Repeated Pattern (with two Tortoises)

When I was very young, we had amongst other animals, a pet tortoise. She was not a bought pet, as almost none of our pets were, but we had found her on our mountain and brought her back home. There was an abundance of tortoises in the mountain at that time, some really really old and huge and heavy, reaching a hundred years old. Our tortoise was a young one, maybe five to seven years old when we found her and we kept her for five years. She ate lettuce leaves, fruit, vegetables, some flowers and fresh cut grass. She lived on the balcony in the summer and in the house in the winter. I am not sure how much "pet like" she felt, but we handled her a lot and she came to eat when it was her time to be fed. My grandmother of course, always advocated her opinion of captured animals and how we should really give them their freedom back.

One day, I came back from school and I could not find the tortoise anywhere. I searched the house upside down and she was still nowhere to be found. I was starting to suspect my grandmother had released her, when I thought of looking on the small balcony at the back of the kitchen. This balcony was normally off limits for the tortoise because its railing started directly from the floor, creating a gap from where the tortoise could potentially fall to the garden, three floors below and die. But on that day someone had forgotten the kitchen door open and the balcony door open too, so that I found to my horror the tortoise half suspended on the very edge of the balcony floor. Half her body was already above thin air and her other half a body and back legs were still on the floor. It looked like she was considering jumping off the edge as if to dive in a pool. She was slightly moving her front legs too so that I had to act quickly to save her. But I was so petrified to touch her in case I pushed her that I stayed there looking at her for a while before I eventually picked her up. My grandmother of course said the tortoise was so very desperate for freedom she was considering jumping off. They must have some feeling for the danger of heights though, as she never did jump.

Not long after that we took the tortoise back where we had found her, on the same spot on the mountain. We took with us some lettuce and fruit, but she very lazily wandered off, stretching her legs as she went. She looked very at ease back there, which gave me hope she could fit in very well again. I remember the tremendous appetite this tortoise had, maybe because she was young and growing, her sharp beak-like mouth and her pink wet tongue. I used to splash her with water in the summer and she loved that. The next summer some of the worst fires hit Athens and our mountain did not escape them. The strong August winds made it very hard to control the flames and there were casualties too. I remember shouting at my grandmother about sending the tortoise back in the mountain to die; I was very upset. My grandmother said that it was very difficult to ever know what is best for wild animals, to interfere with their lives or not to. You might be thinking that you are helping them to begin with, but maybe you are just making decisions whose consequences you are not equipped to predict.

And with that I was left looking periodically for the tortoise at the area which was not burnt completely, hoping she stuck to that area and did not wander very far off, towards the part of the forest that got burnt. That was always possible. Meanwhile, last week, Aretousa and I visited my father, whose neighbour has a very small garden, measuring no more than a metre and a half by a metre and a half. In that small garden there is a lemon tree, an olive tree, two rose bushes and many dried out bushes and weeds. In the winter the neighbour is away and no one has access to that garden. But in the summer the small garden is open to everyone and everyone around visits to take fruit peels to an old tortoise who lives there. This tortoise is around forty to fifty years old and has been in that patch of land for as long as all the neighbours can remember. We are not sure what she eats during the winter; maybe rose petals and green bush leaves. She does not hibernate properly, as Greek winters are mild. What she is lacking in food in the winter, she makes up for in the summer.

 

 

Aretousa and I fed her too, watermelon and melon peels. The first two days she devoured everything with a huge huge appetite. We splashed her with water to cool her down, just like I used to do with my tortoise. The third day she was so full she did not eat any more food, but just snoozed in a shady corner under the concrete stairs. I was half thinking maybe it is too small a patch there for her and she probably never had much contact with other tortoises. I thought maybe she would be happier in the forest of the area, not further than a hundred metres away. And then I thought better about it and did not suggest moving her. She has been there for all those years, so better not to gamble with her luck.
At least her summers are full of sweet fruit and children stroking her and that lasts for half of the year. The other half of the year must be a tortoise-only time, no humans around, a hard time food wise, but probably a bit of a relief otherwise.

Like hedgehogs, tortoises can retract their limbs and head and tail when danger approaches. The main cause of their death nowadays in Greece, is getting run over by a car. Foxes used to get a lot of the hedgehogs by peeing on them. The ammonia in urine caused them to unroll from their protective ball shape position and so be vulnerable again. This does not work with tortoises, who are protected from the ammonia in urine by their shell. Tortoises were vulnerable though to birds of prey, especially eagles, who catch them and fly off with them, proceeding to letting them go from a great height so that the shell breaks and they can eat them. There is a legend that the great tragedian, Aeschylus, spent many of the last years of his life outdoors, trying to avoid a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object; only to be killed by a tortoise an eagle let go above his head, mistaking his shining bald scalp for a rock. Το πεπρωμένον φυγείν αδύνατον (To pepromenon phugein adunaton). It is impossible to escape what is destined!

Below is a pattern with two tortoises, my old pet and the one we just met (my old one should be reaching forty years old if she is still around). I drew it so that it could be repeated, creating an effect similar to those seen in wall papers, wrapping papers and curtains.

Design for Bric-a-Brac

One of my weaknesses, which developed predominately while I have lived in London, is accumulating curious objects from charity and second hand shops. I cannot call these objects a collection with the strict meaning of the term, as they haven't got enough characteristics in common with each other, other than the fact that they have something of interest to me. Often it is their design that appeals, other times their curious nature and rarity, it could be the materials used and the colours or that an object is really old and carries with it a story and a narrative. Often they are objects from far away lands which give me the illusion of having travelled there and brought something back. Although they are not a collection of one type of object, they are still a collection of objects, and one of a considerable size which resists to reach full growth while I still live in London. Once in a while a new addition creeps in, as the low cost and the excitement of an interesting find have become irresistible to me and an important part of living in London.

I need to note here, that by using the term collection I have probably given a misleading impression of the state of these objects. Personally when I think of a collection, I often imagine a display cabinet, with porcelain figures for example, carefully arranged inside. Or a collection of music records on shelves, arranged by alphabetical order, by genre or even by colour. Or I think of tables full of objects arranged in a way that makes sense to the owner. In any matter, I think of a way in which the objects of a collection are easily accessible, safely displayed, personally arranged and of some use in a person's life. Most of my objects are wrapped up in newspaper, some in bubble wrap, and are placed in storage boxes. Other than vaguely fulfilling the criteria of being safely kept, they do not play any other role in my life other than to have given me a short shot of excitement and pleasure when I saw them and bought them and to take up space.

There is no question here about throwing them away, at least at this stage, even if I often open a box and realise I have forgotten I ever bought what lies inside. I am not sure if the fact that I have forgotten an object means that it is not important enough to keep or merely that I have too many things to remember them all. But I know that often the renewed pleasure and surprise of seeing an old object again is so intense that it calls for me to find a solution to this problem. At the least Aretousa would be able to also see, handle and enjoy these treasured finds. Instead I have to re-wrap the old friend of an object back into its box.

In the beginning I thought of getting a display cabinet for them, but it never felt quite right. A display cabinet gives the objects inside it a precious character, which my objects do not carry. Also you need to open the glass doors to reach them, which suggests they are not meant to be always accessible and should be protected when they are not used. Some of my items are delicate and fragile, but I do not feel they would be "at home" in a cabinet with glass doors. Then I thought of putting them in shelves of some description. There they would surely be more easily accessible and we would have full view of them, being able to use, handle and look at them, as and when we pleased. But I was not happy with this solution either and I worked out that the problem is in both cases that the objects would be grouped together. These objects are interesting to me for several different reasons each, but when they are grouped together they become a mismatched cacophony of weird and creepy rescued oddities. They lose their individual characters and what I liked in one now is shadowed by what I slightly disliked in another one, till they all become a big pile of merged rubbish bits.

The happiest I have ever been with displaying these objects was when they were placed on the bookcase, amongst the books and CDs and DVDs. There they looked at home, they could be picked up just like the books could, there was sufficient space between each object to take away the creepy feeling they gave me when they were together as a group. There, they were just like the books I have; slowly accumulated through the years, much loved and displayed for reference and for pleasure. However there is only so much a couple of IKEA Billy bookcases can do, in terms of holding items and also in terms of customised design. I think an ideal design for anything, a house, a shoe, a bookcase, a car, a jacket and so on, would be one that is made specifically for the owner, specifically for a space and would be ideally able to change with time. The most beautiful Californian villa would not only look out of place in a small Greek island for example, it would be impossible to run, impossible to maintain and you would very likely be happy to exchange it for a small, cool, white stone house within a couple of years.

I remember reading in Bruno Munari's Design as Art, a few examples of what a successful, ergonomic design is like. He used the example of the design of a wooden spoon, one we use to stir a fry up in a pan or a pot of soup with. If you were to buy a flat edged spoon, after prolonged use you would notice that one edge starts to become worn out so that the spoon loses its flatness and becomes sloped. A good design for a spoon would be one that has the form that the object would eventually take after prolonged use. The same goes for shoes. Children's shoes have the most ergonomic design in their soles; they are rounded, just like adult shoes will become after prolonged use. This kind of design works with the use of the object in mind, with the laws of physics, rather than against them, making life smoother and more comfortable. So should I be also thinking of creating a "bookcase" specifically designed to host these objects together with some books, CDs and DVDs?

 

I think that it is an interesting prospect; to be truthful I have been sketching a certain kind of shelving for these objects and books, here and there for a while. The reason I never took it seriously, is because I thought that such a shelving unit designed for specific objects, books, CDs and DVDs should surely also be designed for a specific space. If I had in mind a specific wall in a house we owned, then I could design the shelving unit for that specific wall. Then not only the unit could be freely attached to the wall without the worry of leaving a mess behind, but most importantly, the proportions and dimensions of the unit would be designed to work in harmony with the given space. This kind of expectation of custom made objects has no end though, and one could argue that in turn, the ideal thing would be if you could design the house in which the wall was in, design the wall to which the shelving unit is attached. But then how boring would such a place be, one which you have designed everything yourself? Would there be a place there for such a curious collection of objects such as the one I have accumulated or would they look so alien there that one would have to even design their own curious objects to go into their own personally designed shelves?

As a compromise I can imagine finding an old house with some character of its own and then building the shelves there. In the meantime, I thought of creating a kind of prototype design for the shelving unit I have been thinking of for so long. Some of the spaces in the shelving unit have a standard measurement, some that of the height of a CD, some that of the height of a DVD and some are based on very tall books. The depth of the shelves is a standard market one and uniform throughout at this point. Although I have tried to distribute the weight evenly through this unit, there would need to be certain places were the unit is screwed to the wall for additional support and extra security. I have no access to all the objects I have collected at the moment, so the spaces I have made to host them amongst the books are made out of memory and I am sure a unit of the size of this prototype would not be big enough to keep them all. As I have been designing it today, I have been thinking of the objects Aretousa would be most interested in and so have designed spaces for those objects. Following this I have been also thinking of her books occupying the shelves rather than mine. As it is more and more apparent these days, my projects seem to organically transform into projects designed for a child, which is a bit annoying, but also very refreshing and funny.

 

Basic Shapes

Mathematics in the Greek school used to be divided into two parts: algebra and geometry, which were taught separately. Algebra in this case also included logarithms, statistics and percentages. I found geometry a very magical subject and always studied it with great enthusiasm. I really liked the way a two dimensional shape drawn on a piece of paper could be transformed into a three dimensional one with the addition of a few lines and a little imagination. I used to think of a circle, a disc for example, and then imagine a hand picking it straight up from its centre. The course the disc "drew" in space in this case would be a cylinder. And then if a disc was to spin in place around its centre, then that movement would create a sphere in space. I liked the way you could actually touch the solid geometric shapes, as that gave you a feel of the relation of geometry to the real world and made the subject easier to understand for me. When a student struggled a bit with the Pythagorean theorem and its equation and proof, the teacher could draw a right angle triangle, draw all the squares created by its sides and then cut them in such a way to show that indeed the area of the square created by the longest side of the triangle was equal to the sum of the areas of the other two, smaller squares. That availability of a "three dimensional" proof in geometry, gave it a great appeal to me, similar to the one physics held.

I felt very differently about algebra. I could see that it was very useful to everyday life, especially regarding the handling of money, but it always held a strange abstraction to me, it felt much more of a theoretic subject than any other.  Everyone insisted on saying that together with language, mathematics (meaning algebra much more than geometry), was an essential subject that should be mastered, one that if you failed to grasp you would be in trouble for the rest of your days. Even when props were used in algebra, I still thought the whole thing was a bit like an abstract theory, regardless of its very "matter of fact" nature. Beads and sticks were used to represent numbers and units, buttons were used to represent money coins, money were used to represent numbers and value, numbers were used to represent time and so on. The whole thing felt quite like a made up system to me that was left open for discussion and potentially manipulation. So I appreciated algebra to the extend that it facilitated the subject of physics and geometry, but I was left completely uninterested in it, as a subject on its own.

This was not always the case. When I was in primary school, I really liked maths and I saw the exercises we were given as little games, mysteries if you like, that needed to be solved. I liked the fact that 2+2 would always make 4, and there was nothing that could change that, you could count on it. When we started to learn the multiplication table I was very excited when we reached the number 9. It was my favourite number as a child anyway, because we had always lived in a number 9 house or flat, my grandmother was one of 9 siblings and now, when we learnt the multiplication table, I saw that number 9 had a special quality. I noticed that the first five numbers created when multiplying the number 9 with one, two, three, four and five were 09, 18, 27, 36, and 45. Then the following five created when 9 was multiplied by six, seven, eight, nine and ten, were the same numbers but arranged backwards: 54, 63, 72, 81 and 90. I was so excited by this discovery, that I told the teacher about it in class with great enthusiasm. The teacher had the most piercing pale blue eyes,  he leaned above my table and said with a profound frown "All right...I can see that...but it does not affect anything. It does not mean anything, you still need to learn the number 9 multiplications, same as with all the other numbers". I wanted to ask if there was a reason that number 9 multiplications did this or if it happened with larger multiplications with other numbers, if it was normal, but I was too scared to ask and slowly slowly after that I lost my enthusiasm for mathematics.

Things got worse for my idea of maths when Greece joined the European Union. Greece had a very large production of oranges, together with other products such as olive oil, lemons and grapes, and was relying for its economy on exporting a large amount of them to countries in Europe, particularly North Europe. When we entered the European Union, a kind of formula had to be put in place, so that all the countries exporting oranges in Europe (France, Italy and Spain were also large orange producers) were regulated fairly. But the formula they used was based on percentages taken from each country's population and not each country's production of oranges. So Greece's export ability to Europe was sliced dramatically as it was based on the population of the country, which at the time was about 10 million only in comparison to Italy's sixty million, France's sixty five million and Spain's forty six. We were given oranges for free at school, the prices dropped, oranges were piling high on the highways to the South of the country rotting. Producers slowly slowly stopped cultivating oranges and the same thing happened to many other agricultural products, turning a heavily agricultural country to a bare land. My idea of 2+2 always making 4 being a fact you could rely on was shaken, as I realised that the application of this fact would always be up for manipulation from whoever had the power of a decision.

I am a bit nervous about ever having to help teach Aretousa maths, as I only feel at ease doing it through shapes and lines and not so much the traditional way. For the time being we have been playing with some cut out basic shapes, which Aretousa has arranged at random on double spreads of a coloured paper book (she looked concentrated when she was arranging them, so maybe not completely at random). I have then merged these shapes in Photoshop to see what kind of new shapes will emerge. Then I made three-dimensional shapes with the basic cut out ones, took a picture and tried out the same thing. The distortions of the shapes no longer sitting flat on the table have created some new shapes again. The original ones are now less recognisable in the final pictures. However it is still the same seven initial basic shapes which have also created these new ones, even if they look so different. I bet there is someone out there that could tell us exactly how many countless possibilities there are to combine these seven shapes and arrange them either flat on the table or in three-dimensional shapes, so that you could keep on producing maybe thousands or millions (?) of new shapes. Of course that is not the point of interest here, but it reflects how I feel about maths a bit. Numbers are not so factual really, just another thing that can be used this way or the other, in the right hands or in the hands of someone with ulterior motives. It always sounds so proper, so serious when someone drops in statistical figures, numbers and graphs, making you prone to believe them that much more. But the distortions are possible here as they are with anything else, probably a bit more serious here, maths are part of everything as the old primary school teacher said, part of money, of politics, making up a world full of numbers.

Regarding Camels

When I was a student in Athens, there was an international scheme in place, where you could get addresses from children around the world and start a correspondence with them. Its purpose was to encourage students to practice and improve their writing skills in a foreign language and also to give them the opportunity to make new friends and to get a glimpse of different cultures around the world. I think the scheme was very successful and the process of applying quite exciting. I remember you had to tick the language you had chosen, amongst English, French, German and Spanish, and then also tick the countries you were interested in, in order of preference. There was a map of the world with the participating countries and the languages spoken in them. Finally you could choose if you wanted to correspond with a boy or a girl from your chosen countries. Then after waiting for a month or so, an envelope arrived with names and addresses, some perfectly matched; but if no person of your choice was available, a "wild card" person speaking your chosen language was picked for you.

I had five pen-pals as a result of this scheme. The first was a boy from Mexico who wrote to me in English.  His writing skills were not very good, but he had a very funny way of writing, making me laugh a lot. He wanted to be a footballer and he sent several photographs of himself and of his friends practising for his school team. We wrote to each other for two years and then he was accepted in a football academy and after that he stopped writing. The second boy was from Venezuela and he was writing to me in French, which was the language his father spoke. His French was very good and mine only basic, so I struggled a bit to reply to him and it took me a long time to put a letter together. He wanted to be a pilot, like his father, but at the age of fourteen he developed severe myopia, which apparently can prevent you from becoming a pilot. Our correspondence lasted for two and a half years.

The third person was a lovely girl from Malta. When she sent me her photograph I was really shocked. I think she looked almost identical to myself and I had never met anyone who looked so like me. Her parents and friends thought the same when I sent my photo to her. She was a very sweet girl who wrote beautifully in English about her holidays and her family and friends. We had a lot in common, especially our love for the sea and I was always expecting her letter in great anticipation. We corresponded for around four years and then a great family tragedy stopped her from writing to me any further. The fourth person was a girl from Sri Lanka. My correspondence with her started in 1992. She had the most amazing hand writing I have ever seen. Her letters were beautifully fluid, clear and perfectly spaced, with subtle curvy endings, reminiscent of the Sinhalese characters. The papers she wrote on were hand crafted, slightly translucent, with a faint smell of incense and spices. I kept every single one of her letters and envelopes and the stamps. She was in Colombo, in a boarding school, but originally from a village in the North. She wanted to become a doctor and she sent me photographs of herself dressed in beautiful traditional clothes, with fabrics of vibrant pink and orange hues. We corresponded more or less continuously since 1992, although she made me aware how the civil war was affecting the country and especially her family in the North. She was now a doctor in training, working with war casualties and the last letter I received from her was in 2005, just before the escalation of the conflicts. I hope she is well and practising medicine as she had always hoped, in peaceful and stable circumstances.

The final pen-pal to come out of this scheme, was a "wild card", to replace a request, for I think a girl from Portugal speaking in English. It was a girl from Egypt and now a great friend of mine. With this girl everything just happened really fast and it was like I knew her from the beginning. Maybe because she was from Egypt and Greece and Egypt have a long history of friendship, it felt like I was really speaking to a neighbour. Our letters came and went really fast, she replied very quickly and so did I. We exchanged numbers and often spoke very briefly on the phone. We told each other more or less everything in the letters, what was going on in school and in the personal lives. I cannot remember when we started writing, but when we were sixteen we decided that it was high time we met. The tickets were dead cheap and the flight only forty-five minutes long. I asked my mother if she could visit us and she said yes. But my friend was unable to get a visa to travel to Greece unaccompanied by an adult before her eighteenth birthday. But apparently I could. I could get a visa to travel and visit her and her family in Egypt by myself. So I asked my mother.

The debate lasted three months and my mother even consulted my father, something she almost never did. I was adamant that I should go. And of course she was adamant that I should not, as we did not know the family, the country, the language, the religion and the risks and dangers surrounding such a trip were immense. I am not sure how exactly I managed it, but I convinced my mother that I should go and made her speak to my friend's mother and father on the phone several times to reassure her. There were no mobiles at the time so I promised to ring every morning and every night and she had all the numbers she needed. And off I went.

The first time that I actually realised what I was doing, was when I landed in Cairo airport. There were so many people, with no queue, no visible order, that I thought I was going to get stuck in that airport forever. The fear came in cold waves, as people spoke loudly and pushed and pulled. And I just had a little frozen, trembling smile on my face, pretending I knew exactly what I was doing in that airport. I thought that was bad enough, but then I got out of the airport, through an open air corridor made up of plastic fences, which kept a sea of people on either side from devouring you. I was trying to find a face that matched my friend's father's face that I had seen in a photo. I could not see anything, but a sea of faces grimacing. As I was reaching the end of the open air corridor, I started to walk slower and slower, avoiding to reach the end of it, because what could await for me there, other than hundreds of eager taxi drivers to pick me me up and drive me somewhere or other? And as I felt the cold sweat and blood draining to my feet, in the very end of the corridor, there was my friend's father, a Telly Savalas look alike, the friendliest and warmest smile I had ever seen. And then my friend in their car and all of us driving to Heliopolis.

I fell in love with Cairo from the first night in the car, in the drive from the airport to the house. It still remains my favourite city, the atmosphere of it is unmatched by anything, the openness of it, the deep warmth and the mysterious allure of the Cairo nights are unforgettable. The Nile is something I will never forget either, I first saw him from the plane window, a huge flat illuminated black satin ribbon. A constant measure of everything else in the city. Of course, there is unprecedented noise in the streets during the day, a fine desert sand always moving in the air sticking to clothes, hair and skin, the heat reaching crazy highs filled with humidity. The hospitality I witnessed by my friend's family was unbelievable. They made me feel at home, I ate with them the most amazing foods, they showed me around so well that I got to see everything from a local's point of view. Not just like a foreign tourist. There are some things that I still think about and laugh, they represent Cairo for me so well.

I remember all the beeping of the cars in the streets as something out of this world. In the beginning it gave me such a headache, the noise of the horns being so intense and so much that it all merged in my ears into a continuous beeping noise, with occasional ups and downs. But slowly slowly I started to recognise and identify some noise patterns, beepings arranged in specific orders, with specific rhythms, occurring again and again. I asked my friend about it and she said that yes, there was a sequence of beeping for "turning right", one for "turning left", one for "move on", for "stop" and so on. Someone said that the light was so bright that the indicators did not really do the job so this was an acoustic alternative. There was even a beeping like, ta-ra-ta, ta-ra-ta, standing for ba-he-bek, ba-he-bek, (I love you-I love you) which a boy could beep with the car horn to a pretty girl in another car. I suspect there were also swearing beeping available. By the end of my stay in Cairo the beeping turned into a kind of music, sometimes rock-like, sometimes free-arranged and sometimes ethnic, making me involuntarily move my head in my seat with the beeps and occasionally jump on my seat when a genuine urgent beep was sounded.

One early evening we parked the car outside the club they belonged to, in Heliopolis, and I noticed that her father did not put the handbrake on. I wanted to say something, but I was afraid of being insulting, so I didn't say anything. I reckoned that since the whole city was so flat you did not need to use it. In the end of the evening, after a great time with friends at the club, we all walked back to the car in high spirits. But the car was not there. Immediately I felt guilty for not having said anything regarding the handbrake earlier. The whole area was filled with cars in our absence, all stuck together, bumper to bumper, but the old golden American car of theirs was nowhere around. I was surprised to see her father was not that bothered about this fact, and we started walking up and down the street. Then we just saw it, around 10 metres down the road, parked between two other cars. We got in as if nothing had happened. Then I could no longer keep myself from asking, but apparently no one used handbrakes, so that you could push the cars around to make space for everyone to park. This way there were no half-spaces left here and there, in which no car could fit. I thought that was the most hilarious and at the same time the most sane thing I had ever heard and I burst out in an uncontrollable laughter, that thankfully everyone shared with me.

The highlight of the trip was the visit to the pyramids. I think you are no longer allowed to walk on them, but you were still allowed then. I just could not understand it at all, as it looked like an illusion from close up. The sides of the pyramids were not smooth as they looked in the pictures taken from a distance, but made of high steps. Each step was huge, and you had to climb up it. I am not good with heights, so I did not go very high up. To get inside you had to crawl through a very narrow, dark, passage, people directly behind you and in front of you, filling up the whole long way. I am not that great with small enclosed spaces either and I was very relieved to get finally out, my heart pounding. All around the pyramids you could see Arabic horses and camels ready to give you a ride. I was immediately attracted to the camels, although horses were my favourite animals till then. The camels were just so cool and relaxed about everything. They sat around, lazily moving their mouths, as if chewing some kind of tobacco, occasionally spitting out like a bored sailor. They were above it all, looking around at all the silly tourists with a permanent lovely grin on their faces. I just loved them. Then my friend's father said we should all go for a ride and we could choose a horse or a camel.

Camel, modelling wax on steel armature, 1998

My friend's father and her brother and sister chose a horse, and herself and I and the owner were going on camels. Getting up a camel is a most peculiar thing. They sit down and you have to climb up their backs on a saddle. So far so good. Then they do the unexpected thing of getting up first on their back two legs, so that you suddenly fall forwards. You need to counteract this by leaning backwards. Once they are on their back two legs, they kneel on and then fully extend their front ones, so that you now fall backwards. Once on the camel I realised how high up I was. Much higher than on a horse. The camel walked in a sideways fashion, to begin with, leaning to the left and then to the right, making you very aware of your grip and feeling a bit wobbly. But after a while, the movement resembles being on a boat, it is quite relaxing and made me a bit sleepy. Then I realised we actually call the camels boats of the desert, probably for their use to move people and goods, but maybe for the way they move too. Just as I was getting accustomed to all that, and thinking what calm and well behaved and trained these camels were, the owner shouts a question to which everyone replies "yes" with great excitement. Someone starts to translate what's happening, but before I get hold of the first word, the owner makes an amazing call with his larynx, to which all animals, camels and horses, respond by breaking out in a frenzied race.

At that point in time I thought I was going to die from a camel fall. I was so sure of it that at some point when my grip of the saddle started to fail I almost gave up, just to make the fall come faster. The camel was making a great grounding noise in reply to the larynx calls of her owner and was running in an amazing speed I have never felt before or since in a car, boat or roller-coaster. When my arms and grip were failing an image of my mother passed like thunder in my eyes, of her blaming herself for letting me come here alone and dying from a camel fall. Then I ducked really low, with my chest almost parallel to the saddle, gripping the crazy camel from her hairs, the saddle too wet and slippery to hold on to any longer. At some point the camel slowed down and stopped, I cannot remember if someone shouted something or she just reached the end of the race. They all run and cheered and congratulated me for winning the race, especially the owner who wanted to take a picture with me. It's amazing how fast I forgot about my near death experience and indulged in some congratulatory handshakes.

I have since visited Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria one more time and my friend has since been to Greece too. She is now married in New York with a girl the same age as Aretousa. A great problem arises from this story for me, which is that I do not think I would let my daughter of sixteen, go on such a trip to see a pen-pal (let alone a cyber-found friend), who I have never met, in a foreign country. My friend has similar reservations. But I am afraid this is a step backwards in terms of the evolution of parenting. My mother yet again was light-years ahead of her time and I cannot thank her enough for this. Ironically, the weekend after I arrived in Athens, I went to see my cousins, and on Sunday, as we were playing hide and seek in their house, I slipped on the stair case and fell and broke my ankle. The Monday at school, leg plastered and with crutches, I told everyone that I got it from falling off the camel in Egypt. And everyone believed me and asked me to tell them again and again about the adventures there.

The letter Kappa, in Greek, is often associated with easy words for children, such as καλός  (good), κακός (bad), κακά (poo), καρδιά (heart) and so on. But I have chosen the word καμήλα (camel) to represent the letter Kappa. For years after my trip to Egypt I was obsessed with camels, drawing them from memory, making sculptures of them from different materials. For this letter I made stencils for Aretousa to colour in using a sponge.

The stencils 

Aretousa's desert