Appropriately enough, on January 6, 1978, all the lights in my house went out. Candles were lit and the religious holiday was celebrated as, I presume, the Fathers of the Greek Orthodox Church had planned it.
What those venerable gentlemen had not foreseen was the advent of electricity several centuries hence and the dependence of good Christians on that utility. Candles are fine for illumination, but what do you do for heating when you have no fireplace and your oil burner depends very much on 220 volts to function at all? With howling winds outside and temperatures hovering around freezing point the atmosphere becomes less and less conducive to divine contemplation. Indeed, it begins to verge on blasphemy when you try to ring up the Power Corporation and discover that its worthy public servants have taken all their phones off the hook and you cannot find out how long the power cut will last.
The female members of the household then point out to you that your lunch will consist of a cheese sandwich unless you can think of some means of cooking the roast leg of pork and potatoes you had been looking forward to with such relish. You start looking contemplatively at the dining room chairs and wonder how many of them you will need to chop up to make a fire on the kitchen floor of sufficient size and duration to cook the pork.
Then you remember an old gas cooker that works from a butane gas cylinder that you had bought several years ago for a summer house you had rented at Porto Rafti. Where had ypu seen it last? Then you remember. It is sitting under your work bench in the garage under a pile of empty paint tins left there by the painters who charged you a small fortune to paint your house the previous summer.
Battling 60-knot winds, you make your way to the garage and dig it out, together with a gas cylinder that does not feel as heavy as it should. You drag it and the cooker into the. house. The twittering exclamations of delight from the female members of the household quickly give way to groans of disappointment when the discovery is made that the cylinder is as devoid of gas as a gourmet who has just taken a heavy dose of Eno’s.
The shops are closed so it’s a cheese sandwich after all with a cold potato salad. For dessert? Ice cream, of course, which is firm and solid even though the refrigerator hasn’t been working for the past six hours.
After a restless night under six blankets with the wind still howling outside and bowling over trees and light standards like ninepins all around, you rise early, breakfast on cafe frappe and drive off immediately in search of a gas cylinder full of compressed and beautifully combustible butane.
Your first shock comes at the Pharos in Psyhiko where the two shopkeepers who stock gas cylinders shrug ruefully and tell you they are out of stock. Try Halandri, they say. Nothing there either. Try Vrilissia. At this northern suburb, with snow and sleet blinding your progress, you find a shopkeeper who tells you he has one full cylinder but that he is holding it in reserve for one of his customers who is suffering from a heart condition. ‘You wouldn’t want to have him on your conscience would you?’ he says. ‘Perish the thought,’ you say, and continue your search northward.
By two p.m. you have returned home, chilled to the bone and quite gasless. There you are informed by the female members of the household that there are no more candles. Now they tell you, on a Saturday afternoon when the shops are closed. At this point you open the doors of the refrigerator and the freezer and start accumulating as many ice cubes as you can.
‘What on earth arc you doing?’ the female members ask.
‘Cryogenics,’ you say. ‘Suspended animation. Lowering the body temperature to such a degree that all life functions are slowed to a minimum. It’s our only hope for survival.’
‘And how do you propose to do that?’
Ί don’t know. I’ll look it up in the encyclopaedia. You lie in bed and put ice cubes all round you and go to sleep. It’s very simple, really. And much better than sitting in the dark in the freezing cold.’
‘You are mad,’ they say.
‘Well, if you don’t want to try it, I will,’ you say determinedly.
By the fading afternoon light you pore over the chapters in the encyclopaedia that deal with this interesting subject and when you feel you have mastered the basic concepts you begin scattering the ice cubes on your bed.
You put on your best silk pyjamas #nd lie down tentatively. You are so cojld that you don’t feel the cubes at first. You cjose your eyes and dream you are stranded in an igloo with Candice Bergen.
Then you hear whoops of joy from the female members. The lights have come on again. The heating goes on. The leg of pork is popped into the oven.
Very soon you begin to feel warm. The ice cubes melt. You are still with Candice Bergen but you are holding hands now and swimming underwater somewhere in the South Seas.
When you wake up you are in the intensive care, ward of the Evangelismos Hospital suffering from double pneumonia.
So much for ‘Ta Phota’.
