My father has a lovely plot of land in the village of Lymbia that he nurtures with love and a lot of hard work. On it there is a wooden house (complete with kitchen and bathroom completely installed by him), all manner of plants and trees, a beehive and farm animals.
He maintains the trees and harvests the carobs and citrus fruit, as well as looking after and harvesting the olives from another one of the family fields. He has built water systems and structures, set up generator and wind-power systems and knows how to plough the land and tend to the chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigeons. He has also invented a honey extractor and was delighted when he recently bottled his own honey for the first time.
All the family enjoy going to the plot and having dinner, cooked in the clay oven and consumed in the fresh air, but not one other single member of the family would be able to look after it or have the first idea what is needed to keep it running and how.
This is the sad state we find ourselves in; with each new generation, more and more practical skills are lost, and whilst my generation is fairly rubbish, we are a million times better than the generations to come… those who are growing up in an uber-technological era where you do everything with a click rather than by hard graft and getting your hands dirty.
My paternal grandfather was a cobbler, and my paternal grandmother sold homemade ice-cream. My maternal grandfather was a tailor on London's Saville Row. What do I do? I sit at a computer and type. Hubby and I are rubbish at gardening and useless at DIY. There is nothing in our day that requires us to use our muscles in the functional way that working in the fields or manual labour does, so we go to a gym and exercise in a contrived way on machines that move our muscles in an unnatural manner as opposed to functionally.
So far we have managed to keep our two young children away from tablets and the like, but how much longer will we be able to maintain their innocence before we have to give in to peer pressure for the sake of not marginalising them?
These are issues that trouble me, which is why I am always delighted to see the programme of evening classes run by the government. To me they are a wonderful opportunity for a second chance at learning something new, and preferably something that enriches my life away from technology. In the past I took the herbal medicine course (wonderful!), a Turkish language course (it was so hard!), tried (and failed) at guitar and clothes making, but succeeded at the painting class and the glass mosaic course. Personally, I would strongly encourage everyone to take advantage of them and open up new doors of discovery and skill.
As for me, I have my eye on gardening this year (if it fits in with my schedule), as I want to be able to show my own kids in years to come how to look after the village oasis that their grandfather so lovingly built.
First appeared in The Cyprus Weekly, 12/09/14
