Why Blog when I am only moving to Crete

This is the place where I can write things down and be sure that I can find them again.

But maybe if you are reading this you might be wondering who I am.....Well I am an English guy that now lives on Crete, the largest and possibly the most beautiful Greek island.

I first visited Greece in 1969 on an 'educational' cruise on the British India ship SS Uganda with 1500 or so other schoolchildren (that's what they mean by Murder on the High Seas, I think). All of us were from Sussex, and my group of course were from the Lewes County Grammar School for Boys, which later became the Priory School Lewes and is now some awful College of some sort.

All that aside, I fell in love with Greece from the moment I first set foot on it. Not just the archaeology, but everything else about it. It was like the land had a spirit all its own..........A feeling that was reinforced still further by a visit to Delphi, where I am sure the oracle still resides if you will only let it talk to you.

I spent years promising myself that I would return, and eventually I did, on a £79 package holiday to Crete in 2001. Six months later I was back again for another week. The next visit was to be one year later which was quite deliberate because during the second visit I really did not want to go, and strangely enough, neither did my partner!

Driving back from the Gatwick airport to Brighton we were stuck in a traffic jam, and casually I said to my partner 'Why don't we move to Crete?' By 10am the following morning the house was up for sale.

There followed 12 months of frustration as we dealt with a selection of useless estate agents and what seemed like an endless stream of time-wasting non-buyers! We put the price down, we changed the agents and changed the price again, until finally we changed the agent again and put the price up and found a buyer three days later!

The plan had been to leave the UK mid 2003, and knowing that we now had a buyer we decided on the 1st February 2004 as our departure date.

We were lucky enough to be able to stay with friends for 4 months before we left, surprisingly they are still friends, and as we didn't pay any rent, we agreed that they had about 8 months of free accommodation with us on Crete!

More to come soon, these old eyes are tired of sitting in front of the pc for many hours already today!