For people who live in Greece these are troubled times: we know that. But what is to be done about them? Not a lot, but we carry on as best we can, sticking to routine, hoping feebly that pressing problems will go away, putting our heads in the sand, trying to forget that Greece has to cope with the IMF yet again.
I buy potting mix from shop-owner Panayiotis, who runs the mini-market he inherited from his father. I have known father and son for 30 years. Father Spiros was the youngest of a large tribe of brothers born at a time when Greece was experiencing truly dire poverty. Four of these brothers became monks at Mt Athos: I cannot know anything about their religious convictions, but they knew that no monastery would let them starve.
Somehow Spiros started his modest shop, and was doing well when I was first here. Since then he has retired, the market has become more complicated, there are a few more shops competing, and life has changed. In all sorts of ways. Still, son Panayiotis remains philosophical. Well, he's Greek.
'How do you see things at this stage of the krisi?' I ask, for I'm always asking people what they think of Greece's financial crisis, which is of course not just Greece's.
'Crisis? What crisis?' Pano grins. 'Greece has got a crisis; Greeks haven't.' (They're all inclined to be bush lawyers as well as philosophers, I think yet again, and sophist is a Greek word, after all.)
But he's got a point: café society shows no sign of dying, people continue to eat and drink out, and spending on cigarettes and tobacco seems quite unabated. Girls and youths still manage to dress to the nines, and everybody, just everybody, has a mobile phone.
That's the surface, of course. Lift a layer or two, and then the suffering is revealed: the old scrimp and try to save, the unemployed young are angry and frustrated, the sick have to make do with inadequate care. And a multitude of immigrants scrapes along; who knows how?
Says Pano: 'Perhaps it's all to the good; perhaps we'll come to our senses at last, and things will work out.'
Here's hoping. While Pano does quiet but regular