And so I tread onto the well trodden soil of the Meditterranean with a pen in my hand and a mind wide with the expectation that muses wander the streets and inspiration is available dripping from every fountain and waterfall. I have landed in Cyprus with an unpublished novel in my bag and an unfinished play in my head both respectively laying in state for very good reasons, mainly the dormancy of their quality. I am most definately not the first writer to run away to distant shores in the hope that somewhere on this planet writing is easy and painless, but I feel safe in assuming no-one has chosen a place less equipped to satisfy someone who even reads books, let alone writes them. Cyprus, for all of it's charms of which there are myriad, cannot be the "Med" that Robert Graves peered out to as he wrote "Goodbye To All That", I cannot be baking under the same sunshine that inspired Ezra Pounds' Personae. The closest I have seen to any form of culture is a review for a French Canadian Troupes recital of Euripides' Elektra. In French. On Cyprus. I understand it was attended by about twenty people, some journalists and representatives of the higher echelons of what the government like to label their "army". (We can leave the wealth of stories about this band of brother's adventures for another time, just to say the latest fisaco involved a fighter pilot showing off to his girlfriend by flying a figure of eight into a church killing himself and one other. The secretary of defence called him an "exemplary officer" at his funeral). All around I see the rugged beauty that must have inspired so much in so many, and yet all I hear is a language that could pass for a Martial Art that seems verbally to have no sentence structure or emotional lilt that, say, even German might have. What was more surprising was perhaps that this country does have a rich history of art and culture, one that it seems eager to bulldoze over in favour of spitting at the Turks and playing cards in string vests. I recently read that not only is the house of Cyprus' last great Artist, (the gardens of which once played host to the likes of Lucien Freud and Pablo Picasso), now a graffiti etched overgrown pile of rubble but that it was also the final home of the last Queen of Cyprus when the island was invaded by the ambitious Viennese in the 1480's. No danger of a Princess Diana complex on this dry and arrid land. This, along with hearing that a pre-Neolithic burial site was bulldozed three days ago to make way for two Greek flags by, you guessed it, the military. And believe me, Greek flags, here in the south, is not something we are short of. So, as you sit in the pub this evenning moaning at your friends over decent beer that nobody makes programmes like Michael Wood anymore or that "reality" tv culture is eating away at the fabric of our society, think of me battering away at my typewriter with little but aesthetic paradise and memories of feminist-Plath-loving-heavy writing workshops to spur me on. Thinking about it, I don't suppose when Graves settled in Mallorca in the 1950's that he was immediately impressed by the abundance of Shakespeare performances and Goya exhibitions. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "we read to know we are not alone", and perhaps as distances increase and borders shrink, that may very well be why we write, also.

 

This article first appeared in CFUK magazine autumn 2005