrooms, tzatziki, humus, tahinni, chips, olives, macaroni, warm pita bread and more - not particularly in that order, and usually with three or four dishes on the table at any given time. Always with pita and the dips, which get replaced if they're finished. As well as beer and wine. We take small amounts of each but it's still hard not to be stuffed. The point is, of course, more the friends than the meal, but in typically Cypriot style it's incredibly noisy. Assume that Cypriots can't all have bionic hearing so they must - and indeed obviously do - depend on speaking at top volume. We all too Anglo (well, ok, in J's case Polish) to do this and conversation pretty well limited to the two closest people, and even then including the bits where one hopes that the smile and nod has not been in response to an announcement of a terminal diagnosis. Actually, Aylsa's younger sister has died since we last saw them - expected but sad. 

I'm not close enough to Harry to hear much of anything, though he and J talk some local politics. Part of their discussion involves Harry's account of hundreds of Cypriot villagers surrounding about two hundred British soldiers from the British base near us in a pre-dawn confrontation over the cutting down of trees near a firing range. This is an event that has made the world press, where it is dryly noted that the villagers, who claim to value the forested area, also use it to kill migratory birds and illegally trap songbirds (served, equally illicitly, as a delicacy in local restaurants). The soldiers, it is suggested, were hoping to prevent this activity, as well as improving firing range safety.