Axolotl

At my father's practice there used to be a whole shelf full of National Geographic magazines. Sometimes when I went there to see him I had to wait for him to finish with a patient and I used to wait in the reception room, on the sofa, flicking through the National Geographic magazines for what felt, at the time, like hours. I could not read English then, but I loved looking at the photographs of animals, places and people. I could tell the stories and information in them were extremely interesting and I tried to imagine the people, journalists and photographers, who worked for the magazine and what their lives and jobs were like. Occasionally I buy the National Geographic myself now.

The most recent issue I bought was the February 2013 one because it had a very extensive article I was eager to read on Libya. I read it but had no time to read the rest of the magazine so I left it laying around the table, hoping to get to the rest of it soon. Then Aretousa got to it first and started looking at all the photographs. I did not pay much attention, but then she started giggling and pointing again and again at a particular double spread image in the first pages of the magazine. I went to see what it was that caught her attention so much and saw a photograph of a very strange creature I had never seen before.

Axolotl  (Ambystoma Mexicanum)

The creature was a rare Mexican salamander, called an Axolotl. It had the most strange appearance and I could not but search out to find more about it. Unfortunately Axolotls are endangered because the fresh water lakes they used to inhabit in Mexico no longer exist. What is so fascinating about these creatures, is that they do not follow the normal metamorphosis stages that amphibians do. For example a frog will begin life as an egg, then become a tadpole (larva) and finally an adult frog. A typical salamander too, will start life as an egg, then become a larva and then an adult salamander. The Axolotl remains in its larva form throughout its life. It never changes to an adult salamander, but remains as an oversized larva and that is the stage it reaches sexual maturity in. This phenomenon the Axolotl exhibits is known as neoteny, loosely meaning the retention of characteristics seen in youth and childhood by adult individuals. That in the case of the Axolotl refers to the physical characteristics of a larva salamander.

What really intrigued me quite a bit, other than these fascinating facts, was that the Axolotl was described as having a "grotesque appearance" in the web site dedicated to Axolotls (http://www.axolotl.org/). I did not think that at all and I don't think Aretousa thought that, as she was giggling a lot when she saw it, rather than being scared. In fact I thought it was a bit cute, maybe funny and strange, but not grotesque. Then I remembered reading some of Konrad Lorenz's writing on ethology and what it was that made creatures "cute". I think Lorenz was looking at what were the characteristics that made humans and animals cute, and if and why it was important that someone was cute. What he proposed in a few words, was that cute or attractive were the characteristics associated with childhood and infancy, such as a round head disproportionately big to the body, large wide eyes, relative small nose and small over all size.  These characteristics are called pedomorphic, which means literately child-like characteristics. The infants of humans and animals exhibit these qualities for a maximum effect of cuteness and vulnerability, so as to ensure the total protection and nurturing by the adults and ultimately guarantee the survival of the species.

So if that is to be believed, humans retain these preferences into adulthood and look for them not only in children but in other adults, pets, objects and so on. Apparently the Japanese cartoon and design industry has based many products and characters on the research done on pedomorphosis or neoteny. Many cartoons throughout the years also exhibit such characteristics, from Betty Boo to Hello Kitty and the Pokemons. Large round heads with far apart big eyes and relatively small bodies. Some dogs and pets are also deliberately bred to resemble puppies and remain small in size with large eyes, like toy dogs. Of course character traits such as innocence, playfulness, curiosity and tenderness are also associated with childhood and apparently make an individual "cute" if they are retained in adulthood.  In any case, I am totally covered it seems by this research and my and Aretousa's finding the Axolotl "cute" is completely predictable, it being one of the rare cases exhibiting spontaneous neoteny left in the wild.

I think some kind of "cuteness" in design (albeit imaginary) played a bit of a role in me getting some sleep when I was a kid and on holidays. My cousins and I used to spend a big proportion of our summer holidays (which are long in Greece because of the heat) at our grandmother's summer house. My younger cousin and I were always very close throughout our childhood and very alike except on one issue.  One of the things I found hard during those summers was sleeping; both for naps and at night. I always slept in the same room with either my grandmother or my mother at home and we used to talk a lot and tell stories before we slept. I never had issues with the dark or being scared, but then again I always had company. We used to sleep on bunker beds with my cousins, but what annoyed me most was that they slept immediately as soon as their head touched the pillow at night. I told them stories but they were asleep before I had even finished the second phrase. On top of that my younger cousin had to have plugged in a night light in order to sleep. I was used to complete darkness in our house and I just could not sleep between the night light and not having anyone to talk to. So I lay there with my eyes open unable to sleep for what felt like hours. I was also convinced that he just needed the light to fall asleep, but what was its purpose once he had fallen asleep other than to annoy me?

So I used to unplug it after he was asleep for a bit. But as by some kind of sixth sense he always woke up within ten minutes of me unplugging it and got very upset and angry. Apparently he wanted a reference in order to orientate himself in relation to the room, the house and to the road outside. As a compromise eventually he agreed to remove it but instead we left the window shutters open so that some light would come through the curtains. To begin with I thought it might be better, but then the wind used to so very slightly move the curtains and there were all sorts of unidentifiable little noises from outside. Fruit bats used to live around the area and I had seen them flying around the lamp post not more than twenty meters away from our window. I had heard of stories where apparently bats get caught in your hair. I normally have no fear of any creatures but I started to get a bit uncomfortable with those shutters open. It was actually a bit ironic that the darkness did not scare me but the noises and shadows did.  I was almost going to put back the night light and switch the deal back but then I started playing a game. The curtains were unremarkable during the day, made of some rough linen with beige and brown-green and ochre designs typical of the seventies. But with the dim light from outside I started to see some creatures forming amongst the line weaves and coloured shapes. I tried to imagine them as "cute" little creatures dancing around and changing places so as to distract myself from the bat noises outside. And it worked.

Not long ago I found in a high street shop a hand made Indian paper which had wax batik kind of designs that  reminded me a bit of the shapes I saw in the night on those curtains.

Then I cut out some imaginary "cute" creatures and rearranged them against a night background and against a wallpaper.

IKEA still life #1

When I was ten years old my father bought me a present of a small microscope which he brought around our house himself. He wanted to demonstrate how to use it and he pricked his finger with some clippers and put a tiny blood drop between two very thin sheets of glass. He secured them with the clips and placed them under the microscope. He focused it properly and then we looked and saw tiny little things, looking a bit like small creatures and a bit like pomegranate seeds, pushing each other around. Then he sliced a carrot very thinly and we looked at its fine lines, like wood grain under the microscope too. He said that each carrot's designs were unique, just like the designs on each snowflake are unique.

I just finished reading a book a friend bought for me, called French Children Don't Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman. In this book the author, who is American with a British partner, discusses the way French parents bring up their children and the differences in parenting styles between the French and the anglophones. By anglophones the writer mainly refers to British and American parents. She is basing her observations on her own experience of bringing up her children in Paris and on extensive research. The book is very interesting and highly entertaining. In this book I came across, for the first time, the term "helicopter parenting". The term refers to parents who tend to hover a lot over their children most of the time, even when the children are playing happily in a safe environment. They tend to help the children out a lot while they play and do something like a "live commentary" of what is happening while it is happening. Apparently this is more common amongst older parents and anglophone parents. Younger parents and French parents in the book, tend to let the children get on with it and explore and learn by playing amongst themselves or by themselves, in a safe environment. 

I guess pretend play and toys that facilitate pretend play exist in order to allow younger children to play while learning about everyday tasks and situations in a safe way. For example a toy cooker, utensils and fake food will let a child "prepare", "cook" and "eat" the food and even set up a little restaurant without the hazards and dangers of a real kitchen and utensils and without the worry of hygiene issues regarding food. There are countless toys that facilitate and promote pretend play and while they are a great way for children to learn about real skills, they also trigger their imaginations the deeper they submerge into pretend play scenarios. Ikea has a series of soft fabric toys of baskets and trays, some including vegetables, some fruits and some fish. They are very reasonably priced and Aretousa has had hours of great play out of them, pretending to cook them, eat them, feed them to dolls and so on.  

I have realised by now that I have an issue with things and toys not being "real". It is not a very reasonable issue nor is it a very coherent one. I had this problem before I had Aretousa with other things. For example, in theatre, if I could get a real piece of wood I much preferred using that than making a wood effect on a piece of cardboard. Or if we needed a small piece of stone, I would go out of my way to find one rather than make one out of polystyrene with an added effect. Of course that is neither always popular with colleagues, nor possible, nor always safe, nor economical for that matter. And it goes against one of theatre's main traits, which is artificiality. So I conformed with it,  but it always bothered me. Of course I am not going to let a child play in the kitchen, but surely they could play with real vegetables as well as with fakes ones? Under supervision?

Ikea basket with fabric vegetables

basket with the same real vegetables  

I normally don't do that "helicopter parenting" thing, but yesterday the fake toy issue took over me and I put together a basket with the exact same vegetables as the Ikea one. One lettuce, two mushrooms, two tomatoes, a leek, half a cucumber, a garlic and three carrots. I firstly just let Aretousa play with both the real and fake ones.

toy leek and real leek

 real lettuce and toy lettuce

toy cucumber and real cucumber

Then I sliced some of the vegetables vertically and some horizontally to show Aretousa how they look inside. She was trying to eat everything though.

tomatoes

garlic

mushrooms

Then I did some "helicopter parenting" and was explaining a lot about what I was doing and what each vegetable was, how it grew and what we usually do with it, but I think the most fun Aretousa had was manipulating them, smelling them and feeling them. And tasting them.

leek hoops

more leek hoops

Our bathroom has no window, so when you close the door it's absolutely darkness. Aretousa loves to go in there in the dark and we use a torch to make shadows on the wall and ceiling from holes in a cardboard book. We also light a lantern with a small candle inside and watch the colours in the dark. Yesterday I put thin vegetable slices on a perspex and then lit it from underneath with the torch. 

carrot 1

carrot 2

carrot 3

cucumber

tomato

And then we ate

minestrone soup

Totem and Taboo

I generally have a love-hate relationship with museums. I sometimes can relax and enjoy some of them, like a good natural history museum, but art museums in particular have the habit of draining me from any trace of energy. I think that with every work of art I see in them, instead of the viewing adding to my inspiration and to my mind, it seems to take something away from me, for the immediate hours following the visit, so that it takes me a few days to recover from the experience and appreciate what I saw. I remember coming out even from my favourite museums, the Musee d'Orsay and the Hermitage, completely exhausted and drained, as if I had just been through some kind of physical and mental examination. 

The experience of course is much worse if I am accompanied by people who have the habit and feel the need to read every single caption next to the work displayed and so take numerous hours to go through an exhibition (let alone a whole museum). When I was younger I used to be polite and hang around waiting for them, but now I just go my way and seem to race through the rooms quite speedily, which seems to be all I can bare to do. 

To all this there is one very notable exception and that is the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. This is a very small museum dedicated to Cycladic Art and is the only museum that I have voluntarily visited more than twice. In fact I think I have visited it many many times and I always go there again every time I am in Athens. I have a free pass to all archaeological and art sites in Greece which allows me to do that. This museum has a very different feel to it. It is very dark, with dim lighting and velour slate grey display cabinets and a cool air conditioned atmosphere. In summer it feels like you are in a really luxurious and seductive hotel room. Of course all this should not be important, as you are there to see the work, but somehow in this case it is very important. I am always so relaxed there and I lose track of time so much that I sometimes go in in the afternoon and come out in the evening. The works displayed there are each treated with such care and meticulous thought, that it makes you stop in your tracks and look properly. Then of course they have to work with some of the most intriguing and memorable, both in form and in nature, art pieces there ever were.   

Cycladic Art refers to the art created on the Aegean islands from around 3000 to 2000 BC. Standing out amongst the art of that period are the marble sculptures of human figures, mainly depicting the female form but also representing a variety of musicians and other group configurations. The figures are highly stylised, sometimes with a geometric and "modern" feel to them, so much so that they were liked and admired by artists such as Picasso, Modigliani and Brancusi. Although we know for a fact that these figurines were extensively used throughout the islands and mainland and many have been found in graves, their exact purpose still remains elusive. They were not made specifically for burials, as many show signs of damage and repair sustained prior to the burial, but were presumably treasured enough and used by the deceased during their lifetimes to be put in their graves. They might have been idols of gods and deities or even toys. Some are tiny and some are life size and according to, relatively recent findings, they must have been brightly coloured. 

Cycladic Female Figure

Cycladic Harp Player

This issue had caused quite a bit of a stir amongst the Greek fine art circles. My aunty is an exceptional marble sculptor, from the Athens Fine Art School, trained as part of the course on Tinos island, an island producing some of the purest white marble in the world and renowned for its marble carving heritage. The training and technique that has to be mastered for marble carving is very unique, lengthy and specialised. Work of months can go to waste; with just one wrong blow of the chisel against an almost invisible "vein" of a pure white marble and you witness everything shattering into thousands of pieces. It's heart breaking to watch. I remember having very heated discussions with my aunty about the Cycladic figurines on a couple of occasions. 

One of them was regarding the presumably bright colouring of them (apparently Greek and Roman marble sculptures of antiquity were also brightly coloured). Some German archaeologists had done reconstructions of antiquity sculptures, this time coloured in pigments that they had tried to recreate from their research. I think that exhibition was at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and according to almost a unanimous verdict, was at the best tasteless and at the worst grotesque. My aunty was saying that if they did that to the Cycladic figurines, they would totally lose their figure and shape and would become just a platform for colour, covering their unique form. And I was kind of agreeing with that, but was also saying that if they were actually originally painted (which they were), surely we should try and see how they looked like back then? Maybe that would also help us find out their original purpose? But my aunty argued that we would need to find the exact pigments and the exact combinations and intensity of colour to do them justice and that would not be very likely nor very possible. I remember I was thinking at the time that all the amazing marble work that Rodin did was based on a misconception that all antique figure sculptures were pure white; maybe we should be grateful for that? What would his work have looked like if it was coloured? I bet my aunty would not want to imagine that. 

The second occasion we discussed the Cycladic figurines, was after my visit to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. It seems that the Cycladic figurines were so common, everyday things during their time, that for every single one so preciously and carefully exhibited at the Goulandri Cycladic Museum in Athens, there are a hundred laying around in other Museums in Greece. The Heraklion Museum is so busy and full of tourists, with a queue of 2 to 3 hours in August, that I did something I don't often do and used my free pass to jump the queue and felt a bit like a detective flashing my card around. This is a very different Museum, old and bright and spacious and quite run down. The artefacts are not as much displayed there, as they are placed around, so that it feels like they were found in the exact position you see them today. In a peculiar way this makes me feel also very relaxed (in a different way from the Cycladic Museum) and in a moment of relaxation and lapse of concentration I crossed a (really pathetic) thin grey low rope, into a room used as a storage/workshop. There was no one there and although I gathered that I was trespassing I still remained nailed on the spot. The room was filled with a countless amount of Cycladic figurines. Some of them were just laid on the workshop tables, some were placed under large glass bell-shaped covers, some were supported on armatures which looked specifically made for them, presumably awaiting cleaning or restoration. Some were in the course of being packed and transported to other museums. Those were treated with specialised packing materials, brightly coloured  and organic looking polystyrene shapes, spongy looking material  moulded around the figurines so that they fit in it perfectly. In the room were also some brass state of the art equipment that detect vibrations form earthquakes and some beautiful humidity measuring equipment. I found the whole image mesmerising. 

I remember telling my aunty afterwards how amazing I thought it was that such thousands of years old figurines were amongst such man made, modern material and equipment and how I found the mix of marble, plastic, polystyrene, brass and glass absolutely fascinating. The fact that the sculptures were of human figures made the whole thing even more interesting to me; who would have imagined when they made them, so many thousands of years ago, that these figurines would now have this new life, touring around the museums amongst all that gear, their bodies moulded in spongy material and swimming amongst bright pink polystyrene shapes.  My aunty was not sharing this with me and was left quite at a loss with my enthusiasm. Things became worse when I started a series of drawings inspired by the Cycladic figures. Mine looked more like creatures rather than human and my original intention was to model them with wax (my marble carving skills being very basic) and then cast them in a mixture of cement, sand and plaster which would give them an old stone appearance. I was then intending to place them in different scenarios, amongst modern material and current situations to try and recreate that experience of mine in the Heraklion Museum. 

some of my drawings inspired by the Cycladic Figurines 

My aunty loved the drawings and even suggested to help me carve one in marble. She said they looked like Totems. Totems apparently are based on animals or plants as opposed to the human figure. They are used around the world (but mostly observed amongst Native American people) as symbols of a family or clan, often also having strong religious and spiritual significance. But when I spoke of the "situations" I wanted to place the finished Totems in, my aunty lost interest and switched off. I felt a bit embarrassed about that, as if I was degrading the original Cycladic figurines with these ideas of mine. It almost felt like anything to do with changing in any way the original figurines was a Taboo subject; so as that I stopped talking about it. I felt like that once before, when I joined the Athens Fine Art School in an exhibition viewing and I remarked afterwards how one of the old wooden frames on a painting had caught my eye so much, that I was looking from painting to frame and back again, not knowing which to admire more. The room went silent and no one replied to me. They just kept on walking in a deadly silence.

I managed to make four of my drawings into wax models, but without a studio never managed to cast them the way I wanted. Instead I made a series of drawings where I placed them in silly scenarios, just like I was hoping to do in the three dimensional version. I manipulated those in Photoshop afterwards. This project would be the first thing I would do if I ever get a studio. 

Sun and the Clouds

When I did my teacher training course we had a few sessions on child psychology and also some reading on art therapy and art's role in child psychology. The teaching training course was so intense and my first placement in a secondary inner-London school was such a -frankly- shocking experience for me, that all the reading I did at the time is a big blur in my head. Everyday felt like a battle just to stay alive and all my thoughts were initially focused on behavioural management rather than anything else. I do believe that some of that reading was very interesting, although I never had the time to go into detail on a particular subject or research further something that caught my eye.

Once I remember coming across a very interesting article from our reading list which I took to the school I was at for my second placement. This was a selective grammar school in outer London, with much less behavioural problems than my first placement. I was meant to sit in a classroom for an hour and a half on that day, while one of the older classes had a writing test and just "keep an eye on them". They seemed very absorbed in their task so I took out my article and read it on my desk. I remember I was told off so severely afterwards by another teacher for giving the wrong example and reading while I should have been doing something relevant to my job, like correcting papers or going through my registers. I did not even have the chance to explain what I was reading and how it was about child psychology. She said that she has been working as a teacher for ten years and she never had time to read anything other than correcting papers and I should start getting used to it, beginning from that moment onwards! I think I never wanted to become a teacher less than on that day.

Amongst the few things I actually managed to read during that period, was an article on interpreting young children's drawings when they were asked to draw their house and their family. These drawings typically include stick men or more advanced figures depending on the age of the children, a simple square house and triangle roof, pets, sometimes trees and other things, like the sun, a rainbow, butterflies, balloons and so on. I think the article had interpretations of the colours used, of the things drawn, the composition of the picture and position of the figures, scale of objects and intensity of line. What stood out to me was the statement that research had shown that the sun in children's drawings represents the father in the family and children who were growing up without a father or a father figure tended to not draw a sun in their picture. Children who were growing up with their father almost without fail had drawn a sun in their picture and a large percentage of those suns had a smile and eyes on them. When children growing up without a male role model or father eventually started to include a sun because of peer influence, they never included a smile on it. I found that very interesting to read but also thought it might be a lot of rubbish.

It must have lingered in my head though, because the next summer when I finished the teaching course and went home, I asked my mother to bring down from our storage above the bathroom, a file of drawings that I knew she kept from when I was a kid. I remember getting so upset and so angry as I was leafing through them and my hope fading away as even after the last of the dozen or so toddler drawings had finished I had not seen a single sun! There were oversized butterflies, a moon, stars, v-shaped birds like seagulls, a rainbow and a very big amount of clouds, but not a single sun.

I tried to find this article on the internet but I haven't been successful. I genuinely hope it is not true and only a big coincidence, but I suspect and I am afraid that these people have done a lot of research. I also came across another article on research done this time on drawings young children did of members of their family. This one is even worse in its findings than the one I read. The drawing comparison on the last page between children from intact families and those from separated families is quite overwhelming.

http://www.forensicpsychology.it/numero%20002/ippol_ing.htm

Anyway, I thought I should be able -at least now- to make a sun that kind of smiles using the clouds I seemed to use in abundance as a toddler. First attempts below.

I then cut some of the shapes out and messed around with them with Aretousa on the computer screen. Aretousa recognises the sun, but thinks my clouds are fish.

Sun

 the Clouds

Sun and the Clouds

Roter Mohn

I am very glad to announce that I finally managed to finish the set of three wooden dolls that were laying around in bits for several months. I put a deadline for myself a bit less than a month ago (see post Unfinished Business...) and when the opportunity arose early this week I grabbed it by the hair. My mother in law was visiting us for a few days and so I found myself with some spare time to spend on the dolls. Aretousa too, was more than happy to have a new exclusive play pal, so no guilty feelings either.

The set of the three dolls in their original arrangement

and Aretousa's free style arrangement 

Of course "nanna" has now gone and Aretousa is missing her. This happens every time either of the grandmothers come to stay for a bit. Aretousa seems to make a connection between the people and the things they gave her or the things they handled the most. So that even for months afterwards she points at those objects and calls the person's name. I sometimes wonder what she will remember of her grandmothers when she grows up.
I grew up with my mother and my grandmother, but as my mother was always at work it was really my grandmother who brought me up. My grandmother was a very simple person at first sight; she never finished school because of the war and never worked at an actual paid job. She needed very little and somehow was very "self sufficient". She was very patient and spoke slowly with a most clear and melodic voice. It is so strange that I rarely think of her, even now that she has passed away, because somehow it feels like she is always there. When I think of her I remember the stories she used to tell me about the little village in Crete where she grew up. She was somewhere in the middle between nine children and there were the most amazing everyday stories that she told me, not all of them with a happy ending. Standing out amongst them was a story during the war, where a small regiment of German soldiers were posted there to keep an eye on the village. It must have been between 1942 and 1943. From my understanding they were there just as a formality and were actually on talking terms with the locals. Amongst them was a very young German boy with straw-like golden hair that really liked my grandmother. She said that he used to come and find her in the olive fields and used to sing her a song called "rotermon". My grandmother sang me this song in German in the most melodic and trembling voice that it used to make me cry. But I still asked to hear it and the story again and again. One night during a local religious festival the Germans joined in and had a bit too much to drink and the young boy leaned against an old balcony railing, fell off head first and died instantly. My grandmother sang this song right till her death in 2007.
Years later when I was a student in Newcastle, a friend of mine had a German boyfriend to whom I told the story and he said the song was called Roter Mohn and meant red poppy.

My grandmother was suffering from a neurological condition and the last fifteen years of her life was confined in a bed with no muscle power from the waist down. In spite of that she was always in great spirits and never got sad or frustrated. I find this amazingly inspiring. She used to read poetry and memorise by heart really long and difficult poems. She loved Kostis Palamas, Giorgos Seferis and Dionysios Solomos. I was never into poetry, as I found it confusing, but listening to her was most relaxing. She owned only a handful of records, amongst them the Cretan legend Nikos Xylouris, Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and a cassette by Joe Dassin. She had the annoying habit of selecting a particular song and playing it again and again throughout the day. She had the most amazing memory and when a friend of mine came to visit she remembered their birthday, their parents' names and dates of birth and other really strange details. She used to draw with a very particular style of her own, a bit like a naive a painter. She drew her village roads from a view from above but the houses from a side view and the people from the front. Her lines were faint, trembling and repetitive, but the finished drawings were so sensitive, delicate and ethereal, they resembled a dissolving embroidery.
My grandmother loved listening to the radio. She listened to a variety of stations, some political, some with geological and natural history documentaries and of course her favourite religious station. She had a great faith and remained deeply religious till her death. Some years before my grandmother passed away, my mother received a free small TV -as a gift for putting a large order through for her shop- with an external aerial which we put in my grandmother's room in order to "broaden her horizons". As we lived on top of a mountain that hosts all the aerials that feed the whole of Athens with all sorts of signals, using an external aerial brought with it some complications. My grandmother would watch a documentary and suddenly there would be interference and the channel would change; then I would hear "Natalia, Natalia run quick, there is porn! porn on the television! run quick I tell you!". So the TV had to eventually go as I was not able to fix it.

As this technique of setting a public deadline for finishing a project has worked, I had a good think and found many projects that have been left unfinished. A couple never got started at all. There is a three dimensional advent calendar in the form of a house that I did not manage to finish for this Christmas just gone. So I am setting myself a month to finish it, from today.

                                     Rosita Serrano (Michael Jary-Bruno Balz) 1938

Happy New Year

Yesterday was Chinese new (lunar) year 2013, which is the year of the snake. It was welcomed by millions of people in the far East, where this is one of the biggest and most colourful celebrations of the year. Every lunar year corresponds to an animal and the system rotates every twelve years. So there will not be another snake year till 2025. The animals of the the cycle are said to pass traits of their character to people born in their year. I am always fascinated  by these anthropomorphic views of animals and when I was first told about the Chinese lunar year and the animal cycle I was really intrigued .

I grew up in a suburb of Athens which had a village feel to it, as it was situated on one of the mountains surrounding Athens and was "above" and off the main motorway. So quite cut out from even the extended central area of Athens. There wasn't, and still isn't today, a bank or a post office or a school. The nearest school was below the motorway and we had to take an underpass to get there. It was an area famous for its clean air and the fresh meat tavernas, which were packed in the weekend evenings. Also famous for some of the first blocks of flats built  in Athens put up by the United Nations to accommodate a large refugee population in the sixties. Everyone knew everyone there and everything there was to know had gone around twice. One year towards the end of primary school we got a new student who was the most exciting thing that happened to me in my whole schooling days. The new girl was from Korea and did not speak a word of Greek or English or any other European language. I think she was pretty petrified to begin with and also seemed to me a bit angry. I was totally fascinated by her; she had the longest, shiniest black hair I had ever seen, she was tall and very beautiful. I took it upon myself to become her guide, protector and, I was hoping, her friend. We walked home together and communicated in the beginning with signs and funny noises. I walked her back outside her house after school and we met to go to school together. She picked up the language within three months, but I remember she used to get very frustrated when she did not know the words to say exactly what she wanted. She in fact did not need a protector as she was very strong and very tall and could keep her own very well. My mother had met her parents when they went to her shop and they were the first people to open a Korean food shop and restaurant in Athens. Asian food and restaurants were not known at all at that time and even today they are not a common sight.

Anyway, after a few months of meeting her she invited me to her house for lunch one Saturday. This first visit is still imprinted in my head. They had rented an apartment in one of the old refugee blocks of flats and were I think on the fourth floor. The living room was dark, with cushions on the floor instead of a sofa and a very low table. They had a CD player (I had never seen one before and did not see one for years afterwards) and a sound surrounding system that made the music sound as if it was coming out of the walls. They had the biggest selection of music I have ever seen. Her bedroom was very simple, immaculately arranged and had a very particular smell to it, as she did, something between fragrant steamed rice and old fashioned soap. I never saw her parents' bedroom. The kitchen was small and very clean and her mother was there preparing the lunch. She was a beautiful woman and had a very proud, straight back and appeared young. We sat on the floor around the low table and I used chop sticks for the first time. I remember the clean taste of their rice, I had never tasted rice like that before. I can't remember what else was served, but I remember the pickled cabbage, kimchi, that she asked me to try. It was such an alien taste, I did not know what to make of it, but I liked its strong smell, so I ate it.

After that we visited each others houses a lot. I remember both of us vigorously washing our precious navy blue All Star summer canvas shoes in her sink using brushes and soap and then drying them in the sun to get them to look  a bit faded. I remember her father bringing me back from Seoul a very unusual cuddly toy shaped as a tortoise with pink and veramen hexagons on its shell. And I remember her telling me about the twelve animals of the Chinese wheel (she called it Korean wheel) and that we were both born in the year of the horse. We run and galloped and skipped from leg to leg on the way to school pretending to be horses. She was a black shiny horse and I was a white one with brown patches.

She grew up much faster than me in many ways and a couple of years later she started to become a bit distant and distracted when we were together. But she wouldn't say what was wrong. We spent less time together by then. One day she called my house and asked me to please tell her mum that she was with me for that day if she happened to call, but she did not tell me why. I completely forgot to tell my granny that and when her mother called I did not make it to the phone in time and my granny said  that no, she hadn't seen her for weeks. Very soon after that she was sent back to Korea to a boarding school while her parents stayed behind. They had caught her with a boy in the forest of our mountain. I never saw her before she left, but her mother gave my mother a photo of her in her new school; she had cut her hair very very short and looked very sad. I don't know what I did with that photo. I have tried to trace her down since, but her parents left Greece and I have not been successful through social media. I hope enough animal lunar years have passed and that she may not be too angry with my failing to cover for her. And I hope she remembers me.

Below are the twelve animals of the Chinese wheel. The ones on black paper come from a book of collaged animals I made for Aretousa when I was expecting her.

Snake 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989,  2001, 2013

Horse 1930,  1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014

Sheep 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015

Monkey 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992,  2004, 2016

Rooster 1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017

Dog 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006, 2018

Pig  1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019

Mouse 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008, 2020

Ox/Cow 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009, 2021

Tiger 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010, 2022

Rabbit 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011, 2023

Dragon 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000, 2012, 2024