Big Rollers, Who knew?

A week ago I was visiting relatives in Manchester, and they very kindly took me on a day trip to Liverpool. The last time I had been there was fifty years ago, when I was a sulky teenager on a family car trip to Blackpool.

It was one of our last holidays all together, and we were at that awkward age when we felt far too grown up to still be travelling with our parents. I remember deliberately walking a good distance behind them, as though that might somehow disguise the fact that I belonged to them. Then I noticed that even further back, my two older brothers were doing exactly the same—each of us pretending we were not with the others at all.

Now, having lost both my parents, the memory makes me wince. I could almost cry at the selfishness of it. At that age I truly believed myself to be the centre of the universe, and the constant battle with facial spots felt like a tragedy beyond endurance. As someone once put it so well: “Youth is wasted on the young—because they are too busy thinking of themselves to notice it.”

Returning now as a pensioner, I found Liverpool vibrant, energetic, and full of life. The crowded streets, the noise, the sheer abundance of things to see and absorb—it was all quietly exhilarating.

One thing, in particular, caught my eye: the curious and wonderfully unapologetic habit of women wearing large hair rollers in public. From restaurants to buses, from shops to the airport—you could see them everywhere. I had no idea this was even a thing.

What struck me most was the confidence of it. In many places, people—especially women—feel an unspoken pressure to appear “finished” before stepping outside. Here, that expectation seemed to be gently mocked. The rollers were worn openly, almost cheerfully, as part of the process rather than something to be hidden.

I later learned that this is part practicality, part tradition, and part identity. The rollers are setting the hair in readiness for the evening ahead producing a big hair look for a night out—while they tackle daily tasks as usual. But more than that, it feels like a small, defiant celebration of self: a distinctly local style, worn with humour and pride.

And perhaps that was what I enjoyed most—the sense of ease in it. A kind of confidence that I suspect my younger self, so busy worrying about appearances, would never have understood.

Rhodes Memories, from decades ago

No Arms

Six year old Daniel had a bad dream last night and came in to check if I still had both my arms. In his dream I had lost one, and he was very anxious to make sure they were both still there!

A few weeks ago in the market there was a man begging for money. He had only one arm and a terrible hole in his head with awful scarring. That must have been where Daniel’s dream came from.

Braless

We went down to the beach and had a swim. Nason’s ball drifted out to sea, blown along by the wind. I stopped him from going after it and quickly changed into my bathing suit and swam out myself.

My stroke has improved and I’m becoming quite a fast swimmer. However, after about five minutes I realised there was no chance I would catch the ball, so I let it go. Within minutes it had drifted far out to sea.

When I swam back to shore I realised that, in my hurry to get in the water, I had forgotten to take off my bra. Not only that, but I had somehow put the bottom of my bikini on with the leg hole around my waist! I had to laugh at the sight I must have made.

Puppet Show

At a summer school Lewis performed in a puppet show and was very good. At the very end, however, a bigger boy—about fourteen—snatched his puppet monkey away and finished the performance himself, completely spoiling Lewis’s final moment. Lewis was very upset and burst into tears.

I was furious and asked the children’s teacher for the boy’s name. She was a very sweet, polite seventy-year-old English lady and at first said she didn’t know for sure.

“Bollocks,” I said.

She got the message and admitted that she did know the boy and would speak to him.

The next morning she came to tell me there had been a misunderstanding and that the boy hadn’t meant to snatch the monkey or take over the ending.

“Bollocks,” I said again—this time a little louder. A very useful word bollocks!

After an awkward silence she tentatively suggested that perhaps I might like to speak to the boy myself. That was exactly what I wanted.

At break time she brought him to me: a tall, gangly fourteen-year-old wearing a peaked cap, smirking as if he couldn’t care less what anyone thought.

I explained that sometimes we do things that cause offence to others, and it is important that we understand the consequences of our actions.

“For instance,” I said, “if I knocked your hat off—”

At that point I gave his cap a sharp smack and sent it flying off his head.

“You might find that offensive,” I continued, “and if you did, I hope you or someone else would tell me.”

The smug expression disappeared from his face and he backed up against the wall. By the end of our conversation I think he took the matter a little more seriously.

Sometimes you need a little shock to get someone’s attention.

To be honest, I was so angry that if he had kept up his ‘couldn’t-care-less’ attitude I was within inches of head-butting him. Perhaps children sense these things.

What happens if we die?

A couple of days ago Daniel asked me again what would happen if Vessal and I both died. I reassured him that his Granny and Granda from Northern Ireland would fly out and take him back to Portrush to live with them.

He looked much happier and, when he remembered how close he would be to all his cousins, he positively beamed his happiness.

Then, he added apologetically, “But I shall miss you!”

I had to laugh—the rascal.

Tenderness

It may seem crazy to some people what we are doing here on this Greek island, but I wouldn’t exchange my life for anyone else’s.

Since we came here, when I pray I sometimes feel an indescribable tenderness welling up inside me that brings tears to my eyes and makes me feel very close to God. It was never like this before, and I am deeply grateful for such sweet moments.

Failing Greek Lessons

Greek class was tough. I had asked one of my Greek friends to do my homework so all I had to do was read it out.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t read her handwriting. It was dreadful. Talk about bad luck.

The teacher had been away on holiday the previous week, so I told her it was an Irish tradition for teachers who go on holiday to bring back a sweet cake for their students. I only said it in mischief—but blow me down, she brought a cake to class that evening!

It obviously pays to be bad sometimes.

Flying Persian Carpets

I spent two hours today hunting for our Persian carpet in the neighbours’ gardens. I clean the carpets with soapy water and a brush, then hang them over the balcony railings to dry. Sometimes they blow off into the gardens below.

Vessal hates this, as the local dogs immediately pee on them.

Anyway, while secretly searching the gardens for this carpet—which had been missing for days—I enlisted Nason to help. After looking around for a while he came upstairs to inform me that the carpet had been in our back corridor the entire time.

I had spent days hunting for a carpet that wasn’t missing.

I’m definitely cracking up.

Squashed insects

The other day I drove all the way to school on my scooter, taught for four hours, and returned home to find an insect squashed flat on my forehead.

My only concern was whether I had collided with it on the way to school or on the way back.

The thought that I might have taught four hours of classes with a large insect plastered across my forehead is quite amusing.

Faxs of Earthquakes, big birds, rough classes, death and big birthday parties

I have been reading old faxes I sent home from the island of Rhodes to my parents. Certain memories leap off the page. I have tried to place each one in context. Together, they feel like snapshots from our ten years there.

We experienced a 5.7 magnitude earthquake on Rhodes, and it truly shook me. I had never known anything so powerful. In the UK one feels blissfully distant from such events. However, even there, shale gas hydraulic fracturing — fracking — has triggered small earthquakes. Fluid injections into fault zones at Lancashire sites in 2011, 2018 and 2019 caused several minor seismic events, including a 2.9 magnitude tremor in 2019, which ultimately led to a moratorium on fracking in England.  To put it in perspective: a 5.7 magnitude quake produces roughly 630 times more shaking than a 2.9. No wonder I was rattled.

One of my faxes reads:

“I am eating like there’s no tomorrow. I suppose if there is another earthquake tomorrow, at least I’ll have no regrets that I didn’t have that last packet of crisps or bar of chocolate!”

Humour, even slightly hysterical humour, was clearly my coping mechanism.

An unexpected gift arrived one day.

“Our friends from the village arrived today with a gift — a live chicken in a box. We are meant to kill it, but at present this ridiculously large, healthy brown hen is on our flat’s balcony, clucking happily! What on earth shall we do with it? I think we will find it hard to do away with this beautiful bird.”

We kept her on the balcony and fed her until we could find someone with land where she could roam freely. In the meantime, I constructed elaborate, almost Fort Knox–like enclosures to protect her from the neighbourhood cats.

Years later, I confessed this to the villagers. They laughed and told me no cat would dare tackle one of their birds. Village hens roam wild and would be more than a match for any feline. Who knew?

Birthday parties provided their own cultural education.

“I took Lewis to another birthday party yesterday. This little boy was the one who once got Lewis a sandwich and, after placing it in front of him, told him not to eat it. Talk about torture — obviously a real bad egg! Lewis wasn’t keen on going but didn’t want to miss out on any goodies. I told him to make sure he ate more than the price of the present we’d bought. I meant it as a joke, but when he returned he proudly informed me he’d eaten at least 3,000 drachmas’ worth — and the present had only cost 1,000! I didn’t think he’d take me quite so seriously.”

Another memorable party took place in a vast mansion where the eight-year-old birthday boy had an enormous suite to himself. The food was exquisite, but my Greek friend Mary complained bitterly that the child’s suite was larger than her entire home.

Not all memories are light-hearted.

“One of my students — he’s nineteen — lost his father to a heart attack a year ago. But no one has told his grandmother, who lives in northern Greece. So this poor woman carries on unaware that her son is dead. They think the news would kill her. Imagine the effort required to sustain that illusion, and the strain it must place on every relationship involved. What people will do in the name of love, they would never contemplate doing to their worst enemies.”

That story stayed with me for a long time. 

Our children entered Greek primary school without a single word of the language, straight from a village school in Northern Ireland. The adjustment was difficult. One child took two years to feel truly fluent. Yet they all eventually mastered the language and were blessed with many excellent teachers and loyal friends.

Though not all teachers were quite so admirable.

“Daniel’s class was so naughty today that the teacher declared she would have nothing more to do with them! She refused to speak to or teach any of them. Daniel says Spiros, one of the cleverest boys, proceeded to teach the lesson himself, covering both language and mathematics. My friend’s son Niko was almost in tears when he left, as the teacher had been so very angry. But Daniel reported that Spiros had done an excellent job — and assigned far less homework than the teacher would have. Certainly not the worrier our Daniel!”

Looking back, these faxes capture the texture of those years: fear and resilience, generosity and misunderstanding, humour and cultural surprises. They are small windows into a decade that shaped us all.