Evil eye beads and other things you don't use any more

A languor that is also restless always settles on us when we are about to move on.  We don’t want to do anything.  It’s as if our curiosity has gone on ahead of us.  It took the arrival of two determined cleaners with clean sheets to evict us from our little place.  Grant had a minor mission that sent us to the next village.  He wanted some evil eye beads to put in the little bags we had bought for our great nieces in Lyon and Paris.  When I was in Greece fifty years ago the shops were dripping with them but now they have passed out of fashion along with all things peasanty.  Olive oil soap and smartly packaged herbs there are aplenty but no superstitious evil eyes to ward off envy and spite. 

I spotted a sign “Museum of Rural Life” and Grant  said
“Humph, we’ll give that a miss” “What do you mean humph,” I said,” I want to see it” and we are both so glad we did. 

One of Grant’s students once defined a museum as “A place you put things you don’t use any more” and there were lots of things like that. Gorgeous woven bags and coverlets. Embroidered napkins.  Looms and spindles and agricultural tools, rusty and gnarled.  I thought with a slight sense of shock that in my twenties I’d seen all these things in action – the ploughs, the things for winnowing corn but now they have hallowed museum status because they are redundant.  Apparently nobody is much interested in weaving now in Crete.  I guess it’ll take another fifty years for there to be evil eyes in the shops again and classes in the old crafts but right now everybody is too busy being modern and sophisticated.

The design of the exhibitions was exquisite with mirrors to show the backs of the woven bags and a strange poetic gallery lined with cloth that had regular big rips in it.  You could peer through each rip and see something humble and old, a pile of fairly rotten baskets maybe, or a donkey saddle.  It seemed to sum up the papering over of the past that happens when modernity takes over.

Our journey to Lyons has taken place.  We started out at 4.30 am and saw the weird Cretan dawn when for a while the sky is paler than the clouds and they look black.  A very efficient security lady went through all our pockets and put Grant’s bag through several times looking for an object that made a suspicious shadow on the xray machine.  It turned out to be a metal disk with Linear A script from Phaestos on it.  (A copy of course.)  She laughed merrily at her discovery.  We were not amused at having to squash everything back into our delicately organised luggage.  I was glad I’d done the washing though and there were no grotty knickers to encounter.

We are now in a very surprising little air B and B studio beautifully but crazily decorated.  One wall is a deliberately shattered mirror, another has moss and lichen and all sorts of other greenery apparently growing from it.  I honestly can’t tell if it is fake or some cunningly watered arrangement.  Tomorrow we meet the French Connection, or the first part of it anyway.  Grant is making dinner in our little kitchenette and all is well.