Boat people

When I was a little girl, my family would go on sailing holidays. The lifestyle was simple, like camping on water. You were constantly in nature and lived with it and the ocean. This is a common summer hobby in Sweden, and winters were spent repairing, maintaining and improving. [[[Stats: How many Swedish boats?]]]] The...

Hellenic treasures

A still life selection of white pebbles, blue ceramics and small shells. Photo by Jessica Zarins, June 2024. On different Ionian pebbled beaches I searched for two things: perfect skimming stones, and the most spherical pebble of all. It was a fun holiday game to play on each of the beaches I visited on Lefkas,...

The sea, the seals and the smells

It's been two months since I was last by the sea. They say distance makes the heart grow fonder, and I have certainly missed this friend. I'm at Horsey Gap in Norfolk to visit the grey seal colony that breeds and pups here every year. The part of the beach that I enter from the...

Friday 17.06.2022. Evening

Hottest day of the year in England and Wales. And Spain and France. Unnatural. It’s still warm in the house when I go to bed, and I hear mozzies and flies and bees that mistook indoors for outdoors when they saw the light of my lamp. Yesterday’s mozzies and flies and bees lie dead on...

Went to Riga. Came home

I've been going to Riga almost every year since 2016 (pandemic excluded). The first time I hoped for a sense of inherited belonging, that I'd feel at home in my ancestral city. It wasn't without disappointment that I realised that I'm not Latvian, but Swedish-Latvian, and don't belong in Riga, but belong where I create...

Thursday 26 August 2021. Afternoon

Diesel, faeces, fish bone, fruit, leftovers, plastic polluted water. The bay is paradise but at a high cost. No rain since May, forest fires out of control in the east, and a rise in Covid cases. Greece is a very old country, where no water, island or mountain remains unchartered or untouched. And it's a...

KORAX

Sivota Bay, Tuesday 24 August 2021. Morning There's a copy of Aesop's Fables in the boat library. The one about the Mother, the Child and the Raven sticks out to me. A mother takes her child to the seers, who predict that it will die young from a raven (Greek: korax). The mother shuts the...

The houses in the hill

Villas in Sivota Bay at night. Photo by Jessica Zarins, August 2021 The villas in the mountains, so beautifully located. An L shape has been cut straight into the hill, and is filled by three homes in sleek shapes, whitewashed walls, locally sourced stones and greenery growing on the roofs. It keeps the heat out,...

The virginal

Sivota Bay, Lefkas. Tuesday 24 August 2021, afternoon Spending time with my parents for the first time in nine months is comfortable, safe and relaxing in a childlike way. My mother pays for lunch, my father pays for dinner. When there are sounds outside the boat at night, my father goes up to check. When...

Sivota Bay, Monday morning

The swallows, the flowers, the morning light. Cigarette smoke, petrol fumes, coffee vapour and spray-on sun lotion. Dutch, Italian, French, Serbian, English, German, Swedish and of course Greek. Here as in every village, the widows still wear their habits of mourning, despite some of them not being much older than my suntan-wearing parents. Cat on...