Why I Dread the Olive Harvest

It is now four weeks, three days, sixteen hours and twenty-eight minutes until we begin this year's olive harvest. Not that I am wishing my life away counting down the time in eager anticipation until I can get out there with my olive-whacking stick. Oh no. Totally the opposite in fact.

This will be the fourth season that my partner, Penny, and I have attacked our four hundred mature olive trees and I dread the thought more and more every year. Now I know what to expect, the dread begins earlier and earlier. This time, the night sweats began as early as mid June.

So why, you may well ask, did we buy a plot of land with four hundred olive trees in the first place? Good question. When we first saw "Xerika", the name of the farm that is now our home, we were both stunned by the amazing views of sea, mountains and hills. Then my eyes focused on the five acres (20,000 square metres) packed with olive trees, vines and about sixty assorted fruit and nut trees.

My jaw dropped. "Oh, my God," I said.

"Problem?" asked the estate agent, who was showing us round.

"Yes, problem. We don't know the first thing about growing olives."

"It's not exactly rocket science," said the agent dismissively. "You'll soon pick it up."

Penny had immediately fallen in love with the place, however, so the decision was made despite my reservations.

The agent was right though, I have to admit. However, olive growing may not be rocket science, but the olive harvest is sheer bloody hard work and mind-numbingly tedious to boot. It is also an activity which should be registered with the Dangerous Sports Association.

Take last year's harvest, for instance. On the very first day, I had to go to the local hospital as I had a fragment of olive leaf lodged in my eye from looking up into a tree whilst bashing it with my stick. This meant that I had to wear an eye patch for the next twenty-four hours, which seriously affected my whacking aim. Not long afterwards, I almost took my leg off with a chainsaw.

I had various pulled muscles from lifting olive sacks and slipping on greasy olive nets and it took about eight months to recover from "olive harvesters' elbow" - in both elbows, I might add. Combine all this with the detrimental effect on my liver caused by having to consume several pints of beer every night to ease the pain and you'll understand why I believe olive harvesting is far more dangerous than jumping the Grand Canyon with jet-propelled roller skates whilst simultaneously ironing a shirt on the summit of Mount Fuji. OK, I admit that this example might be geographically rather tenuous, but I think you'll get my drift.

As well as the physical danger, there is also the serious risk of the total disintegration of relationships. Penny and I have exactly the same argument every harvest on an almost daily (and sometimes hourly) basis:

PENNY: OK, this tree's done. Next one.

ME: But there's more olives up there than you could shake a stick at.

PENNY: There's about twelve.

ME: Couple more bashes, that's all.

PENNY: We don't have the time.

At about this point in the "conversation", Penny usually accuses me of being anally retentive. I then retaliate by telling her she's slapdash and wasteful, and then we end up not speaking for hours. (Why is it that airheaded, disorganised people always accuse efficient and well organised people as being anally retentive? This thought could lead me on to consider what the opposite of anally retentive might be, but perhaps I won't go there just now.)

I have spoken to a number of friends in Britain who have never even seen an olive tree, never mind harvested one, and they all have this absurdly romantic image of what it's like. They seem to have this idea that Penny and I stroll out into the olive grove every bright and sunny morning, each with a little wicker basket over one arm, and spend a delightful day casually picking individual olives and singing cheery olive harvesting songs. Come to think of it, I've never heard anyone singing while they're harvesting - cheerily or otherwise. I have, on the other hand, heard an awful lot of swearing, groaning, sighing and moaning.

Now I'm totally against the idea of genetically modifying crops (or anything else for that matter) but in the case of olive trees, I would be prepared to make an exception. A friend and I discussed this recently and decided that it shouldn't be beyond the whit of some scientist or other to design the GM Self-Harvesting Olive. This would be achieved by equipping each olive with it's own tiny machete, which it would use to cut through its stalk and detach itself from the tree. It could also have a mini parachute so that the fruit would not be bruised when it hit the ground as well as little legs to enable it to walk to the nearest sack and climb into it.

Until that glorious day comes, however, I will have to endure several months of nightmares about the impending harvest and then the pure hell of the harvest itself.

I once read that, in ancient times, "only virgins and young men sworn to chastity were allowed to harvest the trees" (Athens News). Oh, if only I'd been an olive farmer in those days. I'd have every excuse I could possibly wish for.

ENDNOTE: By the way, for all those friends and relatives in Britain who have been promising for so long that they'd come out and help with our olive harvest some time and haven't yet made it - I'm just kidding. Honest. You'll love it!


(c) Xerika
October 2007

A Very British Obsession

‘You’re very brave’ is a phrase that we heard from quite a few people when my partner, Penny, and I first announced that we were moving to Greece about four years ago. If the truth be told, I don’t think either of us have ever really understood why we were being ‘brave' exactly.

Was it brave to sell up everything in England and travel 1,000 miles to Greece in an elderly VW camper van in the vague hope of finding a smallholding we could buy? - A little rash perhaps or even completely mad, but hardly ‘brave’. On the contrary, it might have been more accurate to say we were being cowardly as, to some extent, we were running away from certain aspects of British life. Let me explain…

As everyone knows, people in Britain are obsessed by the weather. It is by far the most frequent topic of conversation and even complete strangers waiting for a bus will spend a couple of minutes discussing how good/bad the weather is at the moment and what it is likely to do later.

As many of you will remember, ‘Turned out nice again’ was even the catchphrase of a ukelele-playing comedian called George Formby many years ago. In fact, the weather features heavily in all walks of British life. For instance, just think about the vast number of songs there are with titles like ‘Here Comes the Sun‘, ‘It's Raining in My Heart’ and ‘Fog on the Tyne‘.

So endemic is this obsession in Britain that I believe it should be classified as a notifiable disease. It could even be given its own TLA (three letter acronym) such as MOD - Meteorologically Obsessive Disorder. Don't be fooled into thinking that it's just a harmless way of passing a few minutes when you can't think of anything else to talk about. Oh no.

The seriousness of the condition lies in its complete lack of foundation in logic and sufferers should be pitied in much the same way as someone who goes around claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte (unless of course he happens to be a short, balding Frenchman who was born in 1769 and was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington).

My point is that, given that the weather in Britain is almost always rubbish, why do the Brits feel the need to talk about it all the time? Why not just accept that it's rubbish and talk about something more interesting like the price of fish? But no, we still have to have the incessantly repeated dialogues which go:

HE: Weather's a bit rubbish today.

SHE: Yes it is, isn't it.

HE: Do you think it'll be rubbish later on?

SHE: Probably.


I have to confess that, as an Englishman myself, I am not in the least immune from the affliction of being weather obsessed - a true MOD sufferer in fact. It was mainly for this reason that we moved to Greece, not only to escape the rubbish weather in Britain but, more importantly, to escape the endless discussions about it.

It has to be said, however, that in the three-and-a-half years we’ve been here, I am still a long way from being cured of my affliction. For instance, only yesterday (when the temperature was almost 40 degrees), I found myself saying “Hot today, isn’t it” to the woman who was filling my car with petrol.

Not unnaturally, her response was to look at me quizzically, then up at the sky, and then back at me again before shrugging and saying, “It’s August. What do you expect, you stupid English moron?” Okay, she didn’t actually say the ‘stupid English moron’ bit but she might just as well have done as it was heavily implied by her tone of voice.

Well, she had a point of course, but I don’t like silences and I had to say something. Perhaps she’d have engaged more if I’d said, “I see the price of red mullet’s gone up again”.


(c) Xerika
November 2007