NOT BONNY TYLER

Days come and go. We have good days and we have great days. Very occasionally we have bad days. Sometimes we have absolutely brilliant days. You judge today.

Needing to get up at at eight I set my internal alarm clock for seven last night as I nodded off. My internal clock has not adjusted to the DST arrangements yet. I woke at ten past eight. Sun was streaming into the bedroom through the bathroom window. When I opened the window while micturating all I could hear was birdsong - sparrows and chaffinches with their boringly beautiful, insistent songs.

The girls were cuddled up by the gate of their run catching the first thin rays of sunshine - warming their bones - supper finished. The aloe vera that G planted out yesterday by the stairs nestled cheek by jowl with some beautiful orange and purple vetch and now that the rosemary and thyme are in bloom they drag ones eye away from the olive blossom beside the dog run.

Coffee and wake up to a backdrop of sunshine and birdsong as bees and wasps wander through checking out the books and paintings. A sparrow flies straight through the cellar - in the stable door and out of the south facing window. Two pots and we're ready for the fray in Rethymnon.

Check the bank account before committing to the trek to the bank, it's at the other end of Reth to the car park, and what a lovely surprise - the pension is in and it's been increased! Check out LuLu and - lo and behold someone has bought a copy of the blook! Hooray. (Later I'll discover that it was Kell, one of my daughters, but that makes it even better) And then it's off to Reth with the sunroof down and cruising past a cerulean, almost turquoise, blue sea ruffled only mildly by a breeze. Hola, there are people sunbathing already.

We shop the shop and manage to find a nice thin glass to replace the one G broke earlier this week - and not one of those jamjars that pass for wineglasses here - that must be 3 cheers now. Only 6 euros and for once we didn't have to buy a set of six. Dog food is in for the next month; coffee wine and beer for a week. Stop for a frappe in the sun overlooking the new pubic greenspace where the taxis wait - in front of the big church.

On the way home we stop the car before Xrysos Asteria and watch a few moments a scuba diver in the rocky bay beneath us as a we wait. And then it begins: the heat leaves the sun and a strange faux twilight begins. The sea flattens. Other cars pull over beyond us. We are in the thrall of a full solar eclipse. By strange contraptioning of sunglasses and mirrors we watch the sun, a blazing disc until now, gradually eclipsed by the new moon - reducing it to a meniscus, a crescent.

So, you judge. A good day or a brilliant day?