TO SOME people journalism is a sort of religion,’ said John Rigos, the dignified, soft-spoken chief of the UPI bureau in Greece and Vice-President of the Foreign Press Association. ‘There are some highly talented and dedicated journalists working here.’
I HAVE often wondered what I would do if a flying saucer from outer space landed near me and I came face to face with little green men with antennae growing out of their heads.
READERS will remember that last October I reported on the crisis that nearly caused a war between the Freaks and the Jerks when the Jerks sent out a marine monster known as the Beatnik to search for treasure in Freak waters.
LEAFING through our first issue to see what was happening back in April, 1974, we saw that continuous shop hours had just made their first, hesitant debut.
AS WE are walking along the road below Lykavittos in Athens, two women with baskets approach us. In the baskets they have toy chickens, made of rough cotton wool. ‘Thelis poulaki?’ they ask — ‘Do you want a little bird?’ Then they burst into giggles that sound like faulty plumbing — ‘poulaki’is a synonym for ‘penis’.
Driving north on the National Road, at the thirty-ninth kilometres, the village of Avlona can be seen nestling on a hill to the west, it is a familiar sight to those driving to Delphi or points north, but few stop to visit it, or are aware of its unique museum.
RETURNING to England after two years in Greece was a return to language and to rain. The soft English language is natural to a rainy country; the gifts of moistness, scents rising from the ground after a rain shower, the vegetating clouds of a rainy sky, are to be found abroad in the soft, moist vowels of English people.
LAST MONTH I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Hieronymus van Tooting, a senior official of the World Wildlife Fund.
THERE are few men who remain calm in the face of the advancing forces of women’s liberation. The movements throw terror into the hearts of the timid, undermine the convictions of progressive-minded individuals and set outright chauvinists to gnashing their teeth.
“ALL OF us in Anafiotika live for many years,” said Kyrios Mytilineos. “I remember my grandfather shovelling our doorstep one dawn after a heavy snowfall in old Athens. He was then over a hundred years old.”
