When the people of Britain go to the polls on Thursday there is a Greek Cypriot among those hoping to end up in the House of Commons. NADIA SAWYER meets him

With the UK General Election being held on Thursday all eyes from Cyprus should really be focussing on just one London seat, that of Islington South & Finsbury where two contenders have connections to Cyprus.

One is the Labour candidate and Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry. A close ally of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is contesting the Islington North seat, she is considered by some of her political antagonists to be a ‘champagne socialist’ and has been ridiculed by the British press for her television interview gaffes. Her father, the late Cedric Thornberry was, in his own words, “Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Cyprus participating in the inter-communal negotiations, UN member of the Greek-Turkish Committee on Missing Persons and Political Adviser to Unficyp (1981-2)”, and, by the late 1990s enjoyed semi-retirement in Pano Pachna, near Limassol. Ms Thornberry has herself visited Cyprus, including the north, and has promised her political support but, according to the official record of parliamentary proceedings, has never once, neither in 12 years of being an MP nor as Shadow Foreign Secretary, mentioned the island in the chamber of the House of Commons.

Her Conservative opponent, on the other hand, is promising to refer to Cyprus in his maiden speech should he win. Indeed, if elected, Jason Charalambous would be the first ever British MP with full Greek-Cypriot heritage. His father, George, was born in Pano Arodes but spent his early childhood years in Polis and his mother, Anastasia, was raised in Aglantzia, her family originating from Karmi, near Kyrenia. “They came to the UK as children of economic migrants,” says Jason during a Skype call interrupting his campaigning.

His father’s father served in the Cyprus Regiment of the British army in Egypt during World War II, and worked as a blacksmith in Cyprus, later transferring the skill to a job in the UK. His mother’s father had been a barber and a builder who also put his trades to good use in his adoptive country. Charalambous’ two Cypriot grandfathers settled their families in north London, enrolling their children in local schools. After obtaining his ALevels, George wanted to go to university but “he couldn’t afford it,” says Jason, “in fact, he couldn’t even afford a bus pass”. Working various jobs in the rag trade, George eventually set up his own factory and, with the help of family and friends, developed a successful business manufacturing women’s clothes. Meanwhile, Jason’s mother Anastasia had been to the London College of Fashion and was working as a fashion designer when she met George. Their engagement in July 1974, on the night of the Turkish invasion, was a memorable one.

“Everyone was glued to the television when they were meant to be celebrating”, recounts Jason. There followed three children, with Jason the last-born – in Enfield in 1986.

In addition to running the factory together, where Jason fondly remembers being “on the cutting room floor”, his parents opened a shop in Islington, working seven days a week. When the clothing manufacturing industry in London collapsed due to overseas competition, they switched to selling clothes wholesale from another shop. His parents’ hard work ethic would serve as the inspirational backbone to Jason’s life.

While his parents were toiling, Jason and his siblings were studying, even going to Greek school on Saturday afternoons and Monday evenings, which proved very useful when visiting relatives in Cyprus. He produces a photo of himself as a fair-haired toddler in the village of Pano Arodes, surrounded by his father’s family. “I vividly remember being in that village as a child and having a real bond with my great aunts,” he reminisces. “It was remote, traditional, poor… but I had a great time there, on the donkeys, getting lost in the fields…”.

Jason and his grandmother and great aunts in Pano Arodes

Subsequent family holidays were taken all over Cyprus, staying with relatives in the major towns. “From a young age, I had a good understanding of the island and the people,” he says, now a proficient Greek speaker. Although his teenage passion was architecture, an interest that was to later manifest itself in an important cause, he planned to study modern history at university, but was persuaded by his father and brother to do law. A graduate of King’s College, London, Jason went on to the Inns of Court School of Law to do a two-year, evening vocational course while working during the day. He was called to the Bar in 2009 and then cross-qualified as a solicitor qualified to practice as a solicitor-advocate, a position he currently holds both with a city law firm specialising in commercial and maritime law and a high-street law firm that he co-partners with his brother.

Nothing so far in Jason’s upbringing indicates that he would get into politics, so what ignited his interest? “When I was at primary school, Conservative MP Michael Portillo came and spoke. I thought that this was someone who was really inspiring”. The following year Labour MP Stephen Twigg gave the school a tour of the Commons and Jason was the only pupil able to identify Winston Churchill’s statue. “That, I think, was what planted the seed,” he says. In later years, there was a chance encounter with the former Conservative Party leader William Hague on a geography field trip and after the General Election of 2005 Jason decided to join the party. At university, he got his first taste for public speaking when an amusing speech saw him elected as president of his student hall. After university he competed in the party’s debating tournament, winning the final round at Westminster.

Responsible for the youth branch of the party in the London boroughs of Barnet, Enfield, Haringey, Camden and Islington, Jason inspired young people to get involved, by hosting social and political events. It was at a local party event, hosted by Theresa Villiers, former Northern Ireland Secretary, that he found himself sitting next to the current Prime Minister Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. “She didn’t strike me as a typical politician,” he says. “She struck me as someone with gravitas, depth of character and a reassuring seriousness, yet charming”.

It is this initial meeting that sticks in Jason’s mind and convinces him that she is the best person to lead the UK through the Brexit process. “The country voted in a democratic referendum to leave the EU… that was the will of the majority and that must be respected. I believe that if you start to undermine democratic processes then we are in trouble, because democracy underpins the very fabric of society”.
When he talks about democracy so passionately, it is easy to believe there is Greek blood flowing through his veins. When it comes to negotiating with the EU, Jason is also determined that May should be standing on the crease. “You need someone who is strong, who can bat for Britain and win,” he says. Coincidentally, like May Jason was a ‘remain’ voter. “I have since reminded myself that the EU while it started with noble intentions now appears to be heading in a different direction”. He cites the example of the EU-driven appropriation of bank deposits in Cyprus in 2013 as an illustration of this.

As Cyprus recovered from its financial crisis, the still single Jason gives credit to the advice and support the British government gave to its Cypriot counterpart when it came to public sector reform. Citing another symbol of the important relationship between the two countries, Jason refers to their co-operation on defence issues and the respective visits of defence ministers within the last year. In fact, he sees an improvement in Anglo-Cypriot relations, which he trusts, “will continue post Brexit”. Continuing along the same theme, he also understands the concerns of British nationals living in Cyprus.

“I know how important it is for them to live their lives with security and certainty,” he says, hoping that

With Boris Johnson at a Conservative Friends of Cyprus event

British citizens, wherever they reside in the EU, will be granted the right to remain in those countries.
Currently a Conservative councillor for Cockfosters in the borough of Enfield, an area containing one of the largest percentage of Cypriots in the UK, he is part of a racial equality effort attempting to bridge the gaps between migrant and host communities. When a neglected mansion in Enfield caught his architectural eye and he learnt about its historic, World War II intelligence-gathering role, he founded (after three years of hard campaigning) and now chairs, the Trent Park Museum Trust. The Trust is a charity working on the establishment of a museum and learning centre and is endorsed by among others another local boy, Sir David Jason (of Only Fools and Horses fame). Jason is also a governor at his former primary school and a fundraiser for an Islington-based disabled children’s charity.

Maiden speeches in the Commons are often memorable, but with so much to talk about, would Jason mention Cyprus if he were elected? “Yes, I would refer to Cyprus in the context of unresolved conflicts and refugees,” he confirms, believing that solving the Cyprus problem could be the catalyst for resolving other international issues. He would explain that in 1974 over 200,000 people were displaced on the island. He would argue that “every refugee should have the right to return to their home”. It saddens him that some Cypriot refugees in London still carry the keys of their Cyprus houses in their pockets. “You are reminded that, no matter how long the passage of time, only a person who has experienced being uprooted from their home can truly understand that pain”.

Indeed, Cyprus and its people have never been far from Jason’s mind. Since 2015 he has been Chairman of the Conservative Friends of Cyprus (CFC). One of his first achievements in the role was arranging for Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary at the time, to speak to the Cypriot community. “He knew the details and issues better than anyone in the room,” Jason recalls. In 2016, Jason hosted his second CFC event at the Conservative Party Conference, where Boris Johnson, who succeeded Hammond, spoke of his desire to see a solution to the Cyprus issue. “This level of engagement is invaluable,” says Jason, adding that one of the goals of the CFC is to get the Cypriot community more involved in politics. “Our community is under-represented. We have never had an MP in UK parliament and we are a community of 300,000 persons, it is only right that British Cypriots play a more active role in British political life”.
Indeed, Jason has himself led two parliamentary delegations to Cyprus, in 2015 and 2016, showing British MPs the Cyprus problem first hand and meeting with UN and political representatives on both sides of the island.

Jason’s passion for Cyprus is demonstrated not just with words and deeds, but also with pictures – behind his desk maps and prints of the island are clearly visible. A son of immigrants who is proud not only of his British identity but also of his Cypriot heritage. For his endeavours alone, one feels compelled to persuade friends and relatives in Islington South & Finsbury to vote for him, especially since he is almost half the age of Thornberry and contesting one of Labour’s safest seats. Not for the Conservative party, not for Brexit, but for Jason – just because he is a champion for the Cypriot community and a force to be reckoned with.

After 36 years at the helm of Intercollege and the University of Nicosia, one intellectual tells THEO PANAYIDES how he has moved on from being a change-the-world idealist

Max Weber and Albert Camus are coming soon – but first I need to ask about the facial hair. This is something of a frivolous question, I admit, trying to prepare Dr Nicos Peristianis for a dip in our highbrow conversation, but you do have quite a distinctive look – and so he does, a kind of vestigial goatee (really just a tuft of hair below his bottom lip) and a sliver of beard. It’s like this, he replies with a patient smile: when he first co-founded Intercollege he was worried that he might look too young, so he grew a full moustache and beard to project an air of wisdom and experience. Later on, however, the facial hair went prematurely grey (an inherited trait; his father went grey in his mid-30s) – and now he looked too old so he decided to revert, ending up with this Goldilocks solution: neither clean-shaven nor exactly bearded, but somewhere in the middle.

The medical school at the University of Nicosia

He was indeed very young when he co-founded Intercollege, way back in 1981 (he was born in 1954) – though he didn’t technically found it, a mainland Greek married to a Cypriot having established the name a year earlier. Nicos came on as a sociology teacher – but the Greek soon got frustrated and handed him the reins, a big job for a 20-something with no training as a teacher, let alone an administrator (all he had was a Sociology with Economics degree from the University of Kent). Then again, the college was small at the time. When he started, it was offering evening classes to a few dozen students. Nowadays – known, since 2007, as the University of Nicosia – it has over 10,000 (though only about half of those are based in the Nicosia campus), making it the largest university in Cyprus.

That’s where I call to arrange our interview, at the university with which Nicos has become synonymous – only to be told, to my surprise, that “he’s not here anymore”, having actually left a year ago. His term as President of the Council (CEO, basically) came to an end, he explains, and he decided not to stand again; he hasn’t broken off all contact, staying on as non-executive chairman of the board – but the air-conditioned office where we meet is a long way from the main campus, in a two-storey building which also houses a career-guidance service and his own Universitas Foundation. There are books all around (he’s currently writing a book on federations, and the volumes on the shelves are for research) and a pile of papers on the desk between us, heavily marked with corrections in ink. The office is almost bare, the only decoration being a Kandinsky print on the wall behind him.

Why did he leave the former Intercollege, after 36 years at the helm? Various reasons, he replies – and is open enough to admit that one reason was that “some tension” had developed among the faculty, mostly due to pay cuts imposed after the crisis (“I was trying to convince them that we had to be rational and understand that, since fees had dropped considerably, it was very difficult to bring back the old salaries”). It’s worth pausing here to note that openness is a central tenet for Nicos; one of his aims at the university, he asserts with emphasis, was to foster an open climate where anyone could feel free to criticise (not abuse, but criticise) anyone else, including the president. Still, there were other reasons why he decided to retire. For one, he’d been working 12-hour days, with almost no vacation time, for 36 years. For another, as the college expanded, his main job became to “sustain the growth”, snuffing out the academic work he’s always loved and forcing him to become just a manager. For yet another, he wanted to write, “and writing takes time”. Finally, he says, it had always been his plan to make the institution more impersonal as it grew, moving away from the founder and “pushing a more kind of rational, bureaucratic path”.

‘Rational’ and ‘bureaucratic’ don’t seem to belong in the same sentence, I joke.

Well, he shrugs, “that’s Weber’s typology”.

‘Weber’ is Max Weber, the German sociologist (1864-1920) whose ideas have profoundly affected Nicos Peristianis.

It’s worth pausing again to note that he’s one of those people who are very susceptible to ideas: he likes reading them, he likes talking about them, and – above all – he tries to live his life by them. Before Weber, there was Francis Schaeffer, a 20th-century Christian philosopher whose ideas were a big influence on the teenage Nicos. This wasn’t “churchy” Christianity but a kind of compassionate socialism, striving to be fair in one’s relationships and viewing people as “end-values” in themselves – a set of ideas that blended easily with Marxist thought when he went to the UK and became more politicised. (He defines himself as a Leftist but has never had much truck with political parties here, beyond a brief flirtation with Adisok in the 90s.) As a young man – and even a not-so-young man – he was fiercely, change-the-world idealistic. In his teens, he had “a severe clash” with his very conservative parents (his dad was a high-ranking police officer) over his heretical beliefs.

In his 20s he became a union organiser, making himself unpopular with his bosses at the Higher College of Technology (now Frederick University) – a big reason why he moved from there to Intercollege. In between, he spent the summer after his first year of university hitch-hiking from England to L’Abri, the retreat in Switzerland founded by Schaeffer, annoying his parents in Cyprus who hadn’t seen him in a year – then annoyed the folks even further by renting a flat when he came back after his studies, instead of moving in with them like a good Cypriot.

Was he an angry young person, or just stubborn?

“I don’t think I was either,” he replies with a shrug. “I just believed very much in changing and improving the world, so I wasn’t going to sit idle and just do the common things. I wanted to improve them.”

His personal life was equally principled. Nicos met his wife Maria soon after he took over at Intercollege, but they went out for seven years before getting married. He didn’t believe in getting married, didn’t believe in having children (like Sartre, he considered parenthood a bourgeois affectation; he wanted to adopt, which would at least be “a social contribution”), didn’t believe in private property.

That said, he now has three kids – Andrea, Myrto and Ioannis, all in their 20s, the experience of actually becoming a parent having banished all thoughts of Sartre (though it would’ve been nice to adopt as well, he adds wistfully) – and presumably a big house too. “I’ve made money in my life,” he admits, almost with a note of apology. “But I wasn’t trying to make it.”

Some will say it’s the usual story, youthful idealist turned successful businessman and pillar of the Establishment (Nicos is involved in various worthy projects, including an NGO called Politeia and a bicommunal forum called CAD, Cyprus Academic Dialogue). Others may view it more along the lines of the story behind his goatee – a case of always being a little bit awkward (looking now too young, now too old…) before finally finding an in-between style that’s unusual, but at least it’s his own.

‘Awkward’ seems a pretty good word to describe Nicos Peristianis, just as it describes many intellectuals. “One of the difficult things about me is that I’m relatively closed,” is how he puts it. “When people talk to me, I’m open – when they talk to me – but I always find it difficult for myself to open up to others, I’m kind of slow in that. I’m not very good at talking about small things, I like talking about big ideas”. He calls himself “a worldly ascetic” (once again quoting Weber), meaning someone who lives in society, unlike the old Christian ascetics who escaped into the desert to become hermits, but dedicates himself to hard work in pursuit of his beliefs. Nicos’ default mode is debate, not idle chit-chat. He’s not, by his own admission, a spontaneous character – he has to “decide something in my head before I go out and do it” – and is liable to wallow in anxiety (a frequent by-product of over-thinking) if he allows himself to do so, which he doesn’t.

“I used to be an introvert – more of an introvert – in the past, it’s through conscious effort that I’m trying to fight it. I’ve realised that, if I stay with sorrow, I become very sorrowful, so the way I face it is by doing things”. For years, he had a crippling fear of flying (another by-product of over-thinking), but cured it by keeping his mind otherwise occupied: “Now I go in the plane, I start reading frantically! I take books with me, and as soon as I sit, I start reading”. In a way, all the various successful initiatives carried out by the University of Nicosia – attracting students, organising conferences, starting its own excellent radio station – could also be viewed as little tricks being played (on himself) by its introspective president, to prevent himself from falling too far into introspection.

Nicos’ success as an entrepreneur is deceptive in another way as well – because starting a college in the early 80s was as much an act of idealism as a business venture. The idea of a Cypriot university (especially state-run, but private too) is bound up with the idea of a Cypriot identity, which is why it took so long to come to fruition: “The two communities adopted the idea that they shouldn’t create a university of their own, because they wanted their children to go to Greece or Turkey”. We don’t really dwell on this, but it’s clear from various clues (the book he’s writing on federations, his involvement with CAD, a reference to our nationalistic education system) that Nicos has strong views on the Cyprus problem – which may also tie in with something else, the fact that he fought, and nearly died, in 1974.

“The war changed my thinking,” he admits. It was the war that turned his mind to doing social work, and thence sociology. It was the war that complicated his Christian philosophy, so that “I started seeing more [of] the social issues”. It may even have been the war, indirectly, that led him to marry, insofar as Maria was a refugee from a poor family (it’s hard to argue bourgeois affectations with someone who’s lost her home).

His own experiences of the invasion – and here he switches from English to Greek, the memories too messy and fragmented to be expressed in the lofty language of books – are primarily of a chaotic day, when his column of armoured vehicles was destroyed by Turkish planes at Kontemenos, and an even more chaotic night attack he compares to Apocalypse Now.

“It was hell. When I think of Hell, I think of that night” – not least because everything around him was burning, as in Hell. Soldiers dispersed, even their officers not entirely sure where the Turks were (“I doubt they’d had more than one meeting,” he notes caustically). Bombs falling, people dying, the burning fields matching the fires on the Pentadaktylos. It took half the night to travel four miles, from the main road to the beach at Ayios Georgios – and meanwhile, he recalls the soldier next to him listening to popular Greek songs on his transistor radio, even as they attacked! “This is why wars are terrible things, because they’re not rational,” concludes Nicos grimly. “Anything else but rational.”

He himself is rational, of course, maybe even too rational; the ‘worldly ascetic’ tag doesn’t seem to go very well with hedonistic pleasure, for one thing. “If there is pleasure, it’s not your main aim,” he confirms with a chuckle. “You may enjoy life, but that is not your central goal”. He’s not the type to hang out in pubs and cafés, his main relaxation being to “close myself [in a room] to read my books”. I can see how he might’ve been a challenge for colleagues or faculty members – or even loved ones – who weren’t as devoted or serious-minded.

Yet the life of the mind is irrational too – because you focus on ideas so intently, so single-mindedly, and where does it lead at the end of the day? It’s unclear if Nicos Peristianis feels fulfilled, after 36 years; “One of my great disappointments, when I left the university, was how few of the values I tried to instill stayed behind,” he notes rather cryptically. In the end, his favourite philosopher may be Albert Camus on the myth of Sisyphus, the man who was punished by the gods and forced to roll a boulder to the top of a hill only for the boulder to roll down again, over and over. “He knows that it’s in vain,” explains Nicos, yet “he’s not yielding… He knows that it’s his duty, and he’s doing it because it’s his duty. Not because he likes it, not because he’s by nature an optimist – but because he knows this is his calling, this is his destiny”. Life has no meaning, yet it calls to us anyway. He walks me to the door and we part, each to his own meaningless destiny.

Bringing his kids up to ask ‘What would Jesus do?’, one Cyprus-based born again Christian and philanthropist tells THEO PANAYIDES he is often the vessel through which miracles happen

This is not the place to discuss whether miracles are real. Many, many people think they’re not, of course – not just rational scientific folk but even certain Christians and Christian ministers (they’re called ‘cessationists’) who believe that miracles stopped happening at the time of the Apostles. Dr James Sideras thinks they still happen, on the other hand – in fact, he’s sure of it, having witnessed proof of divine intervention, again and again, at the evangelical services he holds all over the world. They’re not his doing, he makes clear, he’s just the vessel: “I’m not a healer, Jesus is the healer… If you’ve come to me expecting a miracle, you’ll get nothing. I can’t even heal myself from the common cold!”. Still, there they are, confirming the truth of the Gospel. “I mean, there’s no scientific explanation. They’re divine miracles”.

The subject looms between us, an elephant in the room – the room being an air-conditioned office supplied by a friend, James having come up to Nicosia from his base in Limassol – as we talk about everything from his early years in the UK to his upcoming relocation (he’ll be moving to America next month, along with his wife and five kids). They’re a tricky subject, these miracles. On the one hand, if I assume they’re fake then it follows that James must be deluded, or worse – yet he seems so likeable, a laid-back, voluble man who says eminently sensible things like “I’m a firm believer in the redistribution of wealth” when he’s not talking miracles. On the other, how can I assume they’re real, especially without actual proof? The internet is usually one’s friend in these situations – but James’ YouTube channel is disappointing, his videos of the “healings” (sporting titles like ‘Boy with visual impairment instantly healed’) tending to focus on after-the-fact testimony rather than the miracles themselves. Unsurprisingly, his videos don’t get many views; his Facebook page, on the other hand (‘Dr. James says’) has 103,000 followers.

Looking down the list of people who’ve ‘liked’ his posts on Facebook, many of the names seem to be Asian – which, again, is no surprise, since he’s ministered widely in Pakistan, India and points east, having gone international since moving to Cyprus in 2006 (then again, he also held “miracle services” in Limassol last weekend). His most recent trip to Karachi elicited a stream of believers with tales of mystical healing. “The most notable was a young boy called Sahil. His mum was there, she confirmed it was a miracle – I’ve got him on video after the miracle happened, testifying that he was born deaf, totally deaf in both ears, and that night, after the prayer, his ears opened. For the first time, he started to hear. I mean, that’s almost unheard-of.”

Some will just say it’s a scam, I point out.

“Well, I think we’ve got to take what people say at face value,” he replies, looking a little startled. “You’ve got the boy, you’ve got the mum, you’ve got people that know him – I mean, how many of them are going to be lying?… There’s no gain for them. I’m not paying them, I can tell you. I’m not paying them to say these things, I’m not coercing them. There’s nothing contrived or fictitious, I can vouch for that.”

Mute Indian girl speaks for the first time

“On my first visit to Pakistan in 2016, three women who were blind in one eye began to see,” he recalls later. “They came up, they testified. Never met them before in my life!… Also, another miraculous healing was when I prayed for a woman in a wheelchair, she had multiple sclerosis for 20 years. It’s like you read in the Book of Acts, Chapter 4, when Peter said to the man who was crippled: ‘Silver and gold have I none but what I do have I give to you, in the name of Jesus Christ get up and walk’. I saw it: I prayed for her, she fell on the floor, she convulsed as I rebuked the spirit of paralysis – then she got up, and she ran. She ran.”

What can you say? Some will already have stopped reading, dismissing the whole thing as nonsense – but the better (or fairer) response is perhaps to reserve judgment on the miracles, looking instead at the man behind them. Miracles may or may not be real – but the Sideras International School is definitely real, sitting on the outskirts of Indore in the state of Madhya Pradesh and accommodating around 1,000 students “of disadvantaged backgrounds” who might not otherwise have had an education. James and his brothers funded that school, along with other philanthropic projects: another school in Uganda, a “huge project for orphans” in Parandwadi, India. Then there’s World Healing Outreach, a registered charity in the UK, chaired and founded by James: “If you go on the website you’ll see that we are helping brick-kiln workers in Pakistan who are like modern-day slaves,” he tells me. “There are child prostitutes that we’re rescuing in India.” The charity’s website (www.whoutreach.org/) speaks of “supporting single-parent families” and “providing aid in natural disaster zones”. These too, in their own way, are miracles.

What’s the story here? Who is this man who apparently communes with God in between giving succour to Indian orphans? The stages of James Sideras’ life seem to go as follows: first he was an English Cypriot boy growing up in London, then a 23-year-old Electronics student, then a businessman, then an itinerant evangelist in the UK (actually, those two go together), then a philanthropist and well-connected international preacher. The 23-year-old student started it all, deciding quite suddenly – though actually after some months of “asking the big questions” – to give his life to Jesus. “There was a moment on the 9th of January 1989, at one in the morning. I remember that time as I remember the date of my birth – because it was my second birth, it was the day I was born again”. He knelt down, cried out to Jesus to save him, “and something from another world came into that bedroom, the presence of God filled that room… I cried like a baby. I woke up in the morning and I was totally brand-new. I looked in the mirror – I had the same blue eyes, same colour hair, same facial features, but I was looking at a new man.”

The 23-year-old dropped out of college – though he later went back for a course in health-care management, followed by a Master’s and Doctorate. By that time, he and his two older brothers (both of whom also “came to Christ” after he did) had started a health-care business, providing services for people with learning disabilities. The services included nursing homes, where James also met a Mauritian nurse named Pascale who became his wife – and the business did well, so well in fact that 10 per cent of the proceeds (an equivalent of the Biblical ‘tithe’) was enough to fund the schools and other projects which they launched in the late 00s. The company was sold in 2013, and his brothers took early retirement. And James himself? How does he make a living nowadays? “I’ve made investments over the years to produce an income for what I do, so I’m – self-funded,” he explains carefully. No working hours, then? No, he replies: “I’m a full-time evangelist”.

He’s also a full-time dad, doing school runs and other mundane tasks in between working miracles. James is easy to talk to – mostly free of that strident, proselytising edge which tends to mark activists, both religious and secular – but we do hit a snag when it comes to hobbies. He looks surprisingly hip for a 51-year-old minister, with his silvery goatee and spiky hair, short at the sides; add some more jewellery to the large gold cross (worn over a red polo shirt with a flowered pattern) and he could almost pass for a music promoter, or an Ayia Napa bar owner (the trendy kind, serving sophisticated cocktails). Yet he has no vices to speak of: he doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink beyond “a tiny bit of wine with my wife over a meal”, hasn’t taken drugs since some teenage, pre-salvation ‘experimenting’. His main hobby seems to be keeping fit – he goes to the gym regularly – but above all, he says, “I love my children. I’m with my children every day, when I’m not on a mission”.

That’s quite interesting too – because James practises what he (literally) preaches when it comes to parenting, inculcating his brood in “traditional family values”. James and Pascale have no maid, which is deliberate; the five kids (aged between 10 and 18) are expected to clean up after themselves, and must finish their chores before they can go out to play. Boundaries and “good old-fashioned manners” are important. They all pray together as a family, every morning before school. The kids aren’t allowed to stay up late watching TV, and are often reminded to live by the maxim ‘What would Jesus do?’. It’s the kind of upbringing one expects to find in a fundamentalist home somewhere in Texas, not among the fleshpots of Limassol in 2017.

That’s the point, however: Christian values are converging and evangelism, like Dr James Sideras himself, has gone international. “Ordinary guy, happily-married man with five kids; I love Greek culture, I consider myself a Greek Cypriot,” he enthuses when I ask for a thumbnail portrait – yet in fact he’s not so ordinary, nor is he merely Greek Cypriot. The move to the US makes sense, both because he already has some high-level contacts (he was part of the “international host” at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC last February, with Trump himself in attendance) and because he already sounds quite American, railing against “liberalism” and singling out issues like transgenderism. All that said, much of what he says about today’s world applies to Cyprus as much as the US: “Sin is made to be the norm,” he laments. “I do believe that there is such a thing as sin. It’s sinful to lie. It’s sinful to steal. It’s sinful to murder. It’s sinful to commit adultery.”

You won’t find many people calling that last one a sin, I point out.

“No, they wouldn’t,” he agrees. “They don’t call it adultery, they call it ‘an affair’. They don’t call it narcissism, they call it ‘exploring yourself’. We have made ourselves to be sort of like a god. We decide now – relativism! – we decide what’s right and wrong. God’s moral law has been abandoned. There is an objective truth, there is an objective moral law – but now there’s no such thing as objective truth, it’s ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’.”

Is that right? Is there really an objective moral law (aka the Bible)? This is where divisions may appear, as they do with his talk of miracles; even many of those who’d applaud his good works nonetheless chafe at the thought of religious ‘truth’. After all, even James’ philanthropy comes with a certain agenda: the child prostitutes his charity (in co-operation with YWAM, ‘Youth With a Mission’) rescues in India, for instance, hail from the Banchara tribe, dirt-poor ‘untouchables’ who sell out their daughters as a source of family income – and the vulnerable girls, once rescued from their families, are placed in centres where they’re fed and looked after but also “taught the teachings of Christ”, and become Christians. Some may also wonder, given the atrocities committed in the name of religion in recent years, how James can remain a believer – but in fact he’s ready for that one, not just distinguishing between Islamic terror and religion in general but also offering this potentially shocking admission: “I’m not religious. I don’t believe in organised religion. I believe in a relationship with one person, Jesus Christ”.

What if the relationship starts to fray, though? After all, haven’t many evangelists faltered over the years, proving themselves hypocritical (or just human), giving in to what James calls “the classic temptations [of] the girls, the gold and the glory”? He himself is always on guard, he confirms: “There are some rules I follow: I will never be alone with a woman in a room, that’s for sure” (as much to prevent false accusations as actual temptation). Evangelists look out for each other, he relates, once again showing that he’s part of a powerful international community going way beyond Cyprus: “I just got off the phone with another evangelist friend of mine called Giles Stevens who’s in Brazil, they’re seeing an incredible revival there. Miracles. People walking out of wheelchairs. He’s part of a church that’s 300,000 people!… And he said to me ‘Jim, hold me accountable. When you’re on the phone with me, I want you to ask me: “How are you treating your wife? Are you managing your reactions when you’re feeling angry?”. Hold me accountable’ – and I say the same thing to him: Hold me accountable, brother!… We all need a check-up from the neck up.”

Quite a life for a former London health-care professional: preaching to multitudes, roaming the globe – and of course experiencing God, not just ‘from the neck up’ but also in his soul, wherever that’s located. I don’t want to sentimentalise James Sideras; rational scientific folk (aka non-believers) will say he’s deluded, and potentially dangerous. Yet he’s very amiable in person – and he does sound genuine, for what it’s worth. “I’m what you would call an incurable believer!” he laughs, when I ask if he’s ever prey to doubts. “With the amount of miracles I’ve seen, with the experiences I’ve had in Christ, I don’t think there’s anything that could shake my faith”. Even now, after 28 years of being saved, he marvels at our resurrected Saviour. “He said, ‘Come to Me. All you who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest’. No other person spoke like this! And all I do is bring people to Jesus”. Miracles may happen, or not really.

The pull of images watched in the dark pulled one director of photography into the industry. He tells THEO PANAYIDES how it can be compared to life in the circus

I imagine Phil Meheux on a film set. He’s marshalling his camera crew. He’s telling them to put a light here and a light there. He’s trying to be kind when somebody makes a mistake, not because he tolerates mistakes (he hates them, especially his own) but because “everybody needs to be encouraged” when making a movie. He’s dealing with everyday problems, and finding practical solutions. “The actor can’t stop in front of the camera when he’s driving a car,” he offers by way of illustration. “How do we get around that? What we do is put a big log in front of [the car], so he can’t go over it!… It’s like, if you can’t reach the top shelf you get a ladder. So it’s very practical in that sense, filmmaking.”

In between, I imagine him striding round the set, calling out to people as he passes, having a laugh and a bit of a banter. “What do you miss most about making films?” I ask (he’s now, he admits, semi-retired, or at least he’ll be 76 in September and hasn’t shot a feature in two years) – and he instantly replies: “The camaraderie”. Casino Royale, for instance (one of two James Bond films he made as director of photography, the other being GoldenEye) was a 118-day shoot, five- and six-day weeks; when the weekend came around, and you found yourself in Venice or some other glamorous location, you’d obviously meet up for lunch with the rest of the crew – and so “it becomes a family. And at the end of the movie, you’re still in touch. Send emails to each other, Christmas cards, whatever. So that was the real social driving force, shooting a movie.”

Phil is a down-to-earth person (I remark more than once on how calm and methodical he seems), but I get the sense he’d make a good drinking buddy. He’s tall and rather jug-eared, with a long face that gets quite expressive as we talk, goggling and grimacing when he’s telling a story. At one point, he springs to the defence of kids’ films, having made a couple himself: “[The studios] make more money from kids’ films than they do out of any other films, so why do people badmouth them?” – and suddenly he throws his head back in the style of the put-upon luvvie, hand to his forehead. “‘Because it’s not artistic! It’s not dramatic! It’s not Shakespeah!’,” he intones, with a dead-on imitation of a cut-glass accent.

Still, though: isn’t he bothered by the lack of kudos? Isn’t it slightly embarrassing when a colleague talks of some Bafta-winning film and Phil responds with ‘I was director of photography on The Smurfs and Beverly Hills Chihuahua’? “I find that people do denigrate children’s films and comedy films, yes,” he replies dryly – but clearly feels no need to apologise for his own involvement. For one thing, he’s made all kinds of movies; his very first feature, Black Joy in 1977, played in competition at the Cannes film festival. For another, as already mentioned, he’s a practical man – and the practical challenges involved in something like The Smurfs are considerable, having to gauge lighting and camera movement for objects which aren’t really there (the Smurfs, being animated, are added later). If the camera moves with them, how fast should it go? If they climb up on something, how fast are they climbing? Phil and his crew made little Smurf-sized models to get an idea, and of course technology helped: they now have “this gizmo” on Hollywood cartoons “which you put where the character is and it records, 360 degrees, all the light and where it is. And you put that into a computer, and the computer then works out how the animated character should look, to match the existing light”.

All this talk of computers brings up an awkward truth about the film business, viz. that it’s now very different to when he started out five decades ago. At one point I ask if he wishes he’d been born later (to take advantage of film schools, which didn’t exist when he was young), but he shakes his head firmly: “No, I wish I’d been born earlier!”. The 1940s and 50s were the heyday of filmmaking – Phil is a bit of a nostalgist, with an interest in film history and loads of books on classic Hollywood – before it got diluted first by television and now, inexorably, by digital cameras. “My job has a lot less respect now,” he admits wistfully. “Because when I was doing it, in the beginning, I was a magician”. Cameras were big unwieldy things, film (never video) was fragile, liable to be underexposed or destroyed altogether by unskilled hands. There were no monitors, so “you’d light something and people couldn’t see what you were doing” – then they watched the footage next morning and oohed and aahed, awestruck by what he’d created. It’s different now; everyone sees the shot before it’s shot and a digital camera will decide the exposure itself, “you can’t really go wrong. So there’s no magic left there now, in the visuals.”

‘Magic’ is an overused word, a clichéd Disney word. It’s a little bit trite to suggest that ‘the magic of the movies’ was what drew Phil Meheux to his chosen profession (the name, by the way, is Belgian, his Huguenot ancestors having moved to Britain in the 16th century). Yet there was something magical in those pre-TV days, albeit just in how remote and exotic that mostly black-and-white world appeared on the cinema screen; as a child, “I was quite a shy person, and I loved the idea of sitting in the dark – and if you go back into the beginnings of a lot of filmmakers they all say the same thing, that they just loved sitting there watching the images”. Phil’s family were solidly working-class: his dad was a driver for the British Admiralty, his mum worked as a shop assistant for extra money. “I wasn’t introduced to a lot of things that I had to discover for myself, like art and painting and music”. The notion of film as artistic endeavour would’ve been alien to 10-year-old Phil. Yet he also recalls watching a newsreel at the cinema that opened with a cameraman standing on the roof of a hatchback car – “and I thought, ‘Oooh, I’d like to be that man who stands on that car’. It really was as simple as that”.

Those two conflicting, or just complementary, impulses seem to have stayed with him throughout his career. On the one hand, a simple craving for the work itself, being ‘the man who stands on that car’. On the other, an attraction to something stranger and more mysterious, the ineffable pull of images watched in the dark.

On the one hand, his path into the industry was workmanlike. He left school at 16, took a job in the sales department of MGM, left for a job as projectionist in a preview theatre where he met some kindred spirits and made a few short films with his new friends. The films were amateur and mostly half-finished – but they helped him join a BBC training scheme as assistant cameraman, from where he slowly worked his way to director of photography. In a sense, it was just a job. “I didn’t really look at film as art,” he admits. “I just knew it was something I wanted to do, and something I had an aptitude for”. In another sense, however, it was much more than that: a passport to another world, the world of those glittering images.

Being in movies (especially then, when movies were precious and elaborate and couldn’t just be made by any kid with an iPhone) meant being part of a loosely-defined yet distinct community, a group of people – a group of artists, in fact – who were more nomadic, more free-spirited, sometimes more disreputable. I assume you meet all kinds in the film business? “Oh yes, you must mean crooks, cheats, liars, pimps, prostitutes and ballroom dancers!” replies Phil delightedly, with the air of a long-standing in-joke. “Yeah, it’s a huckster outfit,” he adds with some relish. “I mean, we’re like a travelling circus – and there’s always a snake-oil salesman somewhere in the mix. But below that, if you go to a circus, all the performers are hard-working, they train very hard, they care about how they perform.”

His own professionalism was in that vein, the stubborn work ethic of the tightrope walker who goes out on his tightrope every night, whatever the circumstances. He’s been on easy shoots where all went swimmingly and gruelling shoots where they worked for 24 hours at a stretch. On The Mask of Zorro, a whole day’s footage got scratched in the lab. On its sequel, The Legend of Zorro, a complicated party scene – Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones arguing while dancing – took three days to work out. He takes pride in being straightforward, an honest man among the crooks, cheats and snake-oil salesmen: “All my life I’ve hated ever letting somebody down, or making a mistake”.

There were sacrifices too, though it didn’t always seem that way. He never got tired of the hassle of film shoots, or the constant travel – “It’s always appealed, because that’s what I always wanted to do” – but it’s also true that he never married, or had children. “That’s partly to do with me, it’s not really the business’ fault,” muses Phil – but he also admits that “all the marriages I know in the business do stumble. And sometimes they fall apart, a lot”. It’s not like he’s been alone all his life (he’s now with a partner, living right in the centre of London), and maybe he did occasionally think about starting a family; “But you have to be into family, and bring your family up. All I wanted to do was make films.”

Friendships suffered too. There are only so many times that friends will invite you to dinner, only to be told you’ll be out of town on a film shoot, before they stop calling. Almost all his friends are from the film industry, and his life (even now, in semi-retirement) seems to revolve around that. He’ll meet up with old cameramen from his BBC days and is also on the board of the BSC, the British Society of Cinematographers, having served as its president for four years. He also gives seminars, shoots the occasional short film for free, and was here in Cyprus as president of the jury for Cyprus Film Days. What about hobbies? “That’s an odd point with me, because I don’t really have any. I enjoy cooking, which I’ve started to do recently” – though even that has a bit of a hidden agenda, being a way to keep his brain occupied and stave off the retirement blues he’s seen in fellow filmmakers. Cooking is a lot like making movies, he opines, being a case of getting disparate ingredients to work in harmony and also a task where planning is everything. “The creativity of filmmaking is about 10 per cent. The rest of it is just hard slog and pre-planning, and making sure you’ve covered every base.”

Spoken like a practical person, surely more technician than pretentious artist – though also more ‘magician’ than mere technician, intoxicated by the power of light to create those mysterious images you watch in the dark. What about his own personal dark side? Any vices? “I’m not going to tell you about some of my personal vices!” sputters Phil with a laugh. He enjoys a drink – “I’m a bit of a whisky aficionado” – but never during the day, not since the time in his younger days when he drank too much at lunch and fell asleep while operating the camera. (He really does hate making mistakes.) Mostly, however, he considers vices to be something unusual or unnatural, which is why he can honestly say he has no vices: “You know, I get cross if the train isn’t on time. I get cross at shop assistants who don’t know what they’re doing. But those are not vices. That’s just everyday life.”

I imagine Phil Meheux on the set of some $100 million blockbuster, giving that same unremarkable shrug as the usual circus unfolds around him. ‘That’s just everyday life,’ he tells his assistants, then turns his attention to the latest everyday problem to be solved. Did he ever have a really bad shoot during his 50-year career? Or at least a very bad day, or a very bad scene that refused to come together? He looks at me with a bright, slightly quizzical expression: “I don’t know really. I mean, I find it all quite – invigorating”. I guess work doesn’t have to be Shakespeah.

At the front line in historic times, THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman who has always done her duty, whether for family, country or cause

The black-and-white photo dates from the early 60s. That, at least, is a reasonable guess, given that the men at the head of the conference table are Archbishop Makarios and Fazil Kucuk, president and vice-president of the newly constituted Republic of Cyprus. The occasion may be a briefing or press conference – but the eye immediately goes to the young woman seated about halfway down the table. Partly it’s because she’s the only one looking at the camera, partly because she’s wearing the saucer-like sunglasses that were popular in the 60s – but mostly it’s because she’s so young, not even 30, wearing a half-smile and a light summer dress, and looks so fresh and alert compared to the stodgy men around her.

Maroula at a meeting with Kucuk and Makarios

That was the story of Maroula Violari-Iacovidou’s life, at least in the early years. The photo appears on the cover of a short pamphlet, published last month for a ceremony honouring Maroula as “the first Cypriot female journalist” – the ‘Cypriot’ tag added because there were indeed a couple of foreign-born women working in journalism when she started out in the mid-50s (Lana Matoff, later der Parthogh, and Barbara Cornwall, later Lyssarides, both at the Times of Cyprus) but she was the only local girl, a fresh petite presence surrounded by stodgy men, and remained so for about four years. “I decided that, since I was the only woman, I didn’t have the right to fail,” she says now, recalling the newfound responsibility of single-handedly representing her gender. “Because everything I did stood out. I was alone.”

Women, it goes without saying, weren’t expected to work in those days. Prior to making in-roads in the world of newspapers, Maroula had achieved another milestone, becoming the first girl from her mountain village of Spilia to graduate from the Pancyprian Gymnasium; three other girls had enrolled, she explains, but all three dropped out in their late teens to get married. One assumes there were quite a few frustrated Cypriot women who dreamed of be-coming journalists in the mid-1950s – so it’s rather ironic that Maroula was allowed through the door without even asking, or wanting, to join the profession. Her plan was to be a teacher, and she’d already passed the exams – but almost exactly 62 years ago, on July 3, 1955, a gentleman named Vias Markides who was editor of Ethnos newspaper (and also president of the Pancyprian’s alumni association, so he had connections) attended the graduation ceremony where Maroula won a prize for her writing skills, then asked the headmaster to approach her with an offer of employment at his paper. She had no experience writing news stories – only essays and fiction – nor any special ambitions in that direction; it was mostly due to the headmaster’s urgings that she said ‘yes’ at all.

To this day, it’s not entirely clear why Markides (and managing director Zenon Severis) decided to take a chance on a woman journalist, especially without being asked. It’s not like she came from a wealthy or well-known family: her dad was a self-made man who sent five of his seven offspring to the Pancyprian and laboured – rather like a journalist himself – to connect Spilia with the outside world, frequently driving down to Nicosia and bringing back a cargo of newspapers (including the Cyprus Mail) for the village coffee shop; but he wasn’t rich, and made his living as a fiddler at weddings.

More importantly, although Maroula had proved she could write, it takes more than a way with words to be a journalist. “It took boldness as well,” she nods. And what about herself, at 18? “I was bold,” she confirms. “Before I’d even graduated I’d become a member of Eoka, from May 1955.”

Now we’re talking. It’s unclear if Maroula’s bosses at Ethnos knew or cared about her Eoka affiliations – it wasn’t the kind of thing you made public – but there’s no doubt that “the struggle”, as she calls it, played a pivotal role in her life. The struggle was where she met George Iacovides, a fellow journalist who became her Eoka ‘contact’ then, later, her husband of nearly 50 years. The struggle was how she came to know Tassos Papadopoulos and Glafcos Clerides (another future President of the Republic, Spyros Kyprianou, was the London correspondent of Ethnos). The struggle may have been what tipped the balance to accept the newspaper job, knowing she could probably do more for Eoka as, to put it bluntly, a propagandist. “We were trying to boost people’s morale,” is how she puts it. “Whether that counts as propaganda I don’t know, but that’s what we did. We didn’t change the facts – we just honoured our heroes’ sacrifice… This, in my opinion, is permissible when you’re fighting for freedom.”

The struggle had been in her heart from way back. The first prayer she ever learned, as a three-year-old in 1940, asked God to bless Mummy and Daddy and “help the Greeks win the war” (they were fighting the Italians at the time). Later, called upon to welcome visiting clergy to her primary school, she’d always ask them to “bless us so we can achieve the enosis of Cyprus with Greece”.

The struggle placed her in hairy situations, frequently stopped by British soldiers after curfew and having to make up lies (“We’ve had reports of a fire in this neighbourhood…”) when her journalist’s ‘curfew pass’ wasn’t enough to persuade them. The struggle marked her first baby steps as a reporter, rushing out to the street, notebook in hand, after the deafening eruption of a bomb blast or standing outside the Central Prison – still just a teenager – to cover the executions by hanging of Karaolis and other heroes (“When we heard the national anthem, we knew it was all over”). The struggle emboldened her to tell Makarios to his face that he was “misinformed”, when she met the Archbishop for the first time in Athens – he’d just come back from exile, this towering figure, and Maroula barely over five feet tall – and he said he had information that morale was low back in Cyprus.

Maroula at the award ceremony

By that time, in early 1959, she’d left Ethnos for Ethniki, a new paper designed specifically to support Eoka – but in fact Ethniki was short-lived and it wasn’t long before Maroula left the newspaper business altogether, with its long hours and unsociable lifestyle. (Reporters typically started around 10am, wrote in the office till six or seven then moved on to the printer’s where they stayed till two or three in the morning, walking back through seedy neighbourhoods where a young lady shouldn’t really be walking.)

Post-independence she rapidly became a civil servant, first at the Ministry of Education then CyBC from 1966 till her retirement in 1997 – which is also, to be honest, where our conversation starts to deflate slightly, both because her life became more settled (with the obvious exception of the invasion in 74) and because Maroula has only good things to say about our dysfunctional Corporation, even breaking out the old excuse that its ratings are low so it can’t make enough from advertising; as if a state-funded channel should have to rely on advertising.

Actually, she has good things to say about everything. She insists she never experienced any sexism, and even the boys at the printer’s – rough, foul-mouthed men working in torrid conditions – turned into “angels” when she came in for the night’s shift. There was never a case of a source being less forthcoming, or an interviewee less respectful, because she was a woman.

One explanation could be that a sole female journalist isn’t actually enough to provoke a reaction; it’s only once the women start arriving en masse that men might feel threatened. But another explanation is surely that Maroula herself won them over with her dignity and humility. “Respect is something you earn, and inspire,” she tells me, adding that “I never gave anyone any reason [to dislike me]”; she worked hard, wrote well, and appears to have very little ego. The ‘first female journalist’ label may be a bit misleading, calling up suggestions of some fiery activist. In fact Maroula is low-key, and so self-effacing that it took repeated pleas before she agreed to the recent tribute.

Was she ambitious, as a person? “I wouldn’t say so. I just wanted simple things in life… I wanted to have a nice family – and I do believe that family is everything. I received a proposal to go into politics once [as an MP], and I said no, it’s not for me”. She was always active in committees and associations, serving on the Media Complaints Commission or the Organisation for the Blind – but that was different, that was social work and came under the rubric of ‘duty’. Maroula has always been big on duty, very much including the duty – the responsibility – of breaking new ground for women in her not-really-chosen profession.

She’s a big believer in doing the right thing, and proudly tells the story of her son Evelthon, 12 years old in 1974 (she also has a daughter, Eleni), going out in his Boy Scout’s uniform to help pack food for refugees, after having heard on the radio that help was needed.

She strikes me as an otherwise-modest person who becomes a soldier to a cause, drawing strength from the thought of a larger purpose. Family and country (“the struggle” again) are perhaps her twin pillars, two kinds of faith demanding two kinds of duty. Religious faith, too, seems to be present, judging by the icons ranged beside the ‘I Love You Grandma’ buttons and book-lined shelves (mostly politics and history) in her small apartment. She shows me a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, a plaque from last month’s ceremony, and a few slim volumes of her own poetry.

There’s a sadness here as well, I have to say. The flat is modest, Maroula looks a little tired. She’ll be 80 in December, and suffers from osteoporosis and other health issues. It all seems so long ago, this talk of Eoka – indeed, this talk of newspapers. Now it’s all Facebook, or at least it’s all online. Like many people her age, Maroula is upset by the “lack of respect” she encounters in the young nowadays. And of course there’s something else as well: her husband George – not just husband but Eoka contact, confidant and fellow journalist – passed away 12 years ago, a gap in her life that’s never been filled and in all likelihood never will be. How, I wonder gently, does a woman deal with becoming a widow?

“They say,” she replies soberly, “that the pain is diminished with the passage of time. But I reply that the pain is not diminished. It grows deeper.” Maroula nods gravely: “It grows deeper. The longer I live, the more I miss him. When I see my grandchildren – our grandchildren – growing up, every time I turn around and look at them I miss him more, because I think ‘He had a right to see them too’.”

He was the man of your life, I mutter awkwardly, as tears begin to trickle from Maroula’s eyes.

“It’s not easy,” she replies with dignity. “I was with him for 50 years. It’s very, very difficult.” Later, she shows me a poem in her latest collection titled ‘To George’ – but another of her poems (titled ‘To My Four Grandchildren’) expresses the loss even better, all the more poignant for being reflected through moments of joy. I’ll copy it here, though of course poems always lose in translation:

‘I looked around again
and again saw nothing.
The void grew bigger
the pain grew deeper.
I heard your voices and your laughter
and they all said
life is beautiful
since I have you
my angels!’

Marriage, you might say, was another of those larger causes to which Maroula Violari-Iacovidou devoted herself so unstintingly – just like Eoka, and CyBC, and journalism, and Cyprus in general. Looking back, the editor of Ethnos made a pretty good choice 62 years ago, whatever his reasons may have been. Did being a news reporter change her, as a person? “I don’t think I changed,” she replies with a shrug. “I mean, I never stopped being myself… I don’t regret anything I did, it was all so – imperative”. Given the times in which she lived, there was never a choice; at least in terms of doing one’s duty.

Now, of course, it’s all different. Values have changed, Cyprus has changed, society has changed, just like the fashions on the girl in that black-and-white photo – indeed, like the girl herself. “What we lived may seem strange today,” she muses. “To us, however, it was our life.” I say goodbye, briefly haunted by the image of a fresh, petite young thing in a light summer dress, surrounded by stodgy men.

Spending her life seeking experiences, one Greece based actress tells THEO PANAYIDES that she has always had adventurous tastes

Who is Michele Valley? The surname is Scottish, the birthplace Swiss (Berne, to be precise), the family French-speaking; her city of residence, since 1985, has been Athens. She’s been a film and theatre actress for four decades – but is probably best-known outside Greece for Singapore Sling (1990), directed by Nikos Nikolaidis. Let us note for the record (is it actually important? who knows?) that she plays ‘Mother’ in that film, a madwoman with a hint of the hermaphrodite – and at one point, having cornered the titular detective along with her equally demented ‘Daughter’, she straddles him, rides him furiously, then pees on his face. It is, as they say, a cult movie.

Her tastes – at least in art – have always been adventurous. It was like that in Berne, when she slipped into a theatre at age 13 and auditioned for a figurant’s role (ie part of the crowd) in The Threepenny Opera. “I was in school, I thought it was very boring. Life was very boring. I wanted to – have experiences, you know? To see things.” From her early teens she was always “the little one”, an eternally curious groupie – she acted and painted but mostly just tagged along, a young girl with “wide-open eyes and ears” – on the fringes of Berne’s artistic circles, going to school in the mornings then rehearsing and performing in the evenings and doing her homework late at night, so tired “I was sleeping on my desk”.

Where did it come from, this taste for excitement? Was the family artistic?

“No, not at all,” she replies at once. Her English is fluent but accented, one of her five spoken languages. The blue eyes are shrewd, the same flashing eyes I remember from the big screen. She wears trainers; she’s been walking all day.

What did her parents do?

“Nothing special,” she shrugs. “I mean – let’s not speak about this. I don’t want to speak about my parents so much.”

There’s a bit of a pattern here. Later, I ask if she has siblings and she sounds surprised, as if to say the question is irrelevant. I ask how old she is, and she balks: “I’m over 60, let’s say it like this”. She came to Greece from Paris – where she’d lived for nine years – to be with the man she loved, but prefers not to say who he was. Yet it’s not like she’s trying to block out any painful subjects. She and the man in question are still good friends – though they’re not together, nor is he the father of her child. (She has a son, now 26.) She and her parents never had any terrible ruction, and in fact she remains close to her mother (her father died years ago). Her reticence is more, I suspect, a natural distance, a critical eye that she casts on the world, including her own life – maybe even mixed with an actor’s instinct, as if to keep the mystery alive: who’s Michele Valley?

There’s something else too, a deep sense of seriousness. She’s very funny in Singapore Sling, but it’s unclear if she knew she was being funny: Nikolaidis has her speak her lines first in French, then in English – riffing on the cheesy old-Hollywood shorthand for exotic foreigners – but her po-faced performance gives no hint that she knows it’s parody (if anything, her seriousness is what makes it funny). She has soul, but no obvious irony. I can see why she might be impatient with those details of her life she considers trivial or frivolous; like a lot of people who’ve spent their lives searching for authentic experience, she doesn’t seem to have a frivolous bone in her body. She’s in Cyprus for three days when we speak, as a guest of the Images and Views of Alternative Cinema festival, and has been a high-minded visitor; she spent most of the previous day in ancient Curium, and now plans to visit Salamis. In between she’s tramping around Nicosia in the hot summer sun, trying to grasp the essence of the place.

What’s her lifestyle like in Athens? What does she do for fun?

“I don’t have fun.”

“No fun?” I repeat, confused.

“I don’t like fun. I don’t know what it means to have a good time, to have fun. No, I’m not at all interested in this.”

Doesn’t she like parties?

“Not at all.”

Surely she goes out, though?

“I go to see things that I haven’t seen. I go to movies. I go to art exhibitions.”

But going out just for fun?

“No. Why should I?” She tells me of the Greek friend who asked her out for coffee once, and of course Michele said yes (“I love coffee”). The espresso came, she drank it down in one, then stood up to go, much to the friend’s bemusement. Greek people sit in cafés for two hours, she notes in disbelief: “I never have two hours in my life to sit around like this. I mean, it makes me crazy… It’s not in my nature.”

Does she have lots of friends?

“No,” she replies flatly. “I have some very important friends, yes. ‘Lots’ doesn’t mean anything. Nobody has lots of friends – or they are not friends.”

I’m a little flummoxed, trying to take it all in. “Was it different when you were younger?” I venture. Michele shakes her head.

“Never. No. I’m not looking for having a good time. It was never my point. I want to have – to have things happening,” she exclaims, warming to her theme now, “to have experiences, to see things, to hear things. I love music. I love to swim, because it’s incredible… It’s an experience. For me, who was not born on the sea, it’s always an experience, even today, to swim in the sea. I mean, you know, something takes you – many times I cry when I’m swimming because it’s so huger than me, it’s so great. You give yourself to something so strong and big, that could make you like this” – she grabs my arms, to denote paralysis or worse – “in one second! This is not fun, how can somebody say that he’s going to swim for fun? I don’t know, I can’t think like this. And I was never looking for fun.”

Who is Michele Valley? Maybe this person, this woman right here – an intensely serious woman looking, above all, to be carried away. It’s not just that life in Berne wasn’t exciting enough, back in the day; it wasn’t transportive enough. I ask about the people who’ve marked her life – the older people she befriended in her teenage years, or theatre director Antoine Vitez (whom she met in Paris), or Nikolaidis himself, who provided her first movie role with Morning Patrol in 1987. What did they all have in common? She thinks about it: “[Vitez] knew so much,” she says at last. “I don’t speak about the attraction. He was an attractive man, for sure, but this was not the point”. What she finds most attractive – most irresistible – isn’t sex appeal but wisdom, something greater than herself; “They are masters,” she says of these mentors. “I always wanted to have masters.” One doesn’t hang out with a master, one doesn’t have fun. One submits, as one does to the sea, or the pull of experience.

Everything she’s done has been tinged with this seriousness of purpose. Her bohemian adolescence makes her sound quite the rebel – up all night with middle-aged theatre people at 14! – but in fact it’s no wonder that her parents were so understanding. “I never had to make a revolution, or to scream and they would lock me up and say ‘No!’ and I say ‘Yes!’ – no, nothing of this happened. Because I was like this, but at the same time I was very correct somehow”. She wasn’t off her head, or erratic, or a wild child. She planned her time carefully, half an hour’s sleep and 10 minutes’ homework. She rebelled, but she did it methodically. Her film roles (even the weirdest and most extreme, like Singapore Sling with its graphic violence and bodily fluids) have been similarly earnest: she values process – “to know the other, to create something, to find a common language” – and has sought a connection with every director she’s worked with. She’ll do anything, however outrageous or explicit, as long as it’s done with “love and trust”.

The problem, alas, is that roles are drying up. Partly, it’s an age thing: “There is this idea that women are interesting, or loveable, or beautiful or exciting as long as they are – how do you say, fructible?” (‘Fertile,’ I suggest, and she nods.) “After [that], they will have no sex life anymore, no erotic behaviour. It’s not true at all!”. That kind of thinking is bad enough – but the other problem, the final nail in her coffin, is that Greece is bankrupt and broken, and Greek filmmakers naturally want to talk about the crisis. Michele has been living there for 32 years, of course, and Greece is her home – “but I am not Greek,” she says simply. “I cannot be representative of the situation now”.

She’s had some work in recent years; Yorgos Lanthimos cast her as the mother in Dogtooth, possibly a nod to her mother in Singapore Sling. Still, she admits, “the financial situation is very difficult… I’m living again as when I was 20 years old, but I have not the same energy. I’m tired, you know?”. Her life is “restricted”; she struggles to afford little luxuries, and does translation work to help pay the bills. “I’m spending a lot of time in front of my computer, breaking my back and breaking my eyes. It’s just not how I thought my life would – end,” she says, pausing grimly before that last word. Still, she adds stoically, “I don’t regret my choices. The only thing I could’ve done is to work a little bit more, in order to save money – but it was not my style… I never dreamed of a big life.”

It’s a melancholy note on which to end (though of course it’s not ‘the end’, not by a long shot), sitting on a hot summer’s day in Nicosia looking back on an ardent, unusual life. There was never a plan; “I always followed the flux,” she recalls dreamily. Living out of one bag as a 20-something in Paris, meanwhile finding her feet in avant-garde theatre. The British man at the Café Flore who offered her his flat for six months, no strings attached. The openness of 70s bohemia, the “hope of love and peace”, the post-war dream of Europe – now curdled and degraded every day on the streets of Athens. (Michele blames her own generation, and worries terribly for her son and his peers.) Her first experience of Greece in the early 80s, when she loved the place but not so much the people. “I thought the men were very macho, I was not used to this. They had these incredible behaviours… At that time, a Greek guy would sit on a chair [and] he needs three chairs – one to sit on, one for the arm, and one for the leg. And then there is one chair left, it’s for you!”.

Greece has changed, we both agree. Has living in Greece changed her too?

In Singapore Sling

“Yes, of course. I am much more open.”

But surely she was open before? She was doing avant-garde theatre in Paris, for goodness sake.

“No, I was not open. I was open in my mind, maybe – but I was also quite dark, and I had my inside stories”. She was always, I suspect, an opaque, intense person: not relaxed, not fun-loving, impatient with convention and banality, always searching for the hope of transcendence. “I think I’m a better person now. I think Greece made me a better person.”

There was always something to Michele Valley, as there is with any effective actor – a presence, a tension, a glimmer of something unsettled. It worked as a flipside to her darkness, an outer proof of the inner yearning that made her recoil from the boredom of ordinary life – “a germ,” as she says, “my personal devil”. They noticed it in Berne, when a 13-year-old got up onstage and, despite zero experience, landed a part in The Threepenny Opera. The British man at the Café Flore saw it too, buying Michele a big breakfast (she was due to take the train back to Berne in a few hours; that encounter changed her whole life) and offering the use of his flat while he was away in South Africa – just because he’d seen something in her, and wanted to help. Years later, Nikos Nikolaidis saw it too, when a casting director sent him a photo of this unknown theatre actress who’d just arrived in Greece; and of course it also appears in her movies, her particular spirit, her own indescribable essence. Who is Michele Valley? That – whatever it may be – is Michele Valley.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a Krav Maga expert who has been on the mat since the age of six and explains why it is important to be able to move from Mr Nice Guy to Mr Not So Nice Guy

Everyone’s wearing black, I’m wearing white. I get a few puzzled looks, which is slightly unnerving since the people giving me those looks – mostly young men and boys (plus a few women) dressed in near-identical black T-shirts with the logo of KMG, Krav Maga Global – are also twisting each other’s arms and placing each other in headlocks. “We will not test with the knife today,” says the square-faced, soft-spoken man in the middle, demonstrating how to fend off an attack with a bottle instead. His students try out the moves in teams of two, using plastic water-bottles as props; there’s a fair bit of laughter and horsing around. One youngster successfully subdues his ‘attacker’ – then, in a classic bit of young-male tomfoolery, aims the bottle up his bent-over friend’s bum.

It’s not serious, almost a social occasion: a ‘bar fight seminar’ taking place in an actual bar, Potopoleio in Nicosia. Nonetheless, Krav Maga is the real thing, an Israeli fighting system teaching people how to defend themselves (“It’s not a sport… It’s survival”) – and Albert Kagalski, the soft-spoken man in the middle, is the real thing too, a Class 3 Expert who’s been doing Krav Maga since the age of 12. Albert is a kind of global ambassador, travelling widely with KMG, yet he doesn’t come across as a natural showman. He doesn’t joke with the students, simply stands there projecting quiet authority, showing how it’s done like a mechanic demonstrating the correct way to work a lathe. If your shirt is grabbed from behind, turn around quickly, glide your head under the guy’s arm, grip his forearm with your right hand then, using the right arm for leverage, push down on his face with your left; “OK, let’s go!” concludes Albert, stepping back to watch his charges at work.

I sit down with him later, at a corner table with his back to the wall (which, coincidentally, is where a Krav Maga expert would sit in a bar, so as to have a better vantage point). He’s 37, with unblinking blue eyes and a wry sense of humour; he doesn’t crack a smile when being photographed, but a rare gap-toothed smile does occasionally appear as we talk. His English is imperfect, Hebrew and Russian being his main languages; he was born in what’s now Moldova, spent his first five years in deepest Siberia (his dad was a mining engineer), then back to Moldova, then to Israel at age 10 with his parents and sister, part of the big Jewish exodus that accompanied the collapse of the USSR.

“We are teaching people to be aggressive when it’s needed,” he explains in his calm, soft-spoken way, indicating the seminar. Yes, I point out, but isn’t aggression a state of mind? You can teach people fighting moves, but how will they react if a real brawl breaks out? “We have techniques for that,” he replies equably, and tells me about “the switch from Mr Nice Guy to Mr Not-Nice Guy” – the switch that unlocks one’s inner “predator” and exists in all of us, however mild-mannered. Not that he’s trying to create killing machines, he goes on; violence tends to provoke a fight-or-flight instinct, and in fact both ‘F’s are acceptable. “If you can flee, you flee, if you need to fight, fight – just don’t do the third ‘F’, which is freeze. Don’t freeze.” In a way, what he teaches is confidence, trying to avoid the sense of helplessness that may cause people to become sitting ducks (ie to freeze) in dangerous situations.

Albert leading a session overseas

For him, this was never a problem. “My personality was aggressive from the beginning,” he admits. He wasn’t angry, even in his teens when he fought all the time – but the switch came very naturally, maybe because he’d been “on the mat” since early childhood (he started with judo at the age of six; nowadays he does wrestling, MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu as well as Krav Maga). His adolescence offered frequent opportunities for honing his skills. The Kagalskis settled in a “problematic” neighbourhood of Kfar Saba, just outside Tel Aviv, in the early 90s; they were never practising Jews, indeed Albert hadn’t even known he was Jewish till the age of seven – and of course he didn’t speak the language. The result was inevitable: “All the time it was engaging with the local population, the local kids. They didn’t understand us, we didn’t understand them, and it always was engaging.”

Engaging?

“Fighting. Fighting all the time. Almost every day.” He wasn’t angry, he repeats, “but I took very hard any – uh, not reasonable behaviour to my side from the local Israelis”. A challenge might be issued, an insult hurled, and suddenly fists were flying; it was juvenile gang warfare, Albert’s ‘gang’ being the local posse of recent Soviet immigrants – incidentally including a girl from Dushanbe in Tajikistan who many years later became his wife (they have two boys, eight and four years old). What did his parents think about all this? “They not have so much time for us. All the time working… So we actually was by ourselves.”

Did he win all those fights?

Mostly, he nods. “I get hit many times in my life, but I always finish the fight. At least when I’m standing on my legs.”

Has he ever been knocked unconscious?

“Me? No. Sometimes someone yes, but not me.”

So he’s knocked other people unconscious?

“Yes, many times.”

Back then, or recently?

“Back then. Today I’m not getting into this situation. I’ve fought a few times since my army service, on the street, but every time I’m – how I say – I’m trying to keep my opponent in one piece!” It’s an interesting point, in that Albert has the opposite problem to most people. Most of us worry about accessing that inner predator when trouble hits, but for him it’s all about controlling the switch – which he now does successfully, he assures me, though I still suspect his personal standards are a little looser than average.

“I will tell you a situation. One time, I was with my kid and my wife in the car. And some guy in front of me did some manoeuvre that was very, very – not smart, and I [only just] avoided a car accident. I stopped the car, I ran to him. For a moment, I think the control was lost” – Albert clenches a fist to denote uncontrollable rage – “but I know exactly what I want to do to him. I ran to his car, and punched his face through the window! Then, when I went to punch him a second time, I saw the guy saying ‘No, no, don’t hit me’.” His fist relaxes, to denote the switch flicking back: “I stopped the second punch, turned, and got back to my car and continued to drive.” He shakes his head at the memory: “It’s not easy to control these situations, but you’re learning all the time – don’t lose the mind. All the time, be cold-minded. And even if you lose it for a moment, recover it.”

“Wouldn’t it have been better not to punch the guy at all, though?” I ask, and Albert looks a little abashed. “But I guess you really wanted to punch him,” I add, trying to be sympathetic.

He nods, smiling ruefully: “I really wanted to punch this guy!”.

Not everyone will smile at that story. Some will say that violence is never acceptable, and will criticise Albert as a thug and a dangerous person. There may be something in that – but it’s also true that the road-rage story happened five years ago, and he hasn’t been involved in a fight since. He seems calm, not remotely aggressive, and insists that it’s now very hard to make him angry. What about with his wife and kids? It’s a well-known fact that kids make you crazy.

“Kids can make everyone crazy,” he agrees. “But in the family is different. It’s a different kind of crazy.” What happens when he and his wife want different things? Does he just back down, to keep the peace? “Yes, definitely! In the family life, I’m very calm, I don’t let myself get angry. Because, you know, it’s my wife, I love her, so she can do almost what she wants. And the kids too, with some limits” (though the kids are “really good guys,” he adds tenderly, and rarely make trouble). Speaking of women, I venture – going off on a bit of a tangent, but I’m curious about his reply – what do they want? It’s a well-known fact that alpha-male machismo isn’t very popular at the moment; our culture encourages men to be peaceful and sensitive. Does he think women secretly want an old-fashioned warrior – like, say, himself – behind the façade, however?

Albert looks puzzled, asking me to repeat the question. “My philosophy in life,” he replies at last, “is I’m always trying to find the middle. A man should be a man – but he needs to listen to his woman too.”

‘Being a man’ is a tricky proposition these days. You can see it in the youngsters in their black KMG T-shirts, trying out the Krav Maga moves as if cloaking themselves in a soothingly primeval idea of manliness. “A man should be a man,” says Albert Kagalski – implicitly meaning bossy, decisive, violent if necessary. There’s no doubt his aggressive personality has the potential to be thuggish and anti-social. He might even have made a good criminal – yet he didn’t go in that direction, doing his best to control the infamous ‘switch’, due above all to two factors. The first is the discipline of training, Krav Maga, and martial arts in general; the second is being a Jew, or more properly an Israeli.

Albert credits the army with having helped him feel at home in Israeli society, and opened his eyes to his Jewish identity (he did his service just before the third intifada, including stints in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon) – and Krav Maga, developed for the IDF and Mossad, is very much aligned with a close-knit, suspicious country forever looking over its shoulder. Krav Maga experts, as already mentioned, tend to sit with their backs to the wall in a strange bar, and Albert also recommends holding your phone at chest height when you check it (the better to spot attackers with your peripheral vision) rather than looking down. What he calls “the situation with the Arabs” is a constant factor in Israeli life, and has even been incorporated into Krav Maga training which now includes terrorist scenarios. (Isn’t that rather unlikely to happen? “In Israel? No, it’s very common! Very common!”) Why not trust other people, though? Why assume that they’re out to get you? It’s about “general awareness,” replies Albert patiently. “Be ready for anything… And try to be nice to people,” he adds, as a kind of afterthought.

Clearly, it makes a difference; just as teenage alienation led to near-daily fights, feeling like a part of society – especially a society that considers itself to be under threat – naturally leads one to be self-controlled and responsible. But the most important factor in Albert’s life is surely Krav Maga and physical training in general, acting as a lifelong channel for potentially toxic aggression. What was his plan, I wonder, back in those stormy days of adolescence? What did he want out of life? “No plan,” he shrugs. “The only thing I always do, I train. I do some sport. This was my guideline in my life: doesn’t matter what happens, I continue to train… The first [thing] for me always was to go to the training place, to the gym – and that saved me from many, many troubles in my life.”

In the end, his message is clear: when things are going badly (and even when they’re not), get some exercise. “Training, sport. Doing something,” he enthuses. “Walk, run, jump – do something with your body! For me, it’s very helpful, and I’m sure for other people too. I really believe in it. Moving, it’s life. Not moving, is death.” His life-plan, it must be said, remains rather hazy: Krav Maga is his passion, of course – but he’s tried other jobs over the years, started a rental-car business (it didn’t last), and has just completed the first year of a university course in Nutrition. It may well be that Albert Kagalski hasn’t really found himself yet – but I ask if he ever gets depressed, and he shakes his head firmly. We all tend to live inside our minds – but he regulates his mind through his body, the physical side that’s always expressed him most eloquently. Fighting keeps him fit, and may keep him sane. “Everything is fighting,” he affirms, and looks at me shrewdly.

Beating rivals half her own age is just the latest iteration of an endless appetite for hard work for Cyprus’ Flyboard leader finds THEO PANAYIDES

Enough of the hustle and bustle; sometimes you just want a nice relaxing day at the beach, interviewing a woman who flies around all day on a kind of aquatic hoverboard connected by a hose to a jet-ski. The sun does indeed shine brightly as I make my way down to Christos Water Sports, just behind the Cavo Maris Beach Hotel in Protaras, and the sea does indeed form a backdrop of crystalline blue behind Petra Wijnker – a bronzed woman with a cascade of blond hair – as she comes up to greet me.

Yet the carefree holiday ambience is deceptive. For one thing, though the water looks inviting enough, there were one-metre swells earlier this morning, and it’s still too choppy for a water sport that involves finding your balance at a height of up to 20 metres (the approximate height of a six-storey building); Petra won’t be giving Flyboard lessons today, indeed it’s one of those rare summer days when she probably won’t even go Flyboarding herself. More importantly, the relaxed sun-and-sea vibe is deceptive in another way – because her life has been eventful, and in no way a day at the beach. She’s always had to work hard – fight hard, train hard – to get what she wanted.

Her current phase is the happiest, and perhaps the most successful. The Flyboard world may be small (the sport was only invented in 2012, though it’s currently the fastest-growing extreme sport in the world), but make no mistake, she’s a celebrity. She went on holiday to Bali last spring, and of course made a beeline for the local Flyboard school. Did they know who she was, when she introduced herself? “Yes. They know definitely who I am, yes,” she replies in her Dutch-accented English. “Yes. Even in Bali, they know. So they were honoured that I was coming, and for me it’s nice to see how other people are working”. The Flyboard World Championship took place in the south of France last month and Petra, representing Cyprus, was one of only 10 female qualifiers. She finished seventh, making her the No. 7 female Flyboarder in the world at the moment.

That’s fame enough – but it gets even better, because Petra Wijnker is 52 years old. “All the other girls – some of them I could even be their grandmother!” she chuckles, speaking of her competitors in France last month. “And they are all in their 20s, so half my age.” On the one hand, it’s a thrill to take on younger opponents and prove yourself better than all of them (except six); on the other, it’s something of a bittersweet accolade – because she also knows her time is running out. “Flyboard all comes from your legs,” she explains, and younger muscles are naturally stronger. “In the winter I’m training my legs. I have a huge trampoline in the back of my garden, to jump on there and make moves and so on. But still, the level [the younger women] have…” Petra shakes her head: “No matter how hard I train, I could never go to that level. I want to, in my head I can do all this – but then I go out on the water and my body says: ‘No, no. We are not going to do this today’.”

You can’t really blame her poor body, which has been thrust into this life after 40 years of being relatively un-athletic. Petra did some dancing and gymnastics in her youth and was always sporty as a kid in her native Holland, swimming in the summer and ice-skating in the winter – but five years ago, when she watched a Flyboard clip on YouTube and instantly fell in love with the sport, she’d just spent 10 years running a successful bar-restaurant (The Romeo Inn) in Ayia Napa, her only exercise being the daily trek between tables. Before that she’d been a barmaid, worked for two years as a flight attendant with Cyprus Airways, co-owned a bar in Nicosia, and spent a few years in Holland working with tulips and other flowers (“I’m specialised in looking for viruses and diseases in bulbs and flowers”). Standing on a board, however, being propelled into the air by jets of water? This is new.

Then again, it’s also more of the same – viz., the endless appetite for hard work that seems to define her sensibility. Life at the Romeo Inn was no walk in the park, she tells me earnestly: her working week was “80 hours, easy”, often close to 100 hours. The place was open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, 8am to 2am, and she was the owner and manager, fielding every detail and mini-crisis; the Inn was always packed, indeed it was so successful that when she sold it (just before the crisis) she was set for life. Nowadays “I don’t have to work,” she admits – which of course is why she was looking for something to do in 2012 and settled on Flyboarding, which she now pursues with the same religious fervour. “If I go for something, I go full for it, I give everything for it. I fight for it. I work for it, yes.”

Work, for her, isn’t an end in itself. Work is a way of self-definition, a way of imposing her will on the world. Working with flowers in Holland – she was born in the northwest where all the tulips are grown, in the small town of Anna Paulowna – was “very beautiful” but it wasn’t enough: “It was boring. And I don’t like boring”. She wasn’t unhappy, and could conceivably have stayed in that job for life – but “I looked at my life and I thought ‘No, this is not going to be it. I want to see more’”. She was 27, and decided to go around the world – a noble plan scuppered by a certain Mediterranean island, one of the first stops on her itinerary. “I met somebody here,” she shrugs, “and I’m still here. That’s 25 years now.”

She’s lived mostly in Napa (she tried Nicosia for a while, but couldn’t handle it: “I need the water!”), but it’s never been about relaxing by the beach. Even her view of Cypriots is untypical, for a North European: “I don’t know anybody in Cyprus who is lazy,” she asserts. “Everybody is working – and working hard. I know many people who are working two jobs. A very hard-working people”. Whether or not that’s true (she doesn’t meet many civil servants in her neck of the woods), it’s surely significant that she chooses this particular compliment. Indeed, one could draw a straight line from what Petra Wijnker is doing now – pushing her body, willing it to compete against younger, stronger bodies – to her 100-hour weeks at the Romeo Inn and before that, to the girl who wanted more than looking after tulips in rural Holland.

Actually, the line could be drawn even further back, to something she talks about only reluctantly: her childhood, marked by the trauma of losing her mother to stomach cancer at the age of six. (She now does a special flight for breast-cancer awareness every October, holding a giant pink ribbon as she swoops on her Flyboard.) Left alone with a young family – Petra has a younger brother and sister – her father remarried, “which was not very successful, so we ended up with my aunt and uncle till I was 16”. Why was it not successful? She hesitates: “She was very abusive,” she explains of her former stepmother. “I am a victim of child abuse, and my brother and my sister as well”.

She doesn’t elaborate, which of course is understandable – but what’s more intriguing is the reason why Petra prefers not to dwell on this childhood unhappiness: not because she’s crippled by it, but precisely because she isn’t. “I don’t want people to think ‘Oh, what a sad girl’ and so on,” she explains, with the clear-eyed resilience of a woman who prefers to keep going. “Because I came out of it all right. I’m okay. My brother and my sister, they’re doing fine. Good jobs. My sister has a family”. It’s important not to feel like a victim, she says firmly. It’s important to be positive – and above all to fight, to work, to impose your will on your circumstances. “I believe in that, because you have to do it. It’s your life. It’s your responsibility to get somewhere. You have to fight for it, to get somewhere”. She’s forgiven her abuser, says Petra, and refuses to blame the past for whatever problems have been placed in her path. “Because everybody can become what he wants to become.”

Has Petra herself become what she wanted to become? Probably – though it took a while. Flyboarding has changed her life completely, she gushes; “It’s not work for me, it’s passion, it’s love… Actually I’m angry with the inventor of the board, that he didn’t make it sooner!”. Does she never have moments when she thinks ‘I’m 52, what am I doing here?’. “No, never. The only thing I get angry about is that my body doesn’t want to do what I want to do. That’s frustrating. But that’s – getting old. I hate getting old.” That said, the age difference is never an issue when she’s competing: “Nobody ever says to me, ‘Grandma, what are you doing here?’. We respect each other, because we know what it takes to Flyboard”. Maybe because the sport is new (there are only a few dozen female Flyboarders at professional level, though the number is growing all the time), they’re like one big family, says Petra – and later uses the f-word to describe Cyprus Airways too, which she also felt to be “like a family”. One almost wonders if it’s part of a subconscious impulse: seeking out surrogate families to replace the flawed one from her childhood, just as she uses work to dispel any thoughts of victimhood.

Then again, does it have to be so complicated? Maybe she’s just a girl who loves to Flyboard, the occasional excitement of World Championships being just a part of her love affair with the sport. Flyboarding isn’t only athletic; there’s an element of performance as well, as there is in gymnastics or figure skating. When competing, Petra launches into “tricks” – maybe a back-flip, or a double back-flip, or a spin or a “dolphin dive”, or a “Superman” where you straighten your body and fly parallel to the water. When in Cyprus, she (along with her business partner Kyriakos) also puts on shows, applying her creative streak to flamboyant costumes. They might do a pirate show, two Flyboards battling in the air with swords, or a James Bond show; their next event is the Paphos Beer Festival in a couple of weeks, when Petra will be wearing a custom-made suit inlaid with (waterproof) lights. “I’m the only female in the world who flies with fireworks,” she adds. “I have fireworks on my back and at one point, when I think it’s the right time, I let them go off.”

Flying through the air is always spectacular – but the more salient point is that putting on a show is less physically taxing, so she’ll still be able to perform even when her body can no longer hack it at professional level. It’s an odd situation, in a way, this stubborn Dutch expatriate who finds herself, in early middle age, as an athlete with a touch of the circus performer – and of course Flyboarding is also an “extreme sport”, meaning potentially dangerous. Not in a lesson, she makes clear (almost anyone can Flyboard; she recently taught a 93-year-old man how to do it, and would certainly have roped me into a lesson if the sea weren’t so choppy), but when you’re an athlete doing tricks without a life-jacket … well, all it takes is for the connection with the jet-ski to fail, for whatever reason, and down you’d come: “And from 20 metres, coming down in the water is like falling on the rocks. You’re black and blue. Guaranteed”. Risky stuff, for a 50-something who claims to consider herself “a very down-to-earth person”.

What’s the best part of being on a Flyboard, for Petra Wijnker? Is it the feeling when you take off and soar through the air? No, she replies, “the best part is when you’re all the way up there”, looking down on the world. She once saw a massive turtle swimming at the bottom of the sea, invisible except from her own God-like vantage point. “You’re flying at 20 metres and you look down and see this creature underneath you, that’s just beautiful”.

Some might say she likes the solitude, or perhaps the feeling of being in control (a feeling she didn’t always have in her early years), but the bottom line is clear, whatever the reasons behind it. “What makes you happy these days,” I ask, “apart from Flyboarding?” – and she hesitates, trying to find some worthy runner-up. “Flyboarding!” she replies at last, and laughs. “That’s it. I wake up with Flyboard, I go to bed with Flyboard.” She gazes out hungrily, at the platform and jet-ski and the vastness of blue sea beyond.

Petra Wijnker and Flyboarding Cyprus can be found behind the Cavo Maris Beach Hotel in Protaras. Call 99-121981 or 97-750560 for more information

One writer has found the meaning of life here in Cyprus, which reflects her affinity with islands. THEO PANAYIDES meets her

Edie Meidav brings out a notebook as I reach for my tape recorder: “I’ll take notes too,” she says brightly. Even before this, on the way from a charming old wreck on Aeschylus Street (where she’s been living since May with her husband and two daughters) to a table on Phaneromeni Square (where she often comes in the mornings, sitting on the steps to write and watch the world go by), she’s been peppering me with questions. Am I from here, i.e. Nicosia? How far back? Parents, grandparents? Have I been a journalist for long? Am I a younger sibling? (There are social cues that give it away, apparently.) (I’m not, though.) She’s unforced, voluble, pixieish; older film fans may think Rosanna Arquette, with that permanently startled New York manner. We order a metrios each, but her coffee sits untouched as she talks. The notebook is also forgotten, except once when she pauses, opens it carefully and notes down the Greek word ‘parea’. More on this later.

I’ve caught her at a very special moment, and not just because she turned 50 this year. It’s unclear if she’d have been so attentive, or asked so many questions, had our conversation taken place in Amherst, for instance – where she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts – or indeed in April, before she came to Cyprus on a Fulbright scholarship. Her first choice was apparently Greece, but Cyprus didn’t have many applicants (“I’m praying for you,” well-meaning friends intoned gravely before her departure; “It looks like it’s very near to Turkey and Syria”) so she switched to our unpopular island, and has found it stimulating.

“I actually really love Cyprus,” she says, unprompted. “This has been an incredible time for me. It’s been a creative resurgence for me to be here. I was feeling a little bit dead, and I feel it’s been a kind of magical time for me – from everyone I’ve met, and the complexities of the political situation… I feel the meaning of life here. I have a fantasy of coming back and working at the Home for Co-operation,” she adds, meaning the bicommunal NGO headquartered in the buffer zone. “I’m drawn to the place.”

Edie is superstitious about works-in-progress – but there may be, could be, hopefully will be a novel coming out of this experience, like there was many years ago when she went to Sri Lanka on another Fulbright and was spurred to write her first book, The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon. Since then she’s written two more novels and a collection of short stories, Kingdom of the Young (“Stylistically virtuosic,” raved the New York Times, praising her “long, looping sentences as full of life as her characters”), and there’s also an as-yet-unpublished novel set in Cuba, where she also lived for a while. Cuba, Sri Lanka, Cyprus: they’re all islands, I point out. True, she admits: “There’s something I like about the knowability of an island, the gravitational pull – in a way, the community it creates… Because it’s like, people really have to deal with one another here”.

It’s an interesting point – because Edie too, spent much of her early life as a kind of island, and took a while to acquire the knack of having to deal with people. She grew up in Northern California during the time of busing (the practice of transporting students to schools outside their neighbourhoods, to improve diversity) and was the “only white kid in my classes”, an island in a raging, politically-militant sea: “There was a principal called Big Daddy, and when we saw him we were supposed to do the Black Power salute”. Later, at the other end of the class-war spectrum, she felt herself an island at Yale, a Berkeley hippy – she’d come to the interview barefoot, having no clue what she was letting herself in for – surrounded by what she calls “the oligarchy of America”.

Nothing really seems to have come easily. “I wasn’t sure what was going on, I was trying to figure it out,” she recalls of her formative years. “I was thinking a lot. One boyfriend a long time ago called me ‘Murk’” – she laughs at the memory – “because I would get into a murky state of mind”. (“He didn’t call me that all the time,” she adds, in fairness to that long-ago beau.) Her family sounds a bit overpowering, one of those “super-driven” idealistic Jewish families where everything’s a drama and a big deal. (“What kind of name is ‘Meidav’?” I ask; “An Israeli acronym for a Polish patriarch,” she replies mysteriously, adding that the family charts its provenance to a 2nd-century sandal-maker in Palestine.) Her mum’s a sociologist and engineer who taught belly-dancing on Sundays; her dad was a “clean-energy visionary” who devoted himself to developing clean energy in countries like Honduras and Kenya. Her older brother lives in Seattle, and until recently had “a very cool job restoring the salmon habitat for a Native American tribe on a reservation”. Edie herself has been working at Kofinou refugee camp during her few months in Cyprus, teaching English to victims of war, and has also volunteered at the SOS Children’s Village orphanage in the occupied north – all in addition to thinking about her novel, and peppering people like me with questions.

It’s not just because she’s writing a novel, though: she reaches out to people all the time, it’s her style. (A few days later I see her at the anti-invasion demonstrations on the Green Line, blithely taking photos of hardliners who surely wouldn’t care for being Instagrammed by some curious American.) “My daughter was just saying to me today that I come on very intensely, like a wave, in the way that I connect to people,” she admits. Yet it’s not something simple, not just a case of being friendly. It’s a kind of survival mechanism from when she was young, allied to the fact that – like all writers – she’s forever trying to figure out the prickly process of connecting with others.

“I was sitting at a table with a bunch of writers,” recalls Edie, “and I suddenly realised that everyone had some oblique relation to speech when they were young. One person stuttered, one person was quiet…” Edie herself was quiet, so much so that her face would flush and her heart would race at the thought of speaking in public. “My family’s really vocal,” she explains, “and there wasn’t really room to speak in that family”. As the youngest of three, she slipped into the background, playing the piano in lieu of speech: “I wasted hours of my youth improvising on a piano”. She seems to have been very promising (her teacher was a daughter of the legendary Jascha Heifetz) – then again she also spent time in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and story editor, and entered Yale as a Biology major, and later went to New York on a dance scholarship, and wrote a story as a teen (about the accidental death of her best friend when she spent a semester in Israel) that won a high-school prize and led her to a class with noted author Peter Matthiessen, and spent a “bohemian summer” living with the gypsies in Granada, and “thought I was going to be an artist” for a while in college so she’d venture to the roughest parts of New Haven in order to sketch sketchy people. It’s fair to say that finding herself took a while.

Improvisation is one possible motif in trying to make sense of this complicated woman. The way she writes has a lot to do with her days at the piano, “listening to possibilities, as one does when improvising”. She likes to “get lost in the words,” says Edie, writing way too much and treating the process as a kind of subtractive sculpture (the trick lies in getting her ego out of the way, she explains) – and of course the way she goes through life is also improvisational, trying things out and seeing where they take her, engaging with people and hoping they’ll respond to her riffs with riffs of their own. Has it ever gone wrong? Many times, she replies. She’s been robbed, and held up at knifepoint; worst of all, she’s been misunderstood. She tells me of a time in Sri Lanka, when her friendly openness with the local houseboy (she was house-sitting for a US Embassy family at the time) was predictably misinterpreted as “Western woman is open to sex”. Her marriage, I suspect, has been a useful anchor in this regard (she’s been with her husband for 20 years; their daughters are 14 and 10) – “but it could’ve gone differently,” in terms of her emotional life.

Islands, as already mentioned, are another motif in trying to encapsulate Edie – not just in terms of being a misfit but in terms of being an individual, the atomised self putting up a sea of self-consciousness between itself and other selves, the ego that has to be sidelined in order for the writing to take place. She’s always tended to take her inner struggles desperately seriously, and also tended to see other people in opposition to herself – not as enemies or rivals, but simply as other islands; “I think it took me a while to find a community that wasn’t just a community of other beautifully-isolated selves”. Academia helps nowadays (a discipline she got into almost by accident, though she’s now a newly-tenured professor), and of course writing helps above all. At one point we talk religion, and Edie says she used to be agnostic until she started writing her first novel: “Because I used to think ‘Shouldn’t I really be volunteering in a soup kitchen with Mother Teresa in India, what’s this whole self-indulgent artist business?’… [But then] I think every artist knows this feeling, when you feel your ego leaves the room and you’re connected, there’s some kind of channel. And so it was through writing that I began to believe in God”.

Letting go of the ego – or allowing it to be subsumed, in a group for instance. This is where she carefully notes down the word ‘parea’ (I assume it’ll appear in the Cyprus novel), the Greek word for a gang of steady friends you socialise with systematically. “It’s amazing to me here, and it’s amazing to my children too,” she marvels – the way Cypriots “travel in groups”, groups from childhood, groups from high school; “It’s actually beautiful to me, I haven’t quite had that experience in my life ever”. It’s flattering to think we’ve inspired her – though, to be honest, Edie’s Cyprus experience has been somewhat selective. She loves that Nicosia is so multicultural, citing the clusters of Sri Lankans and Filipinos – but in fact that mostly applies to old Nicosia, viewed as a ghetto by many suburbanites who have no contact with other cultures. She also loves the Home for Co-operation, its buffer-zone protests and poetry readings reminding her of “the 60s idealists of my childhood”; but most Cypriots don’t share that level of bicommunal enthusiasm, being largely apolitical when not actively hostile.

Does it matter? Not really. An island (like a person) is a closed system, offering – to use her own word – a ‘knowable’ narrative. It’s silly to expect that Edie Meidav’s novel will encompass the whole of Cyprus, or even the ‘real’ Cyprus. Instead it’ll feature the Cyprus that speaks to her personally – the country that stirred her creative juices and may have aroused her self-admitted “saviour complex” (probably inherited from her fervently virtuous family), the country of guitars being strummed in the buffer zone and mornings spent writing on the steps of Phaneromeni, and the spirit of her late uncle Emmanuel who ran a camp for Jewish refugees in Xylotymbou in 1948.

One thing’s for sure: it’ll be a literary novel (assuming it gets written, of course, which is still far from certain), likely to receive rave reviews and sell … well, who knows how many copies? “People ask ‘How are your books doing?’ and I actually don’t know,” admits Edie, all too aware that being a writer is hard (“I could paper this whole square with all the rejection letters I’ve received!”) and finding readers to validate your toil, in this day and age, is even harder. Then again, brain studies show that people who read a lot of fiction literally change their neural pathways, strengthening the neurons that create empathy; that’s why “I still believe in novels at this late point in our history,” she affirms, seeing in books “a technology for overcoming that atomised self”. Islands again.

In the end, it makes no difference why she writes. This is what she does, the end-point of 50 years of wandering and improvising, part of the motley agglomeration of all her other quirks and character traits: “I love to dance. I love speaking another language. I love hiking. I love film.” I assume she loves people too – or maybe not as such, maybe just the endless circuitous process of engaging and trying to connect with them. She leaves me with an absolutely perfect quote, by William Gaddis: “The writer is always a shambles following his work around”. I don’t know the work, though I hope to read that Cyprus novel someday. But I met the shambles, and found her fascinating.

Custom-designing rings for Johnny Depp and saving lives, THEO PANAYIDES meets a former male model scared of love

Johnny Depp asked for a skull ring, says Marcus Platrides, founder and CEO of Etherial Jewellery – just a basic skull ring, nothing fancy. Custom-made, of course, not from the house line; “I don’t think he’d ever buy something from the house line”. He and Johnny only ever spoke on the phone, he explains – but, for instance, the members of venerable rock band Uriah Heep “knocked on my door” here in Nicosia, and he met Kim Wilde in Brussels where Kim was performing onstage and Marcus was accepting an EU business award. We talk on Wednesday; on Friday he’s off to London to design something for Djibril Cissé, the former Liverpool striker and current DJ. Fleur-de-lis is likely to feature in the design, muses Marcus; Cissé, being French, has a thing for fleur-de-lis.

It seems a bit unlikely, Captain Jack Sparrow phoning a one-man operation in Nicosia (there are no permanent employees; it’s just Marcus and a handful of freelancers) for his jewellery needs – but in fact it’s not so unlikely. For one thing, says Marcus, there are only three or four designers in the world making his particular niche, variously described as “rock-chic jewellery” or “luxury skull jewellery” – i.e. rings, pendants, earrings and so forth which are shaped like skulls, bones and vertebrae but made of precious metals and precious or semi-precious stones. For another, though Etherial has a cursory showroom in Nicosia (“I’m never there, I never actually go. It’s by appointment only”), hardly any of his sales come from Cyprus; instead, Marcus makes arrangements for his products to appear in boutiques and hotel shops in places like Las Vegas or Ibiza, which presumably is where Johnny Depp saw something he liked and decided to place a personal order.

The business model seems to work, overheads kept to a minimum: “I rent the equipment [to make the jewellery] whenever I have business. I buy the silver whenever I get paid”. House-line items retail from about €100 to €2,000, custom-made pieces depend on the materials (“I’m not at liberty to say what the most expensive item I sold cost”). That said, the company’s origins are surprisingly casual. I’d assumed Marcus was a lifelong artistic type who’d founded the business to promote his designs but in fact he seems to be the opposite, a businessman who became a designer: armed with a degree in Economics and Politics, he was looking for some entrepreneurial project on which to embark in his mid-20s – and found inspiration when he went to Sri Lanka on honeymoon with his first wife in 2005, and asked a local craftsman to make a copy of a ring he’d bought in London.

Struck by how much cheaper the copy was (and how close to the original), he decided to open a small factory in Sri Lanka, hiring a dozen employees who – unlike him – were goldsmiths and silversmiths. A few months later, still on extended vacation with his wife Mary (“Our honeymoon lasted about a year”) but now in Vegas, he had a stroke of luck when Mary was doing her hair in the salon of the Wynn Hotel and the stylist turned out to be great friends with Mrs Steve Wynn, wife of the man who owned the hotel. Mary befriended Mrs Wynn, mentioned her husband’s new business, Marcus met Mr Wynn “and it was just a matter of him clicking his fingers and saying OK,” he recalls. “Ultimately, Mary is responsible for what Etherial has become today – because it was that opening at the Wynn Hotel which got Etherial viewed by a potential 5,000 new customers every single day!” The only further twist was the closure of the Sri Lanka factory due to civil war, after which Marcus relocated to Cyprus and learned to craft the jewellery himself.

Fast-forward a decade or so, and I’m walking to the door of a stately old two-storey home on a hill overlooking Nicosia, a neighbourhood that’s been posh for generations. There’s money, or at least a proximity to money. Marcus’ maternal grandfather, he tells me later, owned Apollo, “the biggest garment factory in Cyprus”. His mum is now married to Marios Eliades, a prominent lawyer and former minister (Marcus looks up to Eliades and considers him more of a father than his real dad, whom he hasn’t spoken to in five years). His first wife, the aforementioned Mary, was Mary Tornaritis, scion of a big Nicosia family and a staple of the glossy-magazine circuit; still on the internet is a back-and-forth volley of disses between Marcus and Mary after their divorce in 2013, carried out through the pages of Must and Omikron. (They’d been together for seven years; he remarried briefly in 2014, a marriage that ended after only a few months.) Marcus himself looks impressive, tall, buff and bearded, his body covered in tattoos. He goes to the gym every day – “every single day” – and plays football every day; he has no other hobbies to speak of. “This is how I rest, by going to the gym and playing football.”

He’s candid, with a singular story to tell (did we mention that he used to be a model? we’ll get to that later) – but not, strictly speaking, wide-open, with a side of himself he prefers to keep private. This hilltop house is his parents’ home, where he grew up; he lives in a flat with his dog, a Miniature Pinscher named Kal-El, but “I don’t usually bring people to where I live, it’s my private quarters”. His tattoos have their own secret energy: “They basically reflect stories from my life. I have a little boy hanging from a dead tree,” he adds, pointing to one rather gaudy illustration, “and this is supposed to be me”.

Sounds a bit heavy, I note.

“Yeah… A little boy, he’s dead, hanging from a dead tree. And a girl swinging from the tree on the other side” – there is indeed the figure of a girl, swinging happily – “paying no attention to the boy”.

And what does it mean?

“Uhh… It’s personal.”

Other bits of body-art are easier to parse. There’s the clock of life, “to remind me that time is ticking away”. (He’ll be 37 at the end of this month.) Three women representing Columbus’ three ships, the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria, a reminder that he used to be in the Navy (actually “a naval commando in the Greek special forces” during National Service). And what about the painted figures crawling up his shoulder? “These are demons,” he replies. “I have demons, I have demons at the back as well. Demons leaning on a skull. And these are the demons fighting inside of me.” Marcus laughs, a little uncertainly: “Look, jewellery is not the only thing I do in my life, I do other things as well”. He pauses, whether out of shyness or a sense of drama: “One of these things is that I’m a high-ranking officer of the Cyprus Rescue Services”.

To be honest, it doesn’t sound like a case of hidden demons – more like a case of surprising altruism – but it’s certainly a big part of his life; indeed, he adds surprisingly, “I’m actually waiting for a position to open in the Civil Defence”, after which (assuming he gets in) he’ll happily work full-time as a civil servant, and give up Etherial. “The latest rescue we did was two days ago, when we rescued Syrian immigrants from a sinking boat,” Marcus tells me. “I’m on call 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, for the Rescue Services. So – when was it? – last Friday I was at the military camp in Kokkinotrimithia, it’s called Pournara, it’s the camp for the refugees, and basically I set up the camp, I made the registrations of everybody coming in, I made sure everyone was safe [and] had food to eat”. He’s also rescued people and animals from forest fires – “Nothing dies on my shift,” he declares dramatically – adding that “I’ve always had this urge to make sure everybody’s all right”. Look! exclaims Marcus, showing me his arm: it makes his hairs stand on end just to talk about this stuff.

modelling for Dolce & Gabbana

I pause, trying to take it all in. Custom-designing skull rings for Johnny Depp is impressive enough – but it turns out he’s also saved lives, and done all these good deeds. He was in the special forces, has a black belt in karate, modelled for Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana (we really will get to that eventually). Yet he’s also twice-divorced and now lives alone, with a dog called Kal-El for company. Why, with so much going for him, do the long-term relationships not seem to work out?

“I don’t know,” he replies, nodding sadly in acknowledgment. “I’m a free spirit, Theo,” he adds earnestly. “I’m a free spirit… I have so many things to do in this short life, that perhaps I don’t have time to devote myself to what a woman will really need – which is basically love, warmth, and to be there, and love, and cuddle, and wake up together and do things together. Me, I’m always on the go. I might get a call at two or three in the morning – I’ll just get up, put on my uniform and go.”

But surely a mature woman can accept all that?

“Yeah,” he agrees rather dubiously. “I mean, love for me is – I don’t think I can love. I really don’t think I can love. I can give attention, I can protect.” He shakes his head ruefully: “That’s my limit.”

In the end, like a lot of high achievers, it may be that his strongest motivation isn’t love but competitiveness, and a compulsion to prove himself. “What I’m going to tell you now is an insight to my character, who I am and what I’m willing to do,” he declares – then tells me the story (at last!) of his male-modelling days, which began inauspiciously when he answered an ad in the paper as a pimply, chubby 15-year-old. The ad, calling for models, turned out to be a scam, tricking him into paying for photos which turned out to be useless – so, brimming with resentment, teenage Marcus resolved “to become a supermodel, just to show them”. He started dieting and going to the gym – and “about a year later, I literally had the body of a model… One thing led to another, and within six years I had worked for Dolce & Gabbana in Milan, I had worked for Roberto Cavalli. I won Most Photogenic Male Model in the world, in India in 2002 [at] the Mr. International pageant for male models”. A clip from that may be found on YouTube (search for ‘XRayAthens’, the user who uploaded it), with a fresh-faced Marcus fielding generic questions. “All the young girls will be rooting for these men – they’ve been breaking their hearts!” chirps the (female) presenter.

It was all a façade, of course, the empty panorama of men as slabs of marbled beef for young girls to swoon over. In fact, he says now, the world of male models was a dangerous one, full of perils and predators – “drugs, fake promises, homosexuals, you name it” – where gullible young guys said yes to anything in order to get jobs, and sold their souls in the process. “So many lost souls. So many,” muses Marcus, thinking back to his old friends in the industry – and shows me the hairs on his arm again, once again standing to attention at the memory.

Marcus Platrides seems at peace nowadays; maybe he has nothing left to prove, or maybe – after two careers, two marriages and rescuing refugees in his downtime – he’s decided to keep things simple. He lives healthy, wakes up at six every morning and keeps his focus on work: “I don’t owe anybody money. I pay my taxes. I’m straightforward. I sleep at night, and I sleep like a baby”. He doesn’t really plan to remarry, nor does he plan to be designing jewellery for the likes of Johnny Depp forever; a job in the Civil Defence then, 20 years down the line, a quiet retirement to a house in the mountains suits him fine, he claims. “I’m not pretentious,” he insists, despite the celebrity clients and sporadic mentions in glossy magazines. “I’m a very misunderstood character. I don’t know why.”

How does he cope when things go wrong? How does he keep his equilibrium? “I go to the gym, I lift weights,” he replies. “I go play football, I score goals – and I sweat! And when I go home, I go under the shower and I let all the bad toxins go down the drain. Then my dog comes next to me, I pat him. And that’s it.” I shake his hand, feeling oddly exhilarated – whether because he’s so positive, or because I’m just one degree of separation from Johnny Depp.

A lifetime of making shoes has seen one Paphos man shod the rich, famous and royal. NAN MACKENZIE meets him

“I can make any type of shoe be it a classic brogue, or a pair of co-respondent shoes, the Al Capone two tone design, or a classic slip on,” says 80-year-old master shoe maker Myrianthis Kelpis as he walks across his workshop in Paphos in a neat pair of brown and cream lace-ups he made himself. Although the shoes he currently turns out are designed to appeal to a wide audience, the cobbler’s art has seen him rub shoulders with the rich, famous and royal.

The Place in Paphos is a venue that promotes hand crafted goods created by talented locals and Kelpis’ bespoke (and off the peg) footwear is the latest addition. As a ‘footwearophile’ I have spent decades cooing/lusting over shoes, and like many other women have had to hide new shoe boxes from male friends as most would trot out the same silly line ‘Don’t you have enough shoes’?

At long last scientists have been able to explain why women have always been ‘wired’ for shoe lust – due to the presence of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is released when looking in a shoe shop window, bringing on a feeling similar to taking a drug.

Then, if we move into the arena of glorious high heels, the belief is that when women slip on a pair of high heels they assume a basic primal mating pose called lordosis (yes it has an actual title), which refers to when the bottom lifts and the back arches. The final bit of the analysis centres on the fact that our minds are seemingly structured in a way that associates feet with sex, as the parts of the brain that communicate with the genitals and the feet are right next to each other.

Born the eldest of eight children in 1937, after his father died the now dapper Kelpis was apprenticed at the age of 12 for five years to Mesogi shoemaker Kleanthis Sofocles as he had to become the main bread winner for his family. It was not a craft that enjoyed a roaring trade as in those days men, women and children living in the villages wore sturdy boots with the local shoemaker making them new ones only once a year as they were an expensive purchase. Kelpis himself was earning five shillings a week while a good pair of hand made shoes would have cost around three pounds. The young apprentice was taught well, constructing shoes from leather sourced from the busy tannery in Nicosia with leather originating from cows, sheep and goats. A pair of lady’s shoes used two square feet of leather, while good boots would demand eight square feet and with leather at a premium a shoemaker had to be abstemious when it came to cutting it so that there was zero wastage, with any scraps being made into belts, purses, wallets and repair material.

With such pressure on raw materials it was a hard time to make any money from shoes so as soon as he was qualified, Kelpis knew it was time to look overseas. “I knew that once my apprenticeship was complete I would have to leave the island and travel to London where my sister was living. I did that with just 30 shillings in my pocket and high hopes. Once I recovered from the shock of landing in Britain’s capital on a freezing cold November night in 1954, I managed in a few weeks to get a job with a Turkish Cypriot who had a shop selling bespoke shoes. It was here that I learnt the high standards necessary to create the very best footwear, and the long hours involved,” Kelpis says.

This was followed by a stint in a shoe factory where Kelpis found himself in charge of making sandals. The factory was again hard slog and also poorly paid so it was not long before Kelpis realised his experience in hand making plus the knowledge gained from mass production meant he had the necessary technical experience to start out on his own. “I knew that wealthy people wanted hand crafted footwear so I sunk all my savings into opening a shop on the Fulham road. As the weeks passed I had almost given up hope when one afternoon a Rolls Royce pulled up outside, the chauffeur opened the car door and out stepped an elegantly dressed man in the company of a young man who was walking awkwardly as his legs were in callipers. This was a Lebanese businessman whose son had had polio meaning he had serious mobility problems. The father had tried and failed to acquire the correctly fitted shoes his son needed and of course I took on the commission. A few days later, having worked solidly night and day, I delivered the shoes and charged 300 pounds, but the father was so delighted at the finished result he added a further 1,000 pounds to the bill,” remembers Kelpis. That one great commission, followed by a regular order for 14 shoes a year, had him on the first rung of the ladder.

What Kelpis did not know at the time was that the Lebanese man was employed as a financial adviser to the Saudi Royal family and soon the shoe maker was summoned to meet Prince Falsal and Prince Kelif at the Dorchester Hotel. Perhaps not surprisingly this led to more commissions including one for 124 pairs of shoes for a Saudi princess over a two-year period. It was a royal connection that seemed set to grow as he was then asked to make a pair of handmade monogrammed slippers for Prince Michael of Kent and after being taken on by Harrods for special commission work made around 15 pairs of shoes for Princess Diana, although he never met her, measurements being sent in by the relevant royal servant.

“My speciality was creating shoes for people with problem feet because I was always taught that like a good house your body needs a good supporting foundation and if your footwear makes you stand crooked then the rest of your body will also soon be crooked. The real comfort test is to wear my shoes all day and when you get home at night forget to take them off! That’s when the fit is absolutely correct”.

Although the glamorous and high profile wore his shoes, Kelpis did not always get to meet them and they were probably unaware of who he was as the shoes themselves would either bear the Harrods label or that of Deliss, where he worked in the 60s, in Beauchamp Place. “But it was all my own work and during my co-operation with Deliss I made shoes, and crazy boots for Rod Stewart stage shows and monogrammed slippers he wanted made out of a Persian carpet – he always wanted to feel comfortable in shoes during his concerts. I also shod Roger Moore on a regular basis and Elizabeth Taylor,” who was one of the stars he did meet. “She had some problems with her feet and required extra fittings with me. I still remember the black patent sandals she commissioned – she was delighted with the result. She was a truly lovely, gracious woman and the extra bonus was always the presence of Richard Burton who was at her side during the fittings which always took place in their hotel suite whenever they returned to London”.

Kelpis’ bespoke shoe and bag designs were also snapped up by ladies going to society parties or weddings and even 40 years ago a pair of these special designs would cost around 850 pounds.
This master craftsman, mender of bad soles and surgeon to old shoes still makes footwear in almost the same way they made shoes 80 years ago and although he has since returned to Paphos, which he missed in the grey climate of London, he still works every day but now in the company of his son George, who was trained in the art in Italy. George’s final show while in Italy included samples of decidedly different but very appealing boots crafted from denim and leather. George and his father still deal with customers who need specially made and properly fitting shoes and boots in addition to those who respect the fact that a bespoke shoe will not only last for many many years but will stand out from the crowd.

In addition the walls of their shop on a warm summer day reflect that hand made leather sandals are still a popular option. Their store in The Place is lined with them and they are ready and willing to adapt them to customer taste, using everything from beads to woven materials, and at a price that is terrifically reasonable.
Journeying in to work every day remains a pleasure for Kelpis because he adores what he does and is proud that a craft he learnt at the age of 12 has not only provided self satisfaction but allowed him to bring up a family and pass a trade on to his son. “The North American Indians say that you should never judge a man until you have walked in his shoes,” he says. “Well if I had made their shoes then he or she would be judged very well indeed!”

The Place, Kanari 56, Old Town, Paphos. Tel: 26 101955, theplace@theplacecyprus.com, www.theplacecyprus.com

THEO PANAYIDES meets a Nicosia gynaecologist who sees medicine as a Greek tragedy and philosophy as the basis of life

Doctors speak a language of their own, says Dr Sotos Demetriou – and proves it by speaking of super cubic catheters and tocolytic therapy, Bishop scores, ESR and vaginal swabs. Sotos is a gynaecologist and obstetrician, founder and managing director of the European Medical Clinic in Nicosia, and he’s been around. Just one of the hospitals where he’s worked over the years – Baragwanath Hospital, just outside Soweto in South Africa – had 100-140 deliveries a night, most of them examined and dilated (and sometimes delivered) by Sotos himself. He was there for four years, part of his decade (1978-88) in South Africa followed by 30 years in Cyprus. All told, the number of people whom he’s helped bring into this world runs into the hundreds of thousands.

“I remember, I put my arm up to here!” he recalls of one memorable birth, ‘here’ being up to the shoulder – and where he put it is exactly where you’d imagine he put it. “To take and deliver a retained second twin, which was transverse lie. The first twin came out, the second one didn’t want to”. ‘Transverse lie’ is more mysterious doctor-talk, meaning in a sideways position (as opposed to head-down); the second twin was comfily ensconced in its mother’s belly – and, as the hours passed, drastic action was called for. “I put my arm through an open cervix,” he explains, “up there – and when you put an arm inside the uterus, you don’t go for any other part except the toes. You check the feet. You never go for face, head [or] hands”. The trick is to take one foot, check to find the big toe, go next door to the other big toe, then grab with two fingers like a hook and pull, dragging out the recalcitrant twin.

Easy to imagine Sotos doing something so drastic. Easy to imagine him doing anything – because, despite his bespectacled look and halo of white hair, he comes across as a bit of a maverick. Another of his stories has to do with another mother of twins, a 40-year-old Spanish woman living in London who was absolutely desperate for kids; after years of trying, she finally managed to conceive – but the doctors in Britain ruptured the waters of one baby during amniocentesis, then (to “terminate the problem,” says Sotos scathingly) put pressure on the mother to abort. She was only about 16 weeks pregnant, and at a loss what to do – but Sotos, called on to advise by the woman’s sister-in-law in Cyprus, noted that her test results were good, and urged her to resist the doctors’ pressure and refuse to terminate. Easy to imagine the London doctors grumbling darkly about this Cypriot peasant sticking his nose in their business – but Sotos was vindicated when the woman gave birth to two healthy babies, including the one whose waters had been ruptured. “What is my price?” he says with feeling, using ‘price’ to mean something like ‘reward’. “You think it’s the money, Theo? This is my price!”

We speak in his office, with seven diplomas (from Greece and South Africa) on the wall and family photos on the shelf beside him. His eyes bulge behind thick glasses; the face seems to taper away at both ends, into a receding hairline and a long, rather droopy chin. He was born 65 years ago in Famagusta (he’s a Libra, so he’ll turn 65 in a couple of months), the youngest of four. His dad was a senior land surveyor and a man of few words, already in his 50s when Sotos was born, felled by a heart attack when the boy was 14; his mum – whose photo appears three times on the shelf above his desk – seems to have been a strong woman and a powerful presence in her son’s life, accompanying him to Athens (where he studied) and even, briefly, South Africa. Sotos himself has three children, in addition to the hundreds of thousands he’s helped deliver: a daughter and two stepsons, the latter two taken on after marrying their widowed mother in 1990.

He is, it must be said, an unusual person. The line about doctors speaking a language of their own applies doubly to him – as, for instance, when he talks of his wife Maria (to whom he’s devoted) and asserts, out of all possible compliments, that “I’ve never met anybody in my life who is so thoroughly clean”. Not just physically clean, of course, but pure of heart: “You cannot corrupt my wife!”. It’s a token of love – but still, an unusual thing to single out. (Maria is also “well-educated”, having studied at St Hilda’s in Oxford, and her two boys – now grown up – are also Oxbridge graduates; Sotos has a thing for good education.) He and his stepsons seem to have bonded quite smoothly – he explained straight away that he wasn’t there to replace their dad, merely to fill the gap left behind by his death – but some of his stories still give me pause, like the time when the older boy was missing his father and Sotos consoled him with the thought that at least he was lucky enough to have his mother, citing another boy in his class who’d lost both parents in a car accident! The sentiment, of course, is well-founded (always look at the glass as half-full), but it still seems a rather morbid way to cheer up a grieving seven-year-old. I suppose it worked at the time.

My impression, even in our brief acquaintance, is of a distinctive personality, sensitive to slights and utterly devoted to his work. The practice of medicine, for him, is a form of euphoria: “tension, tension, then release, like a Greek tragedy”. At the same time – and possibly related – he’s not easy-going, or necessarily a round peg in a round hole. He had a torrid time in Greece after his studies, partly because of the culture of negligence there (doctors “discussing politics and football”) but also because he’d made the mistake of correcting a senior consultant over an X-ray early in his tenure, “and ever since then, he didn’t like me at all”. Sotos isn’t the type to keep quiet: I see it even in our interview, when an assistant brings me a frappé and he points out that “there’s too much froth, you’ve shaken it too much!”. He’s not quite reprimanding her – he laughs as he says it – but he still points it out; the assistant smiles and departs, obviously used to his ways.

Even in South Africa, he was known for being demanding, getting upset if he felt the care was sub-standard. “They loved me, all those black patients there, they loved me a lot,” he says (he had white patients too, but he’s talking about Soweto), “though they couldn’t pronounce my name… They said, when they came to the hospital, ‘We want to be seen by this doctor – what’s his name? The one [who’s always] shouting too much!’.”

He shouted, but he also listened – and South Africa was the making of him as a doctor (and indeed a human being), says Sotos reverently, an intense youthful decade that taught him compassion and decency as well as the art of obstetrics. He lists some of his mentors, their names still fresh 30 years later. Professor Driscoll, who advocated patience and letting Nature take its course as far as possible. Professor Collet, who’d call Security if a patient tried to offer him money. Another, unnamed professor, who said the following: “You want to become a good doctor? Don’t look at your watch! Never! Don’t look at the dates. Don’t look if it’s Saturday or Sunday, you’re a doctor.” Above all there was Dr Bmbere – a black physician in apartheid-era South Africa – who asked Sotos to assist in a carcinoma operation on a black patient, and took the opportunity for a little human-rights lesson. “You were in Greece. The stomach in Greece, is it different from this one?” asked Dr Bmbere, pointing to the patient’s exposed organ, then did the same with the liver and the gall bladder. “So then why,” he asked, once Sotos had admitted that the organs looked identical, “should humans be treated differently, because of their race or nationality?”.

It’s a good lesson, though in fact one he already knew from his childhood in Famagusta. His family were religious, and widely assumed to be nationalistic – but he also recalls going to the hospital with his mum as a very young boy, and seeing both Greek and Turkish Cypriot mothers sitting on a bench with their newborns, distinguishable only by the colour of their headscarves. “And I remember one Greek mother, her baby crying a lot. Crying a lot, non-stop. The whole hospital [could hear], ‘waaah!’. And this Turkish Cypriot said” – he gestures with his hands – “‘Give it here’. She took it, gave it milk. Because the Greek Cypriot didn’t have milk. As soon as it got milk – it was hungry – the baby went quiet”. Sotos sits back, his point undeniable: “So tell me, after this big lesson, Theo: what’s the difference? What creates nationalities?”

History, I suggest.

“History,” he repeats. “Who writes the history? Humans. Humans! And let me tell you – human rights, justice, truth.” He shakes his head: “Don’t exist. We created these things… If we look inside ourselves, inside our country, then we solve these problems. But we don’t look”. People talk of ‘justice’, he says sadly, when it comes to the Cyprus problem: “I say ‘OK, go find your justice’. In theory! [But] we must compromise in life. We must learn to live next to each other. We must learn to respect each other.”

This is politics, of course, and whether you agree will depend on your own politics – but in fact Dr Sotos Demetriou isn’t political, the lessons he describes being merely an extension of his life experiences. He comes to this with a near-unique worldview: the worldview of someone who’s observed, hundreds of thousands of times, that we’re literally all the same – all of us born as helpless, undefined, morally identical babies. “You need philosophy. Philosophy is the basis of life,” he tells me, his own philosophy being perhaps a serene detachment from all things partisan and ideological.

Not that he’s ‘philosophical’ in the sense of relaxed, however; quite the opposite. He’s not – I repeat – easy-going, and I’m struck by how strongly he still feels the insults he suffered in Greece in the 70s at the hands of senior doctors (most of them probably dead by now): Dr Mendoulas, who tapped him with a steel rod when inexperienced Sotos couldn’t do a D&C womb cleaning, Dr Papademetriou who threw a box-file at him and “swore at me, with the worst words you can imagine, in front of the patients… I was so much insulted that day that I went home, and I wet pillows and pillows!”. And of course, like all Famagustans, he has bitter memories of 1974 – both the first invasion, when he served as a nurse and saw awful things (he recalls a lorry coming to the hospital gates piled high with corpses, and the driver being told to bury them all in a mass grave), and the betrayal of the second invasion when soldiers and police withdrew from Famagusta en masse, leaving the bemused Turkish troops to take over an abandoned city.

There’s so much else to talk about: more on South Africa, and the startling respect for medicine in a racist regime – but also, for instance, the recent rise in Caesareans over natural delivery (about 60 per cent of births in Cyprus are now C-sections, roughly twice as much as it should be), or the challenges faced by obstetricians in the age of IVF, and let’s not even start on abortion and ‘when does a foetus become a baby’. I don’t even really get to ask why he chose gynaecology in the first place – though I do repeat a friend’s feminist complaint that men shouldn’t be allowed to be gynaecologists, and get the kind of amused response you’d expect from a 65-year-old veteran: “Through the centuries, who loved most and sacrificed everything for women? The men! Go back to Helen of Troy, go back to history”.

“These days, it’s fashionable to say –” I begin, but he cuts me off.

“No, no. We don’t go with fashions. We go with feelings.”

In the end, maybe that’s the key to defining Sotos: a man of feelings more than ideas, a maverick who says what he feels, a sensitive soul who feels hurt (or love) to the point of seeming thin-skinned, a doctor whose devotion to the work goes beyond Hippocratic oaths to that feeling of euphoria which (he assures me) only doctors get to feel. Not that his feelings are so strong these days. Does he ever become truly angry, or upset? “When I was young,” he shrugs. “But now, I would say – like in the song ‘My Way’, ‘when tears subside’ – you know, ‘everything looks so amusing’.” Dr Demetriou smiles, his youthful tears mostly subsided. Bishop scores, vaginal swabs and a pinch of Frank Sinatra: truly a language of his own.

THEO PANAYIDES discovers the secret behind Mark O’Neil’s success: see a challenge as an opportunity, eschew negativity and develop a firm belief in karma. A stint in the army also doesn’t hurt.

It’s all one word, apparently – ‘shipmanagement’, not ‘ship management’ – but the two constituent parts still seem a little incongruous. Ships have a romance about them, sailing free on the open seas; management is the dismal domain of bean counters and pencil-pushers. That said, the models of ships decorating the conference room don’t seem especially romantic; one in particular, the container ship APL China – 276m in length – is like a floating warehouse, nothing but columns of stacked crates with a small engine room in between.

The conference room is in Limassol, just off the Germasogeia exit, in the offices of Columbia Shipmanagement – which may soon be the offices of Columbia-Marlow, following a proposed merger between the company and another German-origin company headquartered in Cyprus, Marlow Navigation. I don’t actually know if the merged company will be housed in Columbia’s current premises – but the merger itself is apparently going through, according to Mark O’Neil who says they’re merely awaiting “a number of approvals from various regulatory authorities, which we anticipate will arrive imminently”. The merged company will be “a significant player” in the world of shipmanagement, unsurprisingly since both Columbia and Marlow are already significant players. They collectively employ over 700 staff plus “a pool of seafarers [i.e. crew members for ships] in excess of 30,000”. They have offices all over the world, in addition to the HQs in Limassol plus a big training centre in the Philippines. Mark prefers not to say how many vessels they manage (“it varies”), or what Columbia’s turnover is – but both numbers, I suspect, are quite sizeable.

Mark himself is 51, very trim, with grey hair and glasses. His eyes are hard (not unfriendly, just hard), his manner brisk and initially rather unsmiling, though he relaxes as we talk. He joined Columbia as president this past January, on the understanding that he’ll also be CEO of Columbia-Marlow – indeed, the merger is precisely why he was brought in. The new CEO has to be a neutral, not directly connected to either company but preferably with experience of both companies; Mark fits the bill, having worked in maritime law for 25 years with most of the world’s shipowners and management companies among his clients. He was previously a partner at Reed Smith, “the tenth-largest law firm in the world” – so make no mistake, we’re talking big jobs here. How big? Obviously, I don’t know what Mark’s particular arrangement was, but the Wikipedia entry for the firm includes the following: “In 2014, revenues at Reed Smith reached a record-breaking $1.15 billion. Profits per partner grew six per cent to $1,200,000”.

What kind of person does that kind of job – and indeed this kind of job, manning and managing ships all over the world? A driven person, obviously. A disciplined person. Above all, perhaps, a confident person – though whether people become confident because they’ve been successful, or succeed because they were confident in the first place, is one of those questions we’d all like the answer to. One moment in our conversation may be significant, when I ask Mark what he considers to have been his weak point as a young man of 20 – and he looks untypically flustered. “Weak point?” he repeats with an air of perplexity. “I don’t think I – um, perceive myself as having a weak point”.

There it is, in a nutshell – and of course perception is key here, as it is when he talks of his sideways move from law into shipmanagement: “People have said to me ‘Good luck in your challenge’, [but] I can’t stand the word ‘challenge’, I always use the word ‘opportunity’. ‘Challenge’ suggests something that might succeed or fail – and I have absolutely no doubt that this merger, and I, will succeed in that context”. One man’s challenge is another’s opportunity; it depends on the worldview you espouse, or choose to espouse. In the same way, asking Mark for his weak points as a 20-year-old gets a muted response (he just doesn’t see it that way) – but in fact 20 was the age when he joined the British Army, and he’s happy to admit that the army helped him “grow up” in all kinds of ways. “It taught me organisation. It taught me respect for others. It taught me teamwork”. It also taught him confidence, since he was “as a teenager, probably on the shy side – as we all are in those formative years”; having to stand in front of 45 men, most of them older, and lead them into combat changed that pretty quickly. Should we say he had weak points, though, or was he just a normal youth learning to mature? It’s the same, yet subtly different.

This was real combat, by the way – certainly towards the end of his five-year stint (1986-91) when he served in the first Gulf War as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, leading the charge into Kuwait City. In a way, his situation was different to most of his comrades. Most soldiers enlist straight from school, but Mark already had a good degree (in Law, from the University of Southampton) and could easily have gone straight to civvy street. The reason why he joined up is unusual, in this day and age: he comes from a military family, indeed every male O’Neil for “the last couple of hundred years” has gone into the services. “My father was in the army, my brother was in the army. It was inevitable I was going to go into the army”.

He grew up as “a gypsy army brat being taken around the various army bases in Germany”, where his father was posted (his mum is German; Mark speaks fluent German, which presumably helped in being chosen to lead a merger between two German companies). He must’ve been a forceful, aggressive young man, shyness or not. “My father brought us up to be very competitive,” he admits with a wry chuckle – and he mostly channelled that into sports, especially once in the army. He was captain of the regimental ski team, and narrowly missed an Olympic place in the winter triathlon. “I did horse riding, running, shooting. It was a great environment for a young man to keep fit and grow up”.

Even the actual business of fighting didn’t faze him, indeed it was only after being posted to Sandhurst as an instructor, after the war, that he decided to go civilian. “Probably, had there been more of that soldiering, I would’ve stayed in the army longer,” he muses (it was all the “waiting around” that got to him). Sorry if the question sounds naïve, I venture – but does he think he ever personally killed anyone, while in Iraq? Mark laughs in embarrassment: “Uh, I’m not sure it’s a relevant question. I think – soldiers do what soldiers have to do”. Not to belittle ‘Gulf War syndrome’ or PTSD, he adds hastily, but he himself was never troubled by traumatic memories – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that every soldier will “box away in his mind” those experiences which are best left forgotten.

Once again, it’s a matter of perception. “I’m sure if I went to see a psychiatrist and spent days and days talking, there would be boxes that would be opened – but, d’you know what?” He shakes his head, as if to say ‘I have a better idea’: “Get on with life, and always look ahead and be positive!” Mark leans forward fervently: “One thing I say to people here, is that the only thing I dislike in people is negativity. Positivity is such a great thing. If you’re positive, and you’re proactive and you give everything, 150 per cent, you’re going to succeed. And there will be mistakes on the way,” he concedes – “but you’re going for it, you’re giving yourself every opportunity to be successful”.

The Columbia offices

It occurs to me that there may be a reason why some people become CEOs and others don’t. Big jobs, after all, mean big decisions – and it’s part of the deal that you never really know what the right decision is until you take one. Maybe the most important trait isn’t ultimately drive or intelligence or the ability to motivate others but precisely this proactive positivity he talks about, the confidence – “who dares wins” – to make a move instead of getting tangled up in what-ifs and dwelling on negatives. “There’s so much paralysis-by-analysis in business that people are frightened to take decisions,” he confirms, “or else they defer the decision-making to others, to protect themselves when the decision’s wrong. I’m never frightened of taking a decision”.

What if it’s wrong?

“Then you live with the consequences,” he replies briskly.

I assume that’s a little disingenuous, if only because successful people (by definition) can’t afford to take too many wrong decisions. Still, his general style seems sincere enough – an uncomplicated, even potentially ruthless alpha-male dynamism (“I was always a pretty hyper individual”) and go-for-broke passion for the task at hand, burnished by all the various experiences in Mark O’Neil’s life. His army training, obviously. His lifelong love of sports, bringing an athlete’s focus and decisiveness. Maybe even his nomadic childhood, teaching him the art of detachment.

Speaking of which, there’s another factor we could mention. Mark’s wife used to be a lawyer (they met at the very first law firm where he worked after leaving the army), but stopped practising to look after their two children. She’s now found her second wind as a yoga teacher – and Mark, after much pestering, also took up yoga a couple of years ago, and has found it transformative. It relaxes him, and takes off his edge, but also helps in business – fostering detachment, “the ability to remain calm” in emergencies – and even as a life philosophy. “I’m a firm believer in karma and ‘what goes around comes around’,” he says earnestly, “and if you adopt some of these really good principles in life, I think you’ll benefit”.

This, I suspect, may be the final piece in the jigsaw – the fact that, despite his new big job, I’ve caught Mark O’Neil at a relatively mellow phase of his life. He’s still hyper, but a bit more measured than he was as a young man. He still doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but “as I’ve got older, I tend not to categorise people as fools so readily”. Even his working hours are less inhuman now: “I’m used to legal hours where I’d be getting up at four in the morning, be at my desk at six, and leave at seven or eight o’clock at night”. Now it’s about 11 hours – though of course it never really ends, especially with ships at sea which might be plunged into crisis at any moment (“Work is so fluid,” he shrugs. “Nobody’s switching off their mobiles or iPhones”) – and he’s also commuting at the moment, going back to England every weekend where his family still live. His son is doing GCSEs, he’s “the anchor” to the UK for now – and he’s also, incidentally, the first O’Neil in two centuries who won’t be going into the army, at least if his father has anything to do with it. Soldiering has changed, says Mark soberly, the risks are so much greater now; “I don’t think I could survive the worry of my son joining the army”.

Meanwhile he’s in Limassol, as active as a man in his 50s can be (he runs, he swims, he skis, he horse-rides, he sails, he plays squash, he cycles: “I pretty much do everything”) and enjoying a sense of well-being. He loves Cyprus – he was here for six months with the UN, back in 1989 – both for lifestyle and as a place to do business. I’d cynically assumed it was mostly our tax regime that attracted foreign companies here, but Mark praises the place to the skies. Our workforce is dynamic, hard-working, “better qualified than many other, if not all other, Europeans”. Our family-support networks – a.k.a. grandparents – mean that women aren’t lost to the workforce (as his wife was) after having kids. Our courts are reliable, our accountants “second to none”. Our much-maligned government is actually our trump card: “I cannot think of another government that supports shipping in the same way. In every single conference, I am rubbing shoulders with your Ministers of Finance and Transport who are there, flying the flag for Cyprus. No other government is doing this!”. Limassol could be a global shipping hub, in fact it already is.

There’s a sense of closure too – not just in coming back to Cyprus but because shipping is a lot like the army, surrounded by rugged seafarer types devoted to an age-old institution (I suppose the law is similar, but it lacks that sense of adventure). He feels like he’s come full-circle, he muses, even as a new chapter opens. “Professionally and personally, I’m in the happiest point in my life,” says Mark O’Neil, sitting in the conference room with the models of ships all around, “in the sense that it really does feel as if this was meant to be”. Our 45 minutes are up. His handshake is firm and dry, then he plunges back into shipmanagement.

For the first time a Cypriot has recently been elected as an MP in Britain. THEO PANAYIDES meets a self-effacing bookworm who enjoys the quiet life

I’m a little nervous, stepping into the lobby of the Nicosia Hilton on a Thursday morning; I’ve never interviewed a sitting British MP before. I needn’t have worried because Bambos Charalambous is the nicest man, not at all imperious or intimidating – even despite his rather forbidding appearance: stocky build, dome-shaped forehead, round fleshy face and a rather remarkable pair of hooded, unblinking blue eyes. It’s a look you’d associate more with a street-hardened club owner or shrewd consigliere than the honourable member for Enfield Southgate.

Admittedly, Bambos – the first-ever British MP of full Cypriot descent – has only been in Parliament for a couple of months, having been part of the shock swing to Labour in the recent elections. He himself may have been surprised, though I doubt he’d admit it. The seat has only been Labour three times in its entire history, and the previous incumbent (the Conservative David Burrowes) had been MP since 2005; what’s more, Bambos had tried twice before – unsuccessfully – to be elected, in 2010 and 2015. He credits that 2015 campaign for having raised his profile – “but the big thing was Brexit,” he admits in his measured, affable way, to explain why this time was different: Burrowes was for Leave, the constituency (like most of London, and Bambos himself) are largely Remainers. He smiles and the quick, darting smile is surprisingly sly, seeming to sneak across his features like a whimsical notion before fading back into lugubriousness.

His constituency are also, to a large extent, London Cypriots – which also contributed to his election victory, Bambos being a fellow Cyp and indeed a local lad. At one point I mention that there seems to be an increasing chasm (in Britain, but also worldwide) between elitist, career-minded politicians and the voters they claim to represent, and Bambos looks thoughtful. That may be true in some cases, he allows, but “in my case – you know, I live in the community that I represent. I went to local schools. I grew up amongst them”. People know him when he walks down the street, all the more so since he’s been a local councillor since the mid-90s. “When I’m waiting for a train in the morning, people talk to me at the station. Some people want pictures of me, they want selfies, which I still find hilarious – but I always greet them. I’m delighted that people know who I am, anyway.”

He’s unusual in that regard. Politics, after all, is a career, and prospective MPs go wherever the party sends them, which may be hundreds of miles from their hometown (Bambos himself was initially selected for a whole other constituency, the safely-Tory Epping Forest where he stood, and lost, in 2005). He’s unusual in another way too, as becomes apparent when I ask if he feels pressure to toe the line and always give the ‘right’ answer when asked a question. Is it difficult to always be on-message?

“I think what we saw with Jeremy Corbyn,” he replies slowly, “was that he was un-spun, he was natural, he spoke what he thought. And I think the public are fed up with politicians who are trying to be on-message, and not giving honest answers. So I want to try and be as genuine as I can be, and hopefully people will see that in me. I’m not a very good actor anyway, so I think they’d see through if I wasn’t genuine.”

What kind of person is he?

“Um… I’m naturally quite a shy person. I’m usually very quiet. I’m a good listener, I feel that’s an important skill… And – you know, I don’t like conflict. I try and make friends easily.”

Not the kind of answer you’d expect from a politician – especially one who’s a lawyer by profession, and now finds himself in the often-confrontational crucible of the House of Commons. Yes, admits Bambos, but he was never a trial lawyer. He was actually in the housing litigation department of Hackney Council, so his job was mostly to resolve differences and prevent time-consuming legal battles: “For me, if the case got to trial, then either I’d failed or my opponent had failed”. As for being in Parliament, rival MPs do indeed often clash on the floor of the House – but they also collaborate in committees (he himself hopes to be chosen for the Justice Select Committee, scrutinising the decisions of the Justice Ministry), which is far more important. “There’s always a deal,” Bambos tells me, sounding quite Middle Eastern. “It’s a question of what the terms of the deal should be.”

One such deal is Brexit, which (he says) is looking more like a potential trainwreck every day; given that the UK and EU haven’t even agreed the financial settlement – the money to be paid by the former to the latter – after nine months of trying, “I don’t see how they can possibly have agreed Brexit by March 2019”. Another such deal, of course, is the neverending Cyprus problem, and the flickering hopes for a solution which are currently looking quite faint, post-Crans Montana.

Bambos has been doing lots of interviews during his few days in Cyprus (he was here attending the annual conference of Overseas Cypriots) – and most of them have asked about his views on our national issue, on which he makes all the right noises. “Many of the things that need to be negotiated are very much agreed,” he claims, adding that “the issue of security was discussed for the first time” in the talks, which he feels is a good sign. Is there much he can do, however, as a backbench MP? “Not as such, directly,” he admits – though he’s already asked Theresa May two questions about Cyprus, during her ‘urgent statements to the House’ after attending the Council of Europe and the G20 summit, and hopes he can at least keep the issue alive in Britain. “If I can be helpful in any way – to convey messages, or to speak to people who might be better placed to facilitate things – I can do that,” he concludes, with a touch of desperation.

Let’s be honest: he’s a British politician, not some kind of Cypriot plant in the House of Commons – though his parents were both born here, in the Limassol villages of Fasoula and Kalo Chorio, and he actually speaks decent Greek. Indeed he’s almost bilingual, albeit not entirely happy doing interviews in Greek since a lot of key phrases (“‘economic downturn’, things like that”) come to him in English – but he’s always spoken Greek with his family, his mother’s English being “patchy” even after all these years. It’s the old story of forever being ‘in between’. On the one hand, even Bambos admits that he’s not “fully British”, shaped in part by his culture and upbringing; even some of his fellow MPs doubtless mispronounce his unusual surname (I assume they say ‘ch’ for ‘Charlie’, as opposed to ‘loch’) and he did endure some minor xenophobic bullying in his school days, though admittedly being called a “bubble” (from ‘bubble and squeak’, i.e. Greek) doesn’t sound so traumatic. On the other hand, his actual relationship with Cyprus is mostly limited to holidays and weddings every couple of years.

There’s another kind of deal we could mention: not perhaps an official agreement, but the deal Bambos made with himself as a young man. His A-level subjects tell their own story: Maths, Physics and English Literature, a combination so rare that the retake schedule couldn’t accommodate him when he failed to get the grades he needed – and his plan at the time was to be an engineer, hence Maths and Physics, but he also had a literary streak, hence English Lit. Neither of his parents had been to school past the age of 11 (his dad is a plumber, now semi-retired; his mum worked as a dressmaker), and it’s possible that Bambos, the oldest of three, reflexively went for Engineering as the closest thing to his father’s profession – but in fact, as his friends pointed out, he also loved reading and current affairs, making Law a more logical choice. He ended up swapping Physics for Government Politics, and got into Liverpool Poly for a law degree; like Corbyn – who never even went to university – Bambos is a long way from the Eton-Oxbridge route one associates with British politicians.

Inspiration – Clement Attlee

It’s unclear where the political ambitions came from – but that, perhaps, was the private pledge he made to himself, to give something back to the community (his parents were always very left-wing and political, albeit “more about Cyprus than in British politics”). He’s not an obvious choice as a politician. He’s not, as he says, a natural show-off, quite the opposite. Asked for his role models, he cites Clement Attlee, whom the much more flamboyant Winston Churchill famously (and perhaps apocryphally) called “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” and “a modest man with much to be modest about” – but Attlee also defeated Churchill in 1945, then laid the foundations for the modern Labour Party (and modern Britain) by establishing the welfare state during his first term in office. “He just got things done,” says Bambos approvingly. “And he didn’t always go for the glory… He was a doer. I like people that do things and get things done.”

And he also likes people to be low-key? He doesn’t like showiness?

“No, I really don’t – which is quite unusual for a politician,” he adds, and the sly smile darts across his face again. “I don’t care who gets the credit for it, as long as things are done”.

His lifestyle seems equally un-showy. ‘Any other passions besides politics?’ I ask, and get a political response (“I’m very passionate about equality”) – but reading, I suppose, counts as a passion, something he’s loved since childhood. He’s now reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the great Japanese novelist’s memoir/meditation on long-distance running, as well as a book of essays by Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose book Capital (broadly suggesting that wealth inequality is bound to increase exponentially unless governments intervene by imposing a wealth tax) became a surprise bestseller in 2013. Bambos also likes theatre, watching football (he’s a Chelsea fan) and hanging out with friends and family, but doesn’t seem to have any obvious vices. “I drink occasionally,” he shrugs, “but if I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol, I wouldn’t miss it.” He’s not even into fine dining, despite living in London.

What did I expect a British MP to be like? Hard to say – but maybe I assumed he’d be more self-important, like our own politicians, rather than a self-effacing bookworm living quietly and taking the train to work every morning. Is he married? “Much to my mother’s horror, I’m not,” replies Bambos humorously. “But, you know, maybe one day I will be.” Some would say he’s left it late – he’ll be 50 in December – but even getting older doesn’t seem to faze him unduly. “I’m thinking ‘Wow, 50, you’re getting on a bit there’,” he admits. “But it’s going to happen. So you’ve got to embrace it.”

50 is definitely middle-aged, though. You can’t really claim to be young anymore.

“But, you know – I’m not young,” he replies simply. “So you have to accept these things. I’m also not old, either! But you’ve got to make the most of your time.”

That, in a nutshell, is what Bambos is doing – especially now, of course, with his career having shot to a new level during what may be a pivotal time in British politics. “I don’t particularly seek any sort of – position of office,” he insists. “If it comes I’d be delighted but I just want to get on with being a backbench MP for now, and do the best I can for my constituents”. In truth, he may be a little too modest: he’s a public figure, after all, and can’t really stay the same person that he was before the election. As an MP, you have influence, he concedes, “and that means a lot more people want to contact you. But, you know, I want to be a force for good, so I want to try and make things happen on the ground, try and make a difference to the community that I represent – and also for Cyprus as well”. Bambos Charalambous, ladies and gentlemen: a politician who can actually claim, en passant, with a straight face, that he wants to be “a force for good” – and is able, in our cynical times, to get away with it. What can I say? He just seems like a nice bloke.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a Turkish Cypriot actress and activist who drifted into both roles but is determined to do something to better the country

We meet in the buffer zone, at the Home for Cooperation Café, facing the handsome sandstone of the Ledra Palace whose pre-UN grandeur is now just a fading memory in the minds of the over-50s. People saunter by occasionally, heading to one or the other checkpoint, often in small groups, chatting loudly and toting bags of shopping. Near the end of our conversation the muezzin starts up on the Turkish side, calling out his stock incantations and threatening to drown out Oya’s voice.

This is a significant space for Oya Akin, for three reasons. The first is that she’s worked extensively with the Home for Cooperation and indeed is a Board member of the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, which runs the Home. The second is that this is where she met her husband 12 years ago – or rather, this is where he first saw her (she didn’t notice; she was rather flustered at the time), crossing from north to south and talking in English on the phone to a taxi driver who was supposed to drive her to the set of Panicos Chrysanthou’s film Akamas. The third, more generally, is that the notion of a buffer zone describes her conceptually – because she too is somewhere in between, taking part in bicommunal projects (over 100 in the past few years) and “causing people to get together that would not get together if I wasn’t in the middle,” as she puts it.

It helps that she’s one of the few Turkish Cypriot actors who’s fluent in English (though not Greek, at least not yet), the result of being born in East London – though her parents weren’t exactly immigrants, having gone to the UK to study; they ended up staying for 25 years (her dad’s an accountant, her mother a teacher), yet they “always gave us the feeling that, at one point, we would be coming back”. The family always spoke Turkish at home, and – even before moving back permanently in 1985, when Oya was 10 – would always spend every holiday here, three times a year. The result was that she never lost contact with Cyprus – but also never quite settled in England, sparking a rootlessness that’s afflicted her all her life: “In London not being British enough, here not being Cypriot enough, living in Istanbul for seven years not feeling Turkish enough. There’s always this kind of not-being-enough-ness that’s prevalent, when I look back”.

In her teens, this not-quite-there feeling led her to act out, becoming a rebel and the black sheep of the family: “I was always having boyfriends, getting into trouble, skipping school, getting caught”. Actually she’s always had a headstrong quality, going from terrible twos to troublesome teens – and she’s also, it seems, an extreme personality, even going so far as to call herself “kind of bipolar”. She feels things very strongly, whether it’s triumphs or slights.

Some of this may be down to younger-sibling syndrome. Oya is the youngest of three (her dad, with an accountant’s efficiency, scheduled a kid every five years, she jokes), and the youngest child is always a bit more concerned about being loved, beset with subconscious angst that she may be surplus to requirements. In her teens – and despite the rebelliousness – her only real goal was “to please my dad,” she recalls wryly, and she still has a bit of that anxious sensitivity. “I don’t know if you’re aware of the United Cyprus Now initiative,” she begins tentatively. “I’m very active with that, since the beginning, and now the whole group is getting a lot of – hate speech?” (Oya tends to twist her voice into a question when making a painful or delicate point.) “And I’m so devastated by the whole thing. I’ve always had a problem with people not liking me, or not understanding me, and I always feel the need to clear things up and kind of explain myself.”

Unite Cyprus Now isn’t the only thing in her life – she’s an actress; she’s a Drama teacher at the English School of Kyrenia in Bellapais; she translates poetry, including that of her husband; she does workshops and “devised performances”; she’s a wife and mother – but it’s one of the most important, albeit also the most recent. UCN was only launched a few months ago, when yet another round of talks on the Cyprus problem failed to bear fruit and journalist Esra Aygin posted on Facebook that “the people of Cyprus are out on the streets protesting yet another collapse” – a sarcastic post, since that was conspicuously what people were not doing. A growing number in both communities took up Aygin’s challenge and the group became quite influential, or at least visible – but it seems a shame that it didn’t start earlier, I point out, instead of being launched so near the end of the process. Though of course I don’t know if it’s the end, I add hastily. But it feels like the end.

“It does feel like the end,” agrees Oya soberly.

What’s the mood on the Turkish Cypriot side at the moment?

Well, she hedges, she can only speak for herself – but certainly frustration, despondency, hopelessness. She knows the feeling well, having also felt it in 2004: “I suffered depression after the referendum”.

For how long? Days, weeks?

“For a couple of years?” she replies, twisting her voice into a question again.

Oya tries to sound positive: she’s still clinging to hope, she insists – “but I think the realisation is that [a solution] is not going to happen soon, and we have to work more towards understanding each other, and building trust… But I also have a sense of urgency that, if it doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen,” she admits. “Because everything that is being done meanwhile is more towards – partition”. There’s talk of Islamic nations being urged to recognise the TRNC, “Turkey is talking completely different now”. And of course “everything in the south has always been in line with partition,” she adds bitterly, voicing a view that may come as a shock to some Greek Cypriots. “Be it the education system, which has not changed. Be it [far-right party] Elam, which is –”

But Elam is tiny, I object.

“Tiny, but still. Two per cent is how many people? It’s not that tiny. Or, for example, I’ve stopped driving in the south,” she goes on, “which is very strange for me, because I’ve always – since the checkpoints opened – I always drove”. Recently, however, she’s grown wary. “It kind of gives me an uneasy feeling now? Especially if I have my children with me.” She’s personally witnessed the aftermath of two attacks on Turkish Cypriot cars, once at a poetry event at Famagusta Gate and again this year in Troodos, where four Turkish Cypriot families (not her own) came out of the hotel where they’d been staying to find their tyres had been slashed. Oya knows of at least 20 incidents which have been reported to police – and the worst part, she adds, is that no-one’s been arrested, let alone punished. “They might be one-offs. I’m not generalising,” she concludes, trying to be fair. “But, if it happens, I don’t want it happening to me.”

“But, of course – am I hopeful? Yes,” she goes on, as if aware that she’s letting down the side slightly. “Am I as hopeful as I was? No. Will I continue working for this? Yes. I mean, I’ve been doing bicommunal projects since the borders opened.”

Actually, they don’t even have to be bicommunal (she’s done workshops at Kofinou refugee camp, for instance), as long as they have some “social content”. Oya needs to feel that change is being effected – which is why she no longer works with theatre groups in the north, as a conscious protest. “To entertain? And that’s it?” she wails, fed up with the silly escapist comedies she was being asked to do. Acting, like activism, is something she drifted into (her college degree was in Psychology), getting into theatre while working as a training supervisor for Cyprus Turkish Airlines in the early 00s (ironically, she began acting to cure the crippling stage fright that wouldn’t let her do the public presentations required in staff training!); having started, however, she wants to use her talents for a good cause. “I just can’t sit home and not do something, not be part of it.”

It all sounds terribly serious – yet in fact that’s just Oya Akin’s personality, an out-there, headlong effusiveness which manifests itself in fun things too, not just worthy causes. She does work hard, in fact she works so hard that she ended up contracting pneumonia through overwork three years ago, and nearly died – but then she also likes to go out dancing, in fact she dances so hard that she once fell over and broke her arm dancing. (Was she dancing on a table? [wild laughter] “No, I have platforms!”) She likes a drink or two. She likes photography. She likes road trips, hanging out with friends and meeting new people. She writes short stories and children’s plays, though she doesn’t always finish what she started. “There’s a saying in Turkish, maymun istahli. That would describe me a lot. The direct translation is, I have the appetite of a monkey!… I get very obsessed. I get hooked on something, and I really take it as far as it can go.”

Like what?

“Well, I started aikido. I started learning Greek three times. I started crocheting, I made crochet hats for more than 100 people – 123, to be exact – in just two months. I was finishing crochet hats six a day, I made hats for everyone I know! But then I just binge, and I stop, and I never go back to it.”

The major exception is her activism, which has only grown stronger with the years – especially since becoming a mother in 2007 (she has two kids, a girl and a boy). What’s she like as a mum? “I’m lovely as a mum!” she replies, laughing. Would her children agree with that assessment? “Yes they would. I like my children as people, I think they’ve made me a better person”. Children generate a responsibility, and not just the obvious responsibility to feed and clothe them; they also inadvertently push you to do the right thing, just because you feel them watching. Oya’s husband is the poet Gurgenc Korkmazel (who usually writes as ‘Gur Genc’), a very successful poet but not the most extrovert person; “He’s not out there protesting in the streets,” she admits, “and sometimes I’m like: ‘Our children need to see us doing this. They need to see that we’ve tried, that we’re doing something for this country’. I cannot just be sitting at home, expecting someone to save us all.”

Maybe this, in the end, is the crux of the matter when it comes to Oya Akin – her compulsion to act, not just for herself (though she somehow manages to remain idealistic, and locked herself in the toilet crying bitterly after the collapse at Crans-Montana, having genuinely believed a solution might happen) but in order to ‘do something for this country’, the small community where she’s always been slightly unusual, first as a Londoner, now as a bicommunal activist and progressive parent. “We want [the kids] to be very aware of what’s going on,” she explains. Oya’s children have tagged along to Unite Cyprus Now demos, banging their drums and blowing their whistles, and prepared “little ‘Love is Love’ posters” when they joined her for Gay Pride – but meanwhile the mood in the north is changing, friends now ask “What’s the point?” when they hear she’s still involved with UCN, and (above all) Islamisation is proceeding apace.

“I mean, Turkish Cypriots have never been religious, we really haven’t been,” exclaims Oya with a kind of bewilderment. Her parents never fasted or prayed; Bayram was always a social occasion. “I’ve never been to the mosque, my family has never been to the mosque – nobody I know has been to the mosque, actually!”. Yet women with their heads covered are now a common sight on the streets of Lefkosa, and a (rather scary) recent statistic shows that more mosques are now being built than secular schools. “It’s very strange,” she muses sadly, then echoes a widespread fear in the community: “If only the Greek Cypriots knew that they’ll be neighbouring Turkey, not Turkish Cypriots, in a short while…”

Will her kids stay in Cyprus? “I don’t want them to stay!” she replies at once. So then why does she stay herself? Oya pauses, as if trying to tease out the complexity of it all – the fact that she wasn’t born here being, paradoxically, a major part of why she feels so connected. “I’ve made myself feel Cypriot,” she explains earnestly. She wasn’t brainwashed into it, nor did she take it for granted. This island – and its endless division – is her choice.

And there’s something else as well. “Every time something goes wrong, I tell my husband: ‘We need to get out of this place’,” she admits. “But he says: ‘We have trees’.”

‘Trees?’ I repeat, confused.

“We have trees. For the first time in my life, I’m living in a house where we’ve planted trees.” Oya Akin sighs, looking around at the buffer zone – a symbol of her lifelong wobbly in-between-ness which perhaps, just perhaps, may have found a steadying force after all these years. “We have trees. I have roots now.”

A career defined by hard work sees a prominent Protestant preacher and shoe maker now operate a juice shop as he approaches 100. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man with friends around the globe

Kyriakos Philippides is the oldest person I’ve ever profiled. He turned 97 last month, though his birth certificate – issued in Solea in 1920 – claims he was born in September. Age, in itself, isn’t usually a criterion to determine whether a person is interesting (in fact, it almost never is); still, there’s an undoubted frisson to sitting down with a man who’s been alive just short of a century. In a way, what he says is less important than the fact that he exists, having made it through the various challenges of a long life.

Something similar may be said of our interview, which comes with its own set of challenges. Kyriakos’ voice is faint and creaky as we talk in the alley outside his juice shop, underneath a tree with – no joke – the loudest symphony of crickets I’ve heard in my life. At some point, thumping dance music starts to emanate from a nearby bar (we’re in the pedestrianised, madly trendy neighbourhood around Limassol Castle), making his words even more inaudible as I strain to hear, not to mention all the various passers-by adding their own hubbub. South Asian workers unload boxes. A sharp, hard-looking young man strides down the alley and, without slowing down, yells out a loud staccato greeting: “Philips!”. (“Hello, hello…” bleats Kyriakos.) Philips Shoe Factory was the name of his business, back in the old days. More on this later.

For now, he’s making orange juice – in fact, he now physically makes the juice himself, his Nepalese assistant having done a runner eight days ago, a small, hunched-over figure surrounded by crates of oranges. He stands at a table, nine hours a day, squeezing fruit and dropping the husks in a crate on the floor, half-listening to the ceaseless chatter of a radio behind him. At the entrance to the alley, strategically placed to attract tourists, a sign says: “Orange juice the best in Cyprus. Fresh and cold”, translated into four languages (the German version doesn’t even limit itself to Cyprus: “Der Beste Orangensaft der Welt!!!”). There’s a menu tacked to the sign, a vestige of the time when the shop sold snacks and coffees as well as juice. Before that it used to be a cobbler’s shop where Kyriakos sold and repaired shoes, the fixtures and machinery still visible among the crates of oranges in the dark, high-ceilinged room behind him.

This was not his shoe factory, merely a shop he bought to carry on the trade in his old age, just before his wife died in 2002. “I have seven shops opposite the mosque,” he explains with a flourish, indicating the Grand Mosque overlooking the alley. Those seven shops once made up Philips Shoe Factory, but he’s now gifted them to his sons. He has six kids, three sons and three daughters, and all have been taken care of; “I gave my daughters two houses each, not one but two!”. All six offspring seem to be quite entrepreneurial. One daughter has a restaurant, the second is in the shoe business, the third runs a Christian radio station (Kanali 7) in Nicosia; his oldest son has a business selling women’s garments, the second lives in Indonesia making bamboo furniture, the third has a taxi service. At one point a middle-aged man walks past the shop, and Kyriakos calls out to him. “I can’t now, I’m in a rush!” snaps the man, pouting like a teenager. ‘Who was that?’ I ask, surprised. “My oldest son,” replies Kyriakos, proving perhaps that a father-son relationship never quite loses its edge, no matter how old you are.

To be fair, Kyriakos must’ve been quite demanding as a father. Easy to dismiss him now, at 97, as a harmless, delightful old man, but he seems to have been quite formidable. Hard work never fazed him, indeed it seems to have defined him – why does he carry on working? why not stay home and rest? “I get more tired when I’m resting,” he replies; “I like to work” – but he also had (and has) unusually strong moral principles. “I’m a pastor,” he explains. “I’m an ordained bishop of the Greek Evangelical Church”. This is a Protestant denomination he joined in his teens, having been influenced by a rousing American preacher (“Later I went to his house in Chattanooga, he had three rooms filled with diplomas!”) – and Kyriakos himself was instrumental in building the local church in Limassol, having cajoled money out of Laiki Bank and investors in Australia (of all places). “I was a prominent preacher,” he tells me. “Even now, I get people saying ‘I remember the sermon you gave all those years ago’”.

We’re interrupted by a passer-by, a woman speaking English with a vague Eastern European accent. She looks like she’s heading home from work (it’s late afternoon), greets Kyriakos and stops to grab a couple of oranges from one of his crates – a quick exchange with the look of a daily ritual, a friendly gift from the nice old man down the road. He nods regally, with the air of a landowner allowing a peasant free passage across his land. The woman bends down to pick up her bags, and Kyriakos thinks she’s taking more oranges. “OK, OK. It’s enough, it’s enough,” he says in English, a little gruffly.

“I’ve had three principles in my life,” he resumes. “Three Christian principles, if a person sticks to them he’s bound to do well. First, I believe that, whatever we say, the Lord hears it. Second, whatever we do, with our hands or our feet, the Lord sees it. And third: the Lord hears, the Lord sees – and the Lord writes down!”. He nods sagely, with the native authority of his 97 years. “I lived my life by these principles,” he affirms. “My life was a very, very quiet life… I was always very moral. No drunkenness, no cigarettes, nothing.”

What did he do to let off steam?

“After work, we’d go with the boys to a coffee shop and play billiards,” he replies. “But never more than that. No women, no cabarets.” There are three things that will shorten your life, claims Kyriakos: anxiety, sadness, “and, for a man, uncontrolled sex”. He tells me a story – or I guess a joke – about a 112-year-old man who died, and journalists were asking his wife about him. “My husband had three rules. What were the three rules? ‘Five-two-seven’. What was the ‘seven’? His wine had to be seven years old before he’d drink it. What was the ‘five’? His bread had to be five days old before he’d eat it. And the ‘two’?” He mimes the wife being shy and coquettish, then she replies: “Sex, two times a week!”. I nod, slightly puzzled. The point of the story seems to be that regulating your libido (as opposed to leaving it unharnessed) is the secret to a long life, then again a 112-year-old man having sex twice a week isn’t exactly an advertisement for the virtues of abstinence. Maybe they just had a different sense of humour in the old days.

There is indeed something ancient and opaque about Kyriakos – even if only in the visible signs of wear-and-tear on a man born two years after WWI, a near-contemporary of Makarios (whom he once met briefly, when the late Archbishop was still a Bishop). He’s healthy and active for his age; he doesn’t take pills, and has no need of doctors – yet his eyes are almost hidden behind folds of wrinkled skin, and his face dotted with liver spots. Flies are buzzing in the early-September heat, possibly attracted by the smell of oranges; I watch, fascinated, as he swats at them gently, then seemingly resigns himself to their intrusion. One fly settles by his rheumy right eye, another crawls slowly down his cheek, almost to his lips as he carries on talking obliviously. Do old people simply become less sensitive to this kind of thing, their skins dulled and hardened? Or are buzzing flies just another of the many nuisances to be borne uncomplainingly?

What about death? Has he reconciled himself with that?

“As for death, I don’t believe death is the end,” he nods. “Life goes on, in another form however.”

So he’s not scared?

“No, it doesn’t scare me. I’ve asked God many times ‘When are You going to bring me close to You?’, you know what He said? ‘I need you down there’. So I can talk to people, and advise them.”

Maybe it’s because he’s so conspicuous – working in the shop all day, unlike other people his age – but Kyriakos seems to be something of a local wise man. At one point we’re joined by a youngish girl who sits for a while, listening intently to our conversation, then moves on; I assume she’s a relative, maybe a granddaughter (he has 19 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren), but it seems she’s one of many – often troubled – souls who come and sit with him over the course of a day, not unlike the woman taking oranges and the man shouting “Philips!”. His views on Young People Today are predictably negative: “They call themselves Christians but they’re smoking, doing drugs, drinking… Especially the girls, they’re even worse. Once she turns 13, she’ll tell you it’s unnatural for a 13-year-old girl not to have sex”. ‘She’ is presumably one of his visitors, who often end up following his advice to lead a cleaner life; one girl even claimed that his words were what stopped her from killing herself, says Kyriakos.

And of course there are the tourists. He takes out a plastic folder full of photos – mostly family snaps, but also including some postcards and scanned photos with a message on the back. “Dear Kyriakos, It was lovely to meet you at your café in the old town of Limassol last week (25 May 2015). I enjoyed our chat over a glass of fresh orange juice,” writes Manesh from London. “Bonjour de Strasbourg, France. Thanks for the orange juice, and long and beautiful life for you!” writes Eve, the other side showing Kyriakos kissing Eve’s cheek (she looks rather startled) and squeezing her hand. Others hail from Germany, Russia, Romania. Good luck with “your sweet little business,” says Alex from Magdeburg.

I’m impressed by his collection, a spry 97-year-old with pen-pals from all over Europe. Then again, it’s not like it happened by itself. Next to the juice machine there’s a tray filled with little slips of paper, printed with Kyriakos’ name and address; his m.o. (at least ordinarily, when his assistant is making the juices and he chats with customers) is to strike up a friendship, offer some pithy advice, then hand the customer a slip of paper and ask them to send a postcard when they get back home. It’s a harmless ruse, something to make him feel he’s connected.

Indeed, you could say that Kyriakos Philippides is now in the people business, selling the wisdom of old age (along with a glass of orange juice) just as he spent 80 years selling shoes. His tourists and youthful acolytes surely have no idea what a high achiever he was, seeing him now squeezing oranges. At its peak, Philips Shoe Factory employed 32 workers. They made shoes for the Lord Chamberlain of the King of Greece (who happened to be holidaying in Prodromos) and legendary singer Sofia Vembo. Kyriakos started young – he already had the factory in WWII, and was therefore exempted from fighting – and remained successful for decades. He invented his own machine making orthopedic insoles (he’s always had a knack for engineering) and once bought another machine, from France, for C£19,000, a crazy sum at the time. He made shoes for the father of President Anastasiades, and the father of former President Spyros Kyprianou. Not to mention preaching, and giving sermons, and building churches.

Looking back, has he had any major upsets in his 97 years? Not really, he replies with a shrug. A jealous business rival tried to close him down in the 1950s, and almost succeeded. One of his grandsons nearly died in the huge explosion at Mari in 2011 (the boy was with the soldiers who were killed, but was ordered back at the last minute). He’s been poor, and had no schooling, but flourished anyway – and continues to do rather well, even if only as a quaint old man among the tourists and trendy young people quaffing IPAs, charming them with his homespun philosophy and positive attitude. “Every problem can be solved,” insists Kyriakos in his faint, high-pitched voice, all but drowned out by the chattering crickets. “Always try and be happy”. Then, switching to English: “Always to feel happy, happy, happy…” At his age, I’d be happy just to be here.

Saved by the theatre, one local thespian who is a riot of contrasts tells THEO PANAYIDES he would rather make love than war

Marios Ioannou gives good profile – and he knows it, too. “I love interviews,” he raves excitedly on a bright, windy Limassol afternoon. “I love to talk!” The only question is where to do it. A nearby café is dismissed as too noisy. The idea of sitting on the low wall of the promenade, gazing out to sea as we chat, is briefly mooted but clearly impractical. We end up perched on stools somewhere in the newly-refurbished Old Port, between an incurious waitress and a noisy Spanish family. We talk (or rather he talks) in fluent English and flowing hand gestures, his drink remaining untouched.

Marios is among our leading actors, having appeared on stage, film and even – though never again, he insists! – local television. His most recent production was Uniting the Mediterranean Sea, a bold collaboration with actors from five Mediterranean countries, staged at the sea caves of Peyia, which he also wrote and directed. He has three movies coming out soon, and will also be teaching English-language theatre workshops for the first time; go to the ‘Theatre Tribe’ Facebook page for more information.

He’s also a character and a bundle of contradictions, physical yet obsessively verbal, generous and self-absorbed, with a fine appreciation for the well-turned provocation. He’ll say things like this, quoting Greek poet Nicos Kavvadias for the first part: “Prostitutes, sailors and actors have one thing in common: they hate their job, but can’t get away from it! And, if I wasn’t an actor, I think I would be a prostitute. If I was a woman, I’d be a prostitute.”

Or this: “I don’t like doctors. I think it has to do with aesthetics. I think that hospitals should have more music, more fun. There’s something about the aesthetic of it that doesn’t make me want to run to a doctor.”

Or this, on his theatrical ambitions: “What am I doing, what am I giving to humanity? How am I helping? Am I helping because Mrs So-and-So, who’s more knowledgeable than me” – ‘Mrs. So-and-So’ is a hypothetical theatre professional – “would do it in a better way? She probably would. Well, the stage is yours, darling, do it!”

Or this: “I connect more to a melancholic view of being homosexual. I mean, to me, melancholia and homosexuality are something that’s very connected… The way I fantasise doesn’t belong so much in a Beyoncé concert, for example. It would be somewhere where it’s a city and a grey sky, and not a lot of people live there. In a train! I would fall in love with a stranger in a train. In a dungeon! Somewhere where it’s difficult. I was never into Mykonos, I never went to Mykonos except for a performance. I never was interested in – that.”

He tends to come on strong, his body language at its most flamboyant, then subsides or perhaps adjusts to my own body language (he’s super-sensitive). He talks with a sense of drama, rising to mini-crescendos and laying heavy emphasis on this or that word. He’ll be 46 in March, but looks younger. He’s bald and stubbled, dressed all in black, with an earring in his left ear, a necklace in the shape of an anchor and a baseball cap at a rakish angle. His ears jut out; his eyes are soulful and anxious.

It’s an unconventional face, and he’s often cast as an unconventional person: in Conveyor Belt (a film where he was the only cast member, apart from a turtle) he played a lonely airport worker with an obsessive interest in other people’s luggage; in Rosemarie – one of his upcoming movies – he’s a kind of noble madman, standing watch over the denizens of a troubled apartment block. He won Best Actor at Thessaloniki (the only Cypriot ever to have won the award) as a Syrian immigrant called Mustafa in Kalabush, a film for which he spent two months wandering around Limassol in shabby clothes, toting a plastic bag and living the character.

The way Mustafa carried that bag was also Marios’ ‘way in’ to the character. He’s a physical actor, and indeed a physical person who uses his body as a safety valve when his mind gets overloaded (which is often). He’ll exercise every day, yoga or swimming and usually both. What does he do for fun? “I dance. I love to dance. Sometimes I dance alone, at home.” He tries to recall his favourite song, but only gets as far as crooning “Ooh-ohh-ohh” before collapsing in laughter. “I dance a lot. I love to dance. I walk a lot on the promenade. I’m a loner, I have very few friends. I’m a tree-hugger”. Very few friends? Really? He has no steady circle of friends, explains Marios, no gang of chums with whom to go out for coffee; “I usually go for coffee alone”. I recall the café where we almost sat for the interview, where he was greeted by a distant acquaintance and responded politely but stiffly, with a certain hauteur. His appetite for chit-chat, I suspect, is limited.

He’s physical in other ways too, trusting in sexuality (the idea of “sexual exchanges”) almost as a kind of religion. At one point I ask if he’s ever been in a physical fight, and he shudders visibly. He was born with a rare condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, explains Marios, which means his bones are fragile and break easily – “but I think my soul would also break easily if I was in a fight, I cannot understand to cause pain to someone else’s body. I’m a person who wants to make love with people. I mean really, like a hippy, ‘make love not war’. If there was no Aids, and there was a big field with naked people, I’d definitely be in there making love – then I’d just go onstage, perform, then go back again and continue making love! That would be my life.”

Was he always open about his own sexuality? “Not really,” he replies. “But the more time goes by, the more I kind of said goodbye to – inhibitions, is that the word?” He’s been with Achim Wieland, a German theatre director whom he met in Athens, for the past 14 years, but only came out as gay a couple of years ago. I suspect he’s even more relaxed about discussing it now, when he’s on the cusp of fleeing Cyprus (he plans a move to Barcelona in a few months) – because “Cyprus was the pod in which I was suppressed, when I was suppressed”. Marios recalls a rumbling, persistent anxiety, a case of ‘What will the neighbours think?’ that kept him in the closet for years. “I don’t think, if my mama was alive, I’d be able to [come out],” he admits frankly. “But when your mama goes, it’s a most painful freedom. Because, after both parents are gone, you are really alone on planet Earth.”

His mother passed away a couple of years ago. “She was a –” he begins, trying to describe her, then gives up: “I adored my mum!” he says effusively, rising to one of his mini-crescendos. “My mum was a muse, my mum sang songs, she liked [Greek singer] Sofia Vembo a lot – an extremely romantic woman, like an era of how women used to be, devoted to the one and only person. Singing, looking out the window, very melancholic, with her long fingers, smoking cigarettes, that’s how she insisted to die – smoking, smoking like crazy…”

The ‘one person’ was of course Marios’ father. What was he like?

“He was suicidal,” he replies unexpectedly. “And he died like that, committing suicide.” It happened around 20 years ago, the precise reasons still unknown – though Marios later discovered two unknown half-brothers in Germany, a secret his dad had been keeping for years. Maybe that’s why he himself prefers not to keep secrets, almost compulsive in his desire to reach out. “I love to communicate,” he says. “I love to talk.” Theatre, of course, is a way of reaching out, to the audience and indeed other actors; he recalls how he bonded with his co-stars in Uniting the Mediterranean Sea, crying on each other’s shoulders when the time came to say goodbye. He also recalls his father’s funeral, and the way he sat there devastated – then “I said to myself: ‘It’s all right. You have theatre’,” he says, and nods gravely. “It always saved me.”

Acting was always Plan A (there was no Plan B), the obvious life for a wildly imaginative boy growing up in Paphos in the 80s. “I knew that I was homosexual and an artist since I was very, very young,” he admits, having felt different in so many ways – no interest in football or the usual boyish roughhousing, escaping into Oliver Twist and Gone With the Wind – from the age of six or seven. He moves like an actor; he talks like an actor. Like those sailors and prostitutes, he can’t get away from it. “It was after me like a ghost,” says Marios, and tells a funny story of his days in Athens, trying to make it as a struggling, often literally starving actor, working as a waiter to make ends meet. “There was a morning when I woke up and said ‘I don’t want to be an actor’, I even phoned a friend and said: ‘I’m not an actor anymore! I’m tired of it!’. Then I went to this restaurant where I was working, I went to some customers with the menu and I read them the menu – and they said [in impressed voice]: ‘Oh! You must be an actor’.”

All well and good; but what does it actually mean to be an actor? TV acting – at least in local TV, which is not exactly HBO – doesn’t count, being the thespian equivalent of a sausage factory; Marios recently left a TV show on bad terms (“I was the only one that got fired, because I was the only one who demanded my money”), a risky move in Cyprus where TV is a steady paycheque in a fickle business. Film acting, on the other hand, has a poetry to it. There’s a magic in repeating the same bit of business over and over, “and through the repetition, to find the ecstasy”; it’s like a religious ritual. “I’m an actor-poet,” says Marios, a statement that goes a long way to defining him. He loves ‘devised theatre’, the improvisational process of making a show out of nothing, just whatever props are handy, finding the poetry in one’s surroundings.

I suspect he’s always been this way, feeling out of sync with the surface of things, seeing “life within life” as he calls it – that hidden layer, the touch of poetry. This is why he’s voluble and flamboyant, as if reaching out for that special response that’ll indicate a kindred spirit (this is also why he remains relatively alone, with few close friends beyond his sister and Achim; kindred spirits are scarce in a boring, material world). He looks around at our Old Port surroundings, gazing through the eyes of the actor-poet. A bull on the logo of a high-end steak house is poetry, or at least absurdity (aren’t they often the same thing?). His mum’s empty chair, or her shoes on the floor after her death, were a kind of poetic shadow. “Sometimes when I see Achim walking and there’s a clumsiness in the walk, that’s what I love”; that too is poetry, the flaw in the structure, the moment when life opens out into something poignant, and oddly revealing.

Marios Ioannou walks a tightrope, or perhaps many tightropes – between his bright, charming spirit and the melancholia he’s attracted to; between his love of Cyprus and his desire to “dream bigger”; between his hunger for talk (he laments the decline of words in the age of emojis and selfies) and lifelong flirtation with solitude; between life-as-it-is and the lyrical ‘life within life’ that moves him. There’s another tightrope, between the present and the future. I’ve caught him at a time of transition, he says, a time when he’s “changing skin”, like a snake. Uniting the Mediterranean Sea was a huge personal project that consumed him for two years; now it’s over and he feels the loss keenly (“like a child has been taken away from me”) – but he also feels a freedom, “this huge empty room with so much light, and it’s ready to be discovered”. Seven years ago, when he last ‘changed skin’, a doctor prescribed anti-depressants; now he knows it’s just a case of something coming to an end, and patiently waits for the rebirth.

There’s yet another tightrope, one that’s easy to lose sight of: the sensitive boy is also, as he puts it, a “tough cookie” who’s been through a lot. His folks were supportive, if somewhat repressed (“We never talked openly about the fact that I’m different”) – but Marios was bullied at school, and wrestled with his lack of ‘masculinity’, and struggled to fit in both personally and professionally. Even now, he reports with a touch of bitterness, after all his awards, state theatre company Thoc have never invited him to collaborate.

“So what I’m saying is,” he concludes, doing my job for me as he sums up Marios Ioannou (it’s no wonder he loves doing interviews): “Sensitive, wonderful, the son of someone who committed suicide, poetic, his mother sang Sofia Vembo – but, at the same time, I’m a tough cookie. I’m a survivor. And I do it through art, and I do art to survive”. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

The frenzied passion of a sensible chap impresses THEO PANAYIDES as he watches the new conductor of the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra in action

Yes, it’s a free concert and yes, it’s a Friday night in mid-September – and yes, well-known baritone Kyros Patsalides will be making an appearance. Still, the turnout is impressive – and may have surprised even Jens Bachmann, making his first public appearance as conductor and artistic director of the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra (CYSO) since taking over in July. The square behind Phaneromeni Church in Nicosia is packed, maybe 700 people in all, middle-aged couples and families with kids (one of them unhelpfully supplied with a little tambourine of her own, the better to drown out the music). 200 extra chairs have had to be brought in to accommodate the crowd, which spills over the edges of the square and up the stairs leading to the school.

I arrive five minutes early and can’t find a seat – which is actually a blessing in disguise since I end up standing in the church courtyard next to the square, admittedly watching the show through the bars of an iron fence but also just a few feet away from the orchestra. I can see the expressions (actually just a single expression, focused intensity) on musicians’ faces – and I even fancy that I glimpse a tinge of exhilaration on Jens’ face as he appears in a flowing white shirt, checks out the crowd, bows to them deeply, then turns around briskly and leads the players into ‘Les Toréadors’ from Carmen.

The previous day, we meet in his office in the Cultural Services building of the Ministry of Culture. Ethnic stereotypes should of course be avoided – but he does seem very German as he meticulously explains how to get to the building (“Take the lift to the fourth floor, which is the top floor,” he instructs with perhaps a surfeit of punctiliousness). Then again, maybe he’s just very organised – and indeed it comes with the territory, orchestra conducting being, by definition, “a big-picture job”. He’s the only one with a sense of the whole enterprise, using the musicians like a painter wields his paintbrush or a sculptor his chisel. Sculpture is also his preferred metaphor, explaining why he switched from playing to conducting at an early age: “Getting a sculpture out of a rock, you might say, with the orchestra – that was something that was extremely enticing to me”.

No offence to the CYSO, but Jens seems a little over-qualified for his new job. It’s true he’s on the young side for a conductor (he turned 45 in June), and spent much of the 00s as an assistant conductor – but he assisted some heavyweight mentors, the legendary James Levine at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Christoph von Dohnanyi at the NDR Symphony in Hamburg (he’s also worked at the Munich Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera in New York, among others). He comes across as confident, lively to the point of being hyper, cutting quite a distinctive figure with his egg-shaped head, shock of ash-blond hair and blue eyes behind round, rimless glasses. The smile, when it comes, is relaxed and toothy. He talks breathlessly fast, his English honed by his years in the US; he graduated from the Juilliard School in New York, following four years at the Hochschule fur Musik ‘Hanns Eisler’ in his native Berlin. He’s thin, almost boyish. The top button of his light-purple shirt is unbuttoned, adding to the casual air, then he notices and discreetly buttons it.

What, I wonder, is he like? What are his demons? Alas, this is not that kind of profile – or maybe it’s just that Jens doesn’t have many demons, having decided as a teenager what he wanted to do and set about doing it. His lifestyle is active and wholesome, his hobbies being primarily “Nature activities” like hiking, swimming, skiing and cycling (“I’m looking forward to my first hike in the Troodos mountains”). He eats and drinks healthily, with just the occasional glass of red wine; “My body deserves good treatment because it has to serve me well – and obviously, as a conductor, you work a lot with your body”. Any bad habits mostly derive from being super-organised most of the time, so that he tends to let things slide (leaving his laundry on the rack, that kind of thing) in his downtime. He doesn’t lose his temper, and insists he’s a very patient person. He’s been with his wife – a violinist, and now also a violin teacher – since 1996; they married in 2001, but sensibly waited a few years to start a family. His seven-year-old son has just started school in Hamburg which is why (again, very sensibly) the rest of the family will be staying in Germany, and only coming down to Cyprus during school holidays.

All very sensible – but then I watch Jens in action at the Phaneromeni concert and something else emerges, the frenzied passion of his chosen profession. His hands claw at the air, then beat time in a chopping motion. His body twitches, his shock of hair flops. A conductor isn’t just a traffic cop, his task is to embody the music; he’s a kind of shaman or dancer, acting as a beacon for both players and audience. After all, I note, it’s not just about musical knowhow; rightly or wrongly, we expect a maestro to be charismatic too. “I don’t know whether I should call it ‘luck’ or something,” he replies, “but that was something I never had to worry about, or think about. I believe,” he goes on, trying to find the right words, “once you are filled with your mission, and the output of what you’re supposed to project – it’s something that makes you glow inside.”

That’s the trick, that inner glow; where does it come from? Not genes, apparently, as he wasn’t born to a musical family (or a family of musicians, at any rate). His dad was a landscaping architect, his mum a high-school German literature teacher; “I’m kind of the black sheep of the family!”. That said, flair and a sense of the dramatic seem to come naturally – or, at least, have always been part of his style. “Bachmann has much more theatrical presence than his mentor [i.e. Levine], who looked on from the audience,” wrote the Boston Globe, reviewing a long-ago performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Even in conversation, he brims with a vigorous energy; he does have a glow, even in his office in the Cultural Services building – but it’s the glow of a clean, bright light-bulb, not the mad musical fire he musters in front of an audience.

That light-bulb glow is important, though, and may have helped in beating out some 50 applicants for the CYSO job – a job, he admits, that draws on administrative skills almost as much as musical talent. Jens’ years as a top-tier assistant conductor come in handy here, that job having baptised him in everything from liaising with soloists to checking acoustics in concert halls; his organised side (the clean light-bulb side that supplied me with meticulous directions) also comes into it. Managerial duties are “extensive” in his new position – especially now, at the start of his tenure, with a full season to plan and a repertoire to be chosen. Three musicians are due to retire soon, and auditions must be scheduled for their replacements. Long-term decisions must be made – but short-term success is also important. “Rehearsal time is, let’s say, the most favourite time of my day,” he concludes diplomatically.

Then again, that was the attraction of Cyprus: a case, once again, of the big picture. If you look at most northern European orchestras, you’ll find “a straitjacketing routine” of weekly concerts and very set schedules, explains Jens. Here, on the other hand, things are more flexible. Not only is he able to go abroad when guest conductors arrive (this month he’s actually in Germany working as a piano accompanist, which he likes to do just to keep in practice), but leading the CYSO is also about much more than conducting an orchestra. “I really, really like the idea that under the umbrella of the [CYSO] Foundation there is also the state music school and youth orchestra,” he enthuses, meaning he can focus on the next generation and “the growth of classical music in this country”; you might say he’s conducting the future of classical music in Cyprus.

It’s not a majority taste, I warn him.

“Mm-hm. Well, not at the moment,” he replies affably. “But we work on this. We work on this on different levels”.

Jens has plans. More family and ‘outreach’ events like his inaugural concert in Phaneromeni; working with CyBC to broadcast events, whether on TV or radio. Clearly, the thought of such a big project – not just preaching to the converted, but attracting a whole new constituency to the side of the angels – appeals to his active, communicative side. But there’s also another, more profound vision here, the same Utopian vision that’s behind our multicultural orchestra with musicians from a dozen different countries (only half the players are of Cypriot descent). It’s a faith in the power of music as a unifying force, an “omnipotent” language as he puts it. “Experiences might differ,” he explains, “but we all would agree that if we listen to, um, Schubert’s great C Major Symphony, then we will leave that performance joyfully enchanted, positive, recharged. And that’s kind of a common notion.”

Is it a common notion? Is it even true? Therein lies the rub, and perhaps the key question in the life of Jens Bachmann. After all, there’s music and there’s music. He himself claims to listen to all kinds of music but I reckon he means mostly classical, maybe with a few bits of jazz and rock’n roll. (Tell me a pop song that you love, I ask him. “I don’t have one in my mind at the moment,” he replies instantly, without even so much as a token effort.) Still, there’s no doubt that music is magical – not just beautiful or beneficial, but actually magical. It’s uncanny that sensible, down-to-earth, otherwise-insensitive people can be moved so deeply and inexplicably by something so abstract and ethereal – “the most un-materialistic manifestation of beauty,” as Jens puts it.

Visual art is something you can touch, even dance has a three-dimensional aspect – but music? “It comes into existence only through the collaboration of musicians, but there’s no way you can hold on to it. Once the performance is over, once the piece is over, it’s gone,” he muses gently (ignoring CDs for the purposes of this argument). “And, in some good moments with musicians, we always remind ourselves that we take that sound from whatever realm it comes – out of the silence, into audibility – and deliver it back into silence.”

That’s what I see him doing in the square behind Phaneromeni, the new conductor of the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra being himself quite a sensible chap unaccountably moved by the power of music as he clutches at the air and buries himself in the realm of Bizet, Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Brahms and the others. A conductor’s job is to unify the orchestra, he tells me, based on three main parameters – dynamics (i.e. whether the playing is loud or soft), articulation and tempo – but parameters mean nothing without “the emotional content of a piece”, which is ultimately what determines everything. Technique is nothing. Emotion is king.

Kyros Patsalides has belted out the ‘Toreador Song’ and Jens Bachmann takes it down a notch now, leading the CYSO in the lilting sounds of ‘Morning Mood’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. I decide I’ve heard enough, so I turn around to leave – and come face-to-face with a sight so lovely it catches at my throat. The courtyard of the church is half-empty, just a smattering of youngsters sitting on the cobbles or leaning against the church wall – but there in the middle of the courtyard, entirely unselfconscious, two teenage girls (one willowy and tall, the other shorter) are dancing together in a courtly impromptu caper, hands clasped and feet moving in harmony as they sway to the ebb and flow of the music. No-one calls out, no-one teases them. They dance with the seriousness of youth and a crystalline certainty, caught in the spell of a 19th-century Norwegian summoned by Jens and his orchestra. Only music can do this.

A gallery owner in Nicosia is as well travelled as the maps on his walls. AGNIESZKA RAKOCZY meets a man who has repeatedly had to re-invent himself

In the Congo’s Eastern Province lies a crossroads not far from the Uele river. It is a significant turning point. Also a significant starting point. Turn left and you are on your way to what is now South Sudan. Take the right and you are on the road to Uganda. Its significance as a start-ing point is that this is where Aghis Philippides, art gallery and framing shop owner in Nicosia’s Pallouriotissa district, began life in 1942. To honour his sudden arrival, the locals dubbed it the Aghis Crossing.

“My mother went into labour and didn’t make it on time to the local hospital,” says Philippides sitting in his sprawling premises, walls cov-ered floor-to-ceiling with paintings, drawings and old maps. “So I was born on this crossing and they named the place after the event of my birth. I still hope to go back there one day to see if it still exists,” he says. His voice is suddenly charged with longing for the vast African horizon that only those who lived there can comprehend.

I try to picture this scene in my mind: a mud-brown river, Aghis’ fa-ther Costas driving an old Chrysler, his mother Thalia giving birth in the back of the car, the cry of a new-born baby piercing the surrounds. And I think that somehow there must be a link between Aghis’ screeching arrival and his ongoing journey through life with its recur-ring motif of travel.

From youthful days of driving the endless dirt roads of east Africa to the air routes interconnecting the Mid-East capitals traversed later in his working life, he seems to have always been on the move, seldom at rest. Philippides, a bundle of positive energy, bursting with vitality and enthusiasm, is always on the go and finds it hard to sit still.

He bounces up from his chair to take me by the arm and proudly show me key art works hanging in the vast space of his gallery. The words tumble out, the verbal equivalent of a Jackson Pollock spills as he ex-citedly explains how he acquired each piece and why it is that they are special, even unique.

Pointing to some of the rare, antique maps in his collection, he con-fesses a Tolkien-like fascination with the secrets of the mysterious world of old prints and paintings. “Knowledge of geography, love of art, lots of travelling and reading is the key that opens this world of wonders,” he says. And to prove his point, he starts talking of east Af-rica and its trading routes – a landscape he is as familiar with as the in-side of his own pocket. His eyes gleam with excitement as he skips be-tween the old colonial names and their post-independence reincarna-tions.

“We would transport coffee down river to Stanleyville-Kisangani”, he reminiscences. Then, without missing a beat, he jumps to his school days in Lapithos and Athens, “where I used to be the best at arts”. He is a voracious reader and notes that French authors proliferated because of his fluency in French – as might be expected given his francophone Congo background. “The best book on Turkey I have ever read was in French”, he insists.

Switching back to his collecting, he says the main focus is on the works of famous Greek and Cypriot artists. They form the core of his collection but he readily admits that what makes him “most happy eve-ry morning” is seeing his two paintings by “the well known Russian artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin” shrewdly bought at a London gallery “many years ago.”

This breathless exposition serves to underscore how Aghis Philippi-des, son of an ivory-trading elephant hunter and subsequent coffee plantation owner, has lived a varied life spanning many cultures and a world of contrasts. The Congo phases of his life – early childhood and early adulthood – fell either side of an interlude in Cyprus for school-ing and a subsequent sojourn in Athens where he studied accountancy.

Young as he was, those early Congo years left potent memories. To this day he has vivid recall of Kilimbo, a towering, broad-shouldered warrior, renowned locally for slaying a leopard that had been stealing goats from the Phillipides family plantation. Aghis can still tap out the drummed rhythms used back then to telegraph the tribal community of news of such matters as a death. Magical evenings often entailed visits to the plantations of family friends in the area.

Not surprisingly, being torn from this “paradise” at age four came as a major “shock” to the young Aghis. His parents had decided that their eight children needed proper schooling and brought them back to Cy-prus. “My friends in Cyprus had no idea about Africa and it was diffi-cult to explain to them my life there. I missed the Congo desperately.” He went through primary school in Cyprus, first in Limassol and then in Lapithos where his father’s parents lived. Next stop was Athens where he attended the same Jesuit-run gymnasium his father had once studied at.

On graduation from university in Athens, Aghis began preparations to return to the Congo to help his family run their ever expanding coffee plantation. It was while on a visit to Cyprus that he met a young wom-an from the Ayios Kassianos district of old Nicosia. They fell in love and were soon married. Once more it was back to Africa, this time with his young bride. “And she loved it,” he remembers, his eyes sparkling with pride while glancing at Eleftheria, his wife of 53 years, as she stands by a large table preparing some pictures for framing.

“A lot of women would be very afraid to go to this strange land… they would take it differently but Eleftheria took to it like a fish to water. We were very happy. She quickly learned the local languages – Linga-la and Swahili. Local people welcomed and responded to her. When she went for walks they would accompany her from a distance, keep-ing an eye out for her safety and wellbeing lest she have a chance en-counter with some of the dangerous animals that still abounded there.”

The fates must have been on his side to have found a woman like that, I mused. “Oh yes, very lucky indeed,” he says, his eyes suddenly very serious. “You know, I think, getting married is a chance, finding the right person is a chance. You have to face everything together, even economic difficulties. And we did. We faced huge economic difficul-ties when our life in the Congo finished.”

This was yet to come. For the time being, the Philippides family was doing extremely well. With the advent of Congo’s independence in 1960 they added to the plantations they owned by securing a lease on a huge tract of land enabling them to buy the produce grown by local farmers. In an attempt to give me a sense of the scale of the thriving business, he tells the area was as big as Cyprus.

“We used to buy all their produce, everything from rice and peanuts to palm fruits from which we processed palm oil. The area was huge – 280 by 300 kilometres. Some 30,000 people lived there. It was like a small republic. We built new roads, maintained the old ones. We in-troduced a new type of a palm tree (imported from Bolivia) that in-creased the palm oil production capacity. There were 3,500 people working directly on our plantation and in the factories. We paid their health and pension schemes. Everything we bought from the farmers was at prices set by the government.”

In 1973, it came to a sudden end and with it the end of Aghis’ “first life”. President Mobuto Sese Seko, less than a decade after coming to power, decided to nationalise or “Zairise” the country’s natural re-sources. With one stroke of the pen, Mobuto took back from the for-eign entrepreneurs their flourishing enterprises and placed the thriving economy under the guardianship of the state.

It was sudden, shocking and earth-shaking, Aghis recalls. Government officials made an inventory of the family’s plantation and factories in November 1973. The warehouse tally is imprinted in his memory. “We had 400 tonnes of coffee, 6,000 tonnes of palm oil, 12,000 tonnes of rice. By March 1974 we were back in Cyprus. We left Congo empty-handed.”

By his account, what they left behind them in the Congo had an ap-proximate value at the time of $15 million. Within two years all the family had worked to achieve over the years had been, in his word, “wasted”. Summing it up, he says that “Mobutu’s people” took what-ever money and assets existed, went on a spending spree in Kinshasa and proceeded to “just ruin the country.”

Aghis and Eleftheria had neither time nor money to waste. Not with three children to raise and support. Eleftheria was soon back running the family-owned hotel in Lapithos. Aghis, meanwhile, set off to Swit-zerland where he became Middle East agent for a manufacturer of sub-limation tunnels for dry freezing. Just as they were starting to make headway, another lightning bolt struck. The tragic events of July 1974 and division of the island deprived the Philippides yet again of their properties, this time in Lapithos.

“And the irony of all of this”, Aghis notes, was that being Congo-born and a British passport holder he was never recognised “as a refugee.” Refusing to give in to the latest setbacks, he forged ahead with life number two and was soon operating out of Beirut, selling his sublima-tion tunnels all over the Middle East. He was laying the foundations for a successful business career until the outbreak of another conflict intervened, this time in Lebanon. “I woke up one morning in Beirut and realised I could not cross the road to go to my office because they were shooting. So I left for the airport to travel to Cyprus and there I met Greek tycoon John Latsis and he offered me a job.”

Just like that? The Greek billionaire was once listed among the world’s richest tycoons. Latsis, in his time a major figure in shipping, oil, con-struction and banking, and, of course, was also owner of the much headlined yacht Alexandros, the luxury vessel on which the Prince of Wales spent both of his honeymoons.
“Well, not exactly, but we had a chat and he asked me about my life and I told him about my education and that I speak fluent French and English and some Arabic and he decided he might have a niche for me. So he invited me to Athens for further discussions and soon I was on my way to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia where he had a major port expan-sion project. The next thing was the executive in charge of his dealings with Petromin [state- owned Saudi Arabian corporation specialising in lubricant oils] in Riyadh fell sick and I was sent there.”

Never afraid of hard work, Aghis rose to the new challenge and quick-ly developed warm relations with members of the Saudi royal family, various governmental officials and diplomats. It wasn’t long before Eleftheria joined him in Riyadh. Always charming hosts, their house-hold fast became a fixture in local social diaries, not least because of Eleftheria’s cuisine.

“But then I had enough,” says Aghis. “Being separated from our by now teenage children was too high a price to pay for whatever success I enjoyed. I felt strongly that we should be with our children and not in some foreign country where I could see them only once or twice a year.” So it was that this optimistic and good hearted man quit Riyadh in 1982 to start his life yet again, this time back in Cyprus. “We came back to Cyprus, opened our first framing shop that soon also became an art gallery and thankfully we have never looked back.”
And this is how Aghis’ third life started – the one he lives so content-edly today. It is hard to believe a personal voyage as epic as any navi-gated using those ancient maps hanging on his gallery walls resides alongside and among them in the heart of Nicosia.

A lifetime of drama and impulsiveness are reflected in the poems of a man who used to rub shoulders with Ted Hughes. THEO PANAYIDES meets an English Cypriot proud of his roots

The punchline comes after an hour, when I ask the poet George Tardios what’s the biggest crisis, or difficult situation, he’s faced in his life, and he recounts how he almost died in the Asian tsunami that killed over 200,000 people on Boxing Day 2004. It’s a punchline not because it’s amusing – the event was obviously horrific, and still haunts him now – but because it manages to cap a solid hour of recounting other crises and difficult situations (I don’t even know why I asked the question; he’d have been within his rights to reply: ‘Jesus, man, don’t you have enough?’), from bloody gang warfare on the streets of London to a week in a Kenyan prison in the mid-1980s. And poetry, of course.

Actually, I take it back. The punchline is probably the poetry – the quality of the poetry, much appreciated by the late Ted Hughes among others, and indeed the existence of the poetry, the fact that a working-class, not to say slum-born London Cypriot spent a lifetime (73 years and counting) getting into scrapes, dodging or skirting disaster, getting beaten up and sometimes beating up others – he always had good cause, or thought he did – and plunging into adventures like his two-year Tanzanian trek in the footsteps of Stanley and Livingstone, yet still wrote lines like the following:

Pocked with licked pins, bristling notes
Spilt red wine on her dress
A spreading blot.
Only cicadas heard the stumbled passage to their bed.

We talk for an hour and a half, yet the poetry barely gets mentioned – partly because there’s so much else to talk about, but also because it seems to exist outside himself, a higher plane to which he’s allowed access only intermittently (he has “gaps” between poems, he admits) and then only as a conduit. “This Cypriot book of poems – I feel as if it’s come to me,” he explains in his slow drawl. “It’s come from somewhere else. It’s not me. It’s not me at all, making it happen. It’s something that’s passed through me.”

So, like some Higher Force?

“Higher Force, definitely. And so I wait, for the next round to come up. ’Cause it’s always happened like this, I’ve always waited and it always comes up. This – this writing takes place.”

The ‘Cypriot book of poems’ is called Buttoned-Up Shapes, and its appearance in a bilingual edition – translated by Despina Pirketti, published by Armida Publications and Write CY – is a major event. “It’s almost a kind of revenge writing, these poems,” chuckles George, noting that the title refers to the British, or Cypriots’ idea of the British. “I want [the poems] to be accepted by Cyprus, they are about Cyprus and they’re for Cyprus”. It’s an odd, delicious irony that George handles the English language beautifully – and still pines for London after a few months in his summer home of Kritou Terra – yet doesn’t feel English, indeed he bristles at the very idea. “England is a racist country,” he claims, citing Brexit as the latest iteration of the ordinary Brits who snarled “Get back to your own country” at him as a child in the 50s. “I feel an outsider, I’ve always felt an outsider. At the moment, Islam is getting a very bad press in England,” he goes on, unafraid of sounding controversial; “I’m on the side of Islam. Just like I was on the side of the IRA. Because it was like Eoka, and they were called terrorists just like Eoka.”

We sit in a courtyard in Kaimakli, at the home of a mutual friend; Christine, George’s wife of 48 years, sits in the background, listening discreetly and prompting him when he loses his train of thought, as he does occasionally. The two are a team (they have no children), George with his thick suntanned arms and curly, if thinning, black hair – he looks like he could happily grout your kitchen, or build a garden wall in your backyard – Christine a slim, bubbly blonde. He’s an Aries, she’s a Sagittarius: a good match, apparently. She was also part of the three-person expedition that trekked through Tanzania for two years, then saved both their lives in 2004 by physically pulling him away from the tsunami (he was frozen, staring at the wave as it rose up “like a cobra”). What first attracted her to George? “He talked me into it,” she replies, and laughs. “He wanted to do things, action things – and I’m an outdoor person, so I like to do things as well”. Christine pauses, thinking back to their five decades together: “I didn’t intend to have a peaceful life. And I didn’t get one!”.

They met in a North London nightclub, where George was a doorman-slash-bouncer and Christine a part-time waitress (she worked as a teacher the rest of the week). This was not a high-end place, but it didn’t lack for celebrity guests: the notorious Kray brothers came by, initially hoping to sell protection – “but we were already paying West Hampstead police station,” explains George with a straight face, so the Krays merely bought a few drinks and behaved themselves. Later, there was also “a Scottish gang that wanted to shoot my legs off,” forcing the now-married couple to go into hiding. One of the gang had threatened the chef in the kitchen, and George had intervened rather forcefully; that’s how he was, “I used to go and support all the underdogs,” he recalls with a rueful chuckle, “it’s ridiculous… I’ve changed now,” he adds, “I’m not like this. I’m very peaceful. Obviously I’m so old now, I couldn’t do it anyway.”

He had form, going back to his childhood years in Somers Town, just behind King’s Cross. There were only four Cypriots at his school and all four were prey for the racists of the Somers Town gang on the journey between school and home: “They used to beat us up and smash bottles on our heads, and call us ‘bubbles’” (from ‘bubble and squeak’, rhymes with ‘Greek’). George still has thin white scars on the backs of his hands, from trying to shield his face while being attacked with a cutthroat razor. One of his friends was stabbed on the top deck of a London bus, where he’d tried to flee from the gang. The Cypriots were too few to retaliate in kind – but they did take revenge by ambushing gang members individually, rubbing their faces with hot chili pepper. (And through poetry, of course; but that came later.)

Those were also the days of Eoka, when the British tabloid press referred to Ledra Street in Nicosia as ‘Murder Mile’ and demonised Makarios as ‘Black Mak’. The son of the deputy headmaster at George’s school was a soldier who fell victim to Eoka – so the deputy head took it out on George. “He used to pick on me every day, whether I was at fault or not. He would say ‘Your tie’s on crooked’ and he’d whip me with his cane. ‘Bend over, boy,’ he’d say, and start walloping me. ‘You’re late’ – whether I was or not – ‘bend over’. So I used to get it all the time. And I said to the deputy headmaster, I said ‘Listen, I had nothing to do with your son. Leave me alone, please. I’ve already got it outside [from the gang].’ He started whipping me with his cane – and I just lost it, and I jumped on him”. The man ended up in hospital and George was promptly expelled, ending up as a window cleaner, the first of many manual jobs.

Poetry is now a commodity; Britain has a ‘National Poetry Day’ (this year’s edition took place two weeks ago; the theme was ‘Freedom’), touting poetry as a kind of simplified prose where anyone can express themselves. George has no truck with any of that, his own favourite poets being intricate craftsmen like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas who speak through images and sounds, the music of words; poetry today is “about people’s own experience, and it’s very prosaic”. Poets today are rappers – but George himself was a wrapper, actually a sausage wrapper (sorry, I’ll stop now), wrapping meat in cellophane 12 hours a night, seven to seven, his hands working like spindles.

“The first night we were there, I remember this horrible screaming started up, and people started thumping the tables and banging their feet – a horrible cacophony of sound – and we wondered what this was,” he recalls of his time in the sausage factory. “Then, in the following days, we would join in.” Every night, around three or four a.m., someone would suddenly erupt and everyone else would follow suit, screaming and banging on tables for about a minute; it was “a way of letting off frustration, letting off steam and saying ‘We too are human beings’.” The poetry of the primal scream.

What about the poetry, though? When does it arrive? In the end, it was the angry Scottish gang who precipitated the start of the second chapter in George’s life, forcing him and Christine to flee to Devon where he went to college as a mature student and came under the sway of a poet called John Moat, who’d recently co-founded the Arvon Foundation. This was a charity devoted to creative writing, its motto – “The fire in the flint shows not till it be struck” – all too applicable to the working-class lad who’d always written on the side (he’d been encouraged by a teacher in school) but never felt like it had any value. It’s another irony that this lifelong socialist found his benefactor in a public-schoolboy engaged in a kind of benevolent paternalism – though Ted Hughes (also involved in Arvon) was working-class, which was how George and the future Poet Laureate bonded in the first place. “We used to get drunk together,” says our hero (who still loves his wine). “Then he started to like my poetry.”

The rest came naturally, if not always smoothly. So much to talk about, such a full life – but seldom a lucrative one, mostly sustained by some teaching and a parallel career as a film and TV actor. His father was also a film actor, one Harry Tardios who played minor-role swarthy ethnics in the 60s and 70s – and previously left George’s mum for a singer, when the boy was small. She never remarried, raising him by herself in a two-room flat (not two-bedroom, two-room) with a leaky roof, working in “the rag trade” all day then bringing work home and placing a cloth over the light, so George could sleep in one side of the room while she worked in the other.

“Tin Kypro mou, tin Kypro mou…” (‘My Cyprus, my Cyprus…’) his mother used to say, eternally nostalgic despite having left the island in the 1930s. She returned on a kind of pilgrimage after her divorce, as described in his poem ‘So I’m Told’ – she’d asked his grandma “to create waxen effigies of my legs” and hang them in Apostolos Andreas after George had been confined to a wheelchair by a childhood accident, and was properly grateful when her son was ‘miraculously’ cured – then came back again in the early 90s, hoping to die here. George asked the government to “give me a Turkish house [and] I’ll do it up for my mother to live in,” promising to give it back when asked. They refused. He persisted, making such a nuisance of himself that he ended up being arrested (!) as a Turkish spy. Christine got him out, and they left the island in a hurry. His mum died in England, soon after.

It’s a sad story, yet it may be the best George Tardios story. The one about his week in a Kenyan prison is obviously grittier – awaiting trial for assault, in a dark cell with 40 other prisoners, regularly lined up by the guards who “smashed us all” with their rifle-butts – and of course his experience of the Thailand tsunami is unforgettable (the cut-off screams, the roar of the water, the bloated bodies lying on the beach when the wave subsided), yet his efforts to secure a house for his mother says so much about him. His almost childlike faith in magical solutions, and his stubbornness in pursuing them. His fierce sentimentality, and the way he tends to end up in trouble. His contrarian nature, like the way he’ll stand up for Islamic jihadists now. His propensity to leap in unthinking, like embarking on a two-year African trek without any funding. (What’s his biggest character flaw? “Impulsive!” says Christine with a laugh.) The way he’s always up for a scrap, when it’s for the sake of “the underdog”.

And the poetry? Where does that come from? Would he be the same poet – or a poet at all – had he grown up in the leafy suburbs, or a village in Cyprus? He’s had unusually extensive experience of human cruelty, I point out, and he agrees, having long since concluded that cruelty is part of human nature. But is that why he writes?

I see the sky reflected in my teacup.
I move the cup,
And tilt the sky.

That’s from ‘Islands’, also in Buttoned-Up Shapes – and the title of the poem has an echo of Cyprus, yet the theme is universal. It’s about the way grand cosmic concepts are encapsulated in the tiniest of details – and the way, more specifically, that poetry consists of looking at the world more closely, seeing what others miss and expressing it, painstakingly, through language. His intensity was always potentially a poet’s intensity, it just had to be channelled – or bestowed from above, whatever. “I don’t know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from – angels, who knows?” says George Tardios of his gift, sitting in the warm sunny courtyard, and shrugs expansively.