Page 4 - Gillian Bouras News Today

Attitudes towards truth have changed. Now we accept the idea that there are different sorts of truth: the phrases historical truth, narrative truth and emotional truth come trippingly off the lips of vast numbers of people. Then there are the complex notions of fantasy and fiction: we have long subscribed to the notion of novelists making up various ‘lies’ or fantasies in order to tell underlying truths about human nature. But we also have to accept, I think, that a gentleman’s word is no ...

My son’s Athenian flat was burgled last month. I had been visiting Athens for the first time in more than a year, and so was with the family when they arrived back, after a fairly brief evening absence, to sheer chaos. Anybody who has had this experience will be able to picture the scene: every drawer and cupboard had been opened, with the contents spilled and strewn everywhere. By Gillian Bouras

On the beach, in the storm     The twelve days of Christmas seemed to pass very quickly this time, despite the rigours and monotony of pandemic restrictions. But it’s always an ambiguous period, at least in Greece, for here the Christian belief in the Birth is complicated by a layer of folk-lore involving the Kallikantzaroi, the souls of the dead who haunt the earth at this time, with the express aim of wrecking the Tree of Life, which supports the Earth. Every Christmas these creatures, w...