The ferry rumbled into Gavrion, the main port of Andros. Night had fallen, the sea was calm, and lights of the village coruscated on the dark water.

The rain had left puddles on the front, and when you got off the boat and onto the jetty, pools of darkness lurked between the lights, giving Gavrion a mysterious air. Once the port had been a grey, shabby place, with peeling walls and a general air of melancholy as soon as the excitement of the arrival of the boat had passed. People who had come out to greet the boat had disappeared, like ghosts, back into the darkness. Now they had spruced up the buildings with whitewash, painted the shutters afresh in pretty colours, and planted flowers from windowboxes. Things looked better even in the dark, though as I made my way to Nikos and Ada's bar I passed a taverna, with three old men sitting in it at separate tables. The men were watching a flickering black and white TV, the neon lights and the flickering electronic screen filling the emptiness with harshness, like an old Italian neo-Realist film.
"Hello, Danny," said Nikos the moment I walked into the bar. Nikos was a youngish man in his early forties, with a benign face and a laid-back manner. "What a surprise! What are you doing here at this time of the year?"
"Er.. I'm taking time off work to er... write a novel."
"A novel?" asked Ada, his wife, a big dark woman with a big personality. She made an expansive gesture, as if to say that it was absolutely natural that you should want to brave the Greek winter to do such a thing. "What's it about?"
"Well, I'm looking into that. But I think it might have something to do with silk."
"Ah! Silk!" said Nikos. "Now, that makes much more sense than leaving your good job for a while and coming here in the winter. I take it you'll be staying in Valsamia?"
"Yes," I said."Everything's arranged."
"You'll get very isolated out there. Don't lock yourself up and write too much, or you'll go mad. Come down here as often as you can. I know some people who might be able to help you with silk."
They left me to my thoughts. I sipped my beer, sat near the warm fire, and started to think about what madness had driven me to do this - Nikos was right about the isolation. But then again, I was going to explore the island much more thoroughly than I had done in the past.
The following morning, I flung open the shutters and sighed with pleasure at the sun and the view of the valley, mountains, scattered farmhouses and sea below me. As the day warmed up, I sat out on the terrace and tapped away at a battered old portable Olivetti I had brought with me. Then I heard two hoots of a horn, and I went to investigate. As soon as I saw the car, I knew who it was.
Alekos emerged from the car. There he was, as usual, shadow stubble on his face, his dark hair messed up, a gentle giant of a man with an ageless face and a spirit of amiable melancholy informing his every move and gesture. His car was unique. It was a clapped-out Cortina, a wreck of a car, its paint eaten with rust and pockmarked with bumps and bangs. Its motheaten seats groaned with buidling materials which cluttered the back and poles were strapped onto the rusty, decrepit roofrack which looked as if it would fall off the car at any moment. Waiting patiently in the car in the only available space - the front passenger seat - were his pretty wife and son. Alekos had the genius peculiar to the Eastern Mediterranean of getting vehicles that in other countries would be on the scrap heap up and running.
"Hello, Danny, I saw the shutters open and came to investigate. What a surprise!"
'Yes, indeed!"
"I'm taking Vasso and Spiro on a spin around the North part of the island. Would you like to come?"
Charming though Alekos and his family's company was, I didn't fancy juddering and shaking around the island the morning after I had arrived, so I refused as politely as I could. He said:
"So, come and have lunch with us tomorrow."
"Okay," I said. Spiros and Vasso in the car waved at me. Alekos got into the car, and with a few shudders, trembles, and scutters, the car wheezed into life
and lumbered off as they continued their spin around the island.

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