Saturday, February 11/2023

Grocery shopping translated into pots of spaghetti sauce and lentil soup. Big fridge after months of bar size, although in point of fact the kitchen is cool enough to serve as a cold room cum pantry of old. Grapefruit season over but lemons, avocados, mandarin oranges, blood oranges flourishing. Cypriots, like Greeks, seem to put lemons in almost everything, and our house comes with its own abundantly laden lemon tree, so can see more lemon curd in the future. 

And in the greater picture the death toll from the earthquakes is now over twenty-five thousand. And no one supposes that is close to the total. Yesterday a ten day old baby and his mother were rescued but temperatures are freezing, a hazard for victims and rescue workers alike. And, while the earthquake could not have been prevented, it was expected. No one could have said precisely when or where, but Turkey has two major fault lines. It’s earthquake territory. Thus after the 1999 quake a special tax was levied in order to prepare - to improve construction standards and rescue equipment. People paid the tax for over twenty years in order to find that the money [about €4.4 billion] has disappeared, and not into improving building construction: 

‘ "The maximum intensity for this earthquake was violent but not necessarily enough to bring well constructed buildings down," says Prof David Alexander, an expert in emergency planning and management at University College London"In most places the level of shaking was less than the maximum, so we can conclude out of the thousands of buildings that collapsed, almost all of them don't stand up to any reasonably expected earthquake construction code." - BBC