Thirty-two years ago I came to my husband's ancestral village for six months' holiday. The holiday got out of hand, as I am still here. A nomad without an ancestral village, I was made a present of one, and now find irony in the fact that I will soon have spent as many years here as I did in Australia.
For the first 16 months I lived with my mother-in-law, the redoubtable Aphrodite, who stood five feet nothing in her stockinged feet, wore daunting head-to-toe black, and could quell me with one basilisk glance.
She saw no necessity to change a way of life that had remained the same for countless generations, so I was the one who had to adjust to a set routine of feast days and fast days, to the demands of the Orthodox church, to the dictates of the seasons and the rural round.
The world of books and writing, so important to me, was closed to Aphrodite, who could just manage to sign her name on her pension cheques; she could not read at all. To her I was irremediably foreign, and I don't think she saw a black or Asiatic person in all her life.
Any life entails a struggle to accommodate change, and changes there have inevitably been, even in this small, slow-moving world. Aphrodite grew up in a world without phones or labour-saving electrical appliances, without bathrooms and without radio and TV: local gossip preceded the soap operas that have become so popular.
There were no cars, and buses were few. People often walked to Athens, or rode their donkeys: the journey took a week, and time was measured by the number of cigarettes smoked.
Roads began to be built in the 1950s, after the disastrous civil war had left not a bridge standing in the entire country. Last month a new section of the National Road was opened, toll stations and all, so that it is now possible to get from Athens to Kalamata in just three hours.
When I arrived there were few supermarkets and those that existed were small. It was difficult to buy a packet of corn flakes, peanut butter cost a king's ransom, and bananas were unavailable: with idiosyncratic Greek logic, they were not imported so that the apple industry could flourish.
Bank loans were almost impossible to acquire, and many young people still lived in