Come back, meltemi, all is forgiven! The meltemi, the North Wind that is the scourge of jellyfish and heatwaves has once again this year failed to deliver.

The lack of wind has meant that Andros until today has been shrouded in haze, and mosquitoes have made merry, as they have no punishing breezes to battle with before reaching the rooms of their victims.
The meltemi is a crucial wind that blows throughout August and keeps the Cyclades cool. At its best, i.e. moderate, it gets the ideal balance between keeping the air clean and cool in the blistering August heat. At its worst, it can blow so hard that it kicks up sand into your face, and in some parts of the island you feel as if yourself might be blown off the island by its mighty force - not a moped-friendly wind at its most irate. In general, however, the wind is a blessing, though of course when it blew and blew and blew throughout the summer people started to complain. Now that the weather has become less predictable, we have to change our assumptions about sunbathing, swimming and even travelling. A couple of days ago it was so hot outside that I could not be bothered to venture beyond the cool of my room and small terrace.
This has all changed. There is a slight meltemi today, and I am in the Chora, the very pretty capital of Andros. The sea is refreshing and deep blue, and I can almost guarantee there won't be any jellyfish.
Or won't there be? Yesterday, one of my friends told me she had been stung while swimming. This must be the first time in a decade or so that people have been. The meltemi used to keep the jellyfish at bay by blowing them out. Things in Greece veer from one extreme to the other, and in the mid-eighties, when there was less meltemi than usual, there were so many jellyfish lurking near the shores of Greece that it became a battle of evasion getting your swim in without being stung at least once. A plague of jellyfish was the only way to decribe the pink-purple creatures that spread across the coastline like a rash, glistening angrily in the sun. Some people stopped swimming altogether. Then, mysteriously, they started to disappear. And we haven't seen them since.
The first mystery is what so many of them were doing there in the first place. Theories abounded. For example, many of them floated through the Suez canal when it was closed during the Six-Day War. These immigrant jellyfish soon proved to me more successful at survival and breeding than the indigenous ones... Another theory was less exotic, quite simply, jellyfish-eating fish such as swordfish were popular at Mediterranean taverns, and were being gradually fished out during the eighties. The jellies were flourishing without predators to keep the numbers down. Why, then, did they disappear? Again, a confusion of theories. Conspiracy theorists reckoned that the governments of the Eastern Mediterranean were worried about the damaging effect this was all having on tourism, and maybe they had arranged to dump a chemical that killed the floating creatures in their breeding grounds. I go for a more prosaic idea, that it's all a matter of cycles, though why it's taken twenty years for someone around here to be stung by a jelly rather defeats the cycles theory.