Adventures In Cheese

There is a subtle aroma of Pastitsio around my desk. As I was pulling it out of my bag my lunch decided it wanted to be liberated from its plastic prison and leapt back into my bag, amidst the books and pens, where it wedged between an overdue biochemisty library textbook and a copy of New Scientist. It smirked at me with a mouth made out of pasta and cheese. You'll remember me, it said. For days and weeks your stuff will smell of finely baked cheese and meat dish, one of wonders of Greek cookery. Then it laughed. Honest. It spoke and everything. It's the sauce, apparently. I ate it anyway, despite the screams.

Rain is falling outside my window, with quite a long way to go before it hits the ground. My Monday is grey and smells of cheese, oregano and minced beef.

Krissa and I went up to Providence to celebrate Greek Easter with her family over the weekend, hence the Pastitsio and the lingering taste of ouzo despite vigorous teeth brushing last night. Not that I don't like ouzo, oh no no no - I like it a lot - but the all-pervasive aniseed is a taste that wears thin after the first six hours or so.

We spent Saturday helping Krissa's parents prepare for the big meal on Sunday, and around 11pm that night Krissa, her Dad and I went to mass at a Greek Orthodox church. To put this in context, I'm a non-Greek speaking atheist, but it's always interesting to see religious ceremonies in action. A lot of the service was in English, and the symbolism and intent behind each stage of the process was pretty clear in any case. My favourite part of the service, in a purely aesthetic sense, was the shutting down of all the lights in the church so that the vaunting space was in near darkness (apart from a rector's reading lamp... and of course the glow of the beeping digital camera in the hands of the woman in the row behind us) and then in the gloom a single lit candle was brought out by the priest, and the flame was spread from there to candles held by the congregation and passed wick to wick back through the rows of people until when I looked up into what was the darkness above, the walls of the church and the iconic paintings were gently shown by a hundred flickering yellow lights.

The dinner yesterday was huge - seventeen people around a table, and many of Krissa'as family who I'd not met before. I think I need to come up with a better response to the question 'So where in England are you from?'. The international profile of the Isle of Wight isn't exactly sky high, so I fell to saying, "Well, you know the Beatles' song, 'When I'm 64'? THAT Isle of Wight. It's just off the south coast of mainland England. No, it's not one of the Channel Islands."
It's like a script.

I had a wonderful time, and then Krissa and I drove back to the city in the rain, making playlists on my iPod and drinking coffee and talking.

There is some immensely powerful cheese (I mean immensely powerful. One little cube of this had my tastebuds doing the tingly dance of death) in my fridge at home. I'm not sure how I'm going to eat it.