There being no main drainage, most of the houses in this
little village have a cesspit under the ground floor. I won’t bother to amplify
the symbolism. But as this is a hilltop village, with very few horizontal
areas, this can sometimes mean that the cesspit of one house leaks down through
the walls of a house below, especially as foreign visitors use or rather waste
in two weeks more water than the rest of us use in a year.
Just recently my friend ‘Honey Boy’ (he doesn’t mind the
nickname as it would be hard to doubt his heterosexual orientation, and besides
he’s built like a — well, like a brick shithouse) had the unpleasant experience
of finding that the cesspit of the house just behind his business premises,
where he has the centrifuges (not yet bombed by the Americans) needed to
extract the honey from the combs, was leaking stinkily into the little yard
just outside his door. (Not, thank God, into the premises themselves.) He
complained, and the huge tanker and pump used by the council to deal with such
problems came up — twice — to empty the offending cesspit. But of course it’s
only a temporary solution. In true Greek fashion, a slightly more permanent
solution has been found; here is a picture:
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