THEO PANAYIDES meets a pop singer who after 25 years in the business concentrates on what makes her happy

We start with a bit of a stumble. Our Russian readers know who you are, I remind Valeriya, sitting on the terrace by the pool at the Nicosia Hilton, but others may be unfamiliar with your career; could you name a pop star who might be your equivalent in the West? The big blue eyes show the faintest glimmer of displeasure. “That’s what I – don’t like most,” she replies in fluent but sometimes hesitant English, “to compare myself to anybody else”. The face is calm and mostly unlined, the same face you’ll see on YouTube if you search for her very first album, 1992’s The Taiga Symphony. Iosif Prigozhin, her third husband, sits at the next table, gazing at the pool and taking phone calls.

I’m afraid we’ve started off on the wrong foot; I’m also worried that she might turn out to be a diva – which of course would be understandable in an artist who’s sold well in excess of 100 million albums in her native country. As it happens, I’m wrong on both counts. Yes, Valeriya is here to sing before President Anastasiades and other VIPs at the Cyprus-Russia Gala (organised by Ensemble Productions) and yes, she’s so famous in Russia that her life has been the subject of a TV mini-series – but she’s also very easy to talk to, with an air of practised but disarming friendliness. Even in Moscow she’s always “reachable”, as she puts it, happy to field requests and lend her presence to events. She even, eventually, agrees to name names, citing a Western superstar who might be her equivalent – or rather, one who definitely isn’t her equivalent:

“When we released my English album 10 years ago, Out of Control, Western journalists compared me with Madonna. I don’t think that’s a right comparison, because we have nothing in common. Nothing at all.”

Maybe just longevity? After all, she’s been a star for 25 years now.

“Maybe. But it’s a wrong comparison anyway. We are different in every single way.”

You can see why she feels so strongly – because Valeriya’s persona is clean-cut and sunny, totally unlike the taboo-busting, confrontational style of the former Material Girl. She doesn’t drink or smoke. Her only jewellery is a small gold cross around her neck. Her fans include President Putin, and she’s returned the compliment by, for instance, signing an open letter supporting the annexation of Crimea, which got her in trouble with Western activists. (Three years ago, protesters launched an unsuccessful petition calling on Downing Street to bar her from entering Britain for a gala performance at the Royal Albert Hall.) At one point I lament that Russian pop music is virtually unknown in the rest of Europe, noting that the only Russian singers many in Cyprus will have heard of – for non-musical reasons – are the punk band Pussy Riot, and Valeriya mouths “My God!”, shaking her head in disgust. “They are nobody,” she says of the feminist provocateurs. “Just – bad girls from the street.”

What’s Russia’s place in the world, in her opinion? Would she say it’s a misunderstood country?

“What I often see on TV, when I’m in Europe – I see a lot of twisted information,” she replies carefully. “I know how it is from the inside, and sometimes I’m so furious, as if [to say] ‘Oh my God, it’s not true!’. Of course it’s a powerful country,” she adds. “But we’re not aggressive. We’re not aggressive at all. And if you look back to the history of Russia, we’re not. We’re just defenders.”

She pauses, unhappy with the way this is going. “I hate this subject,” she admits. “I don’t like to talk about politics. What I know is that people all around the world, they want the same thing. They want to be happy. They want to raise their children. They want to live in love and peace. And all the rest is – Game of Thrones!”.

I see her point, forever being asked about Game of Thrones-ish political matters when all she’s ever wanted, or cared about, is music and motherhood. She was 22 when the Soviet Union collapsed (she’s now 49), studying at the Gnesin Academy of Music; that was a momentous time, I point out – but Valeriya just shrugs. “When you’re young, you don’t think much about it,” she replies. “I didn’t care.” She laughs merrily, indeed she laughs a lot throughout our interview. She seems open, outgoing, outdoorsy. Her passions include fitness, travel and above all hiking; she and Iosif have a home on Lake Geneva and she loves to go on 20- or 30-kilometre hikes (often with her older son Artemy, who lives nearby in Montreux), trudging across the Swiss mountains. Does she consciously try to be clean-cut? “No, no, I’m just – as I am,” she replies. “The dirt doesn’t stick to me, somehow.”

So she’s never been involved in scandals, like most celebrities?

“There were scandals. I had a divorce which wasn’t pleasant at all, so [there were] a lot of rumours around and all this stuff.”

That’s a whole other part of her life – and in fact, if one wanted to do a timeline, one might say there have been four stages in Valeriya’s life so far. The first is her childhood and youth in the town of Atkarsk, where she was born to a family of classical musicians. The third is her marriage to Iosif, culminating in their bold attempt to crack the Western market in 2008 – a year when she put out an album, performed with Mick Hucknall of Simply Red as a special guest on his UK tour, and was the subject of a long, admiring article in The Independent (‘Valeriya: Russia’s greatest export (after gas and oil)’ reads the headline), among other attempts to raise her profile. The fourth stage is now, still happily married but more sedate, less ambitious, happy to bask in her years of celebrity.

That leaves the second stage, and her marriage to one Alexander Shulgin – a slightly older musician who was instrumental in her rise to the top, though she balks at the idea that he discovered her. “We found each other,” she makes clear. “I was his only project at the time. Without me, he stopped doing anything in this field”. It was Shulgin, presumably, who clinched the deal to do an English-language album (the aforementioned Taiga Symphony) with Western partners – which also, incidentally, led to Alla Yurievna Perfilova adopting the stage name ‘Valeriya’, as the Western partners worried that her first name sounded too much like ‘Allah’. “I didn’t wake up famous overnight,” she insists – yet it didn’t take long. 1992 was the first year when the newly-minted star was stopped in the street by fans asking to take pictures, “and that’s when I realised that I” – she laughs – “I am watched. All the time”. She hasn’t walked down a Russian street since, except with bodyguards.

Valeriya and Shulgin fell in love, got married and had three children – but her husband was increasingly abusive, both to her and the kids. The violence was physical as well as psychological; he hit her “regularly, every week” for years, says Valeriya.

Why did she put up with it?

“If you cannot escape, nobody can help you,” she replies. “I was just waiting for the right time to escape.”

Going to the cops would’ve been pointless; the 90s were “a criminal period in Russia”, a time when – as the saying has it – “The one who has money is right”. Valeriya wasn’t just abused in the marriage, she was also powerless. Despite her success, she had no money, no credit cards, no papers, not even a passport; everything was kept locked away by her controlling husband. She herself was little more than a puppet, her job being to sing and go onstage – though it’s also true that going onstage was her salvation. “My work – the stage – music and children kept me alive. The only place where my husband could not come was the stage. It was my world. It was my area.”

Even after she finally walked out in 2001, the divorce didn’t leave her with much; Shulgin had made her sign a pre-nuptial agreement, placing all the property in his name. “I started my life from scratch, from the beginning,” recalls Valeriya, looking back to the end of that painful second stage in her life (it was also the subject of her autobiography, which became the TV mini-series); still, “I was so happy because I got rid of him, I got my freedom – so happy that I didn’t care about money, about property. I knew that I am a hard worker, I had my energy, I still had my audience when I came back” – she’d retired for a year, going back to her hometown to avoid the media – “I had my children, the [most] precious thing in the world. So I didn’t care at all. He should thank me for the rest of his life.”

Things are different these days, even in Russia; women have more rights – but it’s not just a question of rights, it’s a question of feelings. She and Shulgin had a complex relationship, both very close and very toxic; this abusive monster was also the father of her children, and her partner on the path to superstardom. She wrote a song about it later, with the rather surprising title ‘It Was Love’. “Yeah, it was love. It was love,” she admits when I quiz her on the title. “It was love, but not anymore.” Valeriya sighs philosophically. “I was not prepared, I was not ready for this kind of thing. I tried to change him, I tried to correct his behaviour. I tried a lot… We were happy in the beginning. And I fell in love, he was in love with me also. But he couldn’t help his personality. He’s very – aggressive by nature, and he couldn’t control himself.”

And how would she describe her own personality?

“Peacemaker,” she replies at once, and laughs. “Because I have three children, we have six between us, and I want to feel peace in the family.”

And when she’s onstage? Does she become a different person?

“Still peacemaker,” she replies, shaking her head. “I want to bring light, I want to bring sun, I want to bring hope to people. I think that’s why people come to my concerts, just to charge their batteries and fill themselves with positive energy.” One fan admitted as much after one concert: “Thanks God, now I refilled my batteries,” gushed this grateful fan, “and I will survive until the next one!”.

I don’t think it’s an act, this sunny persona. Or rather, it’s partly an act – you don’t spend 25 years in the limelight without being conscious of what you say to journalists – but Valeriya does seem genuinely inclined to think, whenever possible, of happy things. Nature, for instance, as experienced on those long mountain hikes. Her children, whom she absolutely adores (her voice wavers slightly when she calls them “the most precious thing in the world”), relating their accomplishments with the glee of every proud parent. Her music, which is bubbly pop for the most part (maybe she should go a bit darker if she wants international success, I suggest, and she laughs: “I don’t want to be darker!”). Her millions of fans who often name their daughters Valeriya after her, and with whom she interacts on social media, especially Instagram. ‘Do you write it yourself, or do you get your manager to do it?’ I ask, and she looks a bit shocked. “People know it: my style, my reactions, my sense of humour. They recognise me. I cannot – how to say? They can tell that it’s me.”

The current fourth stage of her life is the most placid. She turns 50 in April, a milestone even Madonna found challenging – though she clearly doesn’t feel her age, staying super-fit with daily yoga and Power Plate. The attempt to break out beyond Russia didn’t really work in 2008, which was partly a question of timing; that was the tail-end of the CD era, before it all went digital – a bad time to launch a new album, even with big-name support from the likes of Hucknall and Robin Gibb of The Bee Gees. Had she moved to London it might’ve been easier, but she insisted on staying in Russia (“I couldn’t ruin my children’s life”), sometimes cramming 20 interviews in one day then catching the plane back to Moscow. You almost wonder if she really wanted that kind of success, or just liked the thought of it.

Does she still dream of going global? “Honestly, not really,” she sighs. “Not really. Because life is so interesting – the world is so interesting, there are so many things around us, not only music. I was more focused on my career before, now it’s time to look around a little.” The kids are grown, her place in the Russian-pop firmament is assured; this year marks 25 years since The Taiga Symphony, when Alla became Valeriya. Time to move on, perhaps – or to look back, or just relax a little. “Nowadays I value life more,” she says, and looks happy saying it.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a politician who is full of self-belief and quiet persistence who has contributed much to cancer care on the island, not least because she has battled it three times herself

Does experience make the person, or the person make the experience? Is it true to say that Stella Kyriakidou has been dealt quite a tough hand by life, or is her experience – as she staunchly insists – nothing unusual, and no worse than others’? Stella is admittedly a high achiever – not just an MP (with Disy) since 2006 and chair of the House human rights committee but also, among other things, president of Europa Donna Cyprus from 2000 to 2015, recipient of various ‘Woman of the Year’ awards, and, since a couple of weeks ago, the first Cypriot president of PACE, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Yes – but she’s also a three-time cancer survivor, having lived with the disease (in one form or another) since she was a child.

“My journey began in 1968, when breast cancer first came into our lives.” That’s from a Facebook post she wrote on October 1, to mark the start of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. (The post has been liked by some 2,300 people, and shared 387 times.) “The truth,” she goes on, “is that my acquaintance with this disease began very early, at the dawn of my teenage years, when my mother was diagnosed at the age of 38. Those 10 years of her journey, before she passed away at 48, were also crucial for me, and my own journey with cancer.” Stella goes on to recount how she herself was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, just before her 40th birthday (she’s now 61), and how her initial feelings of denial upon discovering the tell-tale lump – “that I’d wake up in the morning and it would be gone” – were muddied by some “small inner voice” which claimed to have known it was coming. “I expected it,” she writes. It had happened to her mum, so she knew it would happen to her.

Actually, she was wrong about that: only seven to eight per cent of breast cancers are genetic or hereditary. Still, the fact that she found herself within that minority – or, alternatively, that her own diagnosis was just a tragic coincidence – doesn’t make it any easier to bear, especially given that she fell ill again a few years later, and again (this time with a leg sarcoma) in 2013. Does she feel that she’s had bad luck, at the very least?

“No,” she replies after a short pause.

No?

“I think it’s part of life. Nobody guaranteed us that life would be without hurdles and obstacles, and everybody has their own problems, their own difficulties to deal with. Mine have been these.”

Fine, I persist – but surely they’ve been rather more serious than the average?

“You know,” she muses, “they say sometimes that if you put everybody’s problems in a pile in front of you, everybody would choose to take back their own. I don’t know what’s going on in somebody else’s life, maybe their problems are much more difficult to deal with than my own. So I can’t say that. I really don’t think – I really –” she raises her voice, drowning me out as I try to protest, “I really don’t believe that. At all.”

I guess people just get used to their own lives, I offer, thinking of her analogy of the pile of problems and everyone choosing to stick with their own.

“No, I don’t think it’s like that,” says Stella. She pauses, as if looking to put this subject to rest once and for all. “You know, I really am like I am,” she says simply. “Because I think you’re trying to guide it in a way that – I should be feeling sorry for myself, or I should be feeling angry, or I’m used to my own life. It’s not like that.

“I’m very aware of my situation. I know to live with my disease, and I get on with my life and I’m generally a very positive person. And it’s as simple as that. I don’t blame anyone else, I don’t feel that I have more on my plate than I should have, and I think that a lot of people have a lot worse to deal with in their lives. So in that sense I’m very lucky, in many ways. And this is who I am. Maybe it’s not what people expect, but this is who I am.”

Translation: experience doesn’t make the person – the person makes the experience, choosing to shape it through their own particular worldview. “It’s not something I do on purpose,” she admits later, apropos of her lifelong tendency to activism. “It’s something I just am.” It’s not like she treats cancer lightly: she’s had periods of depression, and her most recent bout was especially stressful – because sarcoma was something new and unfamiliar, because it required major surgery, and because it came after a year of wrong diagnoses including an unnecessary knee operation. Her weapons, however, include being determinedly open about the disease, being a scientific person in general, and being active (rather than passive) by nature. “Once I knew what I was faced with, I was very matter-of-fact,” she recalls of her first diagnosis in 1996. “I thought ‘OK, you don’t have many choices’. At the time I had two very young children. ‘You have one choice: you have to deal with this and get well. Because you have a family’.”

Her two sons are in their 30s now, the younger a consultant in London while the elder is in Spain, working as a lawyer and married to an Argentine. Stella and her husband Kikis also have two grandchildren – and she suddenly tells me of her grandson Philippos, who was born extremely premature and spent two and a half months in intensive care (she calls his survival a “miracle”). I wonder for a moment why she’s telling me this story – she’s not the type to volunteer much personal information – but this, it turns out, isn’t the end of the story: Philippos’ birth inspired her and others to form an association called ‘The Miracle Babies’ who are currently working “to fund and build a new unit for premature babies at Makarios hospital”, indeed they’ve already raised some €320,000. That’s the way Stella operates, taking her revenge on setbacks by seeking to turn them into something positive – just as she did with Europa Donna, the breast cancer ‘awareness movement’ whose Cyprus branch she was instrumental in founding not long after her own illness (she was also president of the European parent association for two years, 2004-06).

She’s a positive person, she affirms, a glass-half-full person – which is not to say that she’s bubbly or carefree. She seems steely, meticulous, thoroughly organised. “Let’s try and get it done by one o’clock,” she says of our interview (we meet in her office in Parliament, on a warm Friday morning) – and bang on time, without being prompted by her secretary, she suggests that we wrap things up. She comes off as a passionate technocrat, thoroughly enamoured of the EU – it’s “a wonderful benchmark for where we should be going” – and happier with science than abstract speculation. ‘What do you think happens after death?’ I ask, assuming that someone who’s come face-to-face with her own mortality is likely to have some thoughts on the subject. “I have no idea,” she replies flatly.

What would she say is her biggest character flaw? Once again, she demurs, turning to her colleague Panicos Pourgourides (who’s sitting in on the interview) for help. She’s a perfectionist, he admits wryly; sometimes she’ll end up putting others under pressure with her high standards – but she’s also sensitive, and will always turn around and reassure them when she sees they feel pressured. I sense a bit of that even in our own brief chat, the spiky side – refusing to give way on this or that point – closely followed by the sweet, mollifying, no-hard-feelings side. “She inspires people,” adds Panicos, and the secretary pipes up from her desk in agreement. “They exaggerate,” smiles Stella regally.

Is she pushy? “I’m determined. I’m determined, and I’m focused.” Her background is in psychology and child psychology. She worked at the Makarios hospital for 26 years, most of her adult life (she still has a touch of the doctor’s manner, cordial but detached), indeed “I was the first psychologist to go to the hospital, the first to work with children there”. When she started, “they didn’t think they needed a psychologist”. This was Cyprus in the 80s, a time before counselling and therapy; Stella was inevitably posted to the psychiatric hospital – but finally wangled a job working at Makarios for half an hour every week. She agreed to the hours, even though she’d be spending more time driving to the hospital than actually working there, “because I knew that, once the doctors found out what I could offer children, they would themselves ask for my time to be increased”. This, in a nutshell, seems to be her style: self-belief and quiet persistence, an iron hand in a velvet glove.

She gets things done; she always has. I ask if she misses the relative anonymity of her younger years – but in fact she was always a familiar face, even before politics and her own health problems placed her even more firmly in the public eye. These days, in addition to PACE, she works mostly on patients’ rights – a “very strong law” was passed a couple of years ago – women’s health and equality, the issue of child sexual abuse (which she knew about from her work in the hospital, at a time when no-one spoke of it publicly), human rights and of course their first cousin, animal rights. She also does a lot of volunteering, visiting families to offer cancer support and advice in general. Her work is a huge chunk of her life – “I’m not big on hobbies” – not just enacting laws but making sure they’re implemented, putting a note in her diary and chasing it up: “I’m very much the person who’ll go back to it in three months and say ‘Is it still working?’”. She’s the rare, annoying politician who doesn’t stop at the photo ops.

And the cancer? The disease that’s almost seemed to be stalking her for the past 50 years? “It’s part of your life,” she opines. “It doesn’t rule your life, but it’s part of your life.” How, I inevitably ask, has it shaped her? “I think it’s changed me tremendously.” Priorities change, muses Stella. “You learn to value small things in life. You learn to be satisfied with much simpler things.”

She tells a story, from the time she went back to work after her first diagnosis. She was walking with her colleague Niki Christofi, going up to the ward, and they passed a roundabout planted with huge, imposing sunflowers. “And I turned around and said: ‘Niki, look at the sunflowers, aren’t they beautiful?’. And she says to me” – Stella gives it a short dramatic pause: “‘They’ve always been there!’. And I hadn’t seen them…”

It’s a lovely story, but I don’t know how useful it is in making sense of this practical, undoubtedly driven woman; newfound perspective or not, I’m pretty sure she needs more from life than gazing at sunflowers. Then again, there’s also something oddly vulnerable about Stella Kyriakidou, something I glimpse (or think I glimpse) without quite being sure of it. She seems so stable, so rational; yet she also maintains that her husband Kikis is the stable one (“I get excited”), and her brother Chris is “my rock” – a reminder that she’s been through a lot, despite her poise. “I love routine,” she says, rather surprisingly. “I don’t need big excitements.”

The work is challenging, the life is high-profile – yet the woman behind it may indeed have a softer, even shy side. It’s 10 past one, I’m packing up to leave; Stella sits in the small parliamentary office, flanked by Panicos and her secretary, looking more relaxed with the morning’s work behind her. “I feel happy,” she says unexpectedly. “It’s Friday, the end of the week. We had a good interview, nice honest conversation. I’m seeing friends this evening…” She nods, as if in defiance of the dark spectre that first appeared in her childhood, and the painful experiences that tried – and failed – to define her: “I’m happy”. That’s all it takes, apparently.

An interactive bell – that anybody is free to ring – has been installed at the Ledra Palace in Nicosia. AGNIESZKA RAKOCZY meets its creator, a man in tune with the nature around him who thinks art should serve a social purpose

Talking to Marcus Vergette once he gets into full conversational flow is like diving into a stream of consciousness. His is a story that sweeps you along in a turbulent wash of words. This vibrant artist, a painter/sculptor turned farmer who, after being beset by a devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, stays faithful to his smallholding in Devon, drawing inspiration and consolation from the life, and death, cycle of a farming existence while finding creative affirmation and solace in bell making.

What brought about the artistic switch from sculpture to becoming a creator and caster of bells?

When the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 that confined him to his farm for almost six months and resulted in the culling of his livestock was officially declared over, Vergette accompanied the parish bell-ringer to the church tower and witnessed him peal out the good news that the community’s ordeal was finally at an end.

Vergette had never thought much about bells before. But on the day quarantine ended, he sensed them calling out.
On a beautiful sunny day when he was free at last to walk the hillside he was able to greet the neighbours he hadn’t set eyes on during his confinement. Everyone looked haggered and worn out from the dreadful experience.

Following the bell-ringer into the church tower in that west Devon village proved to be an artistic epiphany as he came alongside the three bells, two from the 14th and one from the 15th century.

“I took in these huge bronze bells, sculptures and communication devices, and it suddenly dawned on me what fantastic art objects they are. Even better, an art object that wasn’t about me,” he recalls.

As though the village had read his thoughts, the devastated farmers turned to Vergette and asked him to put his artistic vision to work and commemorate what he terms “the needless” slaughter and hardship they had all endured.

“Since I am not a religious person, I thought a bell that could be rung by anybody would be nice. Everyone thought it was a lovely idea. But then it transpired that it was illegal to make a ‘democratic bell’ because the control of the peal of a bell is an expression of power. So we had to go through a legal process to prove that it wasn’t a matter of law but a fault of the history of power [Church and State] that had denied the idea of a democratic bell. For me, this was more or less the final piece of a puzzle – that this object contained that much power, and that it was a communication device.”

Trained at St Martins in London, Vergette, like many artists, pursued corporate art commissions and exhibitions at the outset of his career. In the 1990s he visited many of the countries of the former Soviet Union and was impressed with how much they knew about art in the West when the West seemed indifferent or knew so little about the state of their arts and the significant social impact of what they had achieved with so little. These visits had a profound effect on his creative vision. He found himself becoming increasingly disillusioned with the demands of commercial patrons and more and more drawn to creative work within a social context.

All his projects are locally-inspired, he says, and he is grateful because by his own admission he never wants to do corporate art again.

“Somebody thinks it will be good to put something up somewhere. I just wait for people to contact me. I don’t do any promotions because that would be me directing a project and that runs contrary to my idea of art. Thankfully, people seem to hear of me and the phone keeps on ringing so I continue to have work.”
One of his current projects is a series of bells to mark high tide at different points along the British coast. Five are already in place and the aim is to have nine by next year, and 12 in total, ringing out to mark high tide at their different locations.

Reverting to the theme of local inspiration, Vergette notes that it was a chance encounter with someone from Cyprus when he was speaking about his time and tide project that led to his being approached by the Artos Foundation. Last year they got in touch with him and suggested he consider designing a bell for placement in Nicosia. Now realised, that installation, an interactive bell, has taken its place outside the Home for Cooperation at the Ledra Palace crossing.

The bell has “three different voices” and is made of oak from Vergette’s farm in Devon. “The thing was to make it accessible and easy to ring so that a child or an adult can ring it.” Thinking about the space (he calls it “rather hard and unloved”) and taking into account the “very complicated situation out here”, he philosophically points out that the selected bell site is set back from the road and partially hidden by a low fence. He has sought to give voice to the people who use the space regularly, while realising that most of the voices who speak about division “never come here”.

This is, he makes clear, a secular bell. It sounds different and has a different shape. “I thought of this acoustic war going on out here [church bells and the mosques’ calls for prayers] and concluded that there was nothing I could do about it, not being religious. All I could do is offer some alternative.”

His hope is that people will start to use his bell and share about it on social media and that they will see it as “friendly, a soft bell, not declamatory, a quiet bell.”

He pauses as a nearby church bell rings out and says: “Listen to this bell here – the structure is harmonically constructed in such a way that there is a dominant sound and this is a concept underlying the construction of church bells because it is about dominance of the church and the fact that you cannot talk directly to god. Instead you must come to the church and it is the church that informs you – that is the basis of its power.”

He is at pains to point out how his bells’ tones are harmonically related so that there is no dominant tone. This means that theoretically and physically it has no authority. It is owned by no one. “It has no specific authority and makes no statement other than everybody and anybody can ring and nobody owns it.”
Vergette admits that he himself has a problem with authority and says he knows exactly the moment in his life when it started: at a school when he was six and his teacher would punish him for asking too many questions. “And I thought that is it – this is power – they don’t answer your questions. I stopped going to school. I became a very bad truant, another reason why I became an artist.”

He talks about mobility and the fact that lots of his bells are on wheels because situations change just as the world changes. He does not believe that sculpture has to stay in one place all the time. A sculpture of an historic figure may no longer be relevant or may have greater relevance if moved to another site. We should not become fixated on art having to have its place, he admonishes.

In his own life, he has moved around a bit. He was born in the American mid-west but it was art school in London that helped make him who he is. “Before that I didn’t really find a place.” He is British. His parents too. They moved back and forth many times but he didn’t feel aligned with any one place.

While studying at St Martin’s he found himself painting on boards, often cutting the boards up. It made him realise how important working with his hands was to him. “I think I must have been one of those horrible little boys always banging away with a with a hammer.”

Our brains, he suggests, are not only in our heads. Have a problem, go for a walk, quite often you’ll come up with a solution. Ergo, part of our brain must be in our feet. Quickly he jumps back to the subject of hands. “I like their cleverness, the way they connect and can manipulate. You can look at something but you cannot really manipulate it with your eyes. Hands are the real way you meet the world whether cooking, loving, creating…”

Having lived in London for a decade, the need for studio space drove Vergette and his wife Sally to the countryside in the late 80s. City birds, neither was convinced that the country life was for them. Yet, having spotted a likely property, they blithely bought it that same day. It was a life-changing decision, one he never regretted. “I saw a barn and a house I reckoned I could fix up and some land. I never thought about it. All I could see was this space. Had we visited a different farm on this day I might still be in London. Who knows. But it has become a very important part of my life to observe nature, to watch things grow and die.”

He is firmly rooted in his West Devon farm, he says. “Farming has been a very necessary part of my life. My wife does the thinking part and I just do the digging and carrying and driving the tractor and that kind of stuff. We have 40 sheep and 15 cows. Yes, it is work but it is nice work. I have a vegetable garden so I have a place to live and all my food which allows me to be more selective with all the things I make. I only make the things I want to make but if there is something in the situation that I don’t like I know I have always got my food.”

The dividing line between Marcus’ life and his little piece of land is almost indistinguishable, he feels. “I don’t know who is running the show. Is it the tree that gives me the oxygen? One way or another I don’t know.” This realisation has had a huge influence on his approach to life and art.

So yes, life in the countryside changed him. “Simply put, if each of us grows a lovely garden the whole world would be a lovely garden. That is my philosophy. So my politics is just to help the gardens to grow – not to tell people what to plant. I think politics gets in the way of people.” He believes we are all part of the planet and that it is our vanity that is destroying it. “How can people say this is how it is when they cannot tell you what butterfly flies at this time of the year or name a specific tree, detail its life cycle and the small creatures that live and depend on it?”

We overestimate our philosophical capabilities so he says let those who are smarter than him wrestle with the philosophical issues. “I just want to open the world of experience – observe, listen and understand before we start making pronouncements about how things are. Try to understand rather than make judgements.

There is so much to learn before we can arrive at meaning.”

‘We sound together Interactive installation in public space’

By bell designer Marcus Vergette and trans-disciplinary human Achilleas Kentonis is located at the Ledra Palace crossing, opposite of the Home 4 Cooperation.

The installation is part of the Does Europe Exist Project developed by Nicosia’s Artos Foundation. The three other components of the project are: a week-long exhibition with the participation of both international and Cypriot artists that will start on November 15 at 8pm, a symposium/ pop-up think tank taking place on November 15 between 6pm and 8pm, and a digital publication documenting all actions that will be published in December 2017. Artos Foundation is based in 64 Agion Omologiton Avenue, Agion Omologiton, in Nicosia. Tel:22 445455.

Can a politician still be successful if he’s dry and understated? Can this low-key, affable geneticist and father of four really make an effective president THEO PANAYIDES asks Stavros Malas

Why Stavros Malas? Why not Nicos Anastasiades or Nicolas Papadopoulos, to name the other two candidates with a realistic chance of becoming President of the Republic next January (or actually February, since it’s almost certain to go to a run-off)? The reason for this profile isn’t because we support Malas’ candidacy; this is not an endorsement, more a fact-finding mission. Simply put, here’s a man who’s now run twice for the highest office in the land, won 43 per cent of the vote in 2013, and has more than an outside chance of becoming our president for the next five years – yet we know very little about him.

“I wouldn’t agree that people don’t know much about me,” says the man himself, speaking in a nondescript office at his campaign headquarters. He leans back in his chair almost throughout our interview. He speaks softly, but his voice is deep and carries easily. The halo of hair is grey, the eyes green, the chin pointed, the forehead high. His English is excellent, a product of having lived in the UK for 15 years. He turned 50 in June.

Most important is perhaps the casual, unpretentious air he exudes, a style that extends to the operation around him. The campaign HQ isn’t in the centre of town (as Papadopoulos’ is) but out in the suburbs, towards Lakatamia. I knock on the glass door, and wait to be noticed by an assistant; the lift is broken, and we climb the stairs to the first floor. “The gentleman’s from the Cyprus Mail,” says the assistant. “He has an appointment with Stavros.” There’s an easy collegial air, everyone on a first-name basis. Stavros (we might as well call him that too) is backed by Akel – even though he’s ostensibly an independent – so I’d half-expected to be joined by some grim-faced handler looking out for the party’s interests, but in fact there are no handlers. We sit alone, talking freely; only once – when he gets a phone call from his wife Zacharoula – does he ask me to pause the tape recorder.

Stavros Malas is indeed quite easy-going, for a presidential hopeful; the only worry is perhaps that he may be too easy-going. As it stands, if the election were held tomorrow instead of on January 28, he almost certainly wouldn’t be president: the latest polls show him on 16 per cent of the vote, with Papadopoulos on 22 per cent and Anastasiades on 32 per cent, meaning he wouldn’t even make the run-off (though of course, if he does overtake Papadopoulos and get to the second round, all bets are off). Much of the resistance to his candidacy is obviously down to the Akel connection – though in fact that’s less toxic now than it was in 2013, when he’d been part of the much-despised Christofias government (he was Minister of Health in 2011-12). Then again, some of the resistance is surely due to his own personality, or at least his public image: can this low-key, affable geneticist and father of four really make an effective president?

You always come across as very calm, unruffled, placid, I point out. Would you say that’s accurate?

He gives a dry chuckle, which seems to be his way of absorbing tricky questions. “I think that’s one way of describing me,” he replies. “Having said that, I think I can be quite – um, tough, very tough in fact, if I see things going in the wrong direction.”

Tough how?

“I think some people have experienced my – I wouldn’t say my wrong side,” he chuckles again, “but my very, very determined side. I usually follow what they teach civil servants in the British foreign office,” he adds unexpectedly: “Be cool and calculated, and show no display of emotions.”

It’s a rare local politician who can claim to model himself on British civil servants. Then again, Stavros’ connection to Britain is unusually strong – he did his degree and PhD at University College London, taking out a loan to support himself, then worked for seven years as a researcher at Imperial College – and there’s something else as well, the fact that he’s not exactly a career politician but a working scientist who’s been “back in research” in the four years since his last presidential run. This, too, is rare in Cyprus; most of our top politicians – including his two main rivals for the presidency – tend to be lawyers, which of course brings its own way of doing things. The practice of law is adversarial and confrontational, by definition; the practice of science is detached and empirical. Indeed, points out Stavros, genetics in particular (his own field of study is brain development, specifically how the genetic code affects the development of the brain in an embryo) has a lot in common with government, at least in the abstract. “Running a country, and running an economy, you have to have a good concept of what I call structural economic engineering” – which is also what genetics studies in the body, i.e. how the ‘bricks’ are put together.

So a country is like an organism?

“That’s right! You said it exactly. A country is like a human body, or an organism.” One could ask, for instance, why the human heart has to be a particular size – just as there’s an optimum size in society for a banking sector (or a civil servants’ union, I add; but he doesn’t take the bait). Both depend on many different sub-systems running in equilibrium, “and in Cyprus we’ve run our economy for many years at a disequilibrium – and a geneticist, or an engineer, can understand that. A lawyer, not so much.”

This is all good stuff – but it’s also a bit academic, which would be fine if Stavros Malas were standing for a position as an academic. Don’t you need something more to entice the voters? What about personal charisma, I ask: that magic touch, the larger-than-life quality of a Winston Churchill?

He nods thoughtfully. “Sometimes I criticise myself that maybe in some TV appearances I’m not – I don’t show what I’m usually like in daily life,” he replies. “Quite often people say to me, when they meet me, ‘My God, you come across very differently [than on TV]’.”

In what way?

“How I interact with people, and particularly the engagement with people. I’m not a person who looks at things – or people – from a distance. I’m a very approachable person.”

Is that true? Well, yes and no. I can see that Stavros is ‘approachable’, in the sense of being candid and seemingly ego-less – but can he really claim that he doesn’t look at things from a distance? Wry detachment is practically his stock-in-trade. Even when we talk about his children (Dionysis and Giorgos, 21 and 20 respectively, plus 17-year-old twins Phoebe and Haris) his natural impulse is to take a step back, albeit with a touch of tongue-in-cheek. “I’m very close to my kids,” he says, “and very patient with them, because” – that chuckle again – “being a geneticist studying brain development, kids are like patients”. Every kid is like a different project, he explains with scientific pride: “Every kid is an experiment – and you’ll see the result of that experiment after many years, so you have to understand that you cannot force the result to come prematurely… The biggest challenge is to wait for the kids to grow, and see the results”. He smiles, thinking of his own adolescent brood: “I think we’re mostly happy with what we’ve achieved”.

Can a politician still be successful if he’s dry and understated? Does he have to slap backs, shake hands, kiss babies, gush about his children? I’m a bit surprised by how genuinely likeable I find Stavros Malas, and even his ideological bent seems quite reasonable: the one book he cites with approval is The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato – a book about state intervention, admittedly, but only in the service of supporting innovation and high-risk investments. Socially, he’s somewhere in the middle. He supports legalising marijuana for medical use, but not recreational. He’s pro-abortion and claims he always has been, blaming the perception that he wasn’t in 2013 on an aide having accidentally ticked the wrong box on a questionnaire.

Yet there’s also a distance there. Asked for hobbies, he mentions fishing, that most quiet and solitary of pastimes (he also likes hunting, but “it’s a sport that’s gone pretty wrong in Cyprus, I think”). He’s spent countless hours in labs doing research – mostly at the Institute of Neurology, when in Cyprus – even at the expense of friends and family. He’s very disciplined, with no obvious vices. He drinks very seldom, and not at all in recent months; he’s never smoked – mostly because, being a scientist, he knows what it does to the body. “I tend to rationalise,” he explains. “Sometimes people say ‘You’re just far too rational. You rationalise everything, and then you make a decision’. That’s me.”

None of this is wrong, to be sure. It might even be a breath of fresh air, after years of populists and blowhards, to have someone at the helm who’s calm, scientifically minded, and prides himself on listening to all sides before taking a decision. The only real question – which is obviously unanswerable – is whether a President Malas would be able to impose himself, both on the party that backs him (which he’s never actually belonged to, he notes) and more broadly in the world of politics. Would his leadership have made a difference at the bail-out talks or at Crans-Montana, for instance, to name the two big developments that have taken place since 2013? He insists it would’ve made all the difference – but his account of how he’d have averted the haircut, viz. by refusing to sell off the branches of Cypriot banks in Greece (so the bail-out would’ve hurt the Greek economy, and they wouldn’t have dared to impose it), seems a bit speculative. Could we really have resisted such so-called ‘ring-fencing’? Did we even have a choice? “Of course we did!”

Maybe so. To be honest, it makes little sense looking back, let alone trying to guess how Stavros Malas might fare if he came to office next year – but there is one more thing we should say in trying to describe him, or more accurately two things.

The first is this: he may not be a ‘career politician’ – yet in fact he’s been running for office for most of his adult life, and even earlier. That was how he met Zacharoula, while still in high school in Paphos (where his family had moved after the invasion): “She was campaigning against me for president of the school. And she lost. But then she won in life!”. That was Stavros’ first electoral victory – and the first of many election campaigns, running twice for Parliament and now twice for the presidency, in addition to his short stint in government. Make no mistake: he’s ambitious.

The second thing is even more important, and quite surprising. Every politician has an ‘origin story’, an account of a moment in their life that spurred them to become who they are. Most are uplifting – helping some needy person, meeting some inspirational mentor – but his turns out to be dark and traumatic. Stavros’ family were very close to Makarios (his dad had also been involved in the events of 1963, helping to protect several high-profile Turkish Cypriots), all of which made them targets for Eoka B in the early 70s. “They were trying to murder my father, even before the coup,” he tells me – and recalls a particular day when Eoka B came to the house, trying to find out where his father was hiding, “pulled me out of the house, stuck me against the wall, and stuck a gun in my mouth”. He was seven years old, and credits that incident with having turned his attention to politics – “to help the country,” he explains, but also obviously as a kind of exorcism, and a kind of subconscious revenge. Make no mistake: he’s competitive.

It’s not all Mr Nice Guy with Stavros Malas. He unleashes a few choice barbs against Anastasiades and other rivals – and there’s also the moment, right at the end, when I ask if he really thinks he can win the election and he suddenly leans forward, after having sat back for most of the previous hour. Is it just because we’re near the end – or because this, ultimately, is the subject that truly energises him, the intoxicating scent of possible victory?

“In 2013, against all odds, 180,000 people voted for me, 211,000 for Mr Anastasiades,” he says with feeling. “That’s all [the gap] was. It’s a small country, remember… I had a 60 per cent increase from the first to the second round, Mr Anastasiades had only 12 per cent.” Stavros looks at me, the green eyes shining. “There is a perception – I should say this – about my candidacy, that it’s an insurmountable obstacle to win the election. But people just don’t analyse the figures!” he points out, every inch the cool-headed scientist. “And the figures say what they say”. Can he win? I don’t know. But at least I know more about him now.

A romantic-sounding existence of freedom reflects a lifelong restlessness for one traveller, finds THEO PANAYIDES

Flush-faced, snowy-bearded, Dean Psaras sits in a friend’s apartment in Nicosia, sipping beer and looking back over his life. He’s in Cyprus for a short while – here to attend a wedding, sell his late mother’s house and give away his massive collection of books – then the plan is to move to Cambodia where he hopes to open a hostel. He’s been spending quite a bit of time in Cambodia recently – not to see Angkor Wat or visit an ashram, but because it’s a country where the tourist visa is easily renewable. A traveller has to think about such things.

He’s been travelling literally all his life: conceived in Kyrenia, still-foetal Dean travelled in his mother’s womb to New York City, where he was born 68 years ago. Then came a couple of back-and-forth moves between the US and Cyprus, a desultory degree at Long Island University then a lifetime of moving around, biking or hitch-hiking or otherwise travelling, staying in one place “as long as I can, as long as I’m making a living somehow”.

Doing what?

He shrugs expansively: “You work, make money, then bum around until your money runs out, then you work again!”.

It’s not quite that simple, of course. He’s half-settled down a few times, like the five years he spent running the Luxor guesthouse in Limassol from 2007 to 2012. He worked as a bartender in Nicosia in the late 1970s, at Mythos and Anemos pubs. He was also in Australia for six years during his 30s – though that doesn’t really count, since he only stayed because his visa had expired and he couldn’t leave without being caught. The rest is more fragmentary. A year and a half in Saudi Arabia. Three years in Korea, teaching English. A two-year course in south Texas, near the Mexican border, getting the MA that allows him to work as a teacher. A stint in the Central African Republic with the US Peace Corps (this was back in the 70s, the time of the fearsome Bokassa), where he caught a mild case of malaria and “hung out with the Pygmies in their forest”. Teaching for a while in northern Cyprus, at Eastern Mediterranean University. Lingering briefly – or not so briefly – in Mexico, Greece, Morocco, Alaska, Indonesia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Palestine, Colombia, Thailand, Belgium, Cambodia.

What does he do? How – asks my not-so-inner bourgeois – does he make money? But it turns out that making money isn’t so hard, if you don’t need very much and are willing to do almost anything. Nowadays it’s teaching, including online teaching, a booming profession as Asians set out to learn English; in the past it was odd jobs – driving taxis, tending bar, doing construction work, handing out pamphlets. “I’ve even done cleaning jobs. Yuck!”. A friend in Antwerp named Bear got him a job cleaning up after patrons in a local bar – which I only mention because Dean looks exactly like a man who’d have a friend in Antwerp named Bear. He’s never starved, but he’s not rich either: he’ll buy one block of cheese every week, he explains, a second block being an unaffordable luxury.

Some will call it a romantic life, a life of freedom and glorious independence. His passions are simple enough: he loves motorbikes, drinking and reading – though the books were mostly there to stave off boredom (he doesn’t have a book that changed his life, though he singles out the author Tom Robbins) and have largely been replaced by “watching crap on a computer all day” nowadays. Others may call it a wasted life – because he doesn’t travel with a purpose, he just travels. He doesn’t see the sights, or do charity work, or paint, or write about his experience. “I do nothing,” he admits wryly. “I’m boring. I just sit around all day watching – you know, Star Trek and stuff”. Dean has no illusions about his place in the world. ‘67-year-old drifter looking for travel companion(s)’ was how he headlined a post on the Lonely Planet forum last year. ‘Occupation: Bum’ he writes in his profile on a site called Travellers Point.

There’s a sadness there too, as so often in people with rootless, unsettled lifestyles – or perhaps not quite sadness (he’s no sadder than the average drone in a nine-to-five job) but a half-buried bitterness beneath the swashbuckling surface, a lifelong sense of not belonging which presumably influenced his lifelong restlessness. Is he escaping from something? “I’m escaping from the world,” he replies with a growly laugh. “I don’t like the world. The world sucks!”

The sense of being a misfit goes way back – and in fact it’s not quite accurate to say that Dean travelled in his mother’s womb from Kyrenia to New York: their first stop was actually England, “where they tried to abort me and couldn’t,” he reports grimly (his cousin told him about it years later). His parents’ marriage was discordant, frustrated. His dad, a restaurateur who’d made money abroad, was 17 years older than his mum; he came back to Cyprus “to show off,” says Dean acerbically, and duly married “the youngest, prettiest girl he could find… Unfortunately, pre-marital sex didn’t happen in those days,” he goes on in his rumbly American drawl, “so horny old man marries a walking refrigerator”. Neither parent got what they wanted from the union – and Dean, as the only child of an unhappy marriage, suffered too, not from abuse (though the rod wasn’t spared) but a disconnection and estrangement that only grew with the years.

Was there some big blow-up with the parents, or did they just drift apart?

“No, I just never got along with them,” he replies, shaking his head. “At all. Ever. Ever.”

To be fair, it sounds like the boy was a bit of a handful too. The family came back to Cyprus in the late 50s – but soon decided to return to New York, fearing that eight-year-old Dean would come to a bad end if they stayed. This was the time of Eoka, and “I was a bit of an asshole child,” as he puts it, “cursing out the British soldiers and telling them that the Cypriots are gonna kick their ass just like we [Americans] kicked their ass. I was breaking curfew, and just sneaking out of the house… I’m sure I would’ve gotten shot sooner or later – I mean, all you need is one Brit whose good friend has just gotten shot by Eoka or something, to take out his anger on a stupid eight-year-old with an American accent and a big mouth”.

So maybe his parents had a point? Maybe he’s also quite hard to get along with?

“My friends don’t think so,” he replies with a shrug. “They just think I’m weird!”

British soldiers on the island during Eoka times

That’s a joke, of course. Dean Psaras comes off as a lot of things – maybe stubborn, maybe prickly and outspoken, and yes, maybe hard to get along with if he doesn’t like what you’re offering – but not weird. He might be unusual (like all lifelong travellers) but he makes his own kind of sense, and he’s all of a piece: he exudes a deliberate quality, a rugged assurance. One can imagine him telling stories in a bar and getting a bit long-winded – but not flying off the handle, and indeed he’s never started a fight in his life (“not my style”). There’s a monolithic aspect, emphasised by his fleshy nose and impressive white beard, and an iron-man quality; back in Africa, “I used to drink water that we were told not to even walk in – and I’m still here”. He must have a strong constitution, I marvel. “The alcohol helps,” he chuckles. “It kills stuff.”

He likes his booze: beer and Anglias when in Cyprus, cheap Jim Beam in Cambodia. “I look like I do lots of drugs,” he admits (it’s true, he does), “but I don’t smoke that much.” Life on the road works by different rules – though Dean, after so many years, isn’t as adventurous as he once was. He used to just put on his backpack and go, now he’ll always book a hostel in advance; then again, the whole scene has changed. “There is no adventure anymore. Nobody goes anywhere that millions haven’t gone before.”

What about the younger travellers he sees nowadays?

“Stupid children,” he replies with another deep laugh. It’s not just the selfies and Facebook posts, it’s the whole mentality. “I mean, when I had my hostel in Limassol I was shocked by how many people would come and the first thing they would do was email home, or Skype home. I mean, I don’t even have a home, and I haven’t really had a home for years. These were still children – they’re calling their mother, telling her ‘I got here safely’. And I’m sorry, even when I was 18 I wouldn’t do that.”

In a way, Dean is a dinosaur – an old hippy from the counter-cultural 60s, inspired by the calls to joyful anarchy of Bob Dylan and John Lennon (“They created left-wing people out of ordinary American brainwashed kids”). Things have changed since he first started wandering; the world has become more uptight, often in ways he can’t predict. His aforementioned Lonely Planet post, asking quite guilelessly for ‘female travel companions’ for a trip to South America, got a snippy response from a woman who all but accused him of being a predator. “Humans have turned into assholes more than they were before. Simple as that,” he concludes grumpily.

How do relationships work on the road, anyway? “Usually the sex is short-term,” he shrugs. “I’ve never been into one-on-one relationships that are exclusive, it’s always been ‘We’re together but you’re allowed to do what you wanna do, I’m allowed to do what I wanna do’.” The trouble, he admits, is that “even women who accept that don’t really want it that way. That eventually kills the relationship.”

Has he ever been in love? Really in love?

“I did really fall for one woman once, in Mexico, who was 20 years younger than me and an absolute goddess. [But] I was totally aware of the fact that ‘You’re being silly, you f**kin’ 40-year-old piece of shit!’.” Did anything ever come of it? “I did spend one night holding hands with her – and she apologised the next day for leading me on. ’Cause she knew how I felt”. Dean sighs wistfully: “At the age of 55, I told myself, I’m willing to settle down with one woman. And I was arrogant enough, considering how many women wanted to marry me through the years, I was arrogant enough to believe it was gonna be easy”. He gives a little shrug. “13 years later, it has not proved easy.”

There’s an unspoken something tugging at that admission, an acknowledgment of life going by and old age approaching. Life on the road is so simple: you pack your backpack – a knife, fork and spoon, rain gear for tropical climes, a Scrabble set, sarongs, bandannas, soap and shampoo – then that bag is your home, and the world is your oyster. Can it really be a permanent lifestyle, though? Bodies age, health fails, needs grow more urgent. Even with the help of other travellers, don’t the rigours of the unencumbered life get too much eventually?

Maybe they do; and it also should be mentioned that Dean Psaras is still very Cypriot. He speaks the language fluently (defiantly insisting that the language is Cypriot, not Greek) and has strong views on nationalism and the culpability of Eoka B during the invasion. He could plausibly settle down here, at 68, even if he claims he can’t afford to – yet here he is, selling off his mother’s house to head off, once again, into the sunset. “I just like moving from one place to another,” he explains. “Now I’m going to Cambodia and I’m happy to stay there, kind of till I die – but I am also planning a motorcycle trip: Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and back! The travel urge doesn’t really go away with age”. Even when he dies and goes to Heaven, he adds in a well-practised quip, “after a year or so I’ll probably go to that God person and ask: ‘Hey man, can I visit downstairs for a while?…’”.

All in all, it’s worked out quite well for him. His childhood sounds awful, and old age now looms rather dauntingly – but the bits in between were so honest, so free, so rich, so eventful. Maybe he’ll write a book someday, says Dean, a memoir of a lifetime of drifting, though he warns that much of it is “not publishable in newspapers”. (He illustrates this with a story involving two guys, a girl and a broomstick, but I’ll spare you the details; don’t worry, it was all consensual.) It’ll all be in there – the cheap bars and “shitty jobs”, the stories told and listened to, the fellow strays and misfits criss-crossing the world, taking life as it comes.

And the future? “I’m in the process of writing a justification for suicide,” says Dean near the end of our interview – not exactly joking, not exactly sombre or unhappy either. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he tells me simply, “I’m afraid of living a miserable life. I mean, most people’s lives I do not envy – and I wouldn’t want to live like that. But I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I killed myself out of depression or anything like that. No, I just got bored. It’s like buying a ticket to another country, except that it’s another plane of existence.” He takes a sip of beer, happy with the thought (just a thought, of course!) of what would, after all, be a fitting conclusion. One last move for a man who’s lived life on his own terms.

It’s the small choices we make every day that shape our lives, a psychologist and happiness author tells THEO PANAYIDES

Dr Jessamy Hibberd stands onstage at the Filoxenia Conference Centre in Nicosia, quoting Cavafy. “Keep Ithaka always in your mind,” she tells the assembled audience. She hasn’t brought too many visual aids – a slightly irrelevant photo of herself at 13, a few slides with useful buzzwords like ‘Empty Time’ and ‘Thoughts Aren’t Facts’ – the main attraction being the account of her own stumbling journey to happiness, or at least greater happiness.

“Do not hurry the journey at all,” she recites, approaching the end of a poem which she feels is a perfect summary of what she’s been saying. She’s slim, 37, with a frank, square-cut face and a beaming smile. “Better if it lasts for years,” she goes on, and her voice starts to shake a little now, “so you are old by the time you reach the island. Wealthy with all you have gained on the way / Not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.” Her voice breaks. Emotion flows. The talk is over.

This is at TEDx University of Nicosia, an event titled ‘Game Over. Play Again?’ which drew a dozen speakers and performers, mainly from the UK and Cyprus. The audience is predominantly young, which is par for the course; TED’s motto is ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ – meaning, implicitly, new ideas, those which have not yet spread, casting the audience as eager disciples tasked with going out into the world. Those assembled are presumed to be modern, tech-savvy, urbane, high-achieving. The speaker before Jessamy is Oliver Burkeman, a Guardian columnist based in Brooklyn, who makes passing reference to “events like this, where smart and ambitious people are gathered” – yet the tone is also reassuring, making the smart and ambitious people feel better about themselves.

It’s odd, in a way, all these authoritative speakers giving people licence to relax. Experts like Oliver and Jessamyn are secular sages for the age of the smartphone, keepers of life-hacks and other keys to unlocking the modern world. Burkeman’s column in The Guardian is titled ‘This column will change your life’; similarly, if you plug Jessamy Hibberd’s name into Amazon you’ll find a half-dozen bestselling books with titles like This Book Will Make You Happy (only the last word changes from book to book, the five other titles being Mindful, Confident, Calm, Sleep and Feel Beautiful). She was featured in the Daily Mail earlier this year, offering “six daily habits that are scientifically PROVEN to make you happier”. Yet Oliver’s message at TEDx was basically that we ought to chill out, stop stressing about all the things we’re not doing and focus on things we are doing – and Jessamy’s talk came with a similar slant. “My motto now is that ‘What you do every day is what makes the biggest difference’,” she informed the audience from the stage of the Filoxenia. “It’s small steps that lead to the biggest changes.”

This philosophy is relatively new for her. Indeed, it’s something of an irony that four years ago, when she was writing books promising to make people happy (to be fair, the titles were her publisher’s idea), she was living quite a different lifestyle, focused more on goals and achievement. The catalyst was the birth of her second child, a daughter (she also has a six-year-old son and another, 20-month-old daughter), adding an extra layer that forced her to make some changes. “I became very focused on meaning after I had my daughter,” Jessamy tells me, sitting in a nearby conference room after her talk, “and what makes a meaningful life, and I did a lot of research around that”.

“I think for a long time it’s been [our belief] that success is work-focused,” she goes on, “and that it’s – you know, a good thing to say you’re in the office till 10pm. I don’t agree with that. I think you can do really good work, and I hope that’s something I do – but I don’t need to give five days of my week over to it. It’s about finding a way that fits for you.”

There’s a lot of her conversation contained in those sentences. The emphasis on “research”, which she often cites to make her point. The talk of finding what fits for each person – not just in life but also, for instance, in the strategies she uses with patients. Above all, the mention of her well-rounded week. “A clinical psychologist is my main work,” explains Jessamy, “so I work with people experiencing common mental-health problems like anxiety and depression. My work is one-on-one with them, I do two afternoons in London and then, on Wednesday, I do Skype calls at home. And then Thursday and Friday I’m with my three children” – not in London but Brighton, where she lives with the kids and her husband Jack – “and have my other role as a mother with them”. I think back to Oliver Burkeman’s talk, in which he wryly spoke of “that mythical state known as work-life balance” and compared it to the yeti, or Abominable Snowman – a fabled beast, much talked-about but never captured, its alleged sightings infrequent and unverified. He’s obviously never met Jessamy Hibberd, and the hairy Himalayan monster she calls a lifestyle.

It sounds like a charming fable: well-known professional and bestselling author learns to “slow down” after becoming a mummy. I guess that’s not wholly inaccurate – but it gives the wrong impression, for two reasons. First, there’s nothing ‘slow’ about her Thursdays, Fridays and weekends: “Those days aren’t calm,” not with three children and frantic schedules (her six-year-old is even taking lessons in computer coding; kids these days, eh?). Second, there’s nothing very Zen about Jessamy herself. Are you quite an easy-going person, I ask, or secretly driven? “I think I’m not-so-secretly driven.”

She talks fast, so fast she sometimes trips over her words. “I’m not very good at sitting still,” she admits. She’s active, obsessively punctual and doesn’t waste time, husband Jack (who works at a beer brewery) being apparently the anchor in this relationship. “If we’re going for a train, me and my husband, I know what time the train I want to get is, and I quickly rush to get it – whereas he’s liable to get a sandwich, get a coffee, if he misses it who cares”. One gets a sense that her life-change of the past few years came as a kind of epiphany – the realisation “that I don’t have to rush from place to place, you know?… That it doesn’t all need to be time-filled”.

The notion of ‘empty time’ is a big part of the current lifestyle; “All of the research shows that those who have empty time are much more productive, and work much better”. Then again, her own empty time isn’t vegging out in front of the TV (“Vegging out in front of the TV is definitely a good thing but it’s not empty time, because your mind is engaged,” she claims) nor does it come through, say, meditation. Much of it comes through being active, running a five-kilometre ‘parkrun’ every Saturday morning or walking around with her music on – though of course it can be almost anything, “walking a stop on your commute rather than getting the Tube” or taking a moment to look out the window on the train instead of perusing your phone. A more introspective type could find ‘empty time’ just by staring into space; for Jessamy, however, emptying the mind often goes hand-in-hand with exhausting the body. “If I’m stressed, going for a run really helps”. She’s that kind of person.

Some might say she’s just a privileged woman who was lucky enough to achieve her professional goals early on and (apparently) doesn’t need to worry overmuch about money. This, however, is missing the point. First of all, money isn’t everything: “I’ve worked in the poorest boroughs of London and the richest boroughs of London, and the problems that people experience are not about wealth. Of course, wealth makes it more comfortable if you’re going through that – but the difficulties in their life are no different”. Secondly, she herself admits (in her talk) that “every box on my checklist was ticked” four years ago – a doctorate in clinical psychology, her own private practice, a loving husband, two amazing kids, and her books as well – yet “the feeling of contentment wasn’t there”, which was why she sat down and tried to look deeper. Her insights into what makes us happy haven’t come because of her success, but (paradoxically) in spite of it.

Above all, Jessamy Hibberd is a practical person. She’s not academic, never has been; at school she was “an average student, never the first to hand in homework” (she preferred riding and gymnastics). Even now, her tastes aren’t especially highbrow: she likes Coldplay, “very cheesy music” like (yikes!) Justin Bieber, Donna Tartt when it comes to novels. She likes tennis, running, walks on the beach with the kids, “outdoorsy stuff” in general. This kind of temperament lends itself not to grand unified theories of happiness but plain, practical measures – her ‘small steps’ theory as mentioned above, the idea that the choices we make every day shape our lives, step by little step. “I think we all trick ourselves that there’s going to be this kind of answer, [with] everything being great, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. It can just be the simple stuff you do”.

Take, for instance, the six “scientifically PROVEN” tips she supplied to the Daily Mail, including things like ‘visit a friend’ (relationships are “the key indicators for well-being, health and happiness,” she tells me) and ‘get up straight away when your alarm goes off in the morning, instead of hitting the Snooze button’. Take her reluctance to make sweeping statements, and the very practical insistence that everything is “person-specific”; the one plea she always makes to patients with depression, she says, is to come back and tell her what strategy is working for them and what isn’t working – because everyone’s different. Take her secret to parenting (offered with the usual caveats about not presuming to tell other people how to raise their kids), which is simply to look at things realistically: “I recognise that, when they’re being difficult, it’s not like a personal insult to me. It’s just how kids are”.

I won’t say I got very far in connecting with Jessamy Hibberd as a person. She and Jack have to get to the TEDx post-party, and besides she doesn’t need to reveal herself to me – she’s just spent 20 minutes opening her heart to a packed house! It may also be that she’s more of a natural sponge, like all good psychologists; I note the way her initial expression is blank on first meeting, as if waiting to respond to my own energy. Still, there’s a strong impression of a dynamic, down-to-earth, compassionate woman – don’t forget she spends most of her week counselling anxious, unhappy people; it takes mental strength to remain so chipper – who’s still rather driven and goal-oriented, even after the life-change. It’s just that her goal is different now: not just achievement, but a life in balance.

Cavafy was right: it’s the journey, not the destination. Modern life makes that hard to discern sometimes, just because it’s so busy; we can access reams of data in seconds, and communicate with the other side of the world. No surprise that many people long to relax. No surprise that Happy, Sleep and Calm were the most successful in Jessamy’s This Book Will Make You… series. No surprise that TEDx, for all its world-changing ideas, often operates as a kind of verbal spa treatment, reassuring high-achiever types that it’s all right, you can take your foot off the accelerator sometimes, it’s about the small, simple things as much as – or more than – the lofty ambitions.

“My goals do not define me. I do not suffer in my pursuit of them, and they are not some kind of test of my self-worth,” proclaims Jessamy earnestly from the stage of the Conference Centre. “My life is now,” she tells the assembled TEDx-ers, and sounds like it comes from the heart. “Being with my husband. Hugging my kids. Being in a room with any one of the amazing people I have the privilege to work with. Working on new ideas. Catching up with my mum and dad. Giggling with friends over a glass of wine. Walking along the sea front where I live. Running in the park. Being here with you.” The crowd eat it up.

Well-known singer Sarah Fenwick also has other strings to her bow, but finds it is being in her fifties that is really liberating. THEO PANAYIDES meets her

I thought we might talk about jazz with Sarah Fenwick. She is, after all, the owner and star attraction of Sarah’s Jazz Club in Nicosia – a rare case of an artist turned entrepreneur, cutting the Gordian knot of performers struggling to perform in a handful of live-music venues – and a staple of the local scene, going back to her days at the old Cotton Club 25 years ago. She has a three-and-a-half-octave voice with, as she says, “a lot of sand” in it – though a quote on her website (sarahfenwick.com) is a bit more effusive, describing it as “the voice of a mystical angel”.

Jazz does feature briefly in our conversation. Sarah explains about ‘scatting’, and the practice of musicians “trading fours” (look it up!); reference is made to Louis Armstrong, bebop and hard bop. Jazz, as she says, is her life’s work, the one “constant thread” in her life’s uneven tapestry. All in all, however, I’d say we talk less about jazz than we do about the subprime mortgage crisis in America in 2007 – and certainly less about jazz than we do about human rights and multiculturalism. The history of Hellenism gets a brief mention too, ditto Camus, automation, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and the village of Moni vs. the village of Psematismenos. Maybe she just likes to ramble, or maybe it’s a function of “the way my brain is built”, her lifelong – and recently, officially diagnosed – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). We talk about that, too.

We meet in her jazz club, of course, open since April, the culmination of years of idle dreaming and a two-and-a-half-year battle to amass the necessary licences (the bureaucratic hassles placed before artists seeking to establish a cultural space are another of the things we talk about). I’m met by Sarah’s husband, TV director Savvas Hadjigeorgiou, and a big dog named Chopy (after Chopin) who sniffs at me attentively and packs a pretty fierce bark, as becomes clear later on when we’re interrupted by a peddler. Muddy Waters plays in the background. The room is simple enough, a bar, a stage, and about a dozen tables with chairs in funky colours, muted by the dim light of an overcast morning. Sarah herself waves hello from the back of the room and comes to greet me – a tall woman with short hair and a round, puckish face that could plausibly be any age.

She actually turns 52 on December 10 – and declares herself very happy to be in her 50s. “It was just a relief. It felt good, to turn 50,” she claims with a laugh, then tries to explain that surprising statement. “When you’re younger, things are very confusing. Everyone starts their families, everyone starts their careers. They buy their cars, or they buy their house. I never did any of that! I never had children, I never bought a house. I never saw marriage as a means to an end.

“I always live very much in – my mind,” she explains, hesitating as she tries to pin it down. “Very much. And a lot of times, actual life – other than music, and writing – became quite burdensome. I felt like I was constantly trying and, you know, had to make a career, and you had to do this, you had to be successful, and these constant feelings of failure because I wasn’t reaching some ideal of success or something. And then, when I turned 50, I was like: ‘OK, now I’m gonna do things exactly as I want them!’.”

The jazz was always there; her parents (her dad is English, her mother Cypriot) weren’t musicians, but the house was full of music. “Since my earliest memories I have Ella Fitzgerald’s voice in my mind, Billie Holiday’s voice in my mind. These are my earliest memories.” She always sang, but was discouraged from doing so professionally; instead she studied Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, but failed to graduate due to a lifelong learning disability with maths (which, for some reason, were a core part of the degree). You wonder if there may have been a hint of subconscious revenge in the fact that later – much later – she made her living analysing numbers, working for a financial news wire in Switzerland and covering finance in general (hence the subprime mortgage crisis) and the Swiss stock exchange in particular.

When was this? In another life – before the jazz club, before her marriage to Savvas (they’ve been married for nine years), before village life in Moni, Skarinou and Psematismenos. We’re jumping around quite a lot – which is fine for this particular profile, but a modicum of structure should at least be attempted. Let’s just say that Sarah Fenwick has always tended to live three lives in parallel: as a singer, a marketing person (!) and a journalist, the journalism often appearing on her website Cyprus News Report. Or, to quote the woman herself: “People look at me from the outside and they go ‘What on earth is she doing? In the morning she’s writing an article, in the afternoon she’s marketing a concert, in the evening she’s singing. What are you, nuts?’. [But] this is how I have to operate to stay interested in life, and to stay interested in what I’m doing in general.”

Jazz may be useful as a governing metaphor here. Jazz, after all, is about freedom – literally so in the beginning, when it sprung from the music of slaves in America, but also later, when the likes of Charlie Parker deliberately went off-key and made creative ‘mistakes’. “Jazz represents rebellion,” says Sarah (though not rage per se; that’s more the blues). Jazz is also about syncopation, emphasising weak beats to keep the music fresh, keeping two different rhythms alive at the same time – and Sarah’s is perhaps a syncopated life, not just in what she does but how she does it.

Here’s one duality: she’s a solitary person, yet also an activist. “If you left me to my own devices, I would take a book and live in the countryside and read. And do not much else. Maybe sing to myself, write and read.” (She did live in the countryside for years, only coming back to Nicosia because of the jazz club.) Yet Cyprus News Report is an activist website, promising “change-making news since 2009”, and Sarah has pursued social causes since her teens, when she joined the protests against an Ayia Napa aquarium that was keeping dolphins in a swimming pool (the dolphins were released, much to her delight and astonishment). She’s happy being quiet, more than happy, but she also has a scrappy side. She quotes DH Lawrence: “Be still when you have nothing to say – but when you have something to say, say it hot!”.

Here’s another duality, perhaps the most profound of her life. She’s a creature ruled by passions – a romantic, “trapped in the emotion,” as she puts it – yet also an observer, a thinker and perhaps over-thinker. The passions are real: her move to Switzerland, and the world of financial journalism, was supposed to be permanent (this was in her 40s when she took a lot of corporate, nine-to-five jobs; she also worked in marketing management) – yet, less than a year later, she was back in Cyprus, “risking all on a feeling of love”, in pursuit of a man who turned out to be wildly incompatible. Her first husband (Savvas is the second) was another romantic impulse, an old teenage sweetheart whom she married in 1992, soon after coming back to Cyprus; they divorced two years later, having learned the hard way that their adolescent ardour had been curdled by age.

“I believe in love,” she says – yet at the same time, like a jazz band able to express two conflicting rhythms simultaneously, some part of her knows it’s a bad idea, feeling compelled to play along out of a kind of intellectual curiosity. It’s the feeling when you know someone’s lying to you, explains Sarah ruefully, but “you don’t bring it to the forefront of your conscious mind, because you’re interested more in why they’re doing it. You wonder why. You want to understand the motivation. Then, when you reach the end of the story, and the motivation is ‘I love someone else’ or ‘I want different things from what I can get with you’, the writer part of me says ‘Observe, learn’. The singer part of me says ‘Express it’. And the rational part of me says ‘What the f**k are you doing?’.” She laughs merrily. “But it’s true. It’s true!” It’s the artist’s curse, a secret part of her that observes all the time, as if seeking raw material for the songs – even when what’s being observed is her own life, even when it means ignoring all the evidence of her survival instincts.

This is not the kind of talk I signed up for. I thought we’d be talking jazz (which we are, in a way), happy feelings, the magic of music. There’s some of that, certainly. Music – especially live music – is “catharsis,” says Sarah. She sees it in the faces of her audience, who often come in stressed and leave smiling and relaxed. She hears it in the feedback she gets: “‘I have your CD, and it really means a lot’ – or, ‘I used to play your CD to my child when she had problems sleeping, and she relaxed. And, you know, I’m a waitress, so I really needed to sleep, and thank you very much!’” (the CD in question is called Jazz Origins, a collaboration with Marinos Neofytou). Above all, she knows it from her own experience – especially in the past two years, when she’s been caring for her mum who’s ill with a rare form of gynaecological skin cancer. “If I didn’t have music, I think I would have – ended it by now. I really would have.”

As in jazz, joyful catharsis goes hand-in-hand with pricklier emotions. Her account of the illness once again brings out her ‘scrappy side’, especially when she talks of having sparred with the doctors: “I didn’t accept their initial prognosis of ‘It’s incurable, just deal with it’. I did research, I found out what had been done in other cases, I was very – let’s say forceful with the doctors”. It worked, to a certain extent: the doctors here are now in communication with doctors in Germany, working together to ensure her mother’s quality of life. Opening the club also brought out the scrappy side: she’s organised a petition calling for a more streamlined licensing process, and already has 400 signatures. “If I’m going to take on a fight, I’m going to win it,” she asserts. “Because I will find every reason, I will find every argument under the sun. I will research until I’m blue in the face”. As Lawrence advised, “say it hot”.

Sometimes the laid-back musician takes over. On a table by the stage, I note the handwritten lyrics for an old Billie Holiday song called ‘Willow Weep for Me’; Sarah sang it last night – and, with a jazzperson’s nonchalance, didn’t actually learn the words before going onstage, the better to encourage improvisation and spontaneity. Then again, it’s also notable that she worked last night – and indeed she works every night, seven days a week, whether singing or organising: “I very rarely sit down for five minutes”. There’s the club, and she also makes perfumes which she sells as merchandising, and she and Savvas also have a company doing marketing and video production. It’s not just hard work – it’s the ADHD, a lack of dopamine (she explains) meaning one is never satisfied, always seeking constant stimulation.

“When I was growing up, they didn’t pay much attention to females who had ADHD, because it was mostly reflected in boys,” muses Sarah. “I mean, boys really exhibit the symptoms, they’re bouncing off the walls. But girls are very different, they’re more quiet, maybe not very interested in what’s going on. You know, they’re dreamy – which I was, as a kid. Dreamy, and never in one place for long. And they hide – I definitely did hide, let’s say, my feelings of low self-esteem, or failure, I hid this with charm. I was sweet”.

Dreamy charm concealing restlessness and burning insecurity. Living in her mind then trying to change the world, cool then hot. A penchant for passion (part of the need for stimulation, perhaps) observed by the observer’s gimlet eye. An avowed avoidance of the usual indicators of success – no house, no kids. (Did she never want them? “Not really, no,” she admits, adding wryly: “Maybe I chose the wrong people because I didn’t want this kind of responsibility”.) All these traits have at some point described Sarah Fenwick – the only constant thread, as she says, being the music, from joining a gospel band (as the only white member) and jam sessions in Chicago blues bars during her college days, to all those years of songs sung between writing gigs and corporate jobs and now, finally, on her very own stage at Sarah’s Jazz Club.

“Every difficulty in life, every heartbreak, every emotional stress that I’ve had, in my personal or work life, I just pour it into music,” she tells me. “Do I use it to calm down? Yes. Do I use it as a catharsis? Yes. Definitely. But does it – um, make life not happen? No. It’s an accompaniment to life, it’s not like an escape. It’s part of life”. As I leave, I get a sudden mental image of Sarah onstage, in full flow, surrounded by all the detritus of her 52 years, college parties and quiet village mornings, fragile parents and bad relationships and wild romances. Love and pain, and all that jazz.

A top Cyprus tennis player says that the sport has taught him a lot, including strategic thinking and a good attitude. THEO PANAYIDES meets him

Spyros Charalambous is Logistics Manager at Ermes Department Stores. It’s a big job, and a demanding one. “It has to do mainly with imports, modes of transportation, then you have clearing warehousing, managing warehousing, managing stock, and of course distribution,” he tells me, sitting in the bar of the Nicosia Hilton. “But behind logistics, there is a lot of planning.” Still, we’re not here to talk about his job – because Spyros is also the No. 22 tennis player in the world.

Caveats follow, of course. For one thing, he was No. 22 in May, but an injury over the summer – while preparing for a tournament in Slovakia – means he’s now dropped to No. 67 in the latest rankings. More importantly, we’re not talking here about the ATP circuit, nor even the senior ATP circuit where Federer, Nadal and Co. will presumably end up when they get too old for Grand Slams. ATP is the Association of Tennis Professionals; Spyros, who never went pro (though he came close), is a member of the ITF, the International Tennis Federation, and is – or was – No. 22 in the Over-40 category of the ITF’s Seniors circuit. He turns 45 in March so he’ll move up a category in 2018, gaining the advantage of youth over players a few years his senior.

Admittedly, all this makes his ranking a bit less impressive – but it’s still impressive. The ITF is highly competitive, with thousands of players from all over the world including a lot of ex-pros. The top player in Spyros’ current category is Roberto Menendez Ferre, a 41-year-old Spaniard who peaked at No. 301 on the ATP circuit in the early 00s. Most top-ranked players work at jobs which allow them lots of practice time; some are professional tennis coaches. Spyros, on the other hand, only gets to go on a tennis court about once a week (though he works on “physical condition” every other day), significantly less than many of his peers who play tennis socially.

It’s his job, he explains. It’s “demanding”, and “very intensive”. Work starts early, at 7.30, and often finishes late. He has 30 people under him, and liaises constantly with other departments: “If I were to put Logistics in the human body, I would say it’s the heart.” I suspect it might also be a case of Spyros keeping a low profile when it comes to his sporting achievements. After all, having a manager who’s also a highly-ranked tennis player is exactly the sort of thing a company likes to put on its website – but he doesn’t seem to toot his own horn, at least in the workplace. We meet in the evening, and he mentions that he’s been in Paphos all day. Did the colleagues in Paphos ask how the tennis is going?

“No,” he admits with a wry smile.

Don’t they know he’s a tennis fiend?

“They know, but they don’t…” he replies – and leaves it hanging, as if to say ‘They don’t realise how big it is’.

To be honest, it’s easy to miss. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and pictured the towering physique of a serve-and-volleyer – but in fact he’s around five-foot-eight and 84 kilos, which would be slightly overweight even if he weren’t an athlete. His handshake is extremely firm, but his eyes have an anxious look; he doesn’t come across as a macho jock type. His strength as a tennis player, he explains, is “strategy”, combined with speed and a stubborn work ethic. “When I was a junior,” he tells me, thinking back to his childhood in Limassol, “every day at 5.30 I’d be out running in the stadium”. One morning it was raining hard (he was only about 12 years old at the time), and his dad suggested that he skip one day. “‘It doesn’t matter if it’s raining or snowing, I’m going!’ I said. This is the drive I had”. Spyros nods approvingly at his younger self. “Nothing comes for free. I worked hard for this”.

The work paid off. At 12, he was part of the national Cyprus tennis team; at 14, he started practising with the Davis Cup team, and played Davis Cup for a few years till he went in the army. Later, in the US, he played Division One college tennis for three years on a full athletic scholarship at Coastal Carolina University, meanwhile pursuing a degree in Business Administration. The tennis, it should be noted, wasn’t a sideline: scholarship students could only take classes in the mornings and early afternoons – because they had to be on the tennis court for three hours of practice each day, followed by an hour and a half of fitness training (there were more hours of training on Saturdays). College tennis “is a step before professionalism. It’s very tough”.

Looking back, could he have gone professional? Was he good enough?

“I could,” he replies after a pause. ‘But, if I wanted to become professional, I should’ve left Cyprus at the age of 13, maximum 14.”

There it is, the unspoken ‘what-if’ gnawing away at our conversation. As he talks of his teenage years, Spyros recalls a cheerful little six-year-old running around as a ball-boy while he practised with the Davis Cup team. That little ball-boy was Marcos Baghdatis, 12 years his junior, who did indeed go abroad to a tennis academy at 14, and later made history by becoming the first Cypriot in a Grand Slam final (the Australian Open in 2006) as well as earning some $8 million in prize money. “I think Marcos took the risk,” he replies thoughtfully when I ask if he ever looks at Baghdatis’ career and thinks ‘It could’ve been me’. “I’m very proud for Marcos, I need to say this, he’s an excellent character and very good player.”

Does he ever feel regret that he didn’t take that path?

“I don’t feel regret, it was my choice,” he replies automatically, then thinks about it: “I can’t say, because I never tried, so I’ll go with what Michael Jordan says – that you regret shots you miss, not shots that you didn’t take”. Just a few moments later, however, Spyros circles back to the subject: “Now, if I regret it, yes and no. Yes, because I never took the shot. And no, because, um” – another short pause – “I’m happy with what I have now”.

It’s a question that can never be resolved, not entirely. First and foremost, he notes, his parents didn’t have the funds to send him abroad – though admittedly the family weren’t poor (his dad was a middle-manager at the Bank of Cyprus, his mum a dressmaker specialising in haute couture), probably about on a par with the Baghdatis family. It’s true that 12-year-old Spyros set some targets for his life, which didn’t include becoming a tennis pro (in fact his main target was to study in the US on a scholarship, which is exactly what he did) – then again, it’s also true that 14-year-old Spyros won a national tournament in Greece, and was then accosted by the president of Argyroupoli tennis club who made him an offer to stay in Greece and play for his club. “‘That’s it, you’re staying,’” roared this excitable-sounding fellow. “‘You’re not going back to Cyprus. I’m calling your dad, he’ll be sending all your stuff here, you’ll be staying at my house!’. I was shocked. I was 14.”

He must’ve been spectacular, a driven young man on a tennis court. “I think it was [only] in my late 20s that I started rewarding myself”. Before that, “I was very focused. Once I achieved a target, I would go for the next one. And it was day after day, day after day”. He seems genial enough, sipping a glass of rosé in the bar of the Hilton, but “on the court I’m very competitive. As I say to the athletes I work with, ‘Take no prisoners. Once you’re on the court, be polite, be nice, show great character, be humble – but take no prisoners. Once you have someone drowning, finish him! Don’t let him come up’. Because tennis is a sport that you may be 5-0, 40-love up, and you may lose”. His favourite book, he tells me later, one he’s read “probably 15 times”, is The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Then again, another favourite book is The Four Agreements, the self-help bestseller by Don Miguel Ruiz setting out precepts for a better life (they include ‘Be impeccable with your word’ and ‘Don’t take anything personally’). Spyros is competitive in tennis, less so in life; instead he talks fulsomely of self-help, personal growth, friendship, mentorship. I don’t know if he consciously became so positive as a way of countering life’s disappointments – including a painful divorce which he calls “the most difficult moment of my life” (he and his ex-wife divorced three years ago, after six years of marriage; they have two kids, six-year-old Giorgos and four-year-old Ioanna) – but, whatever the case, he’s very positive. He speaks more than once of “creating synergies” in his job. He’ll say things like “I love being a dad, I enjoy every moment!” or “Although my sport is very individual, I tend to be a great team player”. When he talks of tennis, he seems to treasure the friendships even more than the victories; he tells me of the players he’s met, many from the old Czechoslovakia (his best friend from college is a Slovak) like Karol Kucera or the late Jana Novotna, whom he saw when she won Wimbledon and even ‘hit with’ a few times.

Some might call Spyros a ‘nearly man’. He nearly made it to professional level, but never did. Later on, he nearly took a job at the Van Der Meer Tennis Academy in South Carolina, but instead came to Cyprus and pursued a career in logistics. Van Der Meer was where he got his coaching certificate, and the legendary Dennis Van Der Meer himself (who’d once coached Billie Jean King for the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ in 1973) asked if he wanted to stay and work there. Spyros was all set to accept, especially since Van Der Meer also talked of sponsoring him for a green card – but then he “came back to Cyprus by chance”, on vacation, and received an irresistible offer from Nicos Stephanou (whom he considers a mentor) at Frangoudi & Stephanou. Even now, the ‘nearly’ curse continues: he’s nearly a top-ranked player on the seniors’ circuit – but not quite at the very top, hampered by the strain of having to juggle tennis and a stressful corporate job.

Then again, that’s a pessimistic view of his life. Tennis has taught him a great deal, muses Spyros – but the main thing it’s taught is the value of “character”, which he defines as “being humble”, working hard and (above all, perhaps) being a calm, steady person. You can’t get too enthusiastic when you win a point in tennis, or you’ll lose concentration; you can’t beat yourself up too much when you make a mistake, either, or you’ll get irritable and make more mistakes. Spyros never had the physical build of a Sampras or Nadal, but made up for that with strategic thinking and a good attitude; his life, too, went in a different direction to (say) Baghdatis’ – but he meets it in a positive spirit, and doesn’t lose his focus by dwelling on the differences. “Things that I learned in tennis,” he smiles, “I apply them in life”.

Others benefit too: he tells me of the younger players he’s coached (and tried to mentor) in Cyprus, many of them following in his footsteps in US college tennis. Photos Photiades played at Yale; Philippe Tsangarides went to Spyros’ old alma mater of Coastal Carolina, and actually outdid his mentor by being ranked No. 1 (Spyros only managed No. 2 back in the day). He’ll often ask young players to keep a notebook and note down “life lessons,” on the basis that everything in life is a lesson – and his own life offers lessons too, if only in the ways in which we’re shaped by our choices, and must learn how to live with them.

“If you ask me now if I’d go back and change it, I would tell you that – at least I’d have taken the shot,” he says without rancour, meaning he’d have taken that excitable Greek up on his offer and moved to Greece at 14, just to try it for a couple of years. Then again, that was 30 years ago. The past is past – and the future remains full of promise: a new year, a new category, hopefully a leap up the rankings. Like logistics, tennis needs a lot of planning. He plans to lose some weight, for a start – and, since he only has time for a handful of tournaments per year, he plans to target more ‘Grade 1’ events which offer more points; and of course he also plans to practise more in 2018. “My New Year’s resolution,” says Spyros, “is to play more tennis”. Good call.

Ten years ago a Nicosia man was struck with motor neuron disease. He has since made the decision to embrace life and breathe his way through it, in addition to writing a book and undertaking a gruelling charity walk. THEO PANAYIDES meets him

I find Leonidas Hadjimitses at an interesting juncture in his life. Some of this is news to me, some I already knew about. I didn’t know he’d recently divorced, for instance – he and his wife of nine years went their separate ways a month ago; they have two kids, a seven-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter – or that the day of our meeting, December 8, also happens to be his 43rd birthday. On the other hand, I knew about Breathe Mazi Mas, the recent charity event which saw him walking the eight kilometres from Mandra tou Kampiou to Machairas – a two-and-a-half-hour uphill walk – in defiance of his crippling motor neuron disease; and I knew about Breathe, the book he’s spent two years writing and a lifetime researching, a compendium of uplifting self-help theories which he calls “my legacy for my kids”.

A copy of the book sits on the table in front of us, in a half-empty Costa Coffee on a crisp Friday morning. He calls my attention to the cover, a bisected portrait: “One eye is the sun shining, the other eye is the moon”. I initially assume he intended a contrast between light and darkness, good and evil, but in fact “any direction you take, they’re both beautiful; either the shining one, or the romantic one”. There’s no darkness in his book – or, it seems, in his public persona. Did he go through an angry phase after he got sick, 10 years ago? Leonidas pauses, as if trying to recall something fleeting and irrelevant: “Ummm…”

So he never raged against the heavens? Never said ‘Why me?’?

“No. ‘Why me?’ ‘Why not you?’…” He shrugs: “OK, it happens. These things happen. It happened to me, that’s it. I wish it hadn’t happened to me, definitely – but ‘Why me?’ is purposeless. It’s stupid to say ‘Why me?’.”

But natural, surely?

“These words take you backwards in your life,” he says firmly. “You know, today, based on statistics, more than 153,000 people will die. Today. Based on statistics. So – I’m alive! I mean, just to ask myself ‘Why me?’ is a privilege, it’s a luxury. Some people will not ask themselves ‘Why me?’ today. Because they will die.”

He talks slowly and a little painfully, sometimes slurring his words slightly. After about 45 minutes he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, walking with a cane and an awkward, erratic gait. “I have urinary urgency,” he explains with a laugh; the disease affects his body “anywhere you have muscles,” which includes the voice and of course the bladder. None of this is really in the book, however. You’d expect the Prologue to lay out the details of his illness, but instead it plunges straight into abstract rumination; Breathe isn’t a memoir, it’s a lifetime’s collected musings on the meaning of life. “I began writing this book by hand while still in elementary school, long before the existence of [the] internet,” writes Leonidas at one point, though it’s just in the past two years that he sat down and wrote it systematically.

“B stands for Breath,” he tells me, even the title of the book being “a synthesis of words I find important”. Breath heralds our entrance to this life, and our final exit too; in between it’s “a mirror of our inner world”, changing to reflect our changing moods. “Stop for a conscious breath! You are alive! Feel it!” counsels the Prologue.

He points to the ‘R’ on the book cover: “Resilience”. It’s “about having a purpose, having the energy to achieve the purpose, creating the right habits for this purpose”. He moves on to the next bit: “‘Embrace’ for the letter E”.

Embrace life, or each other?

“It’s about everything. Embrace yourself, embrace each other, embrace life and the divine miracle of life”. Then the ‘A’ stands for Accountability – being accountable “to yourself, first of all… You are here to live your own life, so you need to understand that your choices make up your life. It’s purposeless to blame others, to blame situations. You know, things happen.”

But situations often define our choices, I point out, thinking of his own condition.

Yes, he agrees – which leads us to the ‘T’: “Truths of life. Truths of life is a reality, it’s what happens. You have no control over it, and you need to accept that”. There are rich and poor, healthy and sick, there are toxic people who’ll hurt you or doubt you: “In life, everything happens. So you need to be strong enough to acknowledge this, accept it if you can’t change it, and build on it”. Then, with any luck, you’ll come to the final two letters: the ‘H’, which stands for Happiness – which we always experience through relationships, he notes – and the second ‘E’, which simply stands for Enjoy. “Enjoy life as it happens.”

Leonidas nods in satisfaction, having mapped out his system. Systems, I assume, come naturally to a man whose professional life has been spent working with computers – first in Chicago (where he did an MBA) as a network consultant, then back in Cyprus. He launched the local chapter of the Cisco Networking Academy (a series of courses teaching computer networking), lectured briefly at Philips College, and worked at various banks and financial institutions. Since 2007, he’s been Head of Information Security at Hellenic Bank.

At around the same time, in 2007, he was coming out of his car one day and noticed that his right foot had “dropped”, as he puts it: “The foot just drops, you lose control… It makes a move, [and] you say ‘But I didn’t want to make this move’.” It happened a few times, then spread to his left foot – then, within a couple of years, had become a full-body condition, involuntary movements and weakened muscles. “It’s a type of spasticity,” explains Leonidas. “It’s not that I’m shaking or whatever but it affects the walk, the way I walk… It also affects breathing, affects the voice. It forces me to consciously breathe”.

There’s a fundamental truth in that last sentence, encapsulating what the condition has meant for Leonidas Hadjimitses. He doesn’t know the name for his particular, fairly rare strain of motor neuron disease, or at least he doesn’t mention it. (‘Motor neuron disease’ is actually an umbrella term for various disorders, unlike ‘motor neurone disease’ which refers specifically to ALS, i.e. what Stephen Hawking has.) He doesn’t even know for sure whether it’s degenerative, or how much worse it’s likely to become; it came on so suddenly and worsened so rapidly, yet 10 years later “I’m still standing,” he notes – indeed, if anything, he’s getting fitter, doing 30 push-ups every morning (more than he could manage a year ago) and walking the eight kilometres to Machairas. His body has changed, obviously and dramatically – yet the physical changes aren’t as clear and unequivocal as the change his disorder has brought to his psychology. Simply put, it’s plunged him into a life of self-consciousness.

That didn’t used to be the case. As a young man – even 10 years ago, when he fell ill – Leonidas was notably impulsive, game for anything. What was his plan? What did he want to do? “You know, I’m a Sagittarius,” he replies with a laugh; “Sagittarius want to do everything! They want to enjoy as much as possible in life – and I’m definitely one of them.” He thinks, trying to come up with a more cogent answer: “It was not solid,” he concludes at last. “I just wanted to enjoy life”.

He was very sporty: “Karate, basketball, volleyball, football, discus throwing”. He has a black belt in karate (“‘I have’?” he repeats to himself, and laughs uproariously. “I have it in my closet!”), and even dreamed of opening his own martial-arts school. As a reckless youngster, he survived three motorcycle accidents. He loved dancing, and indeed met his ex-wife at a Latin dance class. (She’s actually Russian, which is also why he wrote Breathe in English.) He wasn’t shallow, or uninterested in ideas – he’s always been an avid reader – but he was like most people, “living a life outside of myself”, seeking thrills and the joy of movement for its own sake.

All that has changed now. He’s still the same tireless person (“I don’t like the word ‘tired’,” he affirms at one point. “‘Tired’ and ‘boring’ are two words I try to keep out of my dictionary”), but can no longer afford spontaneity. “If I let myself just be, I feel I will not be,” as he puts it; enfeebled muscles must be guided, told what to do. Self-consciousness is now a survival mechanism; every single step is a conscious decision. “I think about moving – I mean the movement of the legs, to walk and not fall. The same thing happens also with talking, it’s like I push myself to start and stay in a flow.” His daily routine is almost normal, insists Leonidas: “I do everything like anybody else, actually I say I do most things better than the average person!” – how many people could go on his charity walk without feeling knackered? – but everything has to be planned, that’s the point. Cold is his enemy now; cold weather stiffens the muscles, “I become like a robot”, so he has to dress well or his body collapses. “It takes a lot of risk management,” he admits wryly, ‘it’ being his life as a whole. “Every step is assessed for risks.”

And there’s something else too. He didn’t worry about getting tired on the trek to Machairas, says Leonidas – he knew he could do it – but there were still three things that gave him pause in the run-up to the big day. One was the cold, and whether it might “block” him; another was his weak bladder, and the fear of being caught short; and the third was the fact that he wouldn’t be walking alone (he was joined by dozens of well-wishers) and it all threatened to become quite emotional. Excitement causes spasticity, he explains: “I have to be in a harmonious state in order to operate”.

It all comes together, recognisably part of the same life. The emphasis, throughout Breathe, on self-help and self-consciousness; the systemised thinking, as if crafting a framework of rules to prevent the unexpected; the Facebook page full of inspirational nuggets (“Leonida mou, you cannot believe how much your words are helping me!… Your words give me a ray of light in this dark hole I find myself in”, reads a recent comment by a Facebook friend); above all, the serene persona that admits no darkness, only two kinds of light. It’s the purposeful response of a man who knows he has to look within, be very conscious of his every move, and create a nurturing, harmonious environment without undue excitements. It’s the only way he can fight the disease.

Having a support system helps. His parents are “young,” says Leonidas (that’s the first word he uses to describe them), his mother had him when she was 16; “They are friends to me”. He seems to have lots of childhood pals who all grew up in each other’s houses, and they’re still very close. Hellenic Bank have been great, and supported his charity walk. I recall what he said about happiness being found through relationships – and of course there’s also the relationship with his kids, who (so far, at least) don’t seem too upset by his condition, though his son does complain about not playing football together and his daughter, at four, seems to be gradually realising that Daddy is a little bit fragile. “Yesterday she came and held me by the hand, and told me: ‘Papa, let’s walk together. Be careful not to fall’,” he reports with a fond smile.

“I mean OK, there is this disease, whatever – but the disease does not make you unhappy. Unhappy is what happens around it,” declares Leonidas Hadjimitses in the rapidly-filling-up coffee shop. “Definitely I cannot have as a dream to go and do karate again, or play basketball, or ride my motorcycle – things that I used to enjoy. Yes. Truth of life. I accept it. But there are so many other beautiful things. And one of them is that, finally, I sat on a chair, and I wrote a book! Otherwise, I don’t see me sitting for so many hours.”

Having a support system helps – but one is alone, in the end, alone with a body that no longer does what it’s told, alone with an illness that arrived, out of nowhere, to upend one’s life, alone to write books and create strategies in order to fight it. “Every day I pray to God to fill me with love. The more filled with love I feel, the better I breathe”. Breathing is the key: the key to flow, the key to life itself. Breathing is our most important job in life – and we all have to do it ourselves, no-one else can breathe for us. Leonidas smiles, his story told; the story of a man who got caught in a trap, and breathed his way out of it.

It’s been a troubled year around the world. THEO PANAYIDES looks 2017 in the eye to reflect on a year gone by

I’ve never profiled a year before. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible, but you’re trained to expect the unexpected in the newspaper business. A colleague’s wife happened to meet the year 1933 – a dapper, stylish gentleman in top hat and tails – at a cocktail party and, after a few too many dry martinis, ’33 let slip some important information. Not only do all the various years exist in flesh-and-blood form like himself, he confided, but there’s actually a secret hangout somewhere in Cyprus where they like to vacation after their retirement. Armed with this startling information, I duly made some phone calls and eventually gained access to the club in question – my mission being to profile our current year, 2017, in the last few days before his successor takes over.

The place itself is simple enough, a roomy, luxurious bolthole somewhere in Limassol (I can’t be more specific, for obvious reasons). From the outside it looks like a private home, albeit one with an unusually high wall and unusually spacious garage where limos come directly from the airport, depositing the various years. I give the password, which changes every day (it was ‘Eternity’ on the day of our interview), and find myself buzzed in to a kind of old-fashioned gentlemen’s club, with ornate Victorian furniture and a fireplace in the corner. Waiters circulate discreetly, bearing trays with various libations. Ranged around the room are the years themselves – reading, playing cards, fiddling with their phones, or just sitting in pensive silence.

The years are a motley crew – though all-male and mostly white, as befits our received version of history. Most of the older members have a gruff, military bearing – war has always been a powerful force in the shaping of human affairs – though I also notice 1968, a long-haired youngish guy in sandals and beads. Skulking in a corner is 1974, who (I later discover) very seldom comes to Cyprus, fearing for his life if news of his presence gets out. The years look invariably weary, Time and the pressures of the job having taken their toll on them. I note seven battle-hardened men in soldier’s fatigues sitting round a table, talking animatedly of tactics and the spirit of the Blitz – and recognise 1939 to 1945, the WWII years.

2017 shouldn’t be in this company, of course. He’s still on active duty, at least for a couple more days – but he’s here on a visit, just to check the place out in anticipation of a well-earned retirement, and you can’t really blame him: it’s been a long year. I find him at the bar, a florid, bombastic man in ill-fitting clothes, eyeing me suspiciously as I sidle up beside him. He looks angry, even before I say anything; his whole body seethes with anger, coming off in waves and crackling in the air between us. I can see it’s going to be a tricky interview.

“I know what you think,” he spits out irritably. “You think it’s been a year of conflict and unpleasantness.”

Well, I shrug – hasn’t it?

“Fake news!” snarls 2017, shaking his head. “The mainstream media make me out to be a monster, but it’s all fake polls and negative reporting. People were happier in 2017 than in any other year, but the fake-news industry only reports the unhappiness. Sad! Look at my hurricanes, we had wind speeds of 185mph. I have the best hurricanes. We’re making hurricanes great again.”

That’s not really something to brag about, though, is it?

He recoils at the question – and, to my surprise, a subtle change seems to come over his features. The belligerence turns to a hurt, defensive expression, as if a switch has been flipped. He still looks angry, though.

“Check your privilege!” snaps 2017. “What do you know about the experience of being a year? Are you part of the year community? Have you ever felt the pain and humiliation of latent year-ism? Your offensive question triggers distressing memories and enables systemic oppression. I demand an apology.”

For a moment, I think about calling the whole thing off and finding some other New Year’s Eve article; it seems clear that any kind of reasonable dialogue will be impossible. Then again, I’m also aware of the circumstances which have shaped my bad-tempered subject – not just the ongoing curse of social media and online interaction, but also the peculiar circumstance of having to follow in the footsteps of his notorious predecessor. 2016 was a flake, an obvious lunatic; I actually glimpse him in the club for a moment, a bug-eyed individual with frizzy hair and frantic body language, babbling madly to a quiet, phlegmatic fellow who just listens patiently (this turns out to be 1866, an undistinguished year nobody remembers). Not only did he take away many of our most beloved entertainers, from Prince to David Bowie, but he also presided over two seismic events – Brexit in the UK, Donald Trump’s election in the US – that still create ripples of controversy. And of course 2017 had to deal with the fallout.

No wonder the man at the bar is so touchy and defensive; his tenure was marked from the start by anxiety and bitterness. Nor is it just the embarrassment factor of being ‘2017’, a dysfunctional year for other years to gawp and laugh at; there’s also the fact that, despite his braggadocio, 2017 feels every hurt and injustice that occurred during his term – not just emotionally, but even physically.

An exhausted Rohingya refugee woman touches the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border

He can brag about hurricanes, but in fact hurricanes (like all natural disasters) leave a mark on his body. “This is Harvey,” he admits grimly, lifting his trouser leg to reveal a yellowing bruise on his calf – “and this is Irma,” he adds, lifting his shirt to show me a long, ugly scar across his stomach. The earthquake in Iran that killed 630 people in November appears as a welt on his arm; the one in Mexico where 370 perished is an evil-looking lump that still gives him pain occasionally. Nor is it just disasters; man-made atrocities, too, leave a literal blemish. During the course of our conversation he shows me Syria, the bombings and famine in Yemen, the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester, the Las Vegas shooting, the truck bomb in Somalia – all of them reflected in bumps, lesions and scars which pockmark his skin. (Syria also gave him the worst IBS, he adds dolefully.) This is par for the course with years, and explains why so many end up being traumatised, often turning to drink or drugs; in a back-room, on my way to the loo, I catch a glimpse of 1990 in baggy pants and backwards baseball cap, seeking oblivion by popping Es and listening to the Happy Mondays.

2017 is quiet for a moment, thinking of the pains he’s experienced. “Where did you say you were from?” he asks me suddenly.

“I’m from here,” I reply. “Cyprus.”

Crans Montana

“Cyprus…” he repeats meditatively, and thinks for a moment. “Yeah, you guys are here too,” he tells me – then takes off his shoe and lifts his foot to show me the Cyprus problem, which appears as a mildly ingrown toenail. It doesn’t really hurt, he assures me, and doesn’t seem to get any worse either; his predecessor had it too, “and so did 2015, for all I know”. It gave him quite a twinge in July, he recalls, around the time of Crans-Montana, he even thought of going to see a doctor – but the pain disappeared, and hasn’t been back since. “I think the problem might be over,” he says with relief, happy to talk about something that isn’t such a big deal for a change.

He checks his watch, and orders another drink. I’m glad I decided to go through with the interview; 2017 might be hard to get along with, but it’s not entirely his fault. He’s a man in an impossible job, buffeted – like all of us – by epochal forces beyond his control.

I’d hoped he might be able to explain our confusing world, but it turns out he’s just as confused as anyone. “How do Bitcoins actually work?” I ask at one point, and 2017 nods very seriously, embarking on a long explanation involving blockchains and network nodes – but halfway through he loses his way, stammers for a while, then simply shrugs and admits that he hasn’t a clue. “What about Kim Jong-un?” I ask. “Is he a madman?” 2017 shows me a small bruise near his shoulder, caused by the whiplash of global fear when North Korea launched a missile test over Japan in September. That doesn’t really answer the question though, I point out, and he huffs defensively, lapsing back into angry mode: “I have the best explanations – but you fake-media journalists want to make it look like everything is puzzling and hard to explain. Sad!”.

I give him a conciliatory smile, wondering if it may be time to make my exit – but an audible buzz suddenly ripples through the room, prompting us both to turn around. Someone is standing, rather hesitantly, at the main entrance – a new year and indeed the New Year, 2018. Some of the other years scowl at the newcomer. The WWII group fall silent, then mutter glumly. 2018 is young, still unmarked by the rigours of the job – but she’s also a woman, the first female year to join this historically all-male club! Her colleagues cast unhappy looks in her direction; 1893 (the year when women first won the unconditional right to vote, in New Zealand) tries to start a round of applause, but no-one joins in.

2018 walks in rather slowly and self-consciously, avoiding eye contact. She walks across the room to the bar, then extends her hand to the grumpy gentleman beside me. “I just wanted to thank you for a year well done,” she says, “and I wondered if you have any tips for me?”. Her voice is high and steady – and miraculously free of anger, at least so far.

2017 grunts in response. On the one hand, I can see that he’s flattered by the young woman’s attentions – but her question also brings out the worst in him, all the pressure and frustrations of the past 12 months. “You have no clue what you’re letting yourself in for,” he growls gloomily – and begins to tell her of the many, many things that could go wrong in 2018. More terrorist attacks. More bluster and violence. More floods and earthquakes. More refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. Fear of war in the Middle East. Fear of new recession in the EU. Fear of nuclear strikes. Fear of people being even more divided than they are now, sitting in the dim light of laptops spewing outraged invective at each other. Fear of robots taking all our jobs.

I listen to this litany, feeling more depressed by the second – but the New Year doesn’t seem to care, or at least she doesn’t falter. She’s full of hope; everything is still new and glorious to her. She waits patiently for 2017 to finish (in the end he runs out of steam trying to list things, and just glares at her darkly) then she nods, and extends her hand again. “We’ll do our best,” she replies very simply, with immense dignity – then, having shaken hands, turns on her heel and walks out again, past the assembly of old, troubled years.

2017 looks down, touched by the New Year’s response. For the first time, I sense his anger ebbing away – maybe because he knows his time is up, and he’ll soon be able to spend eternity playing cards and whiling away the hours with his predecessors, but also because he now knows that anger is never the end. Human beings keep hoping, even (or especially) when things seem overwhelming. I accept his offer of another drink, and raise my glass in a toast with our soon-to-be-old year: “To a new start!” he says, and smiles tentatively.

An author shortlisted for the Man Booker prize wrote his book while studying in north Cyprus. His second novel, set for publication next year, is partly set there. But AGNIESZKA RAKOCZY speaks to a man firmly rooted in Nigeria

It takes time to arrange an interview with Chigozie Obioma. A year to be exact. He is working on his second novel and can’t talk now, says Najla, who answers messages on Obioma’s Facebook profile. This was in response to my initial enquiry in November 2016. Here we are, a year later, when I send a reminder. Obioma answers himself. Yes, he can talk. Let’s set up a date.

Face-to-face is a given for most profiles I write. Not possible in this case since the subject is far from Cyprus. On the other side of the Atlantic to be exact. So, in a bid to visualise this Nigerian writer, before calling him I go to Google where I check out some of his online interviews.

The film and video clips show a young man. Born in 1986, he is 31 years old. A little self-conscious, a little bit ponderous perhaps. When I proceed to Skype him, I am greeted by the same mellow, West African voice as on the Youtube interviews.

He tells me his new book, An Orchestra of Minorities, takes place in Nigeria and north Cyprus, where Obioma spent five years of his life as a student.

Obioma, whose previous novel The Fisherman was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, is currently a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Nebraska. As we speak he is preparing to send off his latest novel to Little, Brown for publication next September. “You will start hearing about it in the summer,” he promises.

According to a preview blurb in The Bookseller, An Orchestra… is “about the life of a troubled young poultry farmer who sacrifices everything to win the woman he loves.” Obioma describes it as a novel about love and “how far can we go to defend that feeling”. It is the story of a man “who goes to north Cyprus because he wants to get a quicker education so he can go back to Nigeria and marry this woman who is highly educated.” She is about to complete her studies and become a doctor. “Her family thinks he is too lowly,” says Obioma. Spurred on by the need to prove his worthiness by acquiring a higher education, he sets off to Cyprus but “goes through a really hard time” before eventually returning to Nigeria where he faces his problems.

“The way the story is told has this mythic dimension about it because the person who narrates is like a god. Where I come from there is this belief that everybody has a personal god attached to them, a guardian angel, and it is the voice of this guy’s angel that we hear throughout the novel.”

The idea for the novel had been gestating for some time. An article by Obioma, ‘The Ghosts of my Student Years in North Cyprus’, was published in the Guardian in 2016. It tells the story of another Nigerian student, whom he met not long after his arrival in Cyprus in 2007.

Being among the first Nigerians to come to north Cyprus to study, Obioma found himself showing the ropes to many subsequent student arrivals. He and his friends encountered a lot of different situations. “We saw one guy who went insane because of the stark realisation that he had been deceived by an agent who arranged his studies on the island,” Obioma says. Student life wasn’t easy nor were the subsistence economics. In his own case, Obioma remembers “a girl I wanted to date” and the sting of “the day I found out she started going out with an older Turkish Cypriot man because of money…

“There was a lot of stuff like that but this guy, Jay, and his death affected me the most. When I left the island I was always thinking a lot about this guy and how he died and how it was such a waste of life. Most of what is happening in the Cyprus section of the novel is inspired by that sad guy’s story.”

The writer himself came to north Cyprus in 2007 to study at the Cyprus International University on the outskirts of north Nicosia. He went on to graduate at the top of his class in 2011 and stayed on for a while teaching at the same school. Then he left for Michigan where he completed an MA in creative writing. Looking back on his time on the island, he notes how “five years is a long period – it reshapes you.”

While his new novel reflects his connection to Cyprus, The Fishermen was almost entirely written on the island and emerged from the strong sense of “nostalgia” he experienced while here for Nigeria and his family. “For the first two years of my stay in Cyprus I couldn’t go home. I became very, very homesick. I missed my family a lot. I was thinking about them, about the way we used to live when I was a child. So I was experiencing both moments of retrospection and introspection – about the meaning of family and a growing political consciousness of the situation in my country, all of which contributed to writing The Fishermen. Coming to Cyprus shattered my vision of Nigeria, sensitised me. I could see the contrast. If I hadn’t come to Cyprus I would not have been able to write The Fishermen”.

The novel was rejected by numerous publishers who, while recognising its literary value, claimed it was too focused on Africa to attract a Western reader. Finally published in 2015, The Fishermen was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won several awards for outstanding new writer. It went on to be translated into 22 languages and featured in many best books of the year lists including those of the Observer, the Economist, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

With the Nigerian tale of The Fishermen was written while Obioma was in Cyprus, and An Orchestra…, which features both Cyprus and Nigeria, in the US, Obioma admits wryly that he only can write about a place when he is not there.

The Fishermen tells the story of four brothers who, while on one of their secret fishing escapades (much against their parents’ wishes), receive a violent prophecy that the eldest brother will die at the hands of one of his siblings. Prophecy and consequences tear the family apart. “The idea came to me after a phone conversation with my father,” says Obioma, who comes from a family of 12 brothers and sisters.

“He was telling me how pleased he was that my two eldest brothers used to fight a lot when they were kids had become very close to each other. Here I was in Cyprus thinking about what my father said and I started trying to imagine what would happen if there had been a different outcome to such a brotherly rivalry. What would have happened if the love turned to hate.”

But the novel, while focused on the Agwu brothers, works on many levels. It is also a political parable set in the 1990s, when Nigeria was writhing under military dictatorship, with the once pure and locally revered river where the brothers go fishing murky with pollution as was so much else in Nigeria. These insights were sharpened for Obioma once he found himself looking at Nigeria not just from overseas but from the perspective of a tiny island country, fractured by invasive events, possessing far fewer resources than his own land yet somehow maintaining a distorted semblance of normalcy.

Ensnared by international embargoes, how could Ankara-dependent, otherwise unrecognised, north Cyprus manage to function when his own oil-rich, free and independent Nigeria was so dysfunctional? “The contrast was very disturbing and I began to wonder where did we go wrong, what the problem is.”

He reckons he would have been much happier in 17th or 18th century Igboland than he is now. He hastily adds that in saying this he is not indulging in some form of extreme nostalgia or suggesting that life back then was perfect. What he as a writer has to think about (and what people in Africa should consider) is this: were their ancestors happy, were their needs met? Most likely, yes. “So people should find what works for them and not try to adopt what the West brings to them because for over 50 years we have been trying to implement this Western system and clearly it is not working for us. Doesn’t it make sense to try something else?”

Obioma regrets that certain aspects of African identity and ideology have been abandoned as he sees it in the race to modernise. He believes a return to those values and beliefs would provide solid foundations on which to build countries in Africa. Downtrodden and ignored in the all-consuming stampede, those traditional values have not yet been totally lost, he contends.

“Our people still believe more in the old ways than in the western system. They follow the western system but they don’t truly believe in it. Nigerians don’t fully believe in democracy. They just pretend they do. But that opens the door to all kinds of corruption. What they actually believe in are the structures that we have had for hundreds of years.”

Why, he asks in a fit of exasperation, “do we pretend that we are Americans or Europeans, when we are not, when we are different?” Nigerians should stick to what they believe in. What is important is whether people are happy, able to eat, survive. They should not feel the need to hop on ships and get to Libya or places like Cyprus. They should not be suffering.

In the circumstances, it seems not unreasonable to ask if he contemplates returning to Nigeria anytime soon. For the time being his job in the US as a professor is a practical consideration. During his frequent visits “back home” he strives to put some of his ideas into practice and that is something he intends to continue doing, with, as he puts it, “one foot here, one foot there.” He concedes that relocating per se is not yet feasible because, his academic work aside, “I am a writer and my work is more appreciated here.” Writers, he notes matter-of-factly, “thrive more where there is relative economic success.”

Obioma knew from early on that he wanted to be a writer. Although The Fishermen was hailed as his ‘debut’ novel, he sheepishly admits to a prior publication, a book that his proud Dad insisted on having self-published back when he was 17. To this day, his father remains a big fan and a valued confidante. “Once I am done with the new book I will ship it to Nigeria because he needs to look at all the words in the Igbo language to make sure they are correct.”

Obioma acknowledges that writing fiction is difficult. He is no fan of the kind of commercial fiction that can be written in a matter of months and sometimes makes millions. “The real challenge is writing fiction that has a focus and heart; that is based around a concept that requires some level of complexity to it, the kind of work that will speak to a man in a very deep way.”

He was still in Cyprus when he first began thinking about Orchestra of Minorities. “I wanted to tell a story about a poor unfortunate, someone who is about to get married and is deceived and loses everything”. He remembers the painful process, the false starts, times when you think you are on your way. “Maybe you have written 10,000 words and then you see that, no, this is not the form this novel needs. So you abandon it. You almost forget about it and after a while you try again and then finally you find the form, the structure. It can be difficult but it depends on the person. Someone like me, I cannot not write. It’s not like I would be incapable of doing something else if I didn’t write but writing is a special source of happiness for me. I am more myself when I write.”

Ideally, he writes in the morning, even when he has classes at the university. Revisions can be done more or less any time. But the creative process requires sleep. “If I am creating something new I have to do it after I have slept. The best time is if I sleep early, say at 8 or 9pm and wake up at 4am. Then I am going to produce good work most likely.”

Already, An Orchestra… has been sold to seven countries. Obioma hopes to revisit north Cyprus next year, after the new novel comes out. When he does he would like to write some articles about the current situation on the island. Readers of his book will want to know more about the island, he believes.

He says he is less interested in the politics than the very idea of the Africans who come here and what motivates them to do so. He fondly recalls trips to Kyrenia and Famagusta and the startling blue of the sea. Cyprus is, he says, a beautiful island. He enjoyed living here. Maybe next time he will get to see the rest of it.

THEO PANAYIDES meets the founder of a Nicosia supper club and finds his entire life revolves around meals. And his comfort at being the head of a large family

The house is cosy, casually strewn with the clutter of a six-person family – Thomas Peccini, his wife Ioanna and their four boys, Sebastian, Maximilian, Julian and Alessandro. Thomas himself sits on the sofa opposite me, a week or so after his 47th birthday: sharp nose and chin, black-rimmed glasses, garrulous manner, slicked-back hair standing up at the top. He’s enthusiastic, shading into flamboyant. “We don’t advertise this,” he muses, “so it’s going to be the first time that people will be hearing about this in print. If they haven’t heard about us on social media.”

‘This’ is Cerines supper club – which admittedly I’d never heard of till recently, even though it’s been going for nearly four years. My own trail to this 10-room house on the outskirts of Dhali was rather convoluted, starting two months ago when I profiled London-based clinical psychologist Jessamy Hibberd at TEDx University of Nicosia, then happened to check her Twitter feed a few days later. “Take me back to Cyprus,” pleaded Dr Hibberd, clearly shell-shocked by the foul UK weather: “the 22 degree heat, the wonderful people we met and this amazing cake at #cerinessupperclub made by @cerinesdotcom”. An Instagram link displayed the cake in question – but I was more intrigued by the fact that TEDx had obviously taken its worldly, high-achieving foreign visitors for dinner to a place I’d never heard of. And what exactly is a ‘supper club’?

“This unique dining experience launched on 31 March, 2014 with 12 diners taking seats,” explains the website at cerines.com. “What was originally intended as a one-off event for foodies and food enthusiasts has grown into an inclusive, invitation-only, private club that has hosted 59 suppers over three seasons”. That was written a few months ago, the number of suppers having now grown to 73, with a total of about 1,100 diners (including repeats) having availed themselves of the Cerines experience – but the actual experience remains much the same: the venue is the Peccinis’ family home (also called Cerines), the food is home-cooked by Thomas (the first course is always pasta, made with organic eggs from his own chickens), and all six members of the family take a hand in hosting the 18 or so guests, even if the boys tend to go into “a steep decline” after a couple of hours. “But I definitely put them to work,” he insists. “They need to understand that this is part of our life. This is – what helps us survive, subsist”.

Hosting supper clubs isn’t what he does for a living: Thomas and Ioanna are both schoolteachers, teaching high-school Italian in the state system, their various sidelines (they also rent out part of the house as an Airbnb) forced upon them by the crisis. Still, Cerines isn’t just an occasional pastime (nor is it free, the diners supplying a ‘contribution’ of €35/person). Preparation time for each dinner is about four days, only half of which is devoted to cooking: the rest has to do with what he calls “life’s little luxuries” – not just sprucing up the house but setting the tables with candles and fresh flowers, laying out crisp white tablecloths, arranging a cloth napkin for each diner and a hot towel “to wipe your hands at the end of a lovely meal”. Thomas is a foodie, a lifelong – if self-taught – cooking aficionado, yet the supper club isn’t just about preparing good food. It’s also about what he calls “the art of hosting”.

It’s also about something else, probably the most intriguing aspect of the whole story – but first we should take a step back and talk about Thomas’ experience in Cyprus, as an Italian-American from Massachusetts who’s been here since 2001. He and Ioanna (a refugee from Kyrenia, ‘Cerines’ being the old Venetian name for that town) met at Rutgers, where both were studying Italian Literature; she wanted to stay in America but he lobbied for Cyprus, having fallen in love with the island since his first visit in 1994. “I love it, I think it’s a great place,” he raves. “It’s special to me. I think most people who live here don’t truly appreciate what blessings we have here in Cyprus”. He’s integrated about as much as an outsider can. He’s learned Greek, has been working as a civil servant for over a decade, and was recently baptised Greek Orthodox; he even makes kourambiedes and melomakarouna for Christmas, sighs Thomas – yet “the culture of Cyprus is still very closed. People here have been very kind, and very nice, but there’s a limit”. This, lest we forget, is a language where the word for ‘foreigner’ (ksenos) is also the word for ‘stranger’.

Cerines supper club shouldn’t really have worked in this culture – because the real gimmick here isn’t the food, or the house, but the company. In theory, all the guests sitting at his table are meeting each other for the first time (in practice, many have been there before), making the club something of a social experiment. “It’s really about bringing people together,” he explains. “People are hungry for more than just good food. People are hungry for connections”. The art of conversation is in trouble, Thomas believes – and the culprit is largely social media, where dialogue has been replaced by grandstanding, violent arguments, and the echo-chamber effect of hanging out with people with identical views to oneself.

Yet, after six dozen suppers and over 1,000 guests sitting down with total strangers, the atmosphere at Cerines has always been friendly and sociable (though he does get the occasional feedback about other diners having made “inappropriate comments”). Partly, I assume, it’s the civilising effect of being served good food in an elegant environment; partly it’s that Thomas ‘meets’ each guest (if only online) before the supper, allowing him to weed out obvious psychos. But it’s also the magic of eating together, the same trick employed by the UN at peace summits: “If we put everybody around a table – yeah, there might be some things you hear that you might not like, but nobody’s going to get obnoxious like they do on Facebook. It’s about breaking bread”. It’s also a question of Thomas’ own stewardship: he never sits down with the guests, but he does keep an eye on them – especially in the ‘cocktail hour’ that precedes the meal, where some are understandably shy. It’s not always easy walking into a party where you don’t know anyone. “I mean, that puts you back in your high-school days. And nobody wants to go back there!”.

I assume that’s a veiled reference to some teenage troubles of his own; after all, he ticks a lot of boxes (a boy who loved cooking and literature? in the 80s?). Turns out my assumption is wrong, however, because Thomas had a fine time in high school: he got along with everyone and was senior class president, making such an impact that his old classmates still like to call him ‘Mr President’. Looks like he’s always been a people person – and indeed a person in charge of other people, a leader, a connector.

Who is Thomas Peccini? The supper-club idea points to one of Nature’s nurturers, but I’m not sure that’s right. (For one thing, though we talk for hours, he doesn’t bring out lots of food and drink, as the nurturing types tend to do reflexively; he’s too busy talking.) He’s really more of an enthusiast, a maven, a persuader – and a pedagogue, a teacher, a man who doesn’t just serve wine at Cerines but “presents” the wine (his winery of choice is Zambartas, which he calls world-class). “I need to tell them how it’s made, who makes it, where it’s from,” he explains; the “stories” he tells about the food – “what it means to me” – are almost as important as the food itself. A recent supper club, just after Thanksgiving (he called it ‘Friendsgiving’), actually had an explicit educational element, including talks by “resident bartender” Vangelis Spetzouras, floral designer Sophia Charalambous and Thomas himself, who presented a ‘holiday food guide’ giving tips on Christmas cuisine.

He has no false modesty, nor any of the British tendency to self-deprecation. “People always said, ‘You’re so talented at cooking, Thomas, you’re talented with your home and how it’s decorated, and your lifestyle – you really should share your ideas!’,” he recalls without embarrassment, on the origins of Cerines. He’s also a proper dad, a paterfamilias, a man who consciously set out to have a large family and considers fatherhood one of the highest joys of life: “I love it. I love it! I tell my kids – I was telling them just the other day – that the greatest gift, every day, is seeing your children grow and develop”.

All four boys sail, for the Famagusta Nautical Club in Limassol. All four, as already mentioned, help out with the supper clubs. This is the old Italian idea of family, where everyone is part of the tribe. It may lack something in rugged individualism, but the kids seem to thrive on it – and Dad, of course, is the head of the tribe. I ask nine-year-old Alessandro if he minds being the youngest of four, and he shakes his head: I like it, he says proudly, because my dad was also the youngest of four (Thomas’ sister, who visited over the summer, also has four kids; seems to be a Peccini thing). At one point we’re interrupted by Julian, who’s come to deliver his report before going out to play:

“Papa, Alessandro is done with his homework and Maximilian is done with his work.”

“OK, make sure your mother knows. Thank you, honey.”

He’s always had this mindset, he explains, more European than American (he doesn’t feel too American, especially these days, and will only refer to Trump as “this person”). “I subscribe more to the way of life here in Europe, with the attention on family and what we do in our free time – which is not so much an American ideal, [which] is really about work, work, work. Making a name for yourself. Becoming someone”. Being a high-school teacher of Italian in Cyprus may not count as a huge professional success – but then Thomas pauses, and holds up a hand so we can listen to the sounds of the household, plates clattering, voices raised, a vacuum cleaner humming. “There’s always something going on,” he marvels. “We are living this life, fully… It’s insane, it’s intense, it’s amazing. I mean, there’s never a dull moment.” He himself grew up “practically an only child”, seven years younger than his next-oldest sibling; the life of a big family – especially with himself as its head – seems to fulfil him on a deep level.

Is there a link to the supper club? Very much so. One thing he noticed when his sister came over, he notes, was how she and her kids were forever on the go, grabbing something to eat in mid-activity – whereas, for his family, mealtimes are sacred, a chance to sit down with your loved ones: “Our whole life revolves around meals”. It’s surely not too fanciful to see Cerines as an extension of that, a grander version of a family mealtime, equally cosy and homely, infused with his own personality rather like the flavoured gins and vodkas (infused with elaborate tastes like desiccated cranberries with apple and cinnamon) in this season’s cocktail hour. Kids, supper clubs, Airbnb guests; I recall the tag-line on the Instagram page, ‘At home with a big family on a small island’. The bigger the better.

“I see the big picture,” says Thomas. “I’m really good with the little details, [and] I’m really good with the big picture. The in-between stuff I’m not so good with – Ioanna’s very good with this, that’s why we make a good team”. Speaking of the big picture, the New Year’s Day photo on that Instagram page (cerinesdotcom) speaks of “some changes coming up for 2018… Time to untie the mooring line, push off and head out on uncharted courses”. All a bit cryptic – but it surely has to do with the supper club, the unexpected project that’s transformed the life of this teacher, home-cook and consummate host.

Diners at Cerines fill in comment cards at the end of the meal, he tells me. One recent comment read: “This, I think, is the future of dining”. Another read: “Thomas, you are an experience-maker”. That’s the crux of the matter, he raves excitedly. “People can go anywhere and have a meal. That’s nothing, it doesn’t mean anything. But why do people come back to the supper club, again and again? It’s because, today, people want experiences… It’s like travelling. It’s transportive”. It’s like Disneyland, only with food. And a six-person family. And just outside Dhali.

Tasked with uncovering ancient deaths and demystifying them, THEO PANAYIDES meets a scientist who says we have a lot to learn from the past

Unless you’re a fellow academic, the most eye-catching part of Kirsi Lorentz’s CV – you can find it on the website of the Cyprus Institute, where she’s an Assistant Professor – probably isn’t her impressive list of conference papers and publications, but the fact that she speaks (at least) nine languages. In addition to her native Finnish, Kirsi can hold a conversation in English, Greek, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Estonian “and others”, notes the CV – that final “and others” being the cherry on the cake since those ‘others’ include most of the languages (Arabic, Turkish, Farsi) which she uses in her fieldwork, excavating ancient sites as part of researching the ‘human bioarchaeology’ of the Near East.

Is she fluent in all nine? “Well, ‘fluent’ is…” she begins, and laughs. “You know, you’re talking to an academic so we twist and turn all the time, and analyse and so on”. She does twist and turn quite a bit, her answers prone to caveat and circumlocution – and ‘fluent’ is of course a matter of opinion, but a YouTube clip of an interview she gave to the CyBC programme Apo Mera Se Mera shows that her Greek, at least, is quite fluent, barring the occasional stumble; what’s more, that interview dates from 2009 so she’s had plenty of practice in the decade since, not least because she’s married to a Cypriot (they met in Cambridge, where she did her PhD; they have two boys, five and two). At one point I remark on her accent – which isn’t British, Nordic or Cypriot, but somewhere in between – and she laughs again: “I’m a bit of a chameleon with accents. By the end of this interview, I’ll probably pick up your accent!”.

That may be a key line in describing her personality – because Kirsi has a scientist’s knack for exploring other cultures (or indeed accents) rather than imposing her own. Most of her interests, both professional and personal, seem to hinge on losing herself in foreign worlds, whether it’s the bottom of the sea as a keen scuba diver (and certified instructor), the world of exotic cuisines as a committed foodie – and of course the world of the past, human bioarchaeology being the study of ancient human remains. “There’s this one lady in Larnaca,” she says at one point, and I crane forward to hear more about her friend – “who was found in a sarcophagus,” she goes on, and I realise that the lady in question lived (and died) thousands of years ago.

Turning the spotlight on herself doesn’t really come naturally. It’s not that she’s standoffish, far from it – but I get the sense that a fair bit of planning has gone into our meeting, in her office at the Institute. I start to sit down in a chair but she points me to another one, with my back to the door. A small plate of nougat sweets has been placed in the middle of the table, next to neatly-stacked piles of leaflets. “If the noise outside disturbs, we can close the door,” she suggests with impeccable, slightly fussy politeness (in fact, there’s no noise to speak of), then later: “Do tell me if you’re not comfortable”. She’s 44, in a high-necked black top adorned with a pendant which belonged to her grandmother, her skin so pale it must suffer terribly in the 50-degree heat of the Arab deserts where she does her excavations. She has the Finnish face, she says cheerfully, her narrow, pale-green eyes seeming almost to vanish when she laughs or squints. On the wall is a black-and-white photo of an elephant herd, taken by her husband on a trip to Botswana; travel is another of her pleasant devices for losing herself in foreign worlds.

She’s not the first Finnish archaeologist to specialise in the Middle East, indeed there’s a bit of a tradition (Jaakko Frösén is apparently the big name among her predecessors) – but it’s still unusual to see her here, especially as a woman in a part of the world that’s notoriously hostile to women. It may have helped that her childhood was slightly unsettled, she and her five siblings following their neurologist dad on his postings around Finland – but it also helps that the region, simply put, is nowhere near as dangerous as it’s made out to be. “To be perfectly honest,” says Kirsi, slightly nonplussed as I probe for tales of close calls and witnessed atrocities, “I felt much more safe in this region than walking around in certain parts of New York or San Francisco”.

But isn’t Tell Zeidan in Syria – an archaeological site where she carried out a human bioarchaeology project funded by the University of Chicago – just five kilometres from Raqqa, the de facto capital of the ISIS ‘caliphate’?

“Well, Raqqa was a different place,” she replies. She was there the summer before ISIS invaded, and “Raqqa was a sleepy town with a nice Friday market, with goats and sheep and spices and cheese and those little bottles of local perfumes and whatnot. And the local baker was friendly to us, and we had trips with the students. It was a normal humdrum place to be, as an archaeologist”. She doesn’t meet raging Islamists, she meets “normal people” with normal lives, people who often go out of their way to help her – especially as a woman travelling alone. I start asking about terrorists but we end up talking about food, the “absolutely fabulous” food of the region. “In Iran there’s this dish called fesenjan, it’s pomegranate molasses, ground-up walnuts and meat – it used to be duck, but nowadays it’s mostly chicken – cooked in this wonderful sauce and served over rice. Another one – I hope you’ve had some lunch,” she adds thoughtfully, watching me salivate – “another one is zereshk polow…”

It’s fitting that Kirsi has worked in a region that’s become synonymous with death, yet makes it sound pleasantly ordinary – because that, more or less, is her job, to uncover the deaths of the past and demystify them, make sense of them, turn them into science. At Tell Zeidan, for instance, soil samples from the pelvic area of an ancient skeleton revealed the remains of an intestinal parasite which causes bilharzia, the earliest evidence of the devastating disease that now affects some 300 million people (she ascribes it to the growth of urban settlements, leading to irrigation agriculture where the parasite thrived). “Looking at bones, looking at how people buried their dead, looking at how they buried their children”: there’s a sadness in what she does, a ghostly humanity inscribed in old bones and soil samples. It’s even more poignant – though that isn’t, strictly speaking, her specialisation – when remains are found, say, with lesions in the head area, or lying face-down with no evidence of a formal burial: the signs of violent death.

Kirsi in Iran

What could’ve been so important, all those thousands of years ago, to justify the snuffing-out of a human life? How trivial and unnecessary it appears from our own perspective – rather like the mass graves in Syria will someday appear to archaeologists of the future. Kirsi nods, taking a sip of tea from a formidable-looking black thermos on the table beside her: “When we see these kinds of things in the past, and think ‘Well, that was pointless, wasn’t it?’, with our benefit of hindsight…” She trails off, shrugging helplessly: “If we would be able to put that perspective to the events that are happening now, I think as humanity we would be much better off”.

There’s a larger question here, one that extends to the whole practice of archaeology; after all, the distant past seems especially distant to a generation for whom even the 20th century is an alien planet. We send messages to the other side of the world in a matter of seconds now, and call up knowledge at the touch of a button; we’ll be colonising Mars soon, or downloading our consciousness into new bodies, or whatever the futuristic gurus would have you believe. Hasn’t there been a paradigm shift? Can we still care about Bronze Age people in the age of technology?

Kirsi pauses, weighing her words: “I personally think we have a lot to learn from the past,” she replies unsurprisingly. After all, the usual narrative of the future as a destination – as progress – is just a narrative; we tend to picture ourselves walking forwards into the future, she points out, but for instance many Aboriginal tribes in Australia (Kirsi’s studies were in both Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology) picture themselves walking backwards, facing the past. “Whether we like it or not, we’re always informed by the past,” she affirms, adding that “this kind of hubris of ‘We are technologically advanced’ also existed in the past”. You only have to rummage around in history (either physically, as archaeologists do, or figuratively) to find ancient texts speaking of some major innovation, societies transformed by technology – but human concerns have always remained much the same, trying to find “some comfort in our life”, some security and happiness. And of course everyone ends up in the ground eventually.

“My line of work is really something that puts into perspective birth and death and everything in between,” she says wryly, “and gives a sense of the fragility of life. Both in terms of what I actually do in the laboratory and the field, in studying these remains, but also in terms of travelling in this region… So, with that in mind, we should live our lives and do our research like it’s the last day we’ve got to do it,” she smiles, reaching for the punchline – “but [also] plan it like we’ve got forever!” she adds unexpectedly, and I think of the planning that seems to have gone even into our casual encounter.

Kirsi Lorentz is a planner, I suspect – an organised, practical type – which is also why she makes a good explorer. Even the aforementioned thermos is proof of good planning, a habit she picked up at the ESRF (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility) in Grenoble where you only get so many hours of “beam time” and can’t afford to waste time getting tea. The ESRF provides microscopic analysis by beaming synchrotron-generated light on (say) human remains, 100 billion times brighter than the X-rays used in hospitals – part of the increasingly high-tech nature of bioarchaeology, and indeed another such facility (SESAME, in Jordan) recently opened in the Middle East, a collaboration between eight members including Cyprus. “I had the privilege of being the very first person using the synchrotron radiation for research there,” she reports with a smile.

Cutting-edge synchrotrons are one aspect of what Kirsi does. Squatting for hours in the baking sun is another aspect, trying to coax out a mud-brick wall from surrounding soil or using the most delicate of instruments – a tiny little brush, even an air-puff – to expose skeletal remains without breaking them. Then there’s her region, the Near East, maybe not dangerous to one’s health because of terrorism – but dangerous to one’s health nonetheless. On one occasion, she came back with what doctors called a “non-specific infection” (translation: we have no idea what’s wrong, but you need to be hospitalised). Another time, in Jordan, it was cystic amoeba from contaminated food – oh, that food! – and she ended up on a drip where, to make matters worse, the bottle containing the drip fell from where it had been imperfectly secured, and cracked her on the forehead. “It was a glass bottle of substantial size,” she recalls with an academic’s dry self-deprecation.

Overall, she seems quite low-profile – a woman who plans and studies and observes and dissects, a picker-up of other people’s accents, a soft-spoken type who most enjoys connecting with people, those of the past and those of the present (she even likes talking to the random folks seated next to her on transatlantic flights, which is surely beyond the call of duty). I don’t know if she relished having to talk about herself, and suspect she probably didn’t – except that she also has a missionary zeal for her work, doing what she can to attract (especially young) people to the bioarchaeology lab at the Cyprus Institute. She tells me of ‘Researcher’s Night’, the annual event where researchers present what they do, and how she set up “little mini-excavation areas, with sand and human remains and so on” to get her message across to the general public.

What is that message? “Getting people to appreciate their ancestors,” says Kirsi – especially, perhaps, when our newfound technological nirvana is also, potentially, a closing of the mind. Once we start believing so fanatically in a brave new world, something is lost, an awareness of the key similarities that exist across Time; to forget the past is to place limits on our own intellectual curiosity. Her five-year-old is a boy entomologist, she reports at one point: he loves insects, all kinds of insects, even crickets and cockroaches. “That’s the kind of curiosity I’m talking about,” concludes Kirsi, and smiles fondly.

No-one can do everything but a travelling exhibition opening next month to raise funds for cancer patients shows there is always something that can be done. NAN MACKENZIE meets its organiser

Sarah Coyne is one of those enviable women who seems to have it all, a very happy long-term relationship, a thriving local business she runs with her partner, natural blonde locks, periwinkle blue eyes and a smile that can light up a room. But when we actually met the stereotypical blonde image failed to impress me as much as her enthusiasm for life and the unstinting support she gives to charities through her initiative The Space Art for Charity – over the past 18 months she has already handed over €26,000 of charitable donations to Cyprus-based registered charities.

Born and brought up with her younger brother in Chertsey, Surrey, she studied fine art at Southampton University, gained a BA Hons in History of Art and went on to study art in Italy before returning to London to work for various galleries including the prestigious Nigel Greenwood gallery before moving on to renowned London Auction house Phillips, putting to excellent use her training in art studies assisting with valuations and organising viewings etc. A spate of auctioneering was followed by starting up with her partner a hugely successful UK-wide franchise business which resulted in her becoming one of the finalists for the Nat West Business woman of the year in 2004 and an accompanying invitation to visit 10 Downing Street.

In 2005 Sarah flew from London to Paphos. Her first visit to the island was so enjoyable she decided like so many others had done before her that this would be a perfect place to relocate and build a life away from the daily pressure cooker existence in the UK capital. Never one to put things on the back burner, Sarah did her homework and at the optimum time sold her franchise business for a healthy profit, moved to Paphos, became home owners and then, as Sarah explained after setting up a new business here, her almost perfect life suddenly changed. “At the age of 36 I suffered a stroke. The doctor here in Cyprus found after multiple tests that the cause had been a hole in my heart, a condition I had been born with and had gone undiscovered, until that fateful day

“I was flown back to the UK where surgeons at the Royal Brompton hospital in London managed to close the hole. Within a few months I had physically recovered but mentally it took several years to get over the experience, and to be honest I don’t think one ever really gets over it completely. What the experience did teach me was that until you have been seriously ill you have no real understanding or empathy regarding what it is really like to go through major operations and the follow up invasive treatments patients have to endure.”

But there was more heartache to follow. “A few years later my mother was diagnosed with a rare form of Lymphoma and once again I moved from Cyprus to London to support her through her treatment at the Royal Marsden Hospital. The cancer which the oncologist thought had been caught in time proved to be more resilient to the radiotherapy and soon returned, this time however the treatment worked. My mother regardless of the strain she was under while being treated then took on the position of a governor at the Royal Marsden as she wished to ‘give back’ to the hospital. Sometimes she was so ill but would resolutely attend meetings, read reports and help implement actions that in turn would improve life for cancer patients.

“She was, and still is my inspiration for raising funds for Pasykaf (The Cyprus Association of Cancer Patients and Friends) then this year a very close friend was diagnosed here in Cyprus with liver cancer after undergoing a double mastectomy for breast cancer a few years previously, and once again my life along with hers changed dramatically. The grim experience of taking one’s friend to Limassol twice a month for chemotherapy over a four month period was at best educational and at worst harrowing. I did see first-hand the enormous toll this treatment takes out of patients and found it heart breaking to see this once vibrant woman be so reduced physically and have her spirit totally numbed by the treatment and the myriad of chronic side effects which developed over the weeks and months of treatment.”

Sarah is now the indomitable driving force behind the Space Art for Charity, which she set up to raise money to support the Pasykaf home care nurses, who through her friend again saw the “utterly and absolutely essential” work they do on a daily basis, crucial to patients’ survival and recovery. “When my friend was very ill and suffering a whole host of side effects from the chemotherapy a nurse visited every day to give injections and deliver medication to curb some of the more extreme side effects such as vomiting, fever, and severe constipation, not something people talk about but these problems added to all the other things going on in her body meant that constant monitoring was the priority. Both she and I now agree that without these daily visits and the ability for me to always be able to call the home care nurse on duty if things changed, she would not have got through those months of physical hell. I also found out that cancer is a constant cycle of tiring and often painful tests, results and treatment and that combined with the sheer metal strain of waiting days for the results of blood results or the report from the CT scan to find out if the cancer has spread to other organs or, if the chemotherapy has done its job, was described to me as an experience akin to waiting for a deathly lottery ticket to be drawn.” Again the nurse was there for support and to keep things in focus. “I readily confess to drinking a good number of glasses of red wine while we waited for each result to come back,” says Sarah.

Pasykaf is a registered island wide charity and the many services it provides are free to all cancer patients regardless of nationality, including the homecare nurses. There are 26 nurses who travel within their set region to care for people in their own homes. These are a special breed of humans as they have to deal also with end of life care and that takes a huge amount of both professionalism and empathy especially as they will have built over the years and months a level of friendship and mutual respect with their patients.

The core aim of the Space Art for Charity exhibitor is to raise much needed funds for those dedicated nurses and to keep them on the road, travelling to outlying villages helping make life so much more comfortable and ‘liveable’ and to offer the feeling of safety for patients and allow them to stay in their own homes and recover. Sarah has raised a considerable amount of money for charity and has learnt it is not an easy task, comparing it to an extreme sport. She says it often leaves her with a feeling she has been “begging” when in fact supporting a professionally-run charity can be mutually beneficial to companies.

Sometimes the ones who give the most are the ones with the least to spare, “and it is a truism that one does find meaning in helping others”. The down side is the lack of support received from those who initially promise their time to help mount an event, “sadly there always seems to be a flurry of excuses when they are actually asked to do something”. Regardless, Sarah and her team keep plugging away to get sponsors and live in the hope their message will get through so sometimes they do achieve a result.

“Sometimes you don’t get your message through, but you have to always keep trying,” she says. “I always say to people that no one can do everything but everyone can do something and I do believe that it is important that charity should be the voluntary actions of the community not the government.”

The third 2018 annual Space for Art event in support of PASYKAF will launch on February 17 at the Almyra hotel in Paphos, before moving in March to the Aphrodite Amathusia Cultural centre in Limassol and the 1010 Hall in Nicosia. The wide variety of works have been donated by both local and European artists, while several have been created specifically for the exhibition Life. Artists involved range from their early 20s to late 70s, and many will be instantly recognised others while others will be new to the exhibition scene, “but the overall standard of works on show be it the sculpture, mosaics or the paintings, will reflect the fact that Cyprus offers a genuine and highly talented thriving creative community”.

The exhibition will give residents the opportunity to view the work of over 80 artists who have all donated 100 per cent of the selling price of each artwork going to Pasykaf. The three venues have also generously given their space at no cost. “We also have excellent award winning wine makers from each of the three regions who will donate freely of their quality wines on each of the opening nights, all we need now is for people to come, for them to also bring their friends and importantly for them to buy an original piece of art. Their pleasure will be twofold: they will then own a visually attractive painting and every time they look at the image they will also know they have also invested in a truly excellent charity. Pasykaf a charity dedicated to recognising and dealing with those diagnosed with cancer and who understand the fear people have when trying to survive in a body that wants to destroy you.”

Cyprus Art Exhibition 2018

Travelling exhibition by local and international artists to raise money for Pasykaf. Opening Saturday February 17, 7-9pm at the Almyra Hotel, Paphos. Open dail until February 28. Limassol Amathusia Cultural Centre, March 3 7-9pm and then daily from March 4 to 8. 1010 Hall Nicosia daily from March 10 to 17. Closing ceremony March 17 from 7-9pm. For more information Tel: 99 254491, thespaceartforcharity@gmail.com

The owner of a newspaper attacked in the north last week for defying Turkey says he is the freest person in Cyprus. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man proud to call himself a marginal

A day before the first round of the Greek Cypriot presidential elections, I cross the checkpoint to the occupied north and walk about 200m, down Ikinci Selim Street. I’ve already been warned that there’s no sign on the building – just a buzzer at the front door, and a small handwritten sticker reading ‘Afrika’.

I have to buzz several times before someone answers, then it takes a while to explain why I’m here – namely, to interview Sener Levent, the editor of Afrika newspaper. The dingy office, up the steep steps of an old narrow staircase, has seen better days. I sit on a squeaky sofa, facing an array of cheap plastic chairs arranged in a circle, as if for a PTA meeting. On the walls are photos of street demonstrations and a poster commemorating Mishaoulis and Kavazoglou, the Greek and Turkish Cypriots whose bicommunal friendship led to them being murdered by extremists in 1965. Fluorescent lights cast a hard, ugly glare.

It takes a few minutes to discern why the atmosphere in Afrika’s waiting room is so gloomy. It’s because the windows have been boarded up – and in fact, as becomes apparent when I peek through a small diamond-shaped hole in the plywood, there aren’t any windows behind the makeshift board, just a small balcony. The reason for this is the same reason why there isn’t a sign on the building: a few days before our meeting, supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan – responding to a speech where he urged “my brothers in north Cyprus” to punish Afrika for an article criticising Turkey’s ‘occupation’ of Afrin in Syria – attacked the newspaper’s offices, smashing windows and climbing up to this very balcony. Had police not stopped them at the last minute, they’d have stormed inside, intending violence to the newspaper staff and Sener personally.

It’s something to bear in mind – indeed, it’s impossible to ignore – while talking to the small, doleful man in the private office adorned with pictures of Che Guevara and Turkish film director Yilmaz Guney: while newspapers in the Republic of Cyprus are wasting time on the candidates’ latest empty promises and pointless bits of mud-slinging, this Turkish Cypriot paper is literally fighting for its life, facing up to an authoritarian leader who has no qualms about treating the press as an enemy. Sener sits behind his desk, flanked by his daughter Elvan who’ll be doing the translating. His English isn’t fluent enough (though I get the sense he understands more than he lets on), his second language being presumably Russian; he studied Journalism in Moscow, back in the 60s. Elvan looks tired, like she hasn’t slept very well; I apologise for having come on a bad day. “These days are all like this,” she replies, obviously feeling the pressure.

It’s not just the fact of being personally targeted by Erdogan; the day before our meeting, 5,000 people marched for peace and democracy in the streets of Nicosia, placing Afrika in the crosshairs of what seems to be increasing tension between the two faces of Turkish Cyprus. It’s enough to make anyone nervous – but Sener himself chuckles quietly when I ask if he was frightened during the attack: “Yok,” he replies in Turkish, shaking his head. But surely his life was in danger? “I know, but I wasn’t afraid. If I were afraid, I’d have been afraid long ago, because we’ve had many attacks since we’ve been publishing. We were shot at twice. They came to kill me here at the newspaper, directly, in 2011.”

Demonstrators outside the Afrika offices

To be honest, I wish I spoke Turkish; Elvan does a more than valiant job of translating – but her dad is obviously a character, and seems like he must have a very distinctive way of expressing himself. His head is egg-shaped, the voice growly, the face pouchy, the grey hair fashionably long in the style of some bohemian academic from the 1970s. He’s been in the newspaper business since his teens (he’ll be 70 in March), initially at a paper published by his older brother, then at various Turkish and Turkish Cypriot outlets as journalist and editor – then, since 1997, at his own paper, initially called Avrupa (‘Europe’), its name waggishly changed to Afrika in 2001 as a dig against the corruption of political life in the north.

Sener provokes strong reactions, on both sides of the Green Line. When I mentioned I was going to be interviewing him, one friend said he was a hero, a ‘leventis’ (a play on his surname, meaning something like ‘splendid fellow’ in Greek), another called him a clown, while a third dismissed him as a provocateur. He himself is undoubtedly aware of his notoriety, and seems to thrive on it; he seems quite surprised that I don’t know about the attempts on his life in 2011. “How long have you been a journalist?” he asks through Elvan, as if wondering if my ignorance could perhaps be excused by being a newcomer to the profession. I don’t do hard news, I explain, only profiles and features, and he nods with a smile. “Doesn’t matter,” he assures me in English, magnanimously.

The two attempts to kill him came within four months of each other, both times deflected by a brave employee named Ali Osman. The first time, a man came to the door with a ‘special’ envelope which he claimed had to be delivered to Sener personally – then, after Osman fobbed him off, the man fired his gun from outside, through the closed door, sticking a piece of paper on the door which read ‘Next time, it will not be like this’. The second time was more bizarre because the hitman (not the same man) came to visit Sener in his office, claiming he’d been hired to kill him but, having asked around and been told that Sener was “a good man”, had decided against it; they shook hands, and even took a photo together – only for the man to return 10 days later, shooting Osman (fortunately, the bullet only grazed him) and forcing Sener to barricade himself in his office. This weirdly erratic assassin was later arrested, tried, and sentenced to 10 years in jail – but, says Sener, never revealed who had hired him.

I’m struck by the lightly amused way in which he tells the story (granted, he’s told it before); he even takes advantage of Elvan’s translation to sneak a peek at the latest issue of Afrika – its front page leading with a photo of the previous day’s demo with the headline ‘Görev tamam’ (‘Mission completed’), ironically echoing what Erdogan’s thugs had declared a few days earlier. So tell me, I ask – trying to get a reaction, more than anything – do you think this job is worth dying for?

He chuckles again: “Everyone dies in this world”.

But maybe he enjoys it on some level? Making trouble?

“Freedom doesn’t mean doing what you want,” he replies gnomically. “It means not doing what you don’t want to do. So I consider myself – and I think I probably am – the most free person in Cyprus! I don’t do things I don’t want to, and I do what I love; I am doing the profession that I love. I think what kills people, in reality, is fear. People can only be happy when they come out from the sea of fear.” Afrika, he claims, has been fearless, broaching subjects no-one else dared mention – like for instance the infamous ‘bath murders’ of a mother and her children in 1963. “These photos were the iconic propaganda photos of the Turkish regime in the north,” he explains – but Sener has publicly questioned whether the official version (that the family were killed by Greek Cypriots) is true, or whether they may have been killed by the Turkish side to encourage Turkey’s intervention. “Here, it’s not even possible to ask this kind of question,” he sighs. “There are many people who prefer to live in a lie, in this world. But I prefer to live in reality, no matter how bitter it is.”

Are his views shared by the majority, though?

“I never thought that my views are the views of the majority,” he replies with dignity.

How does that make him feel?

“It makes me feel that I’m on the right path – because history was written by the minorities. How many people thought like Archimedes? Or Galileo? Or Newton, or Socrates? These people were all lonely people, and nobody told them ‘You are right, you are telling the truth’… [Rauf] Denktash said about us, in Afrika, ‘These people are not more [in number] than the fingers of one hand’. Others found a more popular word for us, they call us ‘marginals’.” Sener chuckles, obviously proud of the designation. “History is written by the brave minority,” he concludes. “The majority is a scared, fearful crowd, and I never wanted to be like them.”

Fighting words indeed, especially under the circumstances – though note that passing reference to ‘lonely people’; there’s a downside to being such a gadfly. He may be fearless, I ask – but is he also, perhaps, rather melancholy? “I’m not a very happy person. It’s my nature,” he agrees. “I grew up in a poor family. It was the kind of family where no-one even knows, or cares, when is your birthday.”

His parents were illiterate, hailing from the village of Terra; his dad sold live chickens at market. (The family may have been poor, but it seems to be close-knit; all three remaining brothers – Sener is the youngest of five boys – now work at Afrika.) At 15, he was handed a gun and stuck behind a barricade on Ermou Street, fighting in the troubles of 1963 like so many other Turkish Cypriot children. “People don’t know, in the south, that the situation on our side was like this,” he says wearily, noting my surprise. “Because, in the south, people also prefer to live with a lie”. He talks briefly of Tochni, Maratha, Santalaris, villages – he says – where Turkish Cypriots were murdered en masse, though Greek Cypriots deny it. Neither side should be let off the hook, in Sener’s telling. Truth transcends checkpoints.

What about away from the office? Is he also a bit of a ‘marginal’? (Work, it should be noted, is central to his life; he takes one day off – New Year’s Day – and hasn’t had a holiday in 20 years.) Of course you are, Elvan interjects, you don’t even go to the beach in the summer! (Her father denies this.) He’s not a loner, and enjoys spending time with friends – yet he does seem to be a bit of a misfit. “I’m not happy at all in the society I’m living in… I don’t enjoy speaking with someone who’s never seen even one film by Almodovar, or read any books by Dostoyevsky”. Sener is a major film buff with a penchant for arthouse (Ingmar Bergman is another of his favourites), and a bit of an intellectual; Fourier gets quoted in our conversation, and he also cites Hamlet – the “readiness is all” speech – to explain why fear of death is absurd, especially when you’re almost 70. Mustafa Akinci is three months older, he adds mischievously, yet he still lives in fear: “What is stopping him from being more brave, at this age?… Call the foreign media, BBC, CNN, Euronews,” says Sener, addressing the Turkish Cypriot leader, “and announce to them that we’re opening Varosha tomorrow, and see what happens! Will Turkey kill you? Why is he afraid?”. The provocateur laughs merrily, delighted by his own provocation.

Say what you like about Sener Levent (and people do), but you have to admit he doesn’t falter. He’s just been attacked by a baying mob, engineered by Erdogan himself – he even agrees it’s “a very serious situation this time” – yet he won’t back down, won’t admit to being scared, won’t consider shutting down the paper. Is it narcissism? A martyr complex? Just sheer guts? Maybe force of habit, after a lifetime of being on the fringes? He mentions having been deeply affected, as a child, by the murder of Ayham Hikmet, a newspaper editor shot by paramilitaries. Does he somehow see that as the ultimate price one must be willing to pay, in order to be free in this society?

Maybe so; but Turkish Cypriot society has grown more constricted in his lifetime, and is now more beleaguered than ever. Sener sighs unhappily: “This place is not Cyprus anymore,” he admits, indicating the world beyond his boarded-up windows. “This is Turkey. The majority is from Turkey, the population. Everywhere – all the shops, kebab places, sweet shops – everywhere belongs to people from Turkey. All these five-star hotels also belong to them. So now, Turkey has total control over the north”.

Where does that leave him, and his brand of stubborn individualism? “I’m one of those who believe that Turkey will finally get out of Cyprus – but I don’t know when,” he replies, somewhat quixotically. “I don’t believe that Cyprus will always stay as a divided island.” After all, he adds, “all the occupiers in Cyprus, everyone left. No occupier stayed in Cyprus, throughout history. Maybe 100 years, maybe 200 – but, in the end, they all left.”

Sure, I agree – but is Turkey even an occupier? Many on his side don’t seem to think so.

Sener Levent smiles shrewdly, replying in Turkish, then waits for his daughter to translate. “This is the majority who think that. I am not that majority!” explains Elvan – and her father watches as I take in that punchline, adding his chuckle to my own. When things look desperate, in other words, the answer is to wear that desperation as a badge of honour. If your position gets lonely, rejoice in your loneliness. I walk out to daylight, away from the boarded-up windows, and cross the checkpoint the other way, back to the happy inertia of TV debates and politics as usual.

From Beckett to Euripides, the grande dame of Cyprus theatre has played them all. THEO PANAYIDES talks failing bodies and growing older with the actress who has recently made a well-received comeback

This might not be the best day to talk to Jenny Gaitanopoulou. Someone in her block of flats – it’s not clear if the culprits are the people on the third or the fourth floor – is taking advantage of this Saturday morning to refurbish their home; a constant racket of banging and drilling comes from below, threatening to eclipse our conversation. Her flat is lived-in, not too large, centrally located. Jenny lives here with four cats and a friendly Bulgarian companion named Dora whom she delicately calls “my flatmate”, though her job is clearly to provide assistance as needed (Jenny turns 80 in September). The name on the mailbox downstairs is ‘Evis Gavrielides’ – her late husband, a renowned theatre and TV director, who passed away two and a half years ago.

Then again, this might also be an excellent time to talk to her, perched as she is between two significant events – one planned, the other not. The unplanned event was a hospital stay the week before our interview, after a painful two-week ordeal which turned out to be gallstones: a reminder of failing bodies and growing older, a recurring theme in our conversation. The planned (and much happier) event is the final performance – at the Rialto Theatre in Limassol, the Tuesday after our Saturday morning – of Klytaimnistra, i to Englima (‘Clytemnestra, or the Crime’), Jenny’s triumphant return to acting after 14 years.

“We’ve had a very successful show,” she tells me – which is something of an understatement. “There are productions which are merely tolerable,” wrote theatre critic Giorgos Savvinides in Phileleftheros; “There are others which are good, or very good, or stunning, or which take your breath away. Very, very rarely, there are also those which are HISTORIC.” The return to the stage of Cyprus’ theatrical grande dame obviously falls in that last-named category, especially in a play which would unforgivingly have exposed any rustiness: the entire second half is a 30-minute monologue by Jenny as Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, standing alone onstage to explain to an unseen judge why she killed her husband 40 years earlier. The first half includes other passages from various sources, brought to life by Marios Mettis (who also directed) and Christina Konstantinou. Mr. Mettis sits in the next room as we talk, waiting patiently for the interview to finish, obviously having been summoned by Jenny for moral support. It must be strange for her, doing interviews again after all these years.

The play is a one-off, she insists. She met Marios and, despite their age difference (he’s in his 30s), liked what she calls his view of theatre – “not just showing off, [but] going deep into the work so you can communicate it later” – and showed him the Clytemnestra monologue by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, which he liked and agreed to mount as a stage production. Jenny had played it once before, years ago, at CyBC – one of her big institutional employers in Cyprus, the other being the Cyprus Theatre Organisation (Thoc) from which she retired in 2003. “I was an employee,” she insists more than once, depicting herself not as a diva – perish the thought – but a jobbing actress, doing whatever she was told.

Was she never temperamental as an actress? Was she never difficult?

“I didn’t have the opportunity to be difficult.” Jenny laughs, shaking her head. “I was submissive,” she insists. “I was submissive.”

It’s part of her nature, or perhaps her persona, to be self-deprecating – especially when it comes to her husband, who also directed her on numerous occasions (including that first Clytemnestra at CyBC). Evis was the man of her life, and she misses him desperately: “We had a very close relationship. And he was my teacher. Both as a director, when we worked together, and in life as well.” It doesn’t sound like a very equal relationship – at least in her telling – but it obviously lasted. Did it help that they both worked in theatre?

“Certainly. He was my teacher.”

People often say that it’s better for couples to keep life and work separate.

“Not for us. Life was different with us. He was very devoted to theatre, and brought a great deal to Cyprus.” She sighs, reminded of the old days. “Those were different times in Cyprus, life was different in Cyprus. There were interesting things going on, now the world is… How shall I put it?” She pauses, looking for the best way to put it. “Cyprus wasn’t small [back then]. And we’d get around, we’d travel – in the summer, in the mountains. There was so much life, so much going on…”

The obvious rejoinder, of course, is that what has changed isn’t Cyprus but her own life, in fact she admits as much (“I guess that kind of life still exists, for young people”). Jenny’s default expression is weary, stoical, a little bit tragic. She sits at her dining-room table, taking drags on a slim cigarette, facing a big Stass Paraskos on the wall – the house is full of art, some of it brought by her parents when they fled Palestine in 1948 – and we tend to talk in circles, hitting the same few landmarks: Evis, theatre, and the deterioration of everything. Life in Cyprus isn’t what it was. The standard of theatre in Cyprus has slipped alarmingly. Local TV used to be better. The Art Theatre in Athens – where she worked in her youth, when it was the best theatre in Greece – fell off precipitously after the death of its founder, the formidable Karolos Koun. Above all there’s her own life, once the queen of the local scene, now a widow stuck in this smallish apartment with her cats and her memories.

How does she spend her days?

“Not very pleasantly. I watch a lot of television, which is all I can do. I’m not – social.”

Did she used to be?

“In the old days, yes, when my husband was alive we had an intense social life. But now he’s gone…” She shrugs eloquently. “I don’t have children, or…” She tails off, as if to say ‘or anyone, really’.

There’s a sister, married, in Canada; they talk on the phone quite regularly. There’s some family here and a sole first cousin left in Jerusalem, where Jenny spent the first decade of her life (even after all these years, “I feel I’m Palestinian,” she says, “I don’t feel Cypriot”); and there’s also the old theatrical family of fellow actors, especially Annita Santorineou and Lenia Sorokou who are both among her best friends. Mostly, though, “my life is very solitary. At home, for the most part.”

Has she found any new hobbies in retirement?

“What hobby could I possibly start at this age? And without being able to see clearly?”

That’s the other big problem – and a major reason why she refused all offers to return to the stage, before Clytemnestra. Jenny suffers from macular degeneration, an age-related weakening of her vision that began a few years ago; there’s no cure, and the condition is likely to worsen. “I just hope I don’t get to the point of becoming totally blind,” she says gloomily. “I wouldn’t want to live, if – if it came to that”. The disease already blights her quality of life: she can no longer read (hence the hours of TV) and can’t go out alone, forcing her to stay in the flat – though it doesn’t sound like she’d want to go out anyway. Does she feel out of place in today’s Cyprus?

“Not out of place. I just don’t have any contact or relationship with it.”

Doesn’t she care?

“I’m not interested in the social life of Cyprus. And now, at my age…”

Age isn’t really so important, though.

“You don’t have much in common with people, let’s put it that way. I have my cats, and I love them very much.”

I ask for their names, and we hit a mini-crisis: Jenny gives me three of the names (Igor, Lucy and Avroulla) but can’t remember the fourth. Marios is enlisted, but he can’t remember either. Dora eventually supplies the name of the fourth cat (Pitsi-Pitsi, who’s also the oldest) and consoles the mortified Jenny: “You got blocked. It’s okay”. Memory does indeed play strange tricks sometimes – but it also occurs to me that she’s going onstage in a few nights, to deliver a half-hour monologue to a paying audience, so it’s not like she’s unable to remember things, or unable to see what she’s doing. What problems did she have during the production of the play? “No problems.”

So then, what’s preventing her from doing more theatre?

“Nothing’s preventing me.”

There’s a slight contradiction in Jenny Gaitanopoulou – and the clue, I suspect, comes in her description of herself as “a born actress”. It’s all she’s ever done, and all she ever wanted to do. Her grandmother in Palestine was also an actress, her mother an amateur actress (her dad, who died young, worked in insurance but loved the arts) – and Jenny too followed this tradition, performing from her teens until retirement, Beckett and Euripides and all points in between. She toured the world, from Epidaurus to South America, acting all the time; “I belong to that generation which produced good theatre in Cyprus,” she explains rather grandly. Is it too much to wonder if she may be acting now, just a little, burnishing a fitting final act to a famous life?

I don’t mean to suggest that she’s making things up, nor to diminish her grief or her health problems. Acting, after all, isn’t lying – indeed, it’s the opposite of lying. But an actor is also attuned to the poignant drama in everyday life. “There’s a hyper-sensitivity in actors,” she tells me. “Their needs are – different… Their lives aren’t pedestrian, like other people’s.” Jenny’s life, even in these twilight years, isn’t pedestrian; even her unhappiness is epic, an ailing Miss Haversham struggling with enforced isolation, shored up by nostalgia for the old days – and the glorious redemption, now, of one final triumph.

Will this really be her last hurrah? Hard to say, of course – but I get the impression it won’t be, that her tentative comeback in Klytaimnistra may eventually lead to more theatre (or perhaps TV and film, which isn’t as physically taxing). There’s no logical reason to think so, except that acting has been Jenny Gaitanopoulou’s life; even the one big exception to that rule – her lifelong relationship with Evis – was inextricably tied to acting. Why would she abandon it for good, especially now with Evis gone? “There’s a magic to the theatre. There’s a magic to art in general, isn’t there?” she says – then frowns, spotting the potential cliché: “I don’t mean romantic. I don’t care about that stuff”.

So then what?

“Something substantial,” she explains after a pause. “Something that makes you a better person”. I recall that she laughed when I asked if she has a ‘dark side’ that she’s able to access onstage; of course not, she replied, she’s just like everybody else. She’s forever at pains to put herself down – an employee, a humble student – yet she also tells me that her life has been full and intense. There’s no contradiction there: life itself is prosaic, and perhaps disappointing – yet theatre makes up for that, offering the fullness and intensity denied by mundane existence. It can make you a better person.

Take, for instance, her Edward Albee story, Albee being the world-famous playwright probably best known for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. When Jenny was in high school, her father – wanting her to improve her English, the better to study in the UK (a dream cut short by his own early death) – urged her to find some pen pals, preferably people with her own interests. She signed up with an arts magazine and received several replies from like-minded youngsters in Britain and America, interested in corresponding with a teenage Palestinian-Cypriot girl in those pre-internet days. One of those pen pals, rather incredibly, was the young, still-unknown Albee. He and Jenny exchanged letters for a while, then she left school and they lost touch – at least till she saw a published play in an Athens bookshop, years later, and recognised the name of her old correspondent.

Life couldn’t find a satisfying ending to this story. Jenny was too shy to contact Albee, even when he visited Greece to attend a production of one of his plays. Finally she plucked up the courage to call him in the US, but a woman (presumably a nurse) answered the phone and said he was sick, and to call back tomorrow; the next day, when Jenny called again, the woman informed her that he’d died. Life, as so often, was disappointing – but the theatre stepped in to offer closure: one of Jenny’s final roles, and greatest triumphs, during her time at Thoc was a much-liked production of Albee’s Three Tall Women, allowing her to briefly reunite with her childhood friend on a higher plane. “Art is a beautiful thing,” muses the elderly woman in the smallish flat – and her words seem to float above the talk of nameless cats and failing bodies, even above the clanking mechanical racket emanating from the third or fourth floor.

Immersed in other people’s lives and the witness to much life and death, one psychotherapist tells THEO PANAYIDES the most important thing we must do is relate

Some are born profile-worthy, some achieve profile-worthiness, and some have profile-worthiness thrust upon them. ‘I know a guy who’d make a great profile,’ raved a mutual friend – and it only takes a few moments in Achilleas Koukkides’ company to see what the friend had in mind. We all have those people we think of as ‘characters’, those who stand out as being lively, or dynamic, or just somehow memorable – and Achilleas is one of those characters. As he cheerfully puts it: “I’m a party person!”.

It almost wouldn’t matter what he does for a living, though in fact it matters deeply. I sit on a garish red sofa in an office decorated with Tintin posters, random-looking phrases scrawled on the walls (“You can’t relate to people without paying a price”) and rotary-dial phones piled in a corner. The décor is eccentric; his moustache is also eccentric, one of those twirly numbers favoured by Hercule Poirot. He’s 46, with curly black hair and extremely alert brown eyes; I’m used to people breaking eye contact during an interview (one can only be observed by a nodding, attentive stranger for so long), but the brown eyes return my gaze effortlessly. It’s no surprise, because looking at people is part of his job; looking and listening, taking in their stories and offering his knowhow – as well as his candid, impetuous energy – in return.

Achilleas is a clinical psychologist turned psychotherapist. For the past few years he’s been in private practice, seeing clients in this very office where he “spends more hours than I do at home”. Before that, for about two decades, he worked as a therapist for sick people (‘clinical’ from the Greek ‘klini’ meaning ‘bed’, hence patients confined to their beds) – initially HIV patients, during his studies in France, then cancer patients for about 15 years, 10 of those in Cyprus. “I would go back anytime, but I’m restraining myself from going back,” he recalls of his time at Arodafnousa and the Nicosia Oncology Centre. “It fit my personality completely. Completely!”

It seems a bizarre thing to say, given how intense and intimate the work was – “because I lived with them, OK? I dedicated most of my time to it, when I was doing it”. Doctors have it relatively easy, insofar as they can fall back on talking therapies and medical terms – but the psychologist has to deal with the nitty-gritty, the mortal fears of patients and their loved ones. “Diagnosis. How to present it to people, how to explain to the family, how to deal with the children,” he recalls, listing his duties. “How to help them get out of their denial, or their anger or depression – how to pick up their pieces and put them back together, in a completely new life… And then the different losses throughout the process. I mean, from the hair, to the lifestyle, to the party [which they’re unable to go to], to the graduation of the child, to going to the cinema, to the body they had. And then the grief at the end. Even if they were cured, there was a grief,” all those feelings they’d placed “under the carpet” and were now ready to deal with. Achilleas pauses, then adds counter-intuitively: “It was magical for me”.

He’s not being callous, quite the reverse. The magic came in the intensity, the “honest conversations” with no time for lies and hypocrisy. “Everyone thinks that working with dying people is like you go into a grave in the morning and come out at night. It’s exactly the opposite! There’s so much life to it… And time becomes precious. Every minute you live there, you feel it.” Then there was the emotional rollercoaster of life on the wards, “this beautiful controlled manic depression of one moment you’re crying with them, feeling like it’s all over, and the next moment you’re in bliss because – I don’t know, the kid next door finished therapy or something”. Many people wouldn’t fancy such extreme emotional swings, I point out. “I adored it. I don’t know if I could do it again today, every day, but I adored it.”

Is he quite an extreme person in general?

It depends, he hedges briefly – “but yes, I like things that have energy and magic. I wouldn’t sit on my sofa and watch TV. I mean, that would be like my nightmare.”

Actually he doesn’t even own a TV, his interests being rather more vigorous. He likes walking, sports, pilates. He used to play squash, and hopes to resume soon. “Good wine, good food, good conversation,” he enumerates, nodding happily (he’s a party person!); he’s a drinker and a smoker, and loves to do both. He’s never married, but was always in relationships (this period now is the first time in his life when he’s single, by choice). Acting was a big obsession in his youth, and he’d like to get back to it; Achilleas was a star of his high-school drama society, indeed it’s what turned him from a bullied boy into a popular one. (I assume, as with everything else, that he liked the intensity of acting, and the intimacy.) Above all, “I write every day,” filling diaries with stories, random thoughts, even a play. He keeps these creative endeavours to himself, though he’s recently – in the past few months – launched a blog at efpraxia.com, where he shares some of his writing (“mostly stories of cancer patients, at the moment”). What about the play? Has he been writing it for long? He shakes his head: “No, everything I write is written very quickly. I’m – not a very patient man”.

Reading through his blog offers more information. As with all good psychoanalysis – though he doesn’t really strike me as a Freudian – many of the answers are to be found in his childhood. One (very touching) story harks back to the time when Achilleas was eight years old, finding echoes of his life in an eight-year-old French boy named Oliver whose grandpa, much later, was one of his patients. Achilleas’ own grandfather died of cancer when the boy was eight years old – a defining event because “I was more attached to him than anybody else in the family”, even his dad. (The father-son relationship seems to have been rather fraught; in the story, listing details of his childhood, Achilleas recalls “the fear of [hearing] my father’s voice”.) He talks of this in our interview – but reading the story fleshes out how profoundly the boy was affected, how he took his grandfather’s pyjamas and slept in them well into his teen years, how he later smashed his grandfather’s record collection with a rock in an act of impulsive rage.

The death was a catalyst, leading directly to his adult profession (he remembers thinking, as a child, “that I wanted to be sitting on hospital beds, next to people who were very sick and were going to go; that was a fantasy I had as a child”) – albeit not immediately, since he studied Aeronautical Engineering in London at his father’s behest before dropping out and moving to Paris. The bond with his grandpa was intense (the old man had taken early retirement, and the two were inseparable) – though you also have to wonder, at the risk of playing psychologist to a psychologist, if it was simply a case of a naturally fiery, emotive personality experiencing the first big rupture in his young life, a rupture he’s unconsciously spent the decades since trying to control.

Note, for instance, that being a therapist isn’t quite the altruistic enterprise it may appear. “It is egocentric to be a psychotherapist, believe me. Oh yes it is!” notes Achilleas when I laud his obvious dedication. It gratifies feelings “of control, of knowing everything, of being the best friend, of being important, of knowing all the secrets”. His immersion in other people’s problems appears heroic (since he’s trying to help) but his intimacy may also act as a form of self-therapy, as if constantly re-living his own early grief without the actual trauma of personal loss. It’s no wonder that – despite his assertion that he’d go back in a heartbeat – he suffered “survivor’s guilt” after quitting the oncology beat, plagued by debilitating panic attacks whenever he tried to relax or do something fun. Once, on his way to the beach, he actually had to stop the car on the hard shoulder – “because I thought I was going to die” – and phone a friend to come get him.

Even now, in his private practice, he’s nothing like the old Woody Allen-ish cliché of the therapist listening absently while the patient lies on the couch. He’s interactive, “pushy” as he calls it; simply put, he makes it personal. (The cliché of the silent shrink actually comes from psychoanalysis, which is not the same as psychotherapy.) “I can get very – you know, filled with energy, and shout,” he admits. “Teenagers, I am extremely interactive with them. I will shake them, if they need it – or they will shake me!” Achilleas pauses, trying to summarise his philosophy: “It’s about relating”.

There it is, in a nutshell. It’s about his personality as well, of course – because he’s really not the type to just listen. He’s not, as he says, the most patient man (though of course it’s different at work). Is he impulsive, in general? “Yes, extremely.” Does he lose his temper? He pauses, sucking breath through his teeth: “As I get older, much less. But [even] when I lose my temper – I’m like a cat, it’s like five minutes of being crazy and then I’m back to normal”.

Would he rather be happy or rich?

“Happy, surely. I was never interested in being rich.”

Would he rather be happy or free?

“Free! Oh, yes!”

There’s a lot of life force in Achilleas. He’s open, noisy, uninhibited. His TEDx talk a few years ago was called ‘Fear of dying, or fear of living?’. His Master’s thesis studied ‘Desire for life’, trying to discern why some terminal patients develop a new lust for life upon being given a deadline, while others lose the will to live completely. (He himself would presumably fall in the first category.) As a frustrated teen – “a real teenager,” as he puts it – he wrote poetry, wished his parents dead to their faces, started a band, studied the Bible, wrote “poetic letters” to God. He can get incandescent with mock rage, as when thinking back to his time in London: “I hated England, I hate it up to now. I couldn’t stand a moment in England! I couldn’t stand their shoes, I couldn’t stand their smell, I couldn’t stand their food…” It’s unclear why English shoes are so awful, though I note Achilleas himself wearing quite an interesting pair of tattered, bright-orange sneakers. “Yes. I love interesting shoes.”

Obviously, this kind of person will be this kind of psychotherapist – one who gets involved with his patients, tries unorthodox routes (the random lines scrawled on the wall turn out to be the “beliefs” that hold them back, one belief per patient), isn’t afraid to push or challenge; it’s a vestige of his years in the oncology ward, leaving him with a healthy awareness that people’s limits aren’t always where they think they are. (Needless to say, he does it responsibly.) But it’s also, as he says, about “relating” – about reaching people on a human level, as befits a man who’s seen so much of life and death.

“I think there is a fear of relating in our time,” Achilleas tells me sadly, thinking of the many troubled souls – young and old – he sees in his work: the OCDs, the depressives, above all those suffering from the modern condition of what he calls “an absence of being”. It’s like with sex, he explains (I just knew we’d get to sex eventually), the way today’s youngsters often tend to measure their exploits by the porn they’ve been watching: “It’s like they’re not present in the act itself”. Absence eats away at all our lives, especially the kids’: “They feel there’s something lacking” – more so than the adults he meets who are often in denial, heading off to psychiatrists (as opposed to psychotherapists) who can offer “the magical solution of pills, which is today’s great mania… We live in the time of quick solutions,” he adds with a sigh. “Quick fixes in everything, actually. From sex, to communicating, to meeting people, to dumping people, to getting married and getting divorced. Everything.”

And what about him? What of Achilleas Koukkides’ own life, much of it lived so intensely, from childhood rupture to all those years of counselling the sorrowful and dying? The intensity may have been a touch too manic, looking back. “I feel like I probably slept 30 per cent of what I needed” during his years in the cancer ward – just because he felt that time was precious and “partied as much as I could”, in addition to working all hours.

He takes it easier now, takes the weekend off and goes abroad a few days each month, just “to digest” all the stories he’s heard. He’s writing more; the blog is a new development. Being single probably helps too. In the end, he’s not your typical psychotherapist, indeed he’s unconvinced that psychotherapy – with its lofty ideals of how people should behave – has all the answers: “I think we do a lot of bad as well”. Just relate, he advises; take the time, be present, make mistakes, don’t be afraid of “just being human”. In this stormy and impermanent life, Achilleas makes the case for just being ordinary. Maybe that’s why he stands out.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a renowned musician, only to find an engrossed and emotionally naked performer who suffers from stage fright despite having spent his entire life on stage

Alessandro Deljavan has a cold. Or not quite a cold, just a cough, but it feels like it could be “the beginning of something big”, as he says in his hesitant English. It’s not surprising since he’s come straight from China (where it was snowing) to much-balmier Cyprus for a piano recital at the Shoe Factory in Nicosia, presented by the Pharos Arts Foundation. Before that he was in Montpelier, playing the Goldberg Variations, and before that in India (Hyderabad, to be precise) in early January; he leaves the Friday after our interview, back to his native Italy where he has to teach for a couple of days – then on to the US (“near Cleveland”) next Thursday, followed by another gig in Brussels on March 3. It’s a life that would test the health of the hardiest pianist.

There’s an added complication, in that Alessandro dreads performing. “Worried. All the time,” he admits, when I ask how he feels before a recital. Seats have been reserved for tonight’s event at the Shoe Factory by assorted VIPs, including various ambassadors and a former President of the Republic, but in fact it makes no difference who’s in the audience, or even how many. In China he was playing to full houses, hundreds or thousands of people – but it doesn’t matter if it’s two or 2,000, he’s still scared. “Scared of everything, really. This is my relationship with music, a little bit.”

It seems odd that he suffers from stage fright; after all, as he puts it, “I started playing the piano before I started speaking”. Alessandro gave his first public performance – an end-of-year show at his music school – at the age of three, and his first recital (where people actually paid to hear him play) at the age of nine! There’s more pressure now, of course; a cute little boy can make the occasional mistake at the piano, a world-famous pianist who’s recorded over 40 albums cannot. Still, you’d think he’d be used to the life after all these years.

I may have caught him on a bad day – though it should be noted that he doesn’t seem grumpy. Some of what he says might appear bad-tempered on paper, but in fact he’s a wonderful interview: warm, low-key, soulful. His voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper, as if sharing confidences with a new friend. He laughs a lot, the conversation ranging from Inter Milan (his favourite team, currently third in Serie A) to the “lucky underwear” which he nowadays tries not to wear while performing, “because I have to be strong myself, without the help of the underwear”. Garo Keheyan, the redoubtable president of Pharos, has meanwhile intervened, steering his guest in the direction of a pile of herbal teas, one of them helpfully labelled ‘Organic Tea Against Cough’. Alessandro takes little sips of the yellow tea, talking of Mozart, Beethoven and less exalted things: “Do you have Masterchef in Cyprus?”.

His look is rather distinctive, a bushy beard topped by a bald dome – the head presumably shaved to disguise a receding hairline, despite his youth (he’s just turned 31). The face, in conversation, is polite and patient – but you only have to watch him on YouTube, for instance in a clip where he plays Chopin’s Etudes, Op. 25, to see how his facial expressions change and contort while performing. The eyes shut. The mouth juts open in a silent scream, then works furiously as if singing along with the music. The head leans in close to the piano, as if physically trying to push the notes along. At one point, when he plays a series of short arpeggios, he grimaces so violently you feel he’s about to start yelling at them.

Does he do it on purpose?

He shakes his head ruefully: “It’s completely not in my control,” replies Alessandro, and sighs. “It’s something I hate, of course! I hate to watch myself playing with this, uh, extreme passion. It’s something I try to control but it’s not possible, unfortunately. That’s why people should close their eyes and listen, maybe”.

The act of making music is a kind of release for him – though also a kind of captivity; he’s engrossed when he plays, and emotionally naked. There’s one exception to the rule that he doesn’t care who’s watching him play: “I think a musician should be honest, and be himself and show himself to people,” explains Alessandro. “That’s why I don’t like to have people I know in the audience”. Tonight, for instance, his programme includes a short piece that was specially written for him by a friend, an Italian composer – and the friend is coming over from Italy to hear him play, which he’s somewhat conflicted about. “It’s strange to have a part of your life listening to your concert. I mean, it’s extremely intimate for me.”

He wasn’t always so self-conscious. As a child, playing music was just a fun thing he did, like playing football – and his parents were smart enough not to make him practise when he’d rather be playing football. “It was all natural. I was playing and enjoying, and taking many risks,” he recalls. “Probably I started working on the piano when I was 18.” The turning point may have been earlier, at the age of 12 or 13, when young Alessandro was enrolled at the Milan Conservatory and started flying there and back (from Pescara, where the family lived) every week. That’s when he realised his life was different from other kids’, and may have begun to feel the pressure.

Something else happened at the age of 12: his father, an Iranian professor of architecture, died of brain cancer, having been sick for four years. Alessandro has a vivid childhood memory of practising at the piano and his father sitting on his bed, listening to him play: “He was telling me, ‘It’s so beautiful that I am almost falling asleep’. So my goal [after that] was to make him sleep when I was playing, and putting all my – all my soul in it”. He sighs: “I remember great things about my father, yes. It was a short relation, but extremely intense”. One reflexively assumes there’s a pushy parent behind every toddler singing Mozart symphonies (Mozart himself having been the victim of a pushy parent) – but his childhood doesn’t seem to have been like that, and there’s no resentment in any case. Alessandro is still based in Abruzzo, a short drive away from his mother, and family remains very important. “I have a very close relation with my mother. She is probably my first fan. And of course I am her favourite pianist.”

Still, there’s a melancholy there – maybe related to that early loss, and the way his musical memories are unconsciously entwined with memories of an ailing father. At one point I wonder if he plans any new career moves; this is all he’s ever done, after all, and he’s still so young. Even if he played the piano for another 20 years, he’d still only be 50. “But who knows if I will live another 20 years?” he replies unexpectedly, masking the chill in that remark with another rueful laugh.

Sure, I persist, but assuming he does – would he like to try some other life too?

“Actually, I’m trying to understand if this is my right life,” admits Alessandro.

Does he regret having devoted his whole life to music?

“Sometimes, a little bit. But of course I understand that there is nothing to do, I mean this is my life. I just – have to find a way to make it a little bit better. And it’s possible. It’s possible.”

Is it just exhaustion talking? The weary ennui of a man flung from China to Cyprus to Cleveland (these past few weeks have been unusually packed), not to mention a man who may be coming down with a cold just a few hours before a performance? Or could I be talking to a musical prodigy on the cusp – a man who no longer has the appetite for the draining, intense performances he’s produced since early childhood? Playing music is just so demanding. “I say to my students” (he teaches a class in Foggia, southern Italy, for about 12 students) “that every time I play I lose two weeks of my life, I think!”

There’s a precedent for this: at the age of 31, Glenn Gould (one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, and certainly among the best-known) stopped giving concerts, retiring from public view to become ever more reclusive. “He was scared,” sighs Alessandro when I mention Gould. “He was very scared. And he probably died because he was scared, of himself. He was an amazing personality… But I understand, I understand. It’s very difficult to construct a relationship with each of the persons who are listening [when you play]. You know, it’s such a complex job.”

Does he talk to the audience? Does he try to create a rapport?

“No, absolutely not. I’m so scared.”

Is it just that he’s shy?

“Probably I’m a little bit shy. Probably I’m – not good enough to talk, and to explain.” He doesn’t compose music either, he tells me later; he just plays, that’s his only vocation. “I believe you can [only] do one thing very well.”

But he teaches too, right?

“Yes, but I’m not a good teacher, I think”. He considers this: “I’m a good motivator, probably. But maybe I can play the piano a little bit better than teaching. And maybe I cook even better than playing the piano!”.

Cooking is his other big passion (hence the mention of Masterchef); his risotto is apparently legendary, at least to his mates. “I love to cook, I really enjoy it,” he says, adding wryly: “Maybe cook for a person I like, is even better”. There is such a person, a woman to whom he’s “very near”; she’s also a musician, with a similar lifestyle to himself (but perhaps “a little more positive” in general temperament). Alessandro, unlike the eccentric Glenn Gould, seems to thrive on being normal, cooking his risotto, watching Masterchef and the San Remo music festival – he loves competition, as long as he’s not competing himself – spending time with loved ones: his mum, his sister, his new baby nephew. Maybe it’s a way to cushion the intensity of what he does at the piano, just as his modesty and self-deprecation (and the way he whispers his replies, sipping tea and chuckling ruefully) also serve to cushion that intensity.

There’s another variable at play here: what he does, as a classical pianist – however intense, however acclaimed – is an art in decline (let’s not say ‘dying art’, just in case a solution is found). The old gets ignored in a culture that worships the new. “I mean, we are losing so many publics. For us, for the young generation – I’m not that young, but for the young generation – I think Asia is the future”. That continent (especially China and Japan) has a newly-acquired hunger for Western classical music, making up – at least for a while – for growing indifference in the West itself. Alessandro Deljavan is a 31-year-old playing 200-year-old music for an audience whose average age is about twice his own. No wonder there’s a melancholy tinge to our conversation.

Where would he like to be, in 10 years’ time? “In the cemetery of Paris!” he replies (I assume he’s thinking of Père Lachaise), laughing merrily at my shocked expression. “You can come and visit me, if you want. I would like a nice cemetery, with all the important people!”. To be fair, it sounds worse than it is; he seems cheerful enough, sipping Garo Keheyan’s herbal tea on a nice Thursday morning at the Shoe Factory. I suspect he’s tired, more than anything – plus of course Alessandro is an artist, and artists are allowed to have a dark side. Beethoven, for instance, was a very violent man, “he was walking with a knife on the streets! And yet we are all loving this amazing composer. I mean, it’s normal, to have a life of violence and then be a genius”.

He himself isn’t violent though, surely?

“I think I have a dark side also, but not that dark. I mean, I will not be in jail in the next five years, I hope.”

I get the sense his dark side veers more towards depression, I venture.

Alessandro laughs, his cough (and mood) much improved by the tea. “I don’t know, let’s not go to that argument, please!” he begs jovially, waving away my attempts at armchair analysis. “Please!… I don’t want to discover things now, before a concert!” Wrestling with his demons might get in the way of the performance; it’s bad enough having come down with a cold, or at least a cough.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a jack of all trades with almost as many interests, in his element with facts, figures and data

If you’ve ever seen the old vaudeville skit where first one person then another, then another and another – a mind-boggling overabundance of people – all emerge from a medium-sized car, then you have an idea what it feels like to talk to Robin Chater.

On paper, he’s medium-sized car personified – something safe and straightforward, a Golf or an Auris: he’s the secretary-general of FedEE, a British company with an office in Cyprus which provides support (with a focus on employment law, and legal and HR compliance) to a global clientele of multinationals. Could it be any more blandly respectable? Look closer, though, and the corporate surface gets complicated. Even the acronym doesn’t wholly fit, given that FedEE stands for the Federation of International Employers (‘International’ was once ‘European’, back in 1988 when the company was founded) – and Robin himself doesn’t really fit the part either, a ruddy, flamboyant-looking man with a marvellous thatch of blond hair. It turns out he’s not a Golf or an Auris at all – more like a Lotus Elise, one of the snazzy sports cars he used to race as a hobby. “I almost killed myself so many times. Eight times – I calculated it – eight times in my life I should’ve been killed. Eight!”

It’s not just the motor racing, though. It’s also his glasses, for instance, which are hand-painted red, green and blue – or his shirt, on the day of our interview, which is not only eye-catching (half-white, half-pink, with a flowery detachable collar and what he calls a Paddington Bear pocket) but also made and designed entirely by himself. He’s not a fashion designer, at least not professionally, but he likes to dabble; men’s fashions are so backward, he laments, they’ve barely developed at all. He likes to dabble in general. Could we call him a jack of all trades? “Renaissance man!” he replies with dignity, and laughs. “I’m interested in everything.”

He’s been a journalist, and quite a well-known one. He’s been a management consultant. He’s been trained in robotics, and worked at a high-tech firm called Cambridge Consultants as Head of Process Control. He’s advised the European Commission on gender equality. He’s been a teacher – his very first job, in a grammar school, teaching English and Drama. (Was he flamboyant? “Very!”) He’s been on assorted radio and TV shows in the UK – mostly as an expert, “brought in to chat” – from Parkinson to Panorama. He speaks Cornish, and a little Mandarin. He’s a pacifist and a vegetarian. He performs ‘slam poetry’. He writes short stories (he wrote one last Sunday, his first to be set in Cyprus), and is halfway through a novel called The Rest is Silence. His second wife Lynda was also a novelist – though also a polymath, with an IQ of 190 (Robin’s own IQ is 174) and a photographic memory. You could open Halliwell’s Film Guide at random, he recalls, give her the name of the director and maybe one of the actors, and she’d give you the title of the movie.

Like the car in that vaudeville skit, Robin Chater keeps surprising you: just when you think he’s disgorged all possible bombshells, he comes up with more. “I’m quite an ancient person, really,” he muses (he’s 69), “but I still work. I’ve always worked 80 hours a week, ever since about the age of 20. And I was an entrepreneur right from the age of around 11.” His first start-up was a magazine business, printing his own and delivering others; he made a deal with kids on paper rounds to distribute Sunday papers. “I was personally earning then – at the age of 11 – I was personally earning £25 every Sunday”. Given that we’re talking about 1960, and £25 then would be worth over £200 today, this is quite a bombshell – yet it’s easily topped when I ask what prepubescent Robin actually did with all that money.

“I bought motor cars.”

Motor cars?

“Yeah. I could drive from the age of eight.”

His parents ran a country pub in Worcestershire, with fields behind; young Robin built a track there and would buy cars, strip them down, then drive around the track with his friends hanging on the back. Cars (and bikes) have almost been his downfall, and he spends an entertaining few minutes talking of his many close calls, the first at the age of 17 – when he suffered a broken back in a motorbike crash, though he didn’t go to a doctor and remained with a half-healed back for 20 years – the most recent in 2013. Most of his accidents have been on a track, racing supercharged Lotus cars, but he’s had serious spills on country roads and motorways too. A drunk German driving on the wrong side hit him head-on, around a bend in Northern Ireland. His sports car bounced off a lorry tyre on the M40, smashed into the central reservation and spun so violently that the car came apart. “The whole car was shredded and I was left in this little seat – it had a little box of aluminium – and everything around me had been demolished. And yet I didn’t have a mark on me”.

Is he philosophical about these near-misses?

Robin laughs: “You know, I don’t know whether there is a God – I’m more Buddhist than Christian – but you have to ask, well, ‘Why am I given all these reprieves? Is there something I’ve got to do? Is there some mission I’ve still got to serve?’. Maybe there is.”

Maybe the Almighty just feels bad about cutting short such a packed and industrious life – and the life has indeed been accomplished, yet there’s also an air of desolation to this gifted, hyper-articulate man, and not just because of his near-misses (there was also a bout of pyelonephritis in the late 90s which nearly killed him; if a friend hadn’t happened to find him unconscious and taken him to hospital, he wouldn’t be here now). He’s been touched by unhappiness, and seems to have been quite unlucky with his loved ones.

His parents weren’t especially supportive. Robin speaks of having been “mistreated as a child”, adding that “I didn’t really have anything to do with my parents”. (The real father figure was a friend of the family named Reg, an avuncular mechanic who kindled his interest in cars.) His first marriage ended in 1996, after 24 years. He married Lynda, the aforementioned polymath, soon after, but in fact it wasn’t really a marriage – more a case of two clever, unconventional friends deciding to use the system for their own ends, forming a quixotic marriage of convenience to ward off annoying suitors and allow them to live an “ordinary intellectual life”. That union ended too, after 12 years.

Above all – and most tragically of all – he’s experienced a parent’s worst nightmare, not once but twice. “Had two children,” he reports briskly, “but unfortunately they were both, sadly killed in accidents. One falling from a horse, doing gymkhana. And the other one – stupid man,” says Robin, shaking his head – “a son, who went to a party and took the wrong drugs, and alcohol, and was rushed into hospital, you know. He was just – silly age, really,” he adds rather gruffly, as I offer my condolences. “So it was very…”

For once, words fail him (sometimes words are inadequate) – though he rallies soon enough, the pain of those particular bombshells having long since been subsumed into his questing, mercurial personality, allowed to reverberate quietly in the background of our conversation. Does he get depressed when things go badly? “I get tense, not depressed,” he replies – and his energy is indeed rather jittery, flitting from subject to subject. It’s not that he rambles, per se; but one thing reminds him of another. Take Brexit, for instance, the event that made him flee the UK (he claims to have seen it coming, and even won money by betting on it). Talking of Brexit – which he says is being handled so incompetently that the outcome is bound to be “a Greek state; a failed state, only bigger” – gets him on the subject of Theresa May, which (given that he calls her “the worst PM we’ve had, apart from Churchill, in the last 100 years”) inevitably gets him on the subject of Churchill, who was such a “dunce” during WWII. “All we had to do – using the base here, probably – was bomb the oilfields in Romania. That’s the only oil Hitler had. Without the oilfields, he couldn’t have conquered anything”.

I learn that WWII was “all about oil”. I learn about the war in Ukraine, the setting for his half-finished novel. I learn, with examples, that Napoleon wasn’t much of a strategist. (Robin seems to have a passion for military history.) I learn that the word for ‘church’ in Cornish is similar to the word in French. I learn that ‘Chater’ is an Armenian name, the most famous Chater having been the late Sir Catchick Paul Chater, a financial titan in colonial Hong Kong. I learn about China, the superpower of the very near future, and the startling fact – according to FedEE’s calculations – that “there are over 20,000 Chinese companies which are ready to become multinational”. I learn that 50 per cent of the working population in the UK are going to be left without jobs in the next 10 years. The reason is of course automation, and the only solution (he believes) is a guaranteed basic income; there needs to be a new way of distributing wealth, which is not based on work. “It’s called Communism!” says this lifelong lefty, and laughs delightedly.

Facts and figures fly around the small office. This is Robin’s element, or one of his elements: data, facts, information. FedEE actually works on collating information, its job being to monitor laws around the world and inform (say) Coca-Cola that it now has to do Thing X in order to be in compliance in (say) Azerbaijan – a narrow niche, but a lucrative one. One of his other entrepreneurial ventures (“still slightly beta”) is a social-networking site called butN, like a non-sexual Tinder aimed at business travellers, once again collating information.

And behind the facts? A love of art, a prodigious appetite, seven decades of what he wryly calls “an interesting, if precarious, life” – and a certain solitude as well, hanging in the room like a faint shadow. Partly it’s because the Nicosia office is so empty, just him and a secretary; partly it’s because he lives alone in Cyprus (he still has a house in France, which he now plans to sell, and he’s also looking to set something up in Singapore) – but mostly it’s because he’s always been independent, pushed to rely on himself from childhood onwards. FedEE seems to be a one-man show (albeit with assistance), its fortnightly news wire “largely written by me” for the past 30 years. The ‘slam poems’ he performs include – with delicious irony – a one-word poem called ‘Me’, “so the only word you hear is ‘me’ and the rest is acting, really”. Robin varies his voice and uses body language, spinning it out to a few minutes – but the only actual word is ‘me’, repeated again and again. As symbols for a quirky, brilliant individualist go, it’s a good one.

The bombshells keep coming, the car keeps disgorging random people. He has (or had) a method for winning at the horses, based on Bayesian statistics, which was so effective he actually sold it to customers. (Statistics was the first of his Master’s degrees, sandwiched between English at Leeds and Labour Relations at LSE.) He claims to have coined ‘Winter of discontent’ to describe the state of late-70s Britain before the phrase was picked up by Callaghan’s speechwriters, back in the days when he wrote for a journal called IDS Report and was quoted in the Times and the Telegraph. He could’ve run for MEP once – hand-picked for the job by the incumbent, a Tory named Fred Tuckman – but decided not to. He works all night, and generally sleeps at break of dawn. He can write a 4,000-word short story in two hours.

“I’m a strange fish,” admits Robin Chater. He’s speaking of his strange sleeping habits – but he might be speaking of his personality as a whole, from his dizzying range of interests to his self-designed shirts; clearly, he’s not like most people. One thing’s for sure, the man can talk, his energy never flagging throughout our conversation. Almost at the end, soon after Napoleon and before the Bayesian statistics, we get on the subject of dictators (he’s scathing about the one to our immediate north) and the talk turns to Franco. Oh, Spain! he enthuses, like a child with a new toy: “It’s so different from the rest of the world, the Inquisition lasted 250 years without a break there”. Robin nods happily: “I could have a whole conversation about Spain”. He could, too.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a Greek comic writer who surrounds himself with strange, beautiful people and the largest collection of Greek language comics in the world

Before we’ve even sat down – at Prozak in Nicosia, the book-lined café patronised by writers and alternative types – Melandros Ganas is offering to put me in touch with other artists who might be worth a profile: a graffiti whiz named Rock The Dog, for instance, or a fashion-designer duo calling themselves Cherry & Mint. You’d assume he’s been in Cyprus for years, to be such a confident expert on the local scene. In fact he arrived from his native Greece last May, went back home for the summer, and has been here since September.

Then again, it’s the same when he’s in Greece. “My life has not been calm, because of constantly moving from place to place,” he recalls. “I’ve met many people – many, many people. I’ve got friends in every town, all over Greece. Whichever town you mention, I can give you the name of someone to talk to”. Manos (people call him Manos, partly because he himself was unable to pronounce his unusual name when he was a kid) seems to be what Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point called a ‘connector’, one of those who relish bringing strangers together. “I know every artist in Cyprus,” he tells me. He’s not shy, nor does he wait around to be introduced; if he likes someone’s work – even if he doesn’t, probably – he’ll go up to them and shake their hand. “I’m very open.”

His particular field is comic books, though he doesn’t fit the stereotype of the awkward, withdrawn comic-book geek. “I’m the most sociable person: I mean, I played football, I’ve been married, I make friends.” He writes the stories (the ‘scripts’) for comics, doesn’t actually draw them – but he’s also, as befits his personality, something of a mover and a shaker in the comic-book world, in Greece and (he hopes) now in Cyprus.

Manos runs a Larissa-based publishing house called Kampos Publications (Ekdoseis tou Kampou), putting out about 12 graphic novels a year. He works with Comicdom Con in Athens – one of Greece’s three big comics festivals, attracting 12-15,000 visitors – as head of department for self-published works. He also has the largest collection of Greek-language comics in the country, probably the world – a monstrous, increasingly unwieldy 25,000 titles, stacked on shelves and deposited in boxes upon boxes at his home in Larissa. They range from well-known titles in translation to Greek fanzines and small-press comics which are vanishingly rare, often published for a minuscule audience (some of his treasures only ever had a printing of 10-20 copies) and preserved by Manos for posterity.

His life in comics is divided in two by a cultural shift that’s hard to pin down precisely – though he dates it to around the turn of the millennium, when he was in his 20s (he’ll be 40 in June). That was when comics became respectable, indeed revered – “the ninth art,” as he puts it – and people like him, who were veterans of the scene in Greece, suddenly found themselves in demand: “Everyone was like, ‘Comics are the ninth art now, who knows how to write about comics? Ganas does, he has 20,000 comics!’”. Before that, things were slightly different: “When I used to read comics in the past, it wasn’t an art-form yet. People stared, and made fun of me. I mean there I’d be, a grown man, in my Air Force uniform, going to a bookshop and saying ‘Hello, I’d like to read some comics’ – and they’d be like: ‘25 years old, and you’re still reading Mickey Mouse?’.”

Wait a minute, though: what was that about an Air Force uniform? That’s the other, more surprising aspect of Manos’ life so far, and explains his reference to constantly moving around: he grew up an Air Force brat, the son of a military man, following his dad all over Greece – primary school in Thessaloniki, junior high in Larissa, four years in the border town of Florina – and later followed Dad into the Air Force, as did his brother, spending 22 years in uniform. He resigned last May, just before coming to Cyprus (his girlfriend already lived here; the girlfriend’s brother has been here for years, running a number of nightclubs). The catalyst for his sudden career move was a lump on his scrotum which he feared might be cancer; it turned out to be just an infection – but “in those hours, till the test results came out, I was afraid I might be dying. And the next day, when I got up, I decided that I’m doing something I don’t like, and life’s too short”. He resigned two days later.

It’s a pivotal moment, for two reasons: one having to do with Manos himself, the other with the state of Greece as a whole. The first reason is the more evident as he sits across the table at Prozak – a raffish, bearded figure, ruggedly handsome. His eyebrows slant upwards as he talks, giving him an ingratiating air. He talks fast and endlessly, even by the standards of Greeks (a people famous for talking fast and endlessly). He’s extremely pro-cannabis, and has called publicly for its legalisation, but has never touched booze in his life. His nose is broken, the result of an elbow to the face during a basketball game. He’s always been sporty (how un-geek-like!) and played football seriously for years, his team ascending to the Greek fourth division during his final season.

He’s also covered in tattoos, maybe not showily (most are hidden by his clothing) but with the same dedication that he brings to comics. His tattoos are a tribute, to himself and his friends. “My friends are all strange, beautiful people,” he explains, “I’m happy to have such beautiful friends. A lot of them are tattoo artists. Others are musicians, actors, theatre people.” Manos is glad to volunteer when a friend wants to try some new tattoo – “I consider my skin to be a collector’s item” – and also marks his own life by turning it into art. A paper boat on his arm commemorates a posting to Crete some years ago. A ring of tattoos around his wrist includes the ‘Nirvana smiley face’ logo (a face with crossed-out eyes and tongue hanging out), signifying that he’s led an “unstable life”. A small stick person on the inside of his finger is the birth of his daughter Irene, now 13 (her name appears in another tattoo). Other markings include a quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – ‘Too weird to live, too rare to die’ – and a cryptic ‘1.3.1.2.’ which actually stands for A.C.A.B., i.e. All Cops Are Bastards. Manos is a walking canvas, with his 40 years on Earth as the subject.

This was not, in other words, a case of a square-looking Air Force officer taking off the military mask in the privacy of his own home. This was a case of an obvious rebel (and self-confessed stoner) somehow ensconced in the Air Force. COs were forever sniping about his tattoos. He was subjected to frequent drug tests, which of course always turned out positive. He’s endured a court-martial, and a forced psychiatric evaluation.

Manos was a square peg from Day One – yet he wasn’t hated, that’s important to note, indeed he was liked and protected by his immediate superiors (it was the higher-ups who were always out to get him). He’s not that kind of rebel, not a rage-against-the-machine type but a free spirit; he’s the cool open-minded guy, the fun-loving guy adding colour to the company, half in half out, the voluble hippy who shrugs at convention. “I was weird,” he admits of his time in the military, but he won respect just by being himself (and artistic); when he left, they all wished him well. “They’re my friends, I love them. I’ll never badmouth the Air Force: it wasn’t for me, it didn’t suit me, but it fed me… I had money from the Air Force all those years” – he went in at 18, straight from school – “I was getting a very good salary, in the public sector.”

That brings us to the second reason why Manos’ story is so fascinating: because it encapsulates Greece, the Greece of the recent past and the Greece of today. Here, after all, were two young men – Manos and his brother – who got civil-service jobs in the place where their dad worked, even though neither was a natural fit (his brother resigned from the Air Force a month after he did). It’s a Greek way of doing things, and worked fine while the country had money; but eventually you get to a point – says Manos – when you see old ladies rooting through the trash for food, and you’re taking home €1,300, doing something you don’t even like, while your friends are making €200. The situation weighed on his conscience, even before the infection-cum-existential-crisis which finally pushed him over the edge – and his only redemption, he decided, was at least to be true to himself, to walk away (without a pension) from his government sinecure and follow his dream, whatever the cost. In a way, he owed it to Greece.

“Greece is a beautiful country,” he sighs. “Very beautiful people. Kalamarades, as you call us. We talk too much! But it makes me sad – because we have some great minds there, yet I can’t see any way back. They’re talking about 20-30 years but no, I can’t even see us going back [to normal] in 20-30 years. I’ve got friends working four hours a day, for €140 a month. I’ve got friends suffering from depression. And I’ve got myself as an example, because I couldn’t stand the misery around me, and I got up and left despite having a salary – I mean, I could be in Greece now, with €1,250-1,300 plus what I make from comics, I could be on €1,700 a month and living like a king. But I chose to leave because – it was getting me down, seeing all those people…” Manos shakes his head: “I mean, I’m here now and I see people smiling. We talk about a crisis in Cyprus, and there is a crisis – but you still see people getting on with their lives.

“I say it’s a shame,” he goes on, getting back to the state of his homeland. “It’s a shame, because we only get one life – and they’re destroying it. We’re to blame, of course, I’m not saying Greece is not to blame. No, we are. I just don’t like the punishment. And you can’t keep punishing an entire people – because I didn’t take any money, what could I have taken? You’ll say to me: ‘You were in the civil service, you’ve been taking money all your life’ – but that was my salary. I didn’t steal.”

So here we are, on a sunny afternoon at Prozak – and here he is, Melandros ‘Manos’ Ganas, taking stock as he embarks on a new chapter of his life. How does he make a living now? “I don’t! My girlfriend works at the moment,” he replies cheerfully. This is not entirely true. Manos is well-known in the Greek comic-book community: he’s currently involved in organising two regional festivals, he does some teaching, he sells his books – and of course there’s the publishing house. Not many Greeks (and even fewer Cypriots) make a living from comics, admittedly, but money is money.

Still, this is the first time in his adult life that he’s not taking home a monthly salary – and that, plus the prospect of turning 40, does seem to have spooked him a little. He admits to some trouble sleeping. Thoughts of obsolescence, and his life being ‘all downhill from here’, prey on his mind. Almost absurdly, given that he spent all those years in the Air Force and flew C-130s, he’s developed a mild fear of flying, and shudders as the plane leaves the runway on his trips back to Greece. I suspect he feels pangs of guilt at not being there for his daughter (who’s being raised by his ex-wife) and now-elderly parents; and of course he admits that Cyprus – much as he likes the place, and would like to stay – is, in many ways, a foreign country.

There’s a bit of a dark side to Manos. The comics he writes are mostly horror, with slashers and serial killers (he also produces pro-cannabis tracts, plus a few jokey porno volumes with comic-book icons getting it on); his biggest hit, with art by Nick Giamalakis, was a 2015 comic called Freakshow, a Gothic tale about an evil travelling circus. Some may also find something slightly desperate in his bonhomie, the desire to know everyone and have friends wherever he goes. I can see how he’d come on too strong, for some people.

Maybe it’s a weapon, a defence mechanism from a peripatetic childhood. One assumes there must be a link between the collector seeking to impose himself on the world of comics – amassing every possible comic, 25,000 of them – and the connector seeking to impose himself on the world of people, flaunting his friendships like rare first editions. Manos is omnivorous when it comes to reading comics, and seems to attack life with the same forthright honesty. “Don’t write it all, just the good stuff!” he pleads as our conversation threatens to become too elaborate – but in fact, journalistically speaking, it’s all good stuff. He shakes hands warmly, and goes off to chat to some other people.