Made in Greece? You "feta" believe it!

The headline was Lou Duro's idea. His ideas were all over the rest of the article, too. My article. I wrote it. Lou, editor of the Crete Gazette, edited it. Charming. I could live with the headline. It resembled one of those classless strap lines the National Enquirer preys on, or indeed any British "red top". It was the story that bothered me now. The flow was all wrong. Crete's English speaking population would be critiquing the story online. For all I knew, Umar might even see it. He told me he liked the story earlier. That was in Chania. Three and a half hours later, and a couple of hours in a car between airports, and the online edition in Britain had someone else's DNA all over it. Why must editors meddle?

It was November 2005. I had just returned from Crete. Kate and I had rented a house overlooking Georgioupolis (pr: Yuri-aw-polie) a few months earlier. I liked the coastal town, and I liked the region's capital, Chania (pr: Hania), even more. Although Crete's interior has an unmistakable frontier feeling about it, Chania is really rather chic. Nestled against a 10,000 ft backdrop called the White Mountains, Chania and western Crete do not lack for much at all.

Kate liked the sun, and she wanted a permanent move away from the UK. A business opportunity seemed ripe to me, too. The plan was to spend a year building a business model in the eastern Mediterranean while cementing my UK business, so that in 12 to 24 months there would be self sustaining operations in the UK and Crete. It was a plan. The plan had to be this way, too. For one thing, there were my daughters. Even if Andrea would ever have agreed to letting the girls out of the UK, Crete did not make sense for them for anything other than school breaks. Also, Crete, or should I say Greece, was in the Euro zone: the drachma was dead, and with it cheap holidays. Greece traded with a new currency: the euro. This was good for Greece in the longer term, but it was double edged medicine. Average pay in Greece was much lower than in Europe's industrialised north. Greek land and property cost a fraction of the going rate in Britain. On the other hand, as goods and services began flowing southwards from the north to improve living standards, Greeks were feeling the pinch as the higher cost of those goods ate into static local salaries. If I was to enjoy Crete, I needed the spending power of a northerner. If I moved to Crete and burned my bridge in northern Europe, I might never have the purchasing power to buy my way back into a G7 economy.

Lou Duro, my editor, was a case in hand. Lou was a tall, dark haired, gregarious 60 year old American. He carried a few pounds more than he needed, but he had one of those builds that coped with excess weight. He tended to slick his unkempt hair back, and wore the kind of dishevelled and fashionless clothes that always leave me wondering what kind of shop they come from. He looked like a newspaper editor. Lou was blunt, but friendly with it, and he liked a story. Lou had moved to Crete some years ago from New Jersey, where he had built and run an advertising/marketing company. He was good in a kitchen, too. He had made a name for himself with a restaurant south east of Iraklion. Life was good for Lou, for a while. His good fortune ended abruptly with a motorcycle accident. It left him with a permanent and awkward limp, the legacy of a messy leg fracture and a year in an Athens hospital. Without medical insurance, Lou lost his fortune. He had to start again. He knew how advertising worked, so he launched a newspaper. It easily became Crete's largest English language paper, published once monthly in print and online. He and his business partner Yannis had plans for the newspaper. The plans were good news for both Kate and me. Lou would be around for a while, too. He would never be able to buy his way back into America. His bridge had burned. He was locked into a small corner of the Euro trade zone, and I really did not want to follow suit.

Here I was then, in North Wales with a cucumber, some tomatoes, some feta cheese, some olive oil, and assorted herbs. A greek salad. It did not taste anything like it does in Crete. The North Atlantic was venting the tail end of an American east coast hurricane across the British Isles. Kate was expatriated, and my vandalised newsflash about feta cheese was working its way around the world like a virus. Who would read it? Hopefully not Umar. Umar. What about her anyway? I asked her to marry me once. She said no. Boy, had I read that one all wrong. She was disarmingly polite about my faux pas: social skills came easily to Umar. It hardly ruined the rest of that trip about twenty years earlier on a square rigged tall ship in the Caribbean leeward isles. Maybe that in itself meant something. I wondered if she ever thought about me, or if maybe I really had got it all wrong. At three and a half hour's flying time from Manchester, that meant Crete was about 1,500 miles further away from Umar than I already was.

A free school lunch

"I am writing to advise that you continue to be eligible for free school meals and that they have been awarded for the 2008/09 school year in respect of the following....."

The letter rambled on with catch-all ambiguity, forged with mundane jobsworth mediocrity. Ken Jones, Denbighshire County Council's "Head of Revenues and Benefits", had written to me to let me know that my 16 and 11 year old daughters were welcome to free lunches for a year provided they went to school. Ken seemed to be very pleased about this because he had written to me a week earlier to tell me the very same thing. Perhaps Ken would even write to me next week after my girls had had the chance to sample their school's canteen food just to ask how it was for them. Perhaps. Ken is not a penny pincher. The letter had been laser printed in at least 600 dpi resolution. Ken's printer was fully duplexed, too, because side two of the A4 sheet of paper bilingually regurgitated a dump of contacts and appeal options. Life as a laser printer in Town Hall must be about as dull as it gets.

No matter. The girls have each been awarded £4.00 a day (about $8.00) to spend at their canteen this year, and the point of sale technology even protects their privileged status.

I say "privileged". There would have been a time when the girls would take their lunch trays to a segregated queue which would have made their newly awarded assisted status plain to caterers, students and teachers. Britain in the 21st century is more socialist than ever, though. It looks after its own. Just as well.

Ironically, the girls will be better off than most of their counterparts. Many of my friends are encumbered with bitter credit problems, and the looming ordeal of finding their kids' weekly lunch money is going to be a stark proposition as they go to bed on Sunday nights. I spoke to Sally a day or two ago. She and her husband never imagined that their household, worth £100k a year in income, could be sifting piggy banks for two "tenners" worth of assorted coins to keep 2 children fed at school for a week. Yet that is the quality of their life in 2008, and yet... yet, even if means did permit how many parents fork out £4.00 daily for their own lunch, let alone their childrens'? Having spent a few dark years trawling my pockets and drawers in hope more than expectation, I understand too well the heartbreaking exigencies of downsizing that so many of my friends are reeling from. In this economic downturn, no household is safe. Or should I say, few households are safe. Poverty has no respect for social order in 2008.

In case there is doubt about the entrenchment of social policy in Britain, here is a parting shot. My 16 year old daughter is to be rewarded for spending her next two years at school. She will be paid a State benefit of £35.00 (about $70) weekly for agreeing to continue at school. This benefit is called "EMA", or Education Maintenance Allowance. It is payable in addition to other grants like school lunches. Presumably EMA is a ploy devised by grey suited ones to discourage students leaving school at 16 to pick and choose from the wide range of attractive unemployment and social benefits available to school leavers. I am tempted to go back to school for two years myself.

The temptation is only whimsical, though. Instead, I will focus on my experiment in Palaeolithic nutrition. There will be celery and cream cheese for breakfast, shrimp salad for lunch, and grilled pork loin chops with a spicy home made guacamole for dinner. Palaeolithic? Why not? There is no carbohydrate. It is not costing me anything, and I doubt many hunter/gatherers needed plastic for their killings either: I can afford my day's nutrition from the money I would otherwise be spending on school lunches. The three day sugar withdrawal is gone, and one week into my project, I am three pounds down. The search for Umar continues.