On many afternoons in December and throughout the winter, I gathered driftwood from beaches, like a tramp scavenging for pickings amongst the litter. Nikos and Ada also liked to collect driftwood and a sort of competition started as to who could get the best and from what beach. Nikos and Ada won hands down, as they had means of transport; I always went for the beaches nearby. We were the first driftwood anoraks.

To keep warm in a Cycladic winter was quite an achievement, as few houses were centrally heated, and the more traditional two-or three- roomed houses had as their centre the hearth. Logs could be brought in from Rafina or cut-down branches scavenged from fields. Gas heaters were also a way of keeping warm.
Sometimes, it was a battle as to whether you could get the driftwood in before a storm. You could see storms gathering themselves above mountains, ready to wrap the island in angry rain. And then, in the depths of winter, a storm could cut you off for three or four days, no boats ran, you huddled around a fire and became like a hermit.
One day, I was discussing with Nikos the best way for keeping warm as we sat outside the bar on a pleasant, balmy December day, one of those ones that make you wonder how you could think that Greece could ever be cold, when a man approached the bar. As he drew closer, he spat and cursed and stumbled along. He stopped outside a building near the bar and started to shout at its walls.
The man was carrying a box that he had opened up at the top and bottom and folded up. He also had some rope, and now proceeded to take the box, unfold it, and step inside it. He passed the rope to a man with a cap on who was standing near him and ordered him to do something. At first, the man with the cap protested, but the box man was adamant. The latter then brought the box up to his shoulders, and the capped man tied him up with a resigned expression on his face.
"Harder! Tie me up harder!" said the box-man.
Reluctantly, the other man did so. Then the box-man went into fourth gear. He yelled, ranted and raved a few more times at the building, lay down on the pavement and kicked the ground, as if trying to break free from his self-created cardboard straitjacket. Dust started to fly. The act continued until he decided to get up again. He had to be helped to his feet by the man who had tied him up. The latter proceeded to untie his knots, the carboard straitjacket came off, and the man slapped his hands together in glee before skulking off into a sidestreet.
"The family look after him," Nikos explained. "I think he was once near a building when something fell on his head. That's why he hates some buildings, maybe they look like the one where that accident happened."
"That was quite something," said Ada. "And you're crazy too, as crazy as he is! You don't come down here very often, don't you get isolated?"
"Writing is a lonely business."
"Don't think you're being a hero," said Nikos, a little unkindly.
"I don't think that at all," I said, but he was right. I did think of myself as being heroic, battling typewriters and words and storms and isolation and long walks to parts of the island few people had been to. And I wasn't here with my wife or girlfriend or even some friends. And to make it worse, I was in the snare that John Fowles pointed out when writing the Magus - he wrote it after he had left the island of Spetse, where it is set. Though I was in a very beautiful place, it was the assault of that beauty on my senses that make it very hard to write. You needed not just the experience, but also a distance from an Andros winter to write about it. So, I was just taking notes, not really dabbling in the skullduggery of silk, or the mad fantasy of mysterious goings on under the whisper of the sea at night, ghostly presences in the olive groves, or unlikely island detectives trying to solve the mystery of the corpse washed up with the driftwood on, say, Vitali beach...
I returned to the house and thought about what Nikos had said. Huddled near the fire, I penned a feeble poem about the blue Hills of Evvia and fell asleep to the sound of a gentle, but cold wind as it danced through the groves.