My landlord, Nico, invited me round for a few beers last night. He lives in the apartment directly below the roof space on which my tiny one sits and his is substantially bigger, palatial in fact. You could fit a few of mine on his balcony alone and still have room to spare. His place is very chic, although in an understated way, with nice furniture and art on the walls. 

He’s Swiss and was an electrical engineer before retiring eight years ago and moving here, where he lived with his partner, from whom he’s now separated, and her daughter, who he now counts as family. She’s at university in Athens but they’re very close. He spoke fondly of her but was silent on her mum – perhaps it didn’t end well. He also has a daughter and son of his own who live in Switzerland, where he returns from time to time, although he doesn’t have a home there anymore.

We sat at a large table on his balcony, surrounded by elegant, well-tended plants and he’d prepared a platter of local cheese and nibbles, including organically grown olives harvested from his own trees. He presses them too and produces his own olive oil. He’d left a bottle in my kitchen with a message to let him know if it needed refilling. 

From one of those fancy double wardrobe size steel fridges in his kitchen, he invited me to choose from a huge range of locally produced beers. He’s a bit of a beer and olive connoisseur and strikes me as a man who doesn’t do things by halves. As he told me later, when he moved here he immediately went to school to learn Greek, which he now speaks fluently, as evidenced when he took a few calls.

He strikes me as a kind-hearted and thoughtful man, and we chatted for a couple of hours about everything from Greek history and culture to the quality of locally grown tomatoes. He lamented the fact that big stores like Lidl now have a presence in Kalamata which, like everywhere, draws people away from local businesses, some of which don’t survive. That’s how we got onto tomatoes. The locally grown ones, which the supermarkets don’t tend to sell are so different to the ones they do, which are a watery nothingness in comparison.

A few beers into the evening we got on to the state of the world and he told me about a book he’d read years earlier that had made a lasting impression on him and the way he lives his life. It was by an American writer who’d lived for extended periods with the Yequana people, an indigenous tribe in the upper Orinoco region of Venezuela. Apparently they were a model of contentment, living simple lives. 

He told me that villagers walk down a steep slope to fetch water from a river where they bathe and wash clothes etc. Someone, presumably an outsider, had once suggested that they could easily save themselves the hassle of going up and down the slope if they dug a small channel from another point on the river to their settlement. 

The story goes that there was consternation at the suggestion and the villagers had asked what they’d do with the time they’d saved. I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, other than that they were happy with the way things were and quite liked walking up and down the slope, or maybe they just couldn’t be arsed to dig a trench. I sort of got it in a ‘be happy with what you’ve got’ kind of way but it seemed like a bit of a watery tomatoe kind of thing to influence the way you live your life. I’m probably being unkind and there’s more to the book than that.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable evening and Nico’s offered to take me to a bar run by some friends of his up in the old town. The temperatures dropping a bit now too, although it’s still in the 30s. I can’t complain.