We took the crickets home. As the children were fascinated by them, we created a little environment in a small aquarium, with egg boxes, a small cactus in an empty plastic pot and a few other things to amuse them. We searched websites to find out what harms them (dampness), what to feed them (orange slices, carrots and potatoes, as they dry out rather than going soggy) and what their life cycle is (short).

The ovipositor tracks are visible in the glass of sand

Within two days we noticed the females were burrowing into the soil around the cactus, poking their long ovipositors in as deeply as they could. These egg-laying tubes stick out behind the females, and help to distinguish them from the males, who are the only ones to rub their wing edges together to ‘sing’. Interesting, we thought, as we read that females could produce thousands of eggs which would hatch within days. We put in a glass of sand, the better to observe the laying process (see picture).

After several days of no baby crickets, we reasoned that the females were probably irradiated by the pet supply shop, to reduce competition. Good idea, we agreed, with some relief. Until, that is, either one of the females threw off the damage caused by irradiation, or our assumption was proven incorrect.

“Babies!” squealed Kira. “The crickets have had babies . . . and they are everywhere!”

And so they were. Unlike their heavier parents, baby crickets – about 2mm long – can climb the glass. They can get out the air vents. They can crawl and hop at speed and blend into the carpet. While their parents sit, docile and easily pleased under their egg boxes, their progeny set about exploring the wider environment with all the zeal of the younger generation.

Our experiment with crickets is now over, sad to say.

The NATC centre is pulled down before our eyes

My rented apartment in West Drayton is in a complex of nicely-designed and laid out apartments in a thriving part of Uxbridge minutes from Heathrow Airport and a short cycle ride from Stockley Park, where I work. The Parkwest development is on part of the site of the former National Air Traffic Control Centre.

The view from my window sets pulses racing, at least among the builders and construction project managers who have come to visit (so far, one of each). I overlook the destruction of the rest of the NATC. It’s an unfortunate view in some ways, as the Parkwest site is otherwise very attractive.

A relative who once visited the NATC in its heyday assures me that it goes down as far as it reached up, at least three floors, and doubts that all the rubble being created here would fill up the holes below. Have they filled them with cement?  You can’t tell by looking, and it’s probably an arrestable offence to ask, as activities on the site were apparently covered by the Official Secrets Act.

My current plan is to try to take two or three photos a week, then build them up into a montage. Who knows, maybe the site developers would one day like to buy it as a record of their good work?

Unexploded cucumber

Exploding cucumbers do what it says on the packet – as they ripen they build up a high pressure inside and, when lightly touched, the small, hairy cucumber-fruit bit pops violently.

Clearly a great strategy for distributing seeds, it also creates marvelous fun as adults and kids take turns to touch them, and hope not to get a faceful of sticky seeds.

Thanks, Maia, for introducing us to them in a monastery car park high over Oroklini!

For more on the exploding cucumber, here’s Wikimedia Commons’s entry on Ecballium elaterium.

Popcorn, pool and pizza

We let the children say goodbye to their friends in Nicosia in their own ways. Kira invited her friends to come and play in Athalassa Park (about which we have banged on endlessly), while Joel went with a large group of his age-mates to the cinema to see one of those interchangeable films in which (to quote the irreplaceable Mark Kermode) large metal things hit each other.

Top topping

Anisa, on the other hand, wanted her friends to come to the house and have a design-your-own pizza party.

Along with swimming, party games and unfeasible quantities of popcorn, the pizza party was a great success. With a range of topping to choose from, the kids designed their lunch in pairs, then enjoyed it together.

Chef-tastic pizza

Reflective

Influenced by Greek styles and colours, the mirror includes the curvy glass that Jane is currently experimenting with, and butterflies – Maia’s ‘signature’ image.

We apologise for the delay in take-off

Thanks to some good friends whom I had better leave nameless, in case someone later decides they were inadvertently breaking any rules, I had the chance to retrace some of my earliest steps before we left Cyprus in June.

Going nowhere

A visit to the old Nicosia International Airport, now a UN-guaranteed de-militarised zone, provided an interesting glimpse back into my own childhood and a poignant reminder of how corrosive has been the modern history of the island.

It didn’t, sadly, provoke any new recollections, nor did I discover much in the way of scenery and buildings that I could remember.

Did I once live here?

My earliest memories are from Cyprus. There aren’t many of them, and most have been augmented by later family story-telling, but I have some clear glimpses burned into my neurons by strong childish emotions that accompanied the events in them.

Careful where you point that ...

My parents were serving with the Royal Air Force when I was a toddler in the late 60s. It was a time of ferment, post-independence and featuring efforts by Greek Cypriots to control their Turkish peers and drive out the British. It was before the Turkish invasion of 1974, which was itself triggered by an attempted coup by Greek soldiers.

Little of that made much impression on me. I remember the first time I gleefully ran away with the other kids across the ‘bondoo’, an area of rough ground behind the house which my mother was convinced was home to a thousand venomous snakes. I could hear her shouting, but deliberately pretended not to hear. I must have been three or four. This is how I know that children are not born innocent.

Broken windows and guano

I can also remember walking alone on a path to visit my friend Karen. It could only have been 200 metres away. A stranger was walking towards me. He stepped to the outside of the pavement at the same time I did. He stepped to the inside, while I mirrored the step. We both made one more spontaneous effort to get around each other and failed – and I ran home crying. How curious that, with everything else going on, that event carries such weight in my mind.

Another moment that has affected me all my life was the birthday party of a slightly older peer across the road. I didn’t know many of the other children and was shy. The mum sat me down at the table and asked me what I wanted to eat. I indicated a slice of bread and what I suppose I took to be a jar of chocolate spread. They let me spread it, and I put it on thickly, then shoved a huge bite in my mouth. And that, oh reader, is the last time I ate Marmite. Even the smell makes me gag, to this day.

Anglican church, Nicosia Airport

We lived in “married quarters” near the airfield on what was called East Road – east of the runway, presumably. No-one I spoke to at the airfield this year could identify where that road might have been; most of the remaining roads are named after trees. There is a large area in which old houses and buildings have been demolished, and I suspect our old house is one of those.

The Anglican church at which I attended Sunday School is still there, and the old source of food, the NAAFI. The school I was too young to attend is now the headquarters of the British military contingent.

Dog-tired on the long airport road

The airport itself is a virtual corpse, held in paralysis between its once vibrant life and a decent burial. You walk through two inches of bird excrement to trace the route past the ticket desks and passport office, through duty free with its crumbling, filthy seats, and to the cavernous empty departure hall. A generation of filth and decrepitude has not erased the recognisable marks of its former trade, but it has turned it into a nightmare parody. It is a film set from Planet Of The Apes, a vision of the post-apocalypse.

Outside, there are at least two more corpses, the remains of aeroplanes that did not make it out when the Turkish exercised their ‘rights’ as a guarantor power and invaded in 1974. One civilian plane was apparently shot down after take-off; the other never made it off the ground.

The airport is now part of the 180-kilometre-long buffer zone protected by the UN and keeping the Turkish controlled north from the Greek-influenced south. This zone, which includes almost 350 square kilometres of land, is said to be a great wildlife reserve, and is more than seven kilometres across at its widest – but in the pedestrianised heart of the capital, Nicosia, it can be crossed in three steps.

This works for nobody

There is no doubt that it also represents the preserved agony of a generation on both sides of the divide. Like my own fleeting childhood glimpses, it is a powerful memory fixed by the howl of emotion that accompanied it. The politics that led to the division were stupid – on both sides – and the lack of a resolution ever since still is. But the impact of that actions has divided communities, families and a nation for nearly 40 years and more than a hundred thousand displaced people would like the dividing line to disappear so they can return to their family homes and lands and take up life on a united island once again.

Kira and class-mates sing

In addition to the abbreviated Macbeth (see previous post) there were a variety of short songs, musical interludes and group items.

Anisa keeping the beat

Both girls took part in recorder playing, and sang.

Hole focus

Click the thumbnails for slightly larger versions.

In harmony

Wild eyed and innocent

She was looking forward very much to playing a witch in the abbreviated version of Macbeth staged by the school as part of the end-of-year drama.

She had mastered her lines (no “hubble bubble, boil and trouble,” though) and spent several lessons learning how to cackle.

Come the night, she was painted up in vivid green, and had allowed her hair to go au naturel – a fine and ragged mop, dusted grey.

Astonishingly, as I took photographs using a long lens and flash, nature added a little extra twist. The red-eye in the photographs is entirely real and not embellished in post-production. (You may need to click on the one on the right to enlarge it, to see the effect.)

Dressed to kill

Whether the whole experience will pique her interest in Shakespeare remains to be seen. It could as easily provoke the kids to learn to love Chemistry, as the staff managed to secure some dry ice with which they made the cardboard cauldron smoke … and lightly burn the kids who came too close to it. Such an experience is always going to have a powerful effect!

More pictures tomorrow from the end-of-school drama, including Kira doing her favourite thing … singing.

Fiery eyes

No, Jane reassured her, snails only eat leaves.

“Are you sure?” continued Kira, a little more urgently. Jane picks up on the tone of voice, asks, “Why darling, do you think they do?”

Snails can be a bit nippy, after all

“Well, this one’s biting me!” says Kira, holding up her arm and pointing to one of half a dozen garden snails stuck to it. After pulling it off, sure enough, there was a little round ring of reddened skin with a serrated and lightly broken circumference. Slightly painful, I have it on good authority, but no lasting damage.

From an early age Kira has had a fearless approach to our creepy-crawly neighbours, which was probably a more worrying tendency in East Africa than in Europe. Our picture shows her with a wall that was covered with 40 or 50 snails, rejoicing in a late and unseasonal rainfall in Nicosia.

For what it’s worth, Kira was never bitten by garden snails in Kenya; only a single Cypriot one. I read that the snail’s mouthpart which supposedly does the damage is the radula, a ribbon-like toothed digging tool, but that wouldn’t explain why Kira’s bite was circular in shape. Any answers out there?

Bright spot at Athalassa Park

You’ll remember that when we first encountered the park, it was bone dry, after three years of drought in the Mediterranean island country. We found it an eery moonscape draped in ghostly tendrils of weed and floored with matted algae. It was only after unusually heavy rains broke the drought and filled the dam that it became clear how pretty – and how well-managed – the park actually is, and we spent a delightul New Year’s Day there. It wasn’t until some time later that we found the more garden-like St George’s park at the northern end of Athalassa, which is probably better-known to most casual visitors. Three of us tried to circumnavigate it on roller skates.

We can happily report that, by the time we left, there was still plenty of water in the main lake. It still has fish and crayfish, birds to eat the fish, and semi-feral cats lurking in the bushes to eat such of the birds as make themselves available.