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Journals of an Expat

出版	CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013-05-19
主題	Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN	14895045409781489504548
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=LHv_nAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This is a remarkable book by a truly remarkable woman. The interesting thing when reading it is that it soon become apparent that Judith Whitworth thinks there is nothing special about her. She is very wrong. She is extraordinary is the true sense of the word. The story she tells is a wonderfully evocative account of nigh on 20 years spent in a foreign land, Greece, undergoing all sorts of trials and privations that would make any ordinary woman flee the foreign shores for a quick passage back to blighty mighty quickly. Does she do that? Absolutely not. With something between immense courage, amazing practical ability and sheer cussedness, she overcomes every obstacle placed in her way and believe me there were many! to succeed where ordinary mortals would have failed. The story itself centres on Judith's marriage with Stamos a Greek gentleman farmer who she met by chance at a dinner party. To describe Stamos as being idiosyncratic is a huge understatement he is eccentric in a way that only people who have experienced Greek eccentricities could understand. He is also completely disorganised and his farm as run down as a farm can be. Add to this a brood of his children who resent the presence of his English lover and eventually wife, and who resort to many lengths to get rid of her, including physical violence at one point, and you have a potent mix. Eventually, when Stamos dies in 1988, Judith is left with nothing, despite having toiled endlessly against all the difficulties to transform the dilapidated farm into something like a highly successful enterprise. That's Greek law for you! In the intervening fourteen years she has some amazing adventures and the book is packed with a whole cast of remarkable characters young backpackers who visit the farm and work in return for little more than food, shelter and a large sprinkling of maternal type love, and native Greeks who range from the amazingly incompetent government officials to the likeable, but thieving 'Rom' gypsy population whom Judith befriends even though they are the outcasts of society and spurned by anyone respectable. This is a long book, make no mistake about it, but once you have read the opening section where she describes her first visit to a Greek market with Stamos to buy a lamb you will be well and truly hooked as I was. If I could have read it in one sitting I would have done so. And at the end of this remarkable story we are left with the feeling that we have been very privileged to accompany such an amazing woman on such an amazing journey. Oh, and by the way. It does have a happy ending!