This post began to write itself a few months ago after a visit to the fish counter at my local supermarket. There wasn’t any progress for months until yesterday’s crisp and sunny Monday morning. Walking to work with the latest episode ofΒ This American Life’s, my body found warmth through the sounds, memories and feelings evoked by these stories with the beach as their common denominator. It was time to go back and write on how I feel really about fish…
Category Archives: Mums
Greek mum (aka ‘Ellinida Mana’)
Our office could have served as a poster for the City of Westminster ‘Some things you only do when you’re drunk‘ campaign yesterday as several people turned up wearing the same outfits as the day before. I had (sadly) missed out on all the fun (I was spared the hangover though) so I felt the need to share my bananas and the toiletries samples that were handed out on the tube the other day to boost the morale. Β Helena had also just returned from holidays in Greece bringing lots of sweet treats for the crowd (that was originally not that enthused – chocolate does not fare well in a stomach recovering from a hangover, bananas are not ideal either).
As one of the co-workers made references to mothers and our attempts to take care of people, he asked ‘Is it a Greek thing?’ To answer to that I would have to open the big book of concepts to the big, massive chapter that is called ‘Greek mums’. A chapter as complicated as organic chemistry and as simple as the alphabet’s A-Z. If Oxford University’s All Souls College had decided to make its historic and now axed one-word entrance essay about Greek mums (yes, I realise that that is two words but in Greek it would have simply been mums; it’s English that makes it all more complicated), my essay would be somewhat like this:
