The spiritual leader of the island’s 5,000 Sri Lankans says he was drawn to the monkhood from a very early age. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man who has never got cross

Who am I interviewing? What do I call him? I glance down at the piece of paper where my contact, a Sri Lankan lady, has written down the name of the man I’m about to meet: ‘Revent Morawaka Soratha Thero’. So is ‘Thero’ the surname? – but no, it turns out ‘Thero’ is an honorific, like ‘Sir’ or the archaic ‘Esquire’. The surname is ‘Morawaka’ – though not the name he was born with but the village where he was born, the tradition being apparently that Buddhist monks use the name of their “native place” as their surname. ‘Soratha’ is his first name, and of course ‘Revent’ (often shortened to ‘Ven’) is a variation on ‘Reverend’ – because the small, round-faced, crimson-robed gentleman standing in front of me is a man of God, and always has been.

The setting is unpromising, a functional hall with white plastic chairs piled up at one end and a statue of the Buddha on a stage at the other. This is not the main Buddhist temple – that’s in Psimolofou, a village just outside Nicosia where Ven. Soratha lives – but a kind of adjunct-cum-cultural-centre which he visits a few times a week (mainly on weekends) to lead meditation classes, dispense advice and teach Sinhalese to Sri Lankan children. It’s a Saturday evening, the leafy side-street outside already dark, the silence broken only by occasional passing cars and the stray barks of dogs being walked. We drag plastic chairs to the middle of the room and wait, a little awkwardly, for Malkanthi to finish her phone call.

Malkanthi is the interpreter, a commanding Sri Lankan lady who not only translates the Revent’s answers but occasionally pauses to add her own comments or shush a rowdy child who’s strayed a little too close to my tape recorder (“Behave well!” she hisses). His English, perfectly fine in casual conversation, tends to falter slightly when he’s trying to express complex concepts, hence the need for an interpreter – and there may be something else as well, an unspoken notion that a monk needs a sidekick, a retainer, in the manner of a princeling or perhaps a celebrity. His handshake, after all, isn’t a handshake. He doesn’t shake my hand, merely touches it briefly, because a handshake isn’t the way he greets people. I witness the correct way of greeting a monk when Malkanthi takes her leave, after the interview is over, and prostrates herself before him in a sign of respect – not for who he is, necessarily, but for what he represents.

His flock doesn’t just bow before him; it also feeds him and pays his rent, an arrangement which may seem surprising to our materialistic Western eyes. We normally think of a priest as representing a grand institution, the Church, which takes care of his living expenses; some might even think it parasitic if a Christian pastor expected his congregation to pay his way in the world – yet that’s precisely the case with Ven. Soratha, who’s entirely supported by the local Sri Lankan community. Every day someone brings him breakfast and lunch – Buddhist monks only eat two meals a day – based on a rota drawn up by the temple committee (“We have now 5,000 Sri Lankans,” explains Malkanthi, “so we can cover, it rotates”). Every week a collection is taken up to pay his rent. “They will give me food and everything,” he explains serenely in English, “I will give them dharma”, i.e. Buddhist teaching.

It may seem like an excess of deference – yet it’s also the opposite. After all, as already mentioned, a Christian’s relationship with his or her priest is essentially passive: a priest is the envoy of a powerful employer, who’s been appointed (and paid a monthly salary) to relay certain teachings to his flock – whereas a Buddhist monk is both less and more, humbled yet exalted, dependent on his people for money but also ‘above’ the whole concept of money. Ven. Soratha went to university after being ordained, and has a degree, but “I did not want to do money-earning job”; some monks also work as teachers, for money, but he doesn’t agree with this. “Money is needed for normal people,” he notes, through Malkanthi. “Buddhist monks, we depend on what they offer, what our people offer. So I don’t care about doing a job. Everything is free, my service. Otherwise I could be a teacher very easily, I have more than enough qualifications to be a teacher. But I don’t want.”

He’s always been a monk, since the age of 14 (he’s now 49) when he first joined the temple “without cutting the hair”, i.e. as a trainee – though in fact it’s more accurate to say that he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. “When I was growing up, I was different,” he recalls. “I was not attached to the normal family, I was very close to the temple”. Even as a tiny child, if he saw “this robe” – i.e. a Buddhist monk – walking in the street, he’d go and walk behind him. There were no other monks in the family: Dad was a civil servant, and none of his four siblings, two brothers and two sisters, have followed Soratha’s path (one of his brothers is an extremely well-known TV actor in Sri Lanka, adds Malkanthi in an excited whisper) – though he does cite a couple of possible role models. The headmaster of his school was a monk, and his beloved grandmother was extremely devout. “I used to go to temple with her,” he recalls, and “I understood that she became so quiet, calm and peaceful woman because of this Buddhism”.

Ven. Soratha mentions those ‘rational’ reasons – Grandma and the headmaster – near the beginning of our interview, as if reluctant to go any further. By the end, however, he feels comfortable enough to hazard the true explanation. “I strongly believe that this is not from my soul, [but] from my previous souls”.

So he used to be a monk in a previous life?

“No, I was wishing,” he explains. This compulsive need to follow the robe, even as a child too young to know what it meant, must’ve been the culmination of many lifetimes’ desires – though it’s also possible that he actually was a monk in some earlier incarnation, he adds with a shrug.

Either way, though, he believes he was literally born for this life?

“Yes. I strongly believe.”

It’s certainly an unusual life, and one that demands constant sacrifice. “Always I try to live a simple life,” he asserts, that being probably the key to a monk’s existence. He only eats two meals, as already mentioned, and both are entirely vegetarian: some rice and curry for breakfast, much the same for lunch. He gets up at five every morning and meditates till six, one of two daily one-hour sessions aimed at leaving his mind “clean and pure”. He says something else, which Malkanthi struggles to translate. “Very light person,” she offers at last. “I know that I am very light. I don’t have anything heavy in my mind or heart.”

No worries? No problems? Does he never get angry?

“I haven’t seen it,” puts in Malkanthi, and Soratha smiles, shaking his head: “Not openly”.

Has he never shouted at anyone?

He laughs, shaking his head.

Has he never seen injustice, and been angry about it?

Malkanthi takes over, too agitated to remain in her role as interpreter. “I was with him for many things, legal matters. There are injustices – for example, he was deported two times! For very small reason, for nothing. If it was me, [she puts on an indignant voice, addressing the flunkeys at Migration]: ‘I have visa! Entering visa is valid’. No. He called me, [now in a low, sing-song voice]: ‘Auntie, they are going to deport me again’. ‘No!’ I said. ‘Speak with them!’.” She shakes her head, exasperated.

Talk of deportation brings us to more mundane matters – a reminder that Ven. Soratha is an alien in Cyprus (despite having lived here for 10 years), and also ministers to a community that’s often ill-treated or discriminated against. ‘What’s your impression of Cyprus?’ I ask, and he replies very softly (he always speaks softly), shutting his eyes to think. “First, I appreciate that – how to say? – people are very lawful,” translates Malkanthi uncertainly. “They respect people… Because he is not going out, he has not seen the racism in the country!” she interrupts herself, once again provoked into editorial comment. “Sorry, I just… He says people are very kind, lawful”. The lawfulness is apparently in contrast to Sri Lanka, where the sound of gunshots is not uncommon and people often take the law into their own hands; the Buddhist tradition has been weakened, says Ven. Soratha sadly, blaming colonialism and the evil influence of alcohol.

What of Sri Lankans here, predominantly young women working as maids? What exactly is his role? “My service has various parts,” he replies. “First thing, I teach dharma. Second one, meditation for their health, mental and physical health. Third one, advice for the better life.” He doesn’t give legal advice – if needed, he’ll refer legal problems to the Sri Lankan Consulate – but his remit does include “counselling” and even advice on managing money, if a girl looks to be on the wrong path. “They take very quick decisions,” he laments. “They leave the husband, and come to Cyprus.”

Above all, he tries to help with psychological turmoil: homesickness, family problems, bad employers. “First, I let her speak,” he explains. “Everything. I listen very quietly. From that first stage, from my listening, half of her stress comes out. She gets relief”. You could say he’s an all-purpose therapist for 5,000 lonely souls looking for a shoulder to cry on – and his main prescription, in accordance with Buddhist principles, is to urge his flock to be cheerful. The money doesn’t change if you’re angry or happy, he tells them, the work doesn’t change – so choose joy, and try to be patient. “Try to understand them, try to please them,” he importunes, ‘they’ being oppressive Cypriot bosses. “I advise to change their behaviour, so that Madam will love you”.

Some might say that Ven. Soratha isn’t really equipped to be offering advice on such worldly matters. Not only has he never worked himself (at least in a “money-earning job”), but he also lives in the realm of religion, a world of spirits and souls. Buddhist theology is complicated, more so than I’d realised – reincarnation isn’t just a matter of coming back after death; there are 31 possible realms into which to be reborn, 29 of them incorporeal (the other two are animal and human) – but it’s still bound to seem like superstition to the non-religious. What does he say to the notion that spirits don’t really exist, and Science is the only true measure? “Science is still not developed enough to catch these invisible spiritual things,” he replies serenely – and talks to me at length of Edgar Cayce, a 20th-century American mystic whose life he’s studied in detail.

There are two very different ways to view Revent Soratha Morawaka. Some may see him – and, by extension, every Buddhist monk – as a detached, inexperienced man who’s never soiled his hands with real life, and now fills the heads of impressionable girls with unhelpful nonsense. Others, however – almost certainly the majority – will discern a more noble figure, a man who’s devoted himself to a single cause, rejected any compromise with the world and spent his life reading, studying, meditating and keeping himself pure so as to retain some contact with those higher things which the rest of us have placed out of reach. If nothing else, his dedication is remarkable.

What does he do for fun? “Fun?” he repeats, as if not understanding. “Why I would want leisure or relaxation? I’m always happy!” No hobbies? Nothing? “My only way of relaxing, of being happy, is in front of Lord Buddha,” he insists – but then seems to relent slightly: “When, in my timetable, I have special time for my creativity, I write poems,” translates Malkanthi – but it turns out he doesn’t mean poems, he means Buddhist chants. Ven. Soratha is actually quite famous in Sri Lanka for his chanting; when he goes back home, he’s almost as popular as his actor brother – his diary fills up with invitations from radio and TV, and he’s on the air every day. But of course he’s very seldom in Sri Lanka, showing off his musical talents; instead he’s stuck in Psimolofou, nannying distraught maids and dealing with the idiots at Migration.

Doesn’t he miss Sri Lanka? “No. I live only today,” he replies instantly. “I think only about today. So I never stick to anybody, [or] any place”. He has nothing in his name, no property, no possessions, no job, not even any real friends (his fellow monks are thousands of miles away). Isn’t he lonely? “This loneliness is only for you people, normal people. For Buddhist monks, this loneliness is better”. Ven. Soratha peers at me from behind his oval glasses: “Most of my life, whether in Sri Lanka or here, I try to be alone!” And he smiles, as if sharing a secret.

A member of 80s pop band The Housemartins and now a prolific children’s writer was in Cyprus last week. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man who has managed to live his life on his own terms

Stan Cullimore sits in an empty hall, reminiscing. “My friend Paul, who I wrote with – hello! do you want anything?” he breaks off, as a little girl approaches uncertainly. The setting is the Junior School in Nicosia, which is in the midst of a Writing and Literacy Week and – as it does every year – has invited a well-known children’s author to talk to the kids. For the little girl, who wants to buy a souvenir pen, Stan is the nice man with the ukulele who sang a song about all his favourite stories being “dirty filthy lies”. I assume she doesn’t know that, decades before she was born, he used to be a member of the Housemartins, a pop band who had six Top 20 singles in the UK, or that “my friend Paul” is Paul Heaton, who later formed the Beautiful South and sold 15 million records worldwide.

That was a long time ago, of course – even for adults. A little later, I overhear some teachers discussing Stan’s pop career as we wait for the man himself to begin his next workshop. “He wrote ‘House of Love’ and ‘Are You Ready?’,” reckons one woman – though in fact “Are you ready?” is the opening line from ‘Caravan of Love’, the band’s only No. 1 hit (and they didn’t write it, since it was originally done by the Isley Brothers). Their most successful original composition was the jangly, exuberant ‘Happy Hour’, which reached No. 3 in June 1986 and was written by Paul and Stan “in about 10 minutes” – though the lyrics are typically sharp beneath the exuberance (speaking of an alienated working man, and the horrors of “a night out with the boss”), a reminder that the band were both Marxists and Christians. The usual process, Stan recalls, was that Heaton would write lyrics, then the two of them “would chop them and move them around to make a song”.

It sounds a bit like Paul was the creative spark, Stan the organiser – which would certainly chime with his persona, from his geeky appearance in the Housemartins (he was the thin, gormless-looking one with enormous horn-rimmed glasses, like a goofier Elvis Costello) to the fact that he didn’t just write songs and play guitar but also managed the band, sorting out the contracts and legal minutiae. “When I was about 24, I used to employ about 30 people – as well as being a pop star, I was also running the company. So one minute we’d be playing the gig, and hanging out with people and having a laugh, then you’ve got to go and talk to the promoters, go and talk to the record company people, go and talk to the lawyers…”

Was he up to it, as a 24-year-old?

“I loved it!” He’d done a maths degree, he notes, with the intention of becoming a teacher, so “I quite liked facts and figures and legal stuff”.

We’re interrupted by another little girl. Stan is camped out in an empty hall, surrounded by memorabilia, and classes are brought in to hear him speak (“My job is to think up stupid stuff and get people to pay for it!” he tells a bunch of kids as I’m leaving) – but now this little girl wants a notebook, described on the cover as “A notebook for super stories, perfect poems and silly songs”.

“Do you want a pen with it, or the last hat?” asks Stan as she hands over a couple of euros. The girl opts for a pen, but also wants him to autograph three pages in the notebook for herself and her friends. (Looks like he’s been signing autographs, one way or the other, since the 80s, I point out as he quickly scribbles his name on the first three pages.) The business side seems to suit him, the whole give-and-take of striking a bargain, even when it’s just peddling notebooks to youthful fans. It’s not like he needs the money, after more than 120 children’s books, dozens of children’s TV scripts, and the Beautiful South compilation (which includes some Housemartins songs) having sold “half a million copies or something stupid” in the UK alone – but “I’ve always been good at deals,” he tells me. “I’ve always been interested in negotiation. I like negotiating.”

I suspect that’s his main personality type – not so much the sensitive artist, certainly not the wild hedonist (his rock’n roll lifestyle doesn’t seem to have extended far beyond the odd pint of ale) but the hustler, the dealmaker. He recalls with relish his big break in the TV business, when he blagged his way into a job with a bigger company at twice the salary and half the working hours. Even his writing is a kind of deal-making. What’s the secret to writing a children’s book? “Always think of your audience,” he replies – and shows me, for instance, a book called Blood Wheels (it’s about an evil ghost car that chases children) which he wrote for a very specific niche, slightly older kids who can’t read very well, so the story is exciting enough for 11-year-olds but the style is geared to the reading ability of an eight-year-old. “Who am I writing for? Who is the person I’m writing for?” The content of the books is almost incidental; anything goes, as long as it’s not too boring or too unpleasant. He doesn’t seem to be the kind of writer who writes to educate children, or pass on specific messages; like he told that Junior School class, what he loves most of all is thinking up stupid stuff and getting people to pay for it.

Has he changed over time? What was he like at 18? “I was probably annoying,” he chuckles dryly. “I had a big mouth, I thought a lot of myself, I was quite big-headed. I now realise that if I met me at that age I’d want to punch him and say ‘You idiot!’ You know? ‘Be more thoughtful, be nicer’. So yes, I was probably not a very nice person”.

Was he ambitious?

“Yes, I think I was very ambitious. I wanted to be a pop star”. Most teenage musicians jam in their parents’ garage but Stan was out busking, playing in the streets from the age of 14 or 15. “I’m very driven,” he says. “Very mouthy and driven. So if I want to do something, I just keep on doing it till someone says ‘Go away’.”

What actually drives him, though? “Having fun,” he replies. It certainly isn’t money. The Housemartins used to give “quite a lot” of their money to charity – not to massive feed-the-world projects but, for instance, buying minivans for a local school or sponsoring a youth football team, “just stuff like that, that we thought would help the local community”. And then of course he walked away from music altogether in 1988, just as his former bandmates became superstars (Heaton formed the Beautiful South; bassist Norman Cook changed his focus to electronic music and became world-famous DJ Fatboy Slim). Why did he do it? He met his wife Amy, he shrugs, and it just made sense. “A lot of the time, if I’m honest, I just do stuff that’s fun, that I think I’ll enjoy. So I wanted to be a pop star. I did it, I enjoyed it, I got a bit bored. Met my wife, thought ‘I think I want to spend my time with her. Just marry her and spend our time raising children together’. So that’s what I did.”

He’s now 53, and has four kids and assorted grandkids (he was already a grandfather in his mid-40s). He’s ditched the enormous specs – which came from a charity shop, that being all he could afford at the time – and now sports a salt-and-pepper beard, but he’s still very thin, his stomach flat as a washboard, and carries himself with a voluble confidence. His patter is a mix of ingratiating smoothness (“You’re right,” he’ll say towards the end of a long answer, making it sound like he’s agreeing with me when in fact he’s making the point he always wanted to make) and somewhat transparent self-deprecation. Did he really think the Paul Heaton compilation would “sell, like, three copies”? Did he really think, when he took part in University Challenge a couple of years ago, that his celebrity team would get knocked out in the first round? (They made it to the final; Stan reads a lot, currently a book about quantum physics.) It’s charm, of course, and the style of a pushy young man who’s learned how to mellow with age; giving interviews is also a kind of deal-making.

“Now, I’ve got one last hat,” he informs yet another little girl who trots over in search of memorabilia, “or you can have a pen with your notepad. Which would you like?”

“A pen,” she replies at once.

“A pen. I like that you know what you want. I like that.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you very much. I hope you write lots of lovely stories in there, OK?”

Stan Cullimore also knows what he wants – and in fact his affable demeanour masks a man of strong principles, even if (he says) he no longer gets as angry as he used to. His parents were, and presumably are, quite religious – Dad was a lecturer in Human Biology, Mum a primary-school teacher; neither was thrilled when he chose to play guitar in a pop band, and they’re much happier now that he’s writing books and visiting schools – the kind of religion that emphasised self-reliance and helping the less fortunate, and dovetailed easily into left-wing idealism. The Housemartins were famously from Hull, their first album titled London 0, Hull 4, even though only one of the four was born there (Stan himself was born in Cambridge, as Ian Peter Cullimore) – but, for instance, Hull is next year’s City of Culture in the UK and Stan is quietly indignant at David Cameron’s attempt to co-opt the band into attending the festivities, because the PM is right-wing, hence the enemy. He still has a touch of the old Marxist, even if “I’ve definitely calmed down as I got older”.

Nowadays he lives near Bristol, having given up the middle-of-nowhere Scottish croft where he and Amy moved after the band split up. His old bandmates are still busy touring – Norman, aka Fatboy Slim, “goes onstage at three in the morning!” he marvels – but Stan himself lives a pretty quiet life, with the exception of the eight weeks a year when he visits schools like he’s doing today. “I spend a lot of time with my family when I’m home,” he says happily. “I like running, and cycling, and swimming. And I’ve got a Vespa. And I’ve got a dog. So, between them, those things keep me pretty busy.”

What would be his ideal day?

“My ideal day is a Sunday. We get up, I’ve got a lot of food in, I cook a huge dinner for everyone,” meaning his children – most of whom live nearby – and grandchildren. “I cook a dinner, everyone arrives. My son will help me cook a huge pork roast. Have dinner, go out for a walk with the dogs and the grandkids, take them to the park, then we go home and everyone sort of sits and chills and chats. And then they all go off, and I have a snooze!” He laughs out loud, at the blissful non-rock’n roll-ness of it all. “And in the evening I go out for a run, or a swim. That’s my perfect day.”

Most people, once part of a mega-successful pop band, would either stay in music or else spend a lifetime trading on past glories – but Stan Cullimore managed to do something else, leaving on his own terms, without acrimonious splits, then making it as a children’s author and TV writer which is arguably even harder than making it as a pop star. ‘On his own terms’ are the most important words in that sentence, he asserts: he’ll get “like a sulky kid” if he has to do what someone else tells him to do. “Perhaps I’m still a bit punchable now,” he muses, thinking back to his big-headed younger self. “But, to be honest, it doesn’t really happen. I’ve set my life up so that, most of the time, I decide what I want to do.”

The hall is filling up now. It’s Year 6, a warier, tougher crowd than their younger counterparts. “If I’m honest, I wouldn’t want to do [pop stardom] again, I much prefer this,” he tells me, eyeing his trusty ukulele. “I’m living the sort of quiet version of my dream. I get to do all the fun stuff, like sing songs and have a laugh – but I also get to go back to the hotel at two o’clock and go out for a walk, or a meal, or a swim!”. He heads to the front of the room, working his charm on the packed crowd of kids. “Does anyone here play football?” he shouts out genially, and all hands go up.

Not wasting a single moment has seen one man spend more than 20 years in education. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man intent on bringing excitement to adult learning

It takes me a while, sitting in his office at the European Institute of Management and Finance (EIMF) in Nicosia, to figure out who Marios Siathas reminds me of, then it hits me: he looks a bit like the actor Mark Ruffalo, Oscar-nominated this year for Spotlight. His eyes are brown, his hair graying at the temples; his smile is quick and easy (though he smiles with his mouth more than his eyes), revealing very white teeth. He’s 43, a few years younger than Mr Ruffalo – though oddly enough, just like the Hollywood actor, he went through a sudden and very serious health problem in his mid-30s. Ruffalo suffered a brain tumour that required surgery, and left him deaf in one ear; Marios suffered a brain aneurysm – literally from one day to the next – and almost died.

We’ll get to that later – but first, what does he do? This is where his life tends to diverge from Mark Ruffalo’s, adult education being quite a bit less glamorous than Hollywood red carpets and Oscar nominations. It’s one of life’s great mysteries that frivolous subjects get people very excited, whereas the really important issues – like the healthy functioning of a corporate economy – tend to leave them indifferent. Mention “the financial and professional services sector” to the person in the street and watch their eyes glaze over – yet, as Marios points out, that sector (with a slight assist from tourism) is the main reason why recession-hit Cyprus hasn’t turned into a basket case like some other nearby countries we could mention. It’s the only sector where employment has grown since the crisis, and also a sector that’s managed (by and large) to prevent clients from deserting us after politicians landed them with the infamous haircut, earning back the trust of the lucrative foreigners with assurances and personal relationships. “I mean, it’s a big thing having people from abroad trusting not the system, but the actual providers.”

Livening up adult education

Helping to train those providers has been his vocation for nearly two decades, first in a 14-year stint at the Cyprus International Institute of Management (CIIM) then, for the past year, as General Manager of the EIMF. The certificates on the waiting-room walls at the Institute’s premises – located above a Burger King, as if to flaunt its attachment to successful business models – speak of AAT-approved courses like ‘Accounting and Ethics’, just as the books on the bookshelves have titles like Game-Changing Strategies and Changing the Sales Conversation, and Marios’ own conversation is littered with acronyms like the IOC (Investment Operations Certificate) and ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) and how long it takes to become certified under ACAMS. That’s the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists, if you must know, and the answer is about six months.

Is it a business school or a management school? “Let’s say it’s an executive education centre.” There are Central Bank compliance courses, short-term training programmes on subjects like fund administration and management skills, and so on. “Last year,” he estimates, “we trained around 1,000 people”, whether youngsters doing professional studies or experienced people with jobs in the sector.

All well and good – but what makes Marios interesting is that he’s not too hung up on education in the strict sense of getting a degree that’ll lead to a ‘good job’. For him it’s more about self-fulfilment, an arrow in the quiver of personal development: he thinks education for kids should be experience-based as much as possible (don’t just talk to them about lions, take them to the zoo), and adult education consists as much of classroom interaction as learning specific facts. His own staff are urged to be interactive, not just in love with the sound of their own voice. “PowerPoint is like a killer in education, for me,” he says, growing animated. “It kills everything else, because you just show nice slides and talk, talk, talk, OK I covered my stuff, go home. I mean, how is that interesting to anyone?”

The idea isn’t just – as so often in Cyprus – to go and study for the sake of studying, especially if studying is all you end up doing. Sticking to a pre-ordained script doesn’t serve anyone. “I interviewed 50 people in the last month,” he muses, “because I’m looking for staff now. They all have super degrees – and they’re all wasted, because [the graduates] come back immediately. They don’t bring anything new to it. It’s like OK, fine, you did nice studies, you were on a nice campus, you met nice people – but you’re not bringing something!” He himself has a Bachelor’s in Marketing and Management from Western Kentucky University (he also did an MBA some years later, at the University of Guelph in Ontario) – but his CV also shows, quite surprisingly, that he managed a Steak n Shake in Kentucky, a fast-food franchise restaurant that was open 24 hours, while he was studying. It’s one thing working as a waiter or dishwasher for some extra cash – but managing a restaurant, getting employees to respect your 21-year-old self, handling the various daily crises that inevitably arise, all while doing a degree? That’s quite impressive.

Admittedly he had some experience, having virtually grown up in his father’s restaurant (the now-defunct Gardenias) in Larnaca. There were four siblings, three boys and a girl (another brother was born when Marios was 18), and they all worked in the business – though the way he recalls his childhood says a lot about the kind of person he is. “I remember from five, six, seven years old talking to all kinds of people at the restaurant. Tourists, Cypriots, anyone. I was the kid that was always there”. His dad had to physically force him out every evening, he admits with a chuckle. Later, in his teens, he spun records as a DJ at a tourist disco and worked at the Flamingo Hotel in winter, when the restaurant wasn’t so busy. “I was kind of intrigued by meeting all these different people… At age 15, I probably had more friends outside Cyprus” – pen-pals with whom he corresponded in those pre-internet days – “than in Cyprus”.

Even now, that’s the way he comes across: as a people person, a positive person, a doer. Inadvertently, his style reveals a basic truth about the financial services sector where he now plies his trade – that it’s really not too different from the hospitality sector where he started out (he worked in restaurants until his MBA, when he did a project on cross-training employees and became interested in education). Any good accountant or corporate lawyer has to know the rules inside out, of course – but they also need to be personable, positive, pleasant with clients: in a word, trustworthy. Trust comes from friendship, even if it’s just a business friendship. One of his passions is travel, says Marios – but he doesn’t tell me of adventure holidays and white-water rafting, though he’s done his share of all that (he visited 40 of the 50 states while living in America); instead he cites the pleasure of meeting old friends, when he happens to find himself in Greece or Russia or Dubai. “I think I have a friend everywhere I go.”

His style, in other words, is gregarious, extrovert. He’s a motivator, which is hard work. People are easy enough to excite, but excitement fades: “To keep that motivation going, you have to be in the right environment. Work environment, family environment”. Head-space is important, being psychologically in the right place for ideas to take root. He tells me a story from his own life: he always used to listen to the news while driving to work in the morning – but the litany of other people’s problems brought him down, leaving him crushed by the time he arrived at the office. Now he listens to music instead.

Like his students, Marios has to push himself. Adult education sounds dull – I’m sorry, it just does – but there’s actually something quite valiant in going back to school when you don’t have to. Our lives, after all, are so busy; it’s surely easier to settle, or go with the flow. His own life is almost completely taken up with work and family, from 6am when he wakes up to 8.30pm when his seven-year-old son goes to bed – but he still tries for more, both professionally and personally. Life shouldn’t just be “task-based,” he asserts fervently – life should be about “looking at more than just what I need to do today. What can I do tomorrow? What can I learn? Can I do something else? I mean, you ask people ‘Can you tell me something else you want to do?’,” he notes, shaking his head, “and they’re like ‘I don’t know, I think what I’m doing is fine’. ‘What excites you?’ and they’re like ‘I don’t know, it pays the bills’. Well OK, if that excites you…”

He himself is restless, always has been. He was restless as a kid, chatting to all and sundry and longing to get out of Cyprus. He’s restless now, sticking his neck out with a personal project like the EIMF (admittedly, it’s a partnership) after feeling like he’d peaked at CIIM. “If you don’t stick your neck out when you’re 43, when are you going to do it?” he asks rhetorically – but money wasn’t the driver, he adds, it never has been. It’s his restless energy, exactly what you’d expect in a man who enjoys travelling and skydiving and snowboarding, and freediving in the sea and trekking in the mountains.

Just above his forehead is a long thin scar to remind him of that restlessness – an old childhood scar, incurred after bouncing around on his bed a bit too energetically. Further up, partially hidden by his hair, is another scar, this one L-shaped and much larger: it’s the result of that evening, around eight years ago, when he was out playing football with friends and suddenly felt ‘the worst headache of your life’, as they say in the literature. His shoulders went numb, he was nauseous, his head felt like it was about to explode. “I owe a lot to the night doctor in the ER,” he says now – because doctors often fail to spot a brain aneurysm, sending patients home with headache medication where the blood clot in their head promptly ruptures and they die instantly. This particular doctor was persistent, doing tests (including a CAT scan and an MRI) until the problem was revealed – but Marios’ ordeal still wasn’t over, because the operation isn’t always successful and often leaves neurological after-effects, ranging from blindness to paralysis, even when it is.

He was lucky, getting off with only the L-shaped scar to remind him of his near-death experience. Did it change his outlook? Not really, he shrugs anti-climactically. “I’m not going to say ‘I saw the light’ or anything”. After all, he’d always been the kind of person who didn’t want to waste a single minute of his life; having its fragility confirmed merely made him more so. I do wonder, however – though he denies it – if becoming a father so soon afterwards didn’t carry a subconscious tinge of ‘Time’s running out’.

Then again, he’s always been relaxed about such things. Marios Siathas has spent 20 years in education, yet his own education almost didn’t happen. The family weren’t rich, his dad – though supportive in theory – urged him to stay with the restaurant, none of his siblings (except the youngest brother, years later) ever went to university – yet he never got frustrated, or doubted that he’d go and study eventually. “I wanted to do it, I had my mind set on it and that’s it,” he recalls quite simply. “It was going to happen.”

Has he changed since then? Not really, he replies serenely; the “basic ingredients” are still there – that mix of extroversion, confidence, personal development and restlessness. “If I’m assigned a task,” he explains, trying to describe his personality, “if you put me in a room and say ‘Do this job’… I will usually look at it and say ‘OK, this is what you do now. But can we do it differently?’”. He chuckles, as if at his own audacity: “Maybe I’m wrong, at the end of the day, but I will explore. I’ll get into this job. I will not just do the job because someone told me to. I will do the job – but I will put some of the Marios style in the job!”. ‘Marios Style’, an exciting new biopic starring Mark Ruffalo.

Eleni Polykarpou Kililis is 62, and seriously ill with a disease that weakens the muscles, Myasthenia Gravis.

She needs expensive medicine in order to “live with dignity”, which the state will no longer supply to her and other patients.

But can sick people simply demand any kind of medicine and expect to get it – or is there a limit, especially in times of crisis?

Related story: Patients are ‘dying over lack of drugs’

THEO PANAYIDES meets an art lecturer, historian and writer known for his work with the Cyprus Academy of Art, established by his father

Looking back over your life, I ask Michael Paraskos, at what age would you say you started to sort yourself out, to feel comfortable in your own skin, to feel like you’d finally come to a good place? He thinks about it, sitting at a table in the Centre for Visual Arts and Research in Nicosia. “That was last year,” he replies, and laughs uproariously.

His roars of laughter are a frequent punctuation mark in our conversation, sometimes accompanying a joke or funny story but more often following a self-deprecating remark (“I can’t imagine anything I’ve said will be of use to you!” he offers by way of farewell) or signalling some inner confusion. You might call it nervous laughter – and I wonder for a while if the nervousness may be due to the imminent launch of the Othello’s Island Conference, an annual symposium on mediaeval and Renaissance art and history which he plays a central role in co-ordinating, but I don’t think so. For one thing, the conference is a notable success story (there were around 80 speakers this year, many from top American universities) and nothing to be nervous about, having become quite established on what he calls “the circuit” of academic gatherings. “There are a group of, a group of conferences – I was going to say ‘scholarships’, for some reason,” he starts to explain, and bursts out laughing again.

The other reason why Michael’s nervousness (if that’s what it is) seems unrelated to the conference, however, is simply because it appears to be his style. I suspect he’s been nervous all his life, where ‘nervous’ equals sensitive, creative, heart-on-sleeve, a bit uncertain, quietly nursing bruises and traumatic experiences. “I have a sort of guilt complex,” he admits at one point, adding wryly: “As you might have noticed”.

Much of it relates to the Cyprus College of Art, founded in 1969 – the year of Michael’s birth – by his late father Stass Paraskos, one of the best-known Cypriot artists of his generation. Stass came back from England in 1989 to run the college, in the village of Lempa; there was also a site in Larnaca which Michael himself administered for about 10 years, till his father’s passing two years ago. Since then, he’s gone back to living in England permanently and back to academia (he once used to teach at the University of Hull), lecturing on Art History at Imperial College London and organising a research programme called ‘Art of the Crusades: A Re-Evaluation’ at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. He’s also written a book, In Search of Sixpence, a fact-and-fiction hybrid which he reluctantly admits was “kind of cathartic” in working through his feelings about Stass’ death.

Michael is soft-spoken, with a rounded, dough-like face. His expression is languid, careless without being carefree, his hair abundant on top and short at the sides. His ringtone is the music from the BBC World Service, presumably used ironically. There’s something boyish about him – or more specifically Lost Boy-ish, the boy who never grew up. One gets a sense that he’s still the boy adrift in Canterbury (where Stass taught at the Institute of Art & Design) as the youngest of five, in a family that was never poor but not exactly rich either – much of the salary went to subsidise the college in Cyprus – and the fearful boy sent to Sturry Secondary Modern, a school he hated. Was he bullied? “Oh yeah, that’s part of going to a secondary modern school”. True, but he might’ve been on the other side of the fence. “No, I wasn’t a bully,” he replies, and bursts out laughing at the mere thought. “Take my word for it!” he adds, and laughs again.

Secondary moderns (later replaced by comprehensives) were part of the deeply divided British educational system at the time, with the quote-unquote smarter kids sent to grammar schools and the rest dispatched to these so-called “sink schools”, where their second-class status was drummed into them from the start: “You knew you were a failure from Day 1. Because they told you! So they weren’t pleasant places to be if you were into art, or books, or anything like that”. At one point, young Michael told a teacher that he wanted to be a journalist when he grew up, “and I was told not to be so stupid, and go think of something else to do… I was absolutely lost. I knew I wanted to be a writer, even at school, but it wasn’t the environment [where] you could actually explore that”.

That’s the other reason why In Search of Sixpence was therapeutic for him – not just in channelling the turmoil he felt at the time, but in validating the urge to write which he’d felt all his life. “It’s made me think of myself as a writer, for the first time. To the point where I can actually say to people ‘That’s what I do’.” Before that, he’d always defined himself as a teacher, a lecturer, sometimes an art historian; he did write, mostly art criticism, but “I didn’t like to say that’s what I did, because I didn’t quite feel I deserved it, [I was] kind of pretending to be this thing. So I’m knocking on the door of 50 now, and I finally feel I can say ‘I’m a writer’ after all these years”.

This, presumably, is why it was only last year that he started feeling truly comfortable in his own skin. (He’s like a young man in his 20s, only just starting to find himself, I point out, and he laughs very hard: “A little bit backward!”.) Leaving Cyprus also helped, a fact he admits openly if not very happily. Going back to England full-time “took away a lot of the stresses of working in Cyprus. I found Cyprus a very difficult environment to work in. And I’ve made no secret of that.”

In what way?

“Just trying to get anything done here, trying to get help, trying to get assistance from people whose job it is to assist you, is so difficult”. He shakes his head at the memory: “After doing that for 10 years directly myself, and seeing Stass do it for 30 years before that – it just grinds you down, you just give up, you cannot cope with that… I just don’t know how people cope with Cyprus,” he goes on, laughing his nervous laugh, “I find it very difficult. I find money is too dominant, I think people are far too venal. There are a lot of very good, talented people here who are not given a chance to show their full expression of creativity”. It’s not just artists, either: “If you’re an entrepreneur here, just the bureaucracy drags you down. Why would you bother setting up a business in Cyprus, when you can go to London and – well, it’s just a damn sight easier?”.

Michael speaks so softly I’m almost having to crane forward now, as if sharing a shameful secret that demands to be shared. “I do feel that I – this is getting heavy now! – I do feel that I’ve tried to love Cyprus for 45 years, and it’s never loved me back. And I don’t mean in terms of accolades or anything like that. I just mean in terms of day-to-day life.”

In his youth he tended to idealise the dysfunctional motherland, a mistake never made by his father: “Stass had no illusions about Cyprus,” he says firmly. Why did Stass come back, then? “He thought he could make the college so successful that it made a difference to society here. He was very much an idealist, and a believer in Art’s capacity to change society.”

Well, I point out, the college is well-known in artistic circles.

Michael shrugs, as if to say that dreams have a bad habit of outpacing reality. “I spoke to him a lot at the end,” he recalls, “and he sounded very disillusioned to me. He wasn’t positive. He didn’t think the place would survive – and maybe it won’t, who knows?”. A little later, we return to the subject: “My – disconnection from Cyprus is a consequence of Stass dying,” admits Michael quietly. “If Stass hadn’t died, I would still be doing what I was doing. But the awful truth of that is I’m more comfortable with what I’m doing now – and therefore happier – than I have ever been. I mean, I would change History in an instant if I could, to have Stass back and do all that I gave up doing, but the truth is I am more comfortable. That leaves you feeling very guilty.”

Was his death very sudden?

“Death is sudden for everybody. Even if you’re prepared by the doctor, it’s still a shock – because you don’t believe it. Some part of you thinks ‘No, it’ll be all right’. And it doesn’t matter if somebody’s in their 30s, their 60s, their 90s, you still feel it, it still feels too soon, you still feel shock. So it felt sudden. The end was quite sudden, but it was also very – it was a very messy end. He didn’t pass peacefully in his sleep. And seeing that was horrible. Profoundly horrible…”

It occurs to me that I’ve caught Michael Paraskos at a strange time in his life: the wounds of his recent experience still fresh, the full import of his new transformation as a writer still unresolved. Yet I also get a feeling – perhaps mistakenly – that something has been constant for most of his four-and-something decades, a sense of never quite being at ease, always slightly out of place: the youngest in a big family, a misfit at school, a foreigner in Cyprus yet not entirely British either, all subtle hurts to his sensitive nature. Art has been many things to him, but part of it has surely been a kind of escape – so it’s fitting that escape is part of what he treasures in Art, not in the mindless way of a Hollywood blockbuster but something more sublime altogether.

“In all artforms,” he declares, “there has to be – and this is very important, I think, now, because we live in an age when people have destroyed this concept – there has to be a place for Beauty”. Something transcendent, he explains, something transformative; something “that takes us out of this world… There is a part of the human psyche, the human spirit, that needs that – almost that vision of Paradise. So maybe that’s what excites me in Art, a vision of Paradise”. That’s what’s lacking now, he asserts, not just in the venal society of Cyprus but also the post-modern, post-everything society of Britain: a place for Beauty, a glimpse of something to strive towards – even if it’s incompatible with our current way of doing things, even if indeed it’s unattainable. “I hesitate to define myself as an anarchist,” adds Michael, reminding me that his Wikipedia page has a whole section devoted to his work on that subject, “but that’s my definition of anarchism”.

An aesthetic anarchist looking for transcendence. A cultural event manager on Othello’s island. A late-blooming writer who found his vocation at 47. A dutiful son who followed – and finally buried – his father in a land that never loved him back. Michael fits all these descriptions, to some extent – though his actual life is modest enough, living in South London and generally keeping a low profile.

What does he do for fun? Long pause. “I’m very boring. I talk a lot about anarchism, but I’m actually very conservative! I like to go and see old plays. I like my Shakespeare, I like my Ibsen and Chekhov and things like that. And I have an allotment” – he gives another of his massive laughs – “I grow vegetables!”. He’s not a clubber or a party animal, never has been. Does he go out to restaurants? “Well, I just don’t have the money,” he replies. “I’m not a rich man in any way”. He does have one, endearingly eccentric vice: he collects vintage bow-ties, the kind you might see in The Great Gatsby – a somehow perfect image for an artist-by-nature who loves elegance and beauty for their own sake, irrespective of social utility. “I don’t get to wear them very often,” he admits of his natty collection. “It doesn’t go down well in South London, somehow!”. And roars with laughter again.

A positive attitude has led to a charmed life for the global brand manager of Nicosia based Wargaming. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man finding creativity in the capital

Ask most people for their favourite films and they’ll hem and haw and reply ‘It depends on my mood’, or ‘I like all kinds of films’. Ask Al King, and he’ll tell you – straight out, no messing. His all-time favourite is A Matter of Life and Death, the wonderfully whimsical Powell-Pressburger fantasy from 1946; second on the list is a tie between Taxidermia, a gleefully extreme Hungarian film from about 10 years ago, and Lord of the Rings. He also loves the work of Italian horror director Dario Argento, and can (and does) expound at length on his favourite shots from Deep Red (1975) or Tenebre (1982).

world of tanks

What’s important here isn’t so much Al’s choice of films as the confidence with which he proclaims them – though film is undoubtedly one of his passions. “I’m more into film than I am games,” he admits, adding sheepishly: “But I’m completely obsessed by music”. He worked in film for about two years, as marketing director at 20th Century Fox, and also did a stint at an online casino company where he learned useful things like search-engine managing and how the Google algorithm works – but the bulk of his career has been in gaming, at Electronic Arts in the 90s and now, for the past five years, as global brand director at Wargaming, the Belarus-born company whose global headquarters, a sail-shaped glass skyscraper, has become a Nicosia landmark.

He can talk the talk when pressed, as when he describes the work he did in rebranding the Wargaming.net logo: “It wasn’t underpinned by a clear brand-positioning statement and a set of brand values, and indeed a consumer proposition”. Fluency in marketing jargon, however, is only part of the story when it comes to success. Lots of people know the jargon, but not everyone has Al’s personal style – the aforementioned confidence, though ‘confidence’ is a vague term for what exactly he brings to the table.

I feel it straight away, when he opens the door of his Nicosia flat (not especially large, for an executive of a big corporation, but totally redeemed by an amazing roof garden). His physical presence sets the tone – tall, square-faced, long-haired, with a booming voice and distinctive mutton-chop sideburns. He’s only been in Cyprus since November, and is slightly apprehensive about the summer: “I live in fear of the heat, because I’ve put on a bit of weight of late,” he says – but in fact he looks trim, and indeed he’s very fit. He plays golf and cycles regularly, not yet in the mountains but up and down the Grammikos cycle path in Nicosia (it’s 20 kilometres to the end and back; he does it in one hour). He’s a rugby man from way back, having played at school and university. All of this is relevant – because athletes, with their affinity for hard work and teamwork, tend to make good executives. He studied Ergonomics at Loughborough, he tells me – not just a good university, but one where they play lots of sport: “Business loves universities that are good and play sport”.

Americans might call him a ‘jock’ – but that carries a hint of the brainless bully, which is not at all the vibe he exudes. He’s assertive without being aggressive: laid-back, reliable-looking, a safe pair of hands. He’s conflict-averse, to the extent that he sometimes worries about being a coward in a crisis situation, though in fact what tends to happen is that “a switch goes” and he becomes a different person when push comes to shove. At school (King’s Grantham, a boarding school in Lincolnshire) he was good academically, amassing 12 O Levels and five A Levels. He’s probably a bit of a geek. On a shelf in his flat is a Game of Thrones board game (he and some colleagues were playing a couple of nights ago). In a corner, past an astrological chart on the wall – Al is a Capricorn – are about 200 vinyl records, a small part of his vast collection (most are still in London; he’s only brought the ones that he felt would be appropriate to life in Cyprus, bands like The Eagles, Little Feat and the Doobie Brothers). His front room in London is awash in rock, jazz and metal LPs, cassettes and CDs – “all alphabetised by genre” – as well as books, VHS tapes and DVDs. He’s not just some marketing guy: he’s also a BAFTA member, getting to vote on the best films of the year, and an occasional music journalist, writing for mags like Classic Rock and Metal Hammer.

“I’m just a normal bloke that’s been working hard and thinking positively,” booms Al himself, sitting upstairs in the roof garden as evening dissolves into night. The aforementioned confidence is partly a confidence about himself, what he’s done and what he stands for. He has some regrets, to be sure. His dad (a chief technician in the RAF) died too soon, before Al really got to know him as an adult. His first marriage ended in divorce – though it did produce two children, 20-year-old Charlotte and 17-year-old Alexander (his wife Andrea has a daughter by her own first marriage, which is why she hasn’t joined him in Cyprus). Mostly, however, he’s a sanguine, convivial presence. Positive energy is a big part of his makeup; so, I suspect, is having fun.

Golf is fun, Game of Thrones board games are fun. All kinds of things are fun. “I did well at school, yeah, but to be honest – and my mum would chuckle at this point, as would various headmasters – though I always understood the importance of school and exams, there was all this fun stuff outside of it. Like, you know, films, rugby, cycling, swimming, long walks, drinking, going for curries, whatever it is. So I burned through my studies, and got it done, so I could do the other stuff. I didn’t get a single A but I got, like, 10 Bs and two Cs”. Parties are fun too. The night before our interview – we talk on a Sunday – there was quite a cocktail party going on here (“I was making mojitos and Moscow Mules”). Al’s first job out of university was as a travelling salesman at Coca-Cola, its finest perk being that it supplied him with a car and an expense account: “Anywhere the party was in England,” he recalls, “I would drive there”.

What about turning 50, a landmark he reached last year? “It was a breeze,” he says airily. “You read stuff about ‘50 is the new 40’, and they all say life begins at 40 – and some of that is true, or it seems to be for me. Yeah, 40 was cool, 50’s great!”. Best of all, his 50th birthday allowed him to throw not one but two parties – the first one, for immediate family, in a small village pub in the east of England, the second one (the “big boozy wild crazy one”) in a rock bar in London, “and it was, like, head-banging and hard rock all night”. He chuckles: “So the 50th was brilliant. And then the whole of last year, it felt like a magic year. It started well and just kept on getting better and better. And I think, in hindsight, I’ll look to moving to Cyprus at the end of 2015 as being one of those great things that I did”.

Wargaming’s impressive Nicosia HQ

He’d resisted at first, and not just because it meant living alone in a foreign country. For four years previously he’d been living in London but working in Paris, getting on the Eurostar on Monday morning and back again Friday evening, toggling between two of the world’s great cities. Nor was he simply living in London, his years of success as a marketing man granting access to glitzy premieres and award ceremonies: “In London,” he explains matter-of-factly, “I’m unbelievably well-connected”. The obvious fear was that Cyprus would blunt his edge and sap his creativity – but if anything, he says, it’s been nurturing it, at least so far. “It’s a life-stage thing,” he shrugs. “I would never have moved here until I was 50”. Right now, however, a few years on the island make sense – and of course there’s Wargaming, a company to which he seems devoted.

They’ve made quite an impact, I note, citing the combination of the firm’s splashy entrance (that skyscraper!) with their unusual Belorussian provenance and the fact that their name was unknown to non-gamers; people weren’t entirely sure what to make of them. Al admits the company may have been slightly opaque at first (“The commercial environment in Belarus is very different to here in the West, and a little bit of secrecy is sometimes the smart way to play it”), but they’re now totally transparent and approachable – and of course 150 million registered users for ‘World of Tanks’, their flagship game, speak for themselves, even if only a fraction are actually paid users. Most gaming works on a “free to play” model, meaning you can play the game for free but pay (if you wish) for the add-ons; the days when companies could blithely charge for packaged products, or even subscriptions, are long gone, for better or worse. “The consumer has won the game,” says Al without rancour – but “there’s still money to be made in the entertainment industry, even online”; especially with smart guys like himself leading the charge.

Al King seems to radiate both the confidence of a successful middle-aged man and the jaunty style of an eternal adolescent. On the one hand, he comes with solid credentials and even won an award for pioneering market research in the late 90s (he was among the first to demonstrate that gaming appealed to all sorts of people, not just the stereotype of the awkward young man with no life). On the other, he still keeps up with music like he did in his teens – listening to three or four new albums every week – and uses the word ‘cool’ without any hint of irony. On the one hand, he plays golf, like any successful executive; on the other, he spurns the “big chi-chi courses” between Limassol and Paphos, with that “sort of golf attitude that you get. They’re gorgeous courses, but the vibe’s not cool”. He prefers Vikla, a smaller, funkier, family-run course set in a hidden valley.

Even his look is quite cool. Did he always have those sideburns? Only for the past few years, he reports cheerfully. “I had the long hair before, but I didn’t have the chops”. He’d grown a beard years ago, when Lord of the Rings came out – “I became obsessed with Aragorn, so I grew the short stubbly beard and it worked” – then grew one again more recently, just for fun. He was shaving it off one day “and I just thought, let’s see how it looks. So I just did this bit first” – he mimes shaving off the middle part, leaving just the sideburns – “and wiped off the foam, and it was like F**KIN’ BINGO!!! THAT is what you’ve finally been building towards!”. Loud, uproarious laughter. “Everyone loves them,” he adds happily. “People either call me Lemmy or Wolverine. By the way, Lemmy…” he pauses solemnly and raises his glass to the late Motorhead frontman. “A great man. I met him many times, he was a wonderful man. Very misunderstood.”

Al has met his share of celebs, mostly rock and metal musicians. He once chatted to Marilyn Manson about Arundel Castle (“I love castles!”), recommending that Marilyn stay at the George Hotel and book the suite. That’s his world, lest we forget – the world of well-travelled media people chatting with rock stars on equal terms. It remains to be seen if the roof-garden flat in Nicosia can match life in London, then again he’s always tended to play things by ear. “I’ve never had those kinds of really clear goals,” he tells me. “They’ve more been to do with, you know, ‘Stay healthy. Live right. Be productive. Be creative’. And out of that comes a version of success that I sort of define on my own terms.”

“I’m a very positive thinker,” he adds fervently. “I do believe it’s possible to sort of manipulate the universe in your favour by positive thinking. It’s a bit of a hippy thing, it’s a bit The Secret, it’s the unprovable law of attraction – but I think there’s something to it. So I vibe out as much positivity as poss, and I do find Life pays it back. And the better you get at it, the more it pays back”. Al King smiles, lost in the ultimate sales pitch, a marketing man’s fondest dream: a formula that’ll persuade the universe to support your own personal brand. Tell you one thing, it takes confidence.

A recent survey has shown that 77% of Cypriots aged 18-35 don’t intend to vote in the May 22 parliamentary elections, citing apathy and disenchantment with the whole political system.

Following that rather worrying statistic, we asked a selection of young people at the University of Cyprus for their comments.

Jamie’s Italian is opening in Nicosia in a few days. THEO PANAYIDES meets the lively female chef in charge of bringing a cooking giant to our doorstep

Jamie Oliver isn’t just a chef: he’s a one-man revolution, a culinary Jacobin. “He makes a difference. He’s one of the only chefs that I can, hand on heart, say actually makes a difference to the world,” says Charlie Barr – and admittedly Charlie is biased, being the Operations Chef for Jamie’s Italian International (the overseas arm of Jamie Oliver’s Italian-inspired restaurants), but she has a point. Jamie’s strategy – or just his approach – has been twofold, a double whammy: first, to demystify cooking with a boyish, unthreatening, unpretentious style; second, to use his position in the hearts of TV foodies to evangelise for good eating habits, his latest (successful) proposal being a UK ‘sugar tax’ on soft drinks.

Jamie Oliver outside another of his Italian restaurants

There are currently 22 international branches of Jamie’s Italian, ranging from India to Brazil to Dubai to Australia; No. 23 opens in a few days in Nicosia. Like the others, it comes with a Jamie seal of approval, not just in terms of food but also “ethos”, as Charlie puts it. “No banned e-numbers [i.e. preservatives], they’re not allowed in the business. Everything’s higher-welfare or free-range. Sustainability. All our fish is sustainable. Everything, every item on the menu, must adhere to Jamie’s ethos”. How this squares with using local produce, which they plan to do “as much as humanly possible”, is a moot point – though, if it ends up nudging local suppliers to up their game, I guess ‘we’re winning’, as Charlie might say.

That’s the way she talks, by the way, two of her favourite words being ‘brilliant’ and ‘fantastic’ (or sometimes ‘faaan-tastic’). She’s 35, five years younger than her current boss, but has much the same direct, unaffected, enthusiastic demeanour – a round-faced bespectacled woman, five-foot-two in her chef’s whites with their rolled-up trouser legs, who’s overseen 17 of the 23 international openings for Jamie’s Italian. She’s been here for about two weeks, training the staff – the training including six days of “food passion”, where everyone tries everything on the menu and runs around the room pretending to be free-range chickens – and hasn’t had time to go out much, but did have dinner at a place near the Cleopatra Hotel a couple of nights ago, which we eventually deduce to have been Barrique Wine & Deli. “I ate there,” she declares firmly. Pause. “Brilliant.”

Charlie has a hearty-but-sensible air that seems too down-to-earth for a big-city girl. She looks like she might’ve grown up on a farm, honing her cookery skills on fresh-laid eggs and veggies with the soil still clinging to them – but in fact she was born and raised in Birmingham, the daughter of two nurses, and didn’t even know (or care) that cooking was something you could do for a living until her mid-teens. It’s actually a remarkable story – because being a chef is a vocation, a difficult and highly-skilled job, and Charlie had quite a CV as a kitchen chef before joining Jamie’s in this more organisational capacity: she started out at Rick Stein’s (“one of the best – well, the best fish restaurant in the UK”) and later worked as junior sous-chef at Simpson’s, a Michelin-starred restaurant. Many would assume that someone cooking at this level has been cooking, or at least madly interested in food, her whole life.

Not Charlie Barr, it turns out. For a while her mum was actually worried about her, because she ate nothing but bananas. Even in school, in cookery class, she only ever made fruit salad, because it was easy. “I had no idea,” she admits, looking back at how her life has turned out. “I had no idea this is what I wanted to do, I had no idea. Even now, my family are like ‘Well, you weren’t like this when you were a child. Where has this come from?’. And I really don’t know”. Young Charlie was a tomboy, forever climbing trees and getting into trouble. “I was always playing hockey. Or I was over at the park. Or I was up to some kind of mischief. Or I was on my bike, or just hanging out”. The family ate quite healthily – Mum was “militant” about vegetables – and sometimes went out for meals, but she never quite made the connection as a child. “I didn’t even know chef-ing was a job.”

The “epiphany” – or just stroke of dumb luck – happened when she was 16, and working part-time as a waitress in a hotel. “The chef at the time got a bit mediaeval,” she recalls, “and fired all his chefs, and I was just the first person in his eyeline. And he was like ‘You! Do you want to come and help in the kitchen?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, cool, let’s give it a go’.” She might’ve previously shown some vague interest in the life of the kitchen – I assume that chef wasn’t completely irresponsible – but mostly it was just a shot in the dark. On Monday she was given a quick tour, “and then on Tuesday I was on my own. And I loved it, I absolutely loved it! Cooking chose me, I didn’t choose it.”

A year later, she was on her way professionally – mostly by fetching Rick Stein a cold beer. Charlie was backstage at the Good Food Show in Birmingham, doing work experience for a Food Preparation course (“You know when they say ‘Here’s one I made earlier’? Well, I made the ‘earlier’”), and Stein was among the VIPs. “I just went up to him and said ‘Can I have a job?’ – and he said ‘Yeah. Get me a cold beer’. So I did. And I got a job.”

Does that happen a lot in the world of food?

She laughs: “Probably not”. I suppose it could’ve been a disaster, a teenager with barely a year’s experience in the kitchen of a top fish restaurant – especially because (a little detail she may have neglected to tell Rick Stein) Charlie was, and is, allergic to fish. Even now, though she takes a pill every day to reduce the symptoms, she can’t handle seafood for any length of time without gloves and, though she can have a little taste, she definitely can’t eat it – yet “I love cooking fish, it’s my favourite thing to do. You should try my acqua pazza, it’s aMAzing!”. Others apparently agree: Charlie has won Seafood Chef of the Year twice, despite being unable to do more than sample her creations. Food, it turns out, is stranger than fiction.

In a way, she personifies Jamie Oliver’s mission to democratise food, living proof that gourmet cooking doesn’t require being born in the ‘right’ sort of family and undergoing years of Cordon Bleu training – that a know-nothing girl of 16 can walk into a kitchen and cook well, right off the bat. Then again, the truth may be exactly the opposite – not that anyone can be a chef but that, as Charlie puts it, “you’re either a chef or you’re not”. She’s a bit like the rat in Ratatouille, an unlikely chef with a natural gift – but don’t imagine for a moment that what she does is easy.

“You know, I think people watch TV and think ‘Oh I can do that, no problem’,” she muses, sitting outside the restaurant with cars zooming by on Griva Digeni. “[But] the reality is, you’re doing it all day. It’s hot. You’re going to cut yourself. And it’s high-pressured as well, because every single dish needs to be perfect. And then you’ve got big names attached to it, and you don’t want to let them down… So yeah, it’s hard. It’s not for everybody.”

I assume you need to be thick-skinned as well, I note, thinking of explosive Gordon Ramsay types hurling expletives at beleaguered staff – but she shakes her head.

“Life’s changed,” she replies. “Kitchens aren’t the same anymore. It used to be very hot-headed and angry, and it’s not anymore. I don’t believe in that,” she adds firmly. “I believe you have to have a structured kitchen – almost like the army, you have to have structure, a bit of a hierarchy. But the whole – demeaning people? It’s not cool. It’s not right. And it’s something I don’t believe in, and I sure as hell know that Jamie doesn’t believe in it”. Instead, the trick is to “grow people”, spotting their strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has them; Charlie herself is “absolutely rubbish at desserts” – though she did once create a cappuccino panna cotta that had Raymond Blanc himself asking for the recipe – and “the boys” on the Jamie International team are all types of people from all types of backgrounds. One trained as a lawyer, another has a Masters in Languages. Some have a lot of “theatre and passion”, others work quietly and keep to themselves. It takes all kinds.

Talk of ‘the boys’ does invoke one thing that hasn’t really changed, however: the world of chefs is still very male-dominated. “For a long time, you have to prove yourself [as a woman]. You almost have to cook better, cook harder, cook faster.” This would be the place for a self-pitying rant about entrenched sexism – but Charlie prefers to go for laughs instead. What’s it like, training a kitchen full of men? “You just use it to your favour,” she shrugs. How so? “Oh it’s easy, you just use guilt. So instead of getting angry, just say ‘I’m really disappointed’. And that’s, like, straight to the heart! They’re like [small male voice] ‘I’m so sorry…’” She laughs delightedly. “I can’t ever reach anything, either! And my whites never fit!” That’s why her trouser legs are rolled up, because she’s wearing men’s whites (the ladies’ version only comes in a couple of styles, both ugly) and most men tend to be bigger than five-foot-two.

I suspect that’s quite a typical moment, though – the fact that she doesn’t embark on a lecture but instead makes a joke of adversity, and simply resolves to work harder. I also suspect that made a difference in how she managed to land such top jobs as an inexperienced youngster: talent is obviously important – but a kitchen is also a hothouse, a family, and she seems like she’s fun to be around. “I’m funny. I like humour,” confirms Charlie. “I don’t think you can survive without humour”. She’s sometimes tempted to leave the UK, especially with all her recent travelling (Brazil is a mad place), but “I quite like the sarcasm of England, and the sense of humour”. She’s a livewire, fond of “a laugh and a giggle”. What does she do for fun? “I play hockey.” I’d have thought something more demanding, like chess. “Oh god no.” She makes a dismissive ‘pfft’ noise: “Boring! Anyway, I can’t stand still for more than 20 minutes”.

Jamie Oliver is like that as well, a bit of a card, a bit ADD – or at least he’s like that on TV, though Charlie emphatically insists that what you see is what you get: “That’s him! That is him. What you see on TV is him. Omigod, no. No, no, no, what you see on TV is the guy in person. He probably even tones it down for TV!”. Then again, Jamie – for all his bonhomie – is also the lecturing type, the line between food education and just plain preachiness being quite a thin one. Charlie, predictably, demurs when I ask why they want to make people feel guilty for having a can of Coke: “I think it’s to make people aware, not to make them feel guilty”. After all, she points out, the restaurant has a dessert menu – and Jamie’s “the first one to like a bit of cake, or a doughnut”. He doesn’t want sugar banned, just consumed in moderation. “You know,” she adds, “how we used to eat”.

That’s how the Barrs used to eat back in Birmingham: no white bread, no fast food (“In the 80s? In Birmingham?” she gapes, as though I’d asked her if they surfed the internet), no pizzas, sweets on Sundays only, maybe the occasional fish and chips on a Friday. That was a whole other life for Charlie Barr, and the path from that life to this one – sitting in the Nicosia sunshine, getting ready for her 17th restaurant opening – was both unlikely and startlingly, almost implausibly easy, indeed it was so easy that I almost wonder if she ever regrets not having tried anything else. But she shakes her head.

“This job has got me around the world three times. I’ve met some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. I’ve cooked some of the best food that anyone can ever imagine. I’ve had the honour of working with some of the best chefs in the world – and I get to have a laugh and a giggle every day!” And she goes back inside, to the wood-panelled walls and Chianti-laden shelves of Jamie’s Italian.

A former professional soldier and cancer survivor is looking to shake up parliament. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman standing for MP with a difference

We’re not the first newspaper to run a piece on Janet Zenonos. As prospective MPs go, she’s not exactly a shoo-in – she’s running with DIKO in the Famagusta region, where DIKO only elected one MP in 2011 – yet her story has captured the imagination, garnering publicity and enabling her to stand out from the middle-aged lawyers and party apparatchiks whom we’re largely being asked to vote for on May 22. She’s 31, unusually young to be running for public office. A cancer survivor. Half-Australian, on her mother’s side. And, lest we forget, a former professional soldier, having served for a decade in the Australian armed forces and been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of the Western ‘intervention’.

Janet is a veteran of the Australian army, with which she served in Iraq and Afghanistan

“I was always very driven,” says Janet, a fair woman with muscular arms and fine, almost doll-like features. “I always feel that our time is limited, and I have to make the most of it… Which is why I’ve condensed quite a lot in my few years”. At 16, just before she moved from Limassol to Adelaide with her parents, older brother and younger sister, she made a list of “life goals”, a strategy she’d heard about from self-help guru Tony Robbins. “I wrote a list of the things I wanted to achieve in my life, and I steadily ticked them off as I went”. The list wasn’t meant to cover her whole life, only up to the age of 30 (last year she made a new list, for ages 30 to 50). She listed 100 goals as a teenager, “and they ranged from the most simple to the most complicated”; she ended up achieving 84 of them.

Can she give us some examples?

“Sure,” she replies at once. Her manner is forthright and chatty; I seldom get a sense that she’s scanning her answer for ‘how it will sound’ before saying it, maybe because she’s not a career politician. “One of my goals was to join the army,” she goes on, “that was one of my big goals. The other one was to finish a degree in Political Science, and also a degree in Law”. That got ticked off as well; we meet in her office at DF Achilleos & Associates, a Limassol law firm. Some goals were small and silly, “like cooking a cheese soufflé”. Others were bigger and more of a challenge, like climbing one of the world’s highest mountains, “which I did”. She and a friend climbed to the top of Mt Kilimanjaro in 2009.

The friend in question was another woman, a captain in the army like her. They “set some travelling goals together” – many of her military colleagues have the same laser-focused personality type as her, admits Janet – and travelled all over the world. Kilimanjaro was just after her deployment in Afghanistan, which may be part of what made it such an “emotional experience”. Other expeditions included the Inca Trail in South America and glacier-climbing in New Zealand, during which she came very close to killing both herself and her friend. They were tied together, walking across a ledge so narrow there was room for only one foot at a time, with sheer cliffs on both sides (think of an icy tightrope, basically). A gust of wind blew her off balance, and she started to topple over the edge – but the friend, walking behind her, immediately leaned to the other side, balancing both of them. “That was the one time I thought ‘I’m gonna die. And I’m gonna die on this random mountain no-one’s ever heard of!’,” she recalls, laughing merrily.

She’s done a lot, and especially seen a lot. That’s easy to forget, sitting here in a corporate office talking about the elections. She was a Transport Officer in Iraq in 2007 (the time of the famous ‘surge’) and an Intelligence Officer in Afghanistan two years later. She recalls seeing women in Afghanistan being whipped with a cat o’nine tails, right in the street. She recalls the “barbaric” story – she heard about this, didn’t actually see it – of the 14-year-old girl who was sold to an old man for marriage then, when she tried to escape on their ‘wedding’ night, had her ears and nose cut off by her would-be husband, and was thrown in the street to die.

She recalls a fellow soldier who was jogging in the camp doing his morning exercise when, in a monumental stroke of bad luck, a mortar hit him full in the chest, a bolt from the blue. She recalls, on the other hand, the soldier who for some reason woke up one night, and for some reason decided to go out for a smoke, only for a mortar to hit the container where he’d been sleeping two minutes earlier. She recalls the corporal who became known as a jinx because, almost every time he went out on patrol, his car got blown up (yet he somehow emerged unscathed); in the end no-one would go on patrol with him, and he had to be sent home.

All this made her rather “fatalistic” about life and death, she says – which is partly why she remained calm when confronted with a diagnosis of Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a cancer of the lymph nodes) a couple of years ago. She’d felt a lump on her neck, and remembered that some of her colleagues in Afghanistan had had similar lumps that turned out to be cancerous (it’s unclear if that was just a coincidence, or related in some way to their tour of duty). She caught the cancer in time, before it spread below the diaphragm, and four months of chemo got rid of it – a time during which “I set myself a programme” (her driven personality showing through again) that allowed her to eschew the usual drugs for treating side effects. She changed her diet, focusing on clean protein like quinoa and lots of fruit and vegetables washed in vinegar (it kills the bacteria) – “and then I would also go and run after chemo… I would go to the beachfront and just smash myself from running”.

Why do that, when she was already weak from the chemo?

“It gave me a sense of control,” she replies significantly. It was psychological, a trick she played on herself: “So, when I was feeling sick, I would mentally think I’m feeling sick because I trained hard – not because of chemo.”

Those four words – ‘a sense of control’ – are surely central to a woman who’s methodically set down life goals since the age of 16 and methodically sought out new challenges, pushing herself to the limit. “Anything extreme is bad, in my view. Too much of anything is bad,” she opines – a surprising statement from someone who’s climbed glaciers and scaled Kilimanjaro, but she means ‘extreme’ in the sense of over-indulgence. “I try to control myself in all things, because I believe that discipline is very important in all things in life, across the board. So I try to be moderate in everything that I do.”

Doesn’t she have any vices?

“I do, I do have vices!” she replies, but has trouble thinking of any. She doesn’t smoke, and drinks in moderation. She’s not the type to go clubbing till four a.m.; “I was never really a going-out sort of person”. One bad habit is that, if she starts a book, she becomes so engrossed that she’ll neglect everything else in order to read it. (That doesn’t sound so awful, I point out. “But I can’t control it!” she protests.) Finally, she comes up with an undeniable vice: a tendency to lose her temper. “I’ve been working on it since forever, but I have a temper,” admits Janet. She’s getting better at controlling it, though. “My husband has been very good for me in terms of that. He’s been good at helping me find a more balanced reaction to things”.

Her husband is a gym instructor, though he’s now given up his job “to look after our son, and so that I can pursue my goals”. Their son is 10 months old, and family time for Janet includes exercising with both husband and child – first running with the baby down the Limassol seafront for half an hour (she has a special three-wheeled pram designed for parents who run), then training with her hubby at home, all between six and seven in the morning (she typically goes to bed around 10, and wakes up at 5.45). That’s the daily routine, though it’s slightly harder now with her election campaign taking up extra hours. “I’m doing as much as I can,” she shrugs when I ask if she’s doing the requisite self-promotion (including, I suppose, this very interview), “and we’ll see what happens”.

Presumably, going into politics is somewhere on her new list of life goals – and it does seem a little superfluous, given how much else she’s already done, but in fact her life is all of a piece. Her experience with cancer showed her the urgent need for a radiology centre in Limassol, so patients don’t have to trek to Nicosia – a “personal goal” she intends to pursue even if she doesn’t become an MP – while her years of soldiering match with some hawkish views on the Cyprus problem (DIKO is the most hardline party in this respect). Just as she’s pessimistic on the future of Afghanistan – her personal view is that “fanatic crazy people” will take over once Western forces leave – so she’s deeply mistrustful of Turkey, which she says is a proven sponsor of ISIS. “We are pinning our hopes on a country that actively supports ISIS. To me, that’s not logical,” she says firmly, calling for a “much more dignified approach” in the ongoing negotiations. “Apparently we’re bowing down to every demand of Turkey, and that’s not the right way to negotiate with a country like that – or with a leader like that. Because Erdogan was an Islamist, and I believe he continues to be one”.

How can we have a solution if we don’t trust the other side, though? Or does she think Turkey will magically vanish, leaving Greek and Turkish Cypriots to get on with it?

“Cyprus does have power,” she replies sharply. “It has the ability to become a proper power-broker in this region, we just choose not to do it”. Simply put, we don’t have to kowtow to Turkey. “We should be looking internally to create a strong, powerful, proud nation – which we are capable of becoming. We just don’t do it, for some bizarre reason”.

Janet Zenonos is a strange kind of politician; I’d almost say a new kind of politician, if it weren’t for the fact that most politicians tend to revert to type once they actually start playing politics. Still, there’s one detail that suggests she might be different, assuming she gets in. Politicians want to be popular, it’s part of the job – but Janet becomes uncharacteristically evasive, for instance, when I ask about her high school days. Did other kids resent this strong-willed 16-year-old girl who knew exactly what she planned to do with her life, and had a temper to boot? “Uh, I honestly can’t say what other people thought of me. I have no idea,” she replies – implying, or at least raising the possibility, that she wasn’t especially popular, and has learned to be fine with that. A politician who doesn’t need to be loved could do a lot of good around here.

There’s no doubt she’s a tough-minded lady. One almost feels sorry (not really!) for her unsuspecting son, whom she plans to raise as her mother raised her – with an emphasis on honesty, taking responsibility for his actions, and above all discipline. (Kids in Cyprus tend to get away with murder, I point out. “Oh no, he won’t,” she laughs.) “I’m not really sure what gives me this need to achieve, or try and achieve, so much,” muses Janet. “I’ve just always felt that we have to make the most of our time, it’s just a feeling I’ve always had. I hate to waste time, and I hate to – to just be. To me, you [always] have to be striving for something, striving to achieve something”.

Cyprus politics offers plenty to strive for. The €2.4 million being paid to this year’s retiring MPs just for leaving Parliament is “unfathomable,” she says. The ‘heroic No’ that ushered in the second haircut was a disgrace. As for the public sector and their culture of ‘fakelakia’ (little envelopes, i.e. low-level bribes)… well, in Australia you’d lose your job for accepting a bottle of water, that’s how strict the system is. Janet Zenonos fidgets in her chair, seething quietly: “Just wait till I get in!” she says. “I’ve got an Australian-type plan for them!”. Sounds like fun.

Minus One are among the most popular rock bands on the island, playing weekly gigs for appreciative audiences. They’re also our representatives at the Eurovision Song Contest this year, and made it through the first semi-final last Tuesday to appear in the final on Saturday.

As Minus One, the band mostly play covers of well-known rock songs – but they also have a second persona as ‘Marianne’s Wish’, where they play their own material.

To mark their Eurovision success (and hoped-for success on Saturday), here’s our backstage video from 2014 when we spoke to Minus One/Marianne’s Wish at Avlea in Nicosia, a few days before they became the first Cypriot band to play at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

Note that the band had a slightly different line-up at the time.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a costume designer who says the creative flow is always open, there’s no agonizing over it

Jo Katsaras isn’t really her name, it turns out, at least not her birth name. The woman sitting opposite me on a sunny but breezy afternoon in Nicosia was born Ioanna Constantinides, but married a Mr Katsaras in a rather impulsive-sounding union when she was only 22 (she turns 50 in November). The marriage lasted no more than a year, but it did produce a son – now 26, and a graphic designer in Cape Town – and “I didn’t want to have a different surname to my son,” she explains, “so I kept it. And then I made it famous, and now I can’t change it”. And what about that ill-fated marriage? Jo frowns, drawing down the blinds on that particular window: “I’d rather not get into the personal stuff”.

She looks tired, to be honest. Her voice is slightly hoarse, as if from too much talking or too much partying – both plausible scenarios since she’s president of the jury at Cyprus Film Days, the annual movie festival, and has presumably endured (or enjoyed) some busy days and late nights over the past week. I also get the sense that her default expression isn’t carefree, a vague worried frown tending to predominate over a small, rather rabbity smile – and she may also be thinking of the masterclass she’s about to give at the Point Centre for Contemporary Art, where we sit in the empty patio trying to hear each other talk above the cacophonous din of cars and motorbikes screeching down Griva Digeni.

The masterclass is on Costume Design – specifically the relationship between costume designer and director – because that’s what she does. When Jo mentions that she’s made her surname famous, it’s no idle quip – indeed, when it comes to Cypriots in show business, she’s among the small tier of locally-born artists who can truly be said to have made it on the world stage. She’s been Emmy-nominated (for The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency a few years ago), and has dressed the likes of Juliette Binoche, Samuel L Jackson, Stephen Fry and Hilary Swank. Just in the past two years, she’s spent six months in Morocco, one in Barcelona and eight in Austin, Texas. Why Austin? “I was doing a show called The Leftovers” – an HBO drama by Damon Lindelof, who also wrote Lost, that’s among the most-talked-about series of the past few years.

Jo works all the time – though, crucially, not all the time. Partly it’s a conscious decision that she took in 2009, the year of her Emmy nomination, when too much work started taking a toll on her health – a decision to strike a balance between working, mostly in the US and UK, and retreating for creative renewal to her two home bases in Cape Town and Limassol – but she also turns down a lot of work, and not just because of time constraints. “If I don’t see the images when I first read a script, then I won’t touch the project,” she explains. “It doesn’t matter if I’m starving, I won’t do it”. It sounds surprising, after all these years in the business; surely, with her vast experience, you’d think she’d have found a way to make costume designs take shape in her head, even if they didn’t appear straight away – but Jo, it seems, works on instinct, which is why she works so easily. “It’s like playtime for me,” she says of her process. “It’s very much ‘creative tap is open’. It flows. And I trust and believe – and have experienced – that everything I need comes to me.”

That’s remarkable, and pretty unusual. Creative types are often tormented; creativity is hard (if it were easy, everyone would do it) – but Jo seems to be one of those people with a God-given talent that simply takes over, at least when the material speaks to her. She’s always overflowed with ideas, even as a girl: “My mother tells stories of how she used to buy me these beautiful dresses, and then I would chop them up and make other things! So, yes – I was always covered in paint, or making jewellery. I was always doing something”. Her mum was a hairdresser, her late father an inspiring figure who encouraged her “on a soul level”, instilling the belief that Jo could do anything she wanted if she put her mind to it – and it also helped that the family emigrated to South Africa when she was five, going back and forth throughout her childhood, so she always felt connected to Cyprus (they visited in summer, and came back for two years in her early teens) but was able to keep some distance from the small-island mindset that so often stifles artistic dreams.

Did she ever feel like an outsider in childhood?

She smiles, in a sort of affectionate salute to her younger self. “Umm… I had to find my tribe. Yes. I did. I was often misunderstood… But it didn’t take long,” she adds. “Once you understand that you’re different – and you’re sensitive. My sensitivity’s a huge thing. People who know me, and are close to me, know how sensitive I am. And I know that if I switch that sensitivity off, and become a hard person, it cuts off my creativity.”

‘Sensitivity’ is perhaps a mixed blessing. I think of her worried countenance, that semi-permanent frown playing at the edge of her expression; I imagine her as one of those people who pick up on everything, not just what others say but non-verbal cues and body language and hidden tensions and the atmosphere in a room. “It’s almost like I have these antennas,” she confirms, “like I’ll walk into a place and feel out and absorb. I’m like a flokko [Cypriot for ‘mop’], I absorb everything – the good and the bad. And sometimes you get very drained from that. Especially in Cyprus, where I find that people have a fear, and they resonate on a negative energy – like ‘What will people say?’ or ‘You can’t do it that way’. There’s rules, unspoken rules. And I often think, if I’d stayed here what would have become of me, because Africa gave me – almost a freedom to roam and explore. And it’s not a criticism, I do love Cyprus, but I think the mentality, especially of the older generation, is like ‘An artist? You’re going to die broke!’. You know what I mean?… You have to clean yourself of that negativity. You’ve got to believe in the dream”.

What does she mean by ‘becoming a hard person’?

“Becoming desensitised. Growing a thick skin, you might say.”

But then, if she doesn’t have a thick skin – well, isn’t she likely to get hurt sometimes?

“It’s my risk,” she admits. “But I’d rather have my creativity than be thick-skinned and not feel. Like, my friend Stelana” – film director Stelana Kliris, who’s also involved in Cyprus Film Days – “was just playing me the song which she’s chosen for her wedding, and I was crying in the taxi. It was touching, you know? So it’s that. I’ll cry at the drop of a hat”.

There’s a balance, of course. Being super-sensitive is all well and good – but, as the costume designer on a major film or TV series, she might have 50 people to manage and motivate (and occasionally yell at). “I take no nonsense,” she affirms. “I’m very straight down the line. I have high expectations, and I expect the same of my team”. There’s also the very specific “people skill” of working with famous names, gaining their trust and stepping around their famous egos – though of course it’s usually fine, because stars are professional and the bigger they are, the more professional they tend to be.

Does she chat with celebs during costume fittings and so on?

“Absolutely. You get to know each other. I mean, think about it – I see them in their nakedness! I know what’s going on in their lives.”

So she’s like a confidant?

“Of course. And lips are sealed,” she adds significantly – but then semi-relents, telling a rather endearing story of Juliette Binoche at the pre-production party for Country of My Skull in 2004. “Every actress goes through this thing of, like, ‘I can’t act’,” laughs Jo, “and I found her at the party, under a tree, and she was crying and saying ‘I can’t act, I can’t act’. I’m like, ‘Juliette, you’ve won an Oscar’, and she said ‘Yes, but that was long ago! It was so long ago, I can’t do this!’…” Jo shakes her head like a fond auntie: “Actors are like you and me,” she concludes, “it’s just their job is different. They have to access a huge well of emotion – and we’re the support crew, we’re there to support them.”

What about her, though? Who supports the support crew? As already mentioned, Jo isn’t prone to Binoche-type insecurities – if she’s on the set in the first place, it’s because she’s already seen the images of the costumes she wants to design dancing in her head – but she also takes certain precautions, to maintain creativity. When she was younger she’d take on any job, however challenging, but “now I think twice, and I think about how a job will be emotionally”. She also has a life outside work: she cooks, plays pirimba, does a lot of painting and illustrating (mostly for herself, though that may change), hangs out with family and friends – she calls herself a “connector”, the kind of person who has friends all over the world – and goes to the beach as often as she can: “I just find that water sort of soothes me and cleanses me, and takes away all the bad energy”. Cyprus, she says, is her motherland, South Africa her spiritual home; she loves both – and even now, in between star-studded projects in Texas or Morocco, she comes back often. “I love the smell of cedar. I love the light here, I love the sea. I do love the people – even though they’re some of the most paranoid, complex-ridden people I’ve ever met!… And it feeds me, it feeds me spiritually.”

How does she feel about turning 50 this year?

“Do I have a choice? I don’t. I’m ageing, I’m going to be 50. I’m quite excited, actually.”

Is it just a number?

“It is a number – but it’s also…” She thinks about it: “I think, as I got older in life, I just became more and more comfortable in my skin, and who I am. I’ve also, of course, hit pre-menopause,” she adds – a hormonal change that’s made for some emotional changes. “My tolerance level of bullshit has disappeared, and that’s been such a huge relief… It’s like you don’t have to pussyfoot around anybody, or be nice to somebody who is unprofessional”. Just this morning, she reports, a plumber stood her up after promising to come by – so she calmly told him not to bother coming by at all. “I used to give somebody 23 chances. No more.”

Looks like we ended up getting into ‘the personal stuff’ after all – and in fact Jo Katsaras (née Constantinides) is entirely happy to discuss her feelings, just like most creative types. In the end, Mr Katsaras is the only aspect she’s reluctant to talk about, a youthful mistake she’d rather not dwell on. She never remarried, though she’s come close. “I haven’t met the man who speaks Jo yet,” she quips, adding however that she was involved for about seven years with “a lovely Australian man” (his name is Steve E Andrews, according to the Internet Movie Database which wrongly claims they were married) – but the practical problems of holding down a relationship while they both worked in the film industry proved insuperable, so “we’ve kept the love and friendship, and we let the relationship part go”, she recalls with perhaps a touch of ruefulness.

Almost time for the masterclass. She plans to talk about “mood boards”, she explains, her secret weapon when working on a movie – a kind of visual collage that evokes the mood she has in mind, like a map of the inside of her head. It occurs to me that life itself is a mood board for Jo, her antennae picking up vibes wherever she goes. She’s like an open wound, sensitive to the slightest pressure – but that doesn’t sound very nice so instead let’s call her an open heart, which is the phrase she herself uses. “I strive to always keep an open heart,” she says, adding that she’ll quit her job if she ever finds herself becoming cynical, and losing that openness: “The day I become bitter about the film industry is the day I stop”. Or perhaps when the pictures stop coming, the images of elegant frocks that have danced in her head since childhood.

The link between deaf people and the hearing world can be tricky to straddle. THEO PANAYIDES meets an interpreter who does so with joy and energy

Konstantina Papageorgiou has a certain energy. It’s not what she says, necessarily, but her body language and the spark in her eyes: an urge to connect, an openness of spirit, an avid good humour. Maybe it’s because of the circumstances, given that we meet in the noisy foyer of Satiriko Theatre in Nicosia where she’s being interviewed (for the first time ever, she says) a day or so before giving a talk at TEDx Nicosia – an annual event “powered by Cytamobile-Vodafone” to quote the official phrasing, this year’s theme being ‘Traces’. Maybe, too, it’s because she’s a visitor, here for a few days from her native Thessaloniki, brimming with a traveller’s curiosity about everyone and everything.

Then again, maybe that’s just her energy – a non-verbal energy, which actually fits very nicely because that’s what we talk about, the magic and method of communicating without talking. When you meet a 30-year-old woman who’s been practising Greek sign language since her teens, you naturally assume she had some personal reason for learning to sign – a deaf friend or family member with whom she had to communicate – but in fact it’s nothing of the sort. Young Konstantina simply happened to watch the news on TV, and was instantly smitten by the sign-language interpreter translating the day’s headlines in a corner of the screen – a window, so it seemed, into a new exotic world where the rules were different, words were superfluous and emotions, crucially, were out in the open.

What exactly did she find so magical about sign language? “I guess the facial expressions,” she replies in flawed but fluent English (the third of her four languages, after Greek and sign language but before Spanish). “That, without seeing the hands or knowing the words they were using, I could get the feeling of what they were saying”. Also, she adds wryly, “I really love quiet and silence, and, to my child’s mind, it was really cool that you could talk in silence – but really talk, really have a discussion.”

In what way does she like silence?

“I like silence,” she says simply. “I like being alone. I like not-very-loud music, I like music being in the background… I prefer everything being soothing and quiet and halara,” she adds, using the Greek word meaning roughly ‘laid-back’. “Calm. I like being calm.”

There’s a bit more to say on this subject. “Maybe it’s because lots of times when I interpret,” explains Konstantina, “the deaf and the hearing are fighting each other – so I have to yell, I have to be mad… And this is not who I am, so sometimes I get out of myself. So, when I go back home, I want to be peaceful, because I did things I wouldn’t do normally.

“For example, I was interpreting one time, and there was a [deaf] daughter with her father who were fighting. And the daughter was like ‘I hate you!’, ‘Go die!’, ‘Go to hell!’ – I will never say that to anyone, but I was interpreting, so I was shouting, because I was representing the woman that hired me.”

Her job as a freelance sign-language interpreter often puts her in the midst of other people’s dramas – and she has to take part in those dramas, by definition. It wouldn’t have been enough, in the case of that father-daughter fight (they were in court, arguing over some family property), for Konstantina to have simply told the father ‘She hates you’. She had to convey the emotion as well, had to supply the furious volume which the deaf woman was unable to access: the father “should understand her anger,” she explains.

It’s something that hadn’t occurred to me, that interpreters are forced into such an intimate relationship with the people for whom they interpret. “Think of the deaf as a linguistic minority,” says Konstantina. “They’re not actually disabled, because they can go anywhere and do anything by themselves, but whenever it comes to language they need an interpreter. It’s as if they were Chinese, or something”. If a Chinese person in Greece had to go to a doctor or lawyer for a serious matter, they wouldn’t go alone – and a stranger, paradoxically, makes more sense than a family member, when it comes to the deaf, because family members often hide the truth in a misguided attempt to protect them. There was even a doctor once, recalls Konstantina, who refused to tell a deaf patient that he had cancer, forcing the interpreter into an uncomfortable situation. “He’s got cancer,” whispered the doctor in Konstantina’s ear while the patient was dressing. “Don’t tell me, tell him!” she replied – but the doctor wouldn’t, not wishing to burden a disabled man with such terrible news (he did suggest a course of treatment, so it wasn’t completely unethical). “And we left the doctor’s office, and I asked him to go for a coffee with me so I could tell him – why me? – that he had cancer!”.

Needless to say, such misplaced over-sensitivity is almost as bad as insensitivity (in its way, it’s a form of dehumanisation) – especially when it comes to deaf people, who are more than able to take care of themselves. “I have lots of deaf friends,” reports Konstantina. “I have a deaf godchild, I’ve even had a relationship with a deaf person”. She knows the community well – and if anything, she says, the deaf are tougher than the hearing, less weighed down by fear, for the simple reason that they’re not susceptible to outside information that might confuse or constrain them. A deaf driver won’t be put off by the squeal of brakes, or annoyed by the honking horns of less patient drivers.

They’re also, it seems, a good laugh. “Whenever I’m sad, or I have anxiety or any problem, I go out with them, because they’re really good fun. And whenever I go out with my deaf friends I have a really, really great time”. The deaf don’t have any taboos about partying or getting drunk – and they’re also “a little bit more open-minded than we are, because growing up they had a lot of discrimination” which has made them more tolerant. They go to clubs, sitting close to the speakers so they can feel the music through the vibrations; “They do dance excellently”. They also make sign-language jokes just like the hearing make puns, Konstantina’s own party-piece – the story she’ll never live down – being a boo-boo she made in her teens, while she was learning the lingo. She was at a restaurant with deaf friends, asking if they’d like some carrot salad. The sign for ‘carrot’ is a cupped hand coming to the mouth from the side, like Bugs Bunny taking a nibble – but instead she brought the hand to her mouth from the front (and forgot to chatter her teeth) so it looked like she was cupping, or offering, something else altogether.

It does seem rather tricky, as a language. Facial expressions matter (you use the mouth to suggest volume, as for instance to sign ‘the door slammed’ as opposed to ‘the door closed’), and it also makes a difference where on the body a “hand-shape” is placed. Some signs make sense – ‘pride’ is indicated by tugging at an invisible necktie, to suggest a person preening – others seem more random. ‘Hate’ is a thumb flicked out from the chest. ‘Interpreter’ is a finger tapping back and forth on the opposite palm, as if turning the pages of a tiny book.

The most pressing problem, however, isn’t learning how to sign but making a living out of it. A freelance sign-language interpreter can no longer make ends meet in Thessaloniki (Athens is slightly better), because it’s a service provided to the deaf by the state, and the state no longer has money to provide that service. At 30, Konstantina – who now has a second job training interpreters at the college where she herself trained – is very much a part of the ‘lost generation’ that’s borne the brunt of Greece’s collapse. What will they be like in their 40s, I wonder, assuming things eventually improve? What will they believe in?

“I think, nothing,” she replies.

So they’re all becoming cynical?

“Yes. Cynical and nihilistic. And it’s really bad – I think we are a destroyed generation.” It’s impossible to settle down or start a family with no job, or a job paying €500. She and her peers are seething with rage, she reports, “because we’re at the age that we can give 100 per cent of ourselves to a job, to family, to anything. And we can’t”. A young person needs that sense of intense commitment, but you can’t give 100 per cent to a job with a humiliating salary – and the missed potential gnaws at your insides, like a prisoner trapped in a small room slowly going stir-crazy. Maybe all these unfulfilled youngsters will “get wild” in their 40s, she muses half-jokingly, as if to make up for being cheated of their 20s – “and this will be bad, I think. But most of us are just emigrating. I really love Greece, I really do; but if I cannot live there, if I cannot be decent, if I cannot have a house or a car, why should I stay?”.

Her adventures have included the desert Bedouins

I suspect the sense of being trapped may be especially sharp for Konstantina – because she’s always been the type to look beyond, her most salient trait being a thirst for experience and connection with new, exciting worlds: “I am,” as she puts it, “very, very curious as a person”. On her Facebook page are photos from a recent trip to the Sahara, three days’ camping with Bedouins and camels which she calls “one of those huge experiences of life”; they sat around the campfire every night, swapping stories with the Bedouins despite having no language in common. (So how did they tell the stories? “Eh… The human spirit!”) She loves to travel, though not in the sense of sightseeing – more in the sense of immersing herself in a new community, taking the pulse of a different world.

The Sahara was one such experience. A 10-day camping holiday on Gavdos – the southernmost Aegean island – was another, a “trip that changed my whole perspective of the world”. It wasn’t just the island, she explains, but the people she met there, a mini-commune of environmentally-aware visitors who fished for food, shared what they caught, burned all their garbage and left the beach as pristine as they found it. (“It was pure,” she explains fervently.) And of course the sign-language world of the deaf was, and is, another such experience – an exotic sub-culture that first bewitched her years ago and which she now knows as well as, or better than, the half-collapsed ‘real’ world around her.

What attracts her in people? “Energy,” she replies; “I like positive energy” – but not ‘positive’ as in viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses, more like her own brand of candid, welcoming energy. She’s essentially a down-to-earth person, balking when I ask if she’s spiritual: “This is very heavy…” she replies uncertainly. “I don’t know. I try to be. I don’t know, I really don’t. I mean, I’ve met some spiritual people – and when you meet them, you know that they are. I don’t think I am”. I assume she’s far too sensible to discern deeper meanings in the silence and calmness she appreciates so much; she just loves it anyway, the way she loves the music of Alkinoos Ioannides or the pleasures of sipping tsipouro in small tavernas in Thessaloniki – but spiritual? “I believe in Love,” she shrugs. “I believe in Nature.”

And what of TEDx itself? I’m afraid I didn’t catch Konstantina’s talk two days later (it’ll surely appear on the tedxnicosia.com site sooner or later) but she did offer a preview, the point of the speech being the ‘traces’ she bears of the two worlds between which she shuttles, those of the deaf and the hearing – and the point being also to offer some advice, from her vantage point as an intermediary.

“Dealing with the deaf,” she says breathlessly, “or any other human being who’s a little bit different from us – it’s fun! It’s nice to do it”. We often shrink away from that kind of contact, and there’s really no reason to. “Lots of people, when they see a deaf person, they feel embarrassed,” she admits, “or they don’t know how to treat them. Just – just treat them! Somehow! If they are offended, they will tell you”. There’s that certain energy again: the open spirit, the urge to connect.

Life rarely goes according to plan. THEO PANAYIDES meets a public speaker who helps people overcome problems and bad memories by the power of positive thinking

Robert G. Smith has a number of stock phrases as a speaker. All public speakers do, using them as punctuation marks to pace themselves and keep the audience attentive – and Robert has to do a lot of both, leading a roomful of about 60 people (most of them female) through a weekend-long “experiential course” titled ‘The Secret to All Great Relationships’ – but one phrase in particular leaps out as I watch him at work. As he talks about “imprints” and “affirmations”, holding the room in a steady gaze, he’ll share some tidbit from his own life or relate some revealing anecdote (often folksy, like the tale of a woman with a fear of junebugs) in his slow Oklahoma drawl – then pause, let the info sink in, and ask the audience before moving on: “Am I making sense?”.

Thousands would assert that he is, judging by the videos on his YouTube channel ‘HealingMagic’. There are demonstrations of “tapping”, and detailed explications of Robert’s patented method FasterEFT (EFT stands for ‘Emotional Freedom Technique’). There are testimonials, many with titles like “How I freed myself from the horrible pain of my husbands [sic] death” or “I am no longer bipolar and I solved my own issues by using what worked” (“1996. Curled up in a corner, rocking, wanting to kill myself,” begins the middle-aged woman – a former manic depressive – in that video). During a break in the workshop I ask a few of the attendees how they heard about Robert, and most turn out to be familiar with the YouTube videos. Andreas Mesarites, one of two FasterEFT practitioners in Cyprus (the other is Myroulla Malloupa), says he spent the whole of August 2013 glued to the videos, and credits them with saving his life. Andreas has Parkinson’s, but FasterEFT – he says – has arrested the disease, and even rolled it back a little.

Robert has been training people since 2001, as the man himself explains when we talk a day earlier at the Cleopatra Hotel in Nicosia. “I went from making nothing, to almost a million dollars last year,” he declares, nursing a double espresso. “And that is just by teaching. Teaching people how to take control. I lived in a mobile home for 26 years, now I live in a very big, 450-square-metre house – and it’s almost paid for. And all this stuff is because I want to help people. Show ’em that, y’know, life can be easier.”

Is he making sense, though? Robert is a beefy 55-year-old with a square, ruddy face, close-cropped greying hair and clear blue eyes with a touch of icy calm; he could plausibly pass for anything from a CEO to a truck driver to a James Bond villain. He actually worked as a used-car salesman before discovering, as he puts it, “the mind’s ability to transform itself” – initially through legendary guru Tony Robbins in the mid-90s, then shifting to the EFT system founded by Gary Craig before developing his own system a few years ago. Which is what, exactly? “FasterEFT is a thinking system that helps you change your thinking,” he explains. “Change it in a way that’s more positive.”

“See, the deal is that your life is a product of everything you’ve experienced,” he goes on. “So what we do is we address the memories and references of what you consider unpleasant. And then what we do is we change the memories”. Not the past itself, of course – the past is over – but how you view and respond to it. “I understand the mechanics of thought. I understand how you create your problems, and it’s all built on internal references.” Robert has worked with all forms of trauma, people scarred by memories of rapes, beatings, addictions – “and we just go back and change the memory references, change the emotions, change how they represent themselves and how they see themselves. Then the outcome of their life will be changed too”.

Tapping helps as well, but “the thinking is the biggest part,” says Robert, “the tapping is a sideline”. Tapping depends on lightly touching the body’s “meridian points” – the temples, the collarbone, under the eyes and so on – to ease out bad feelings, but of course one has to rise above those feelings first. The brain is a computer, he says, everything depends on how you programme it. “If you’ve got a bad memory, and you change it, you can never feel bad about it again, even if you try”.

But memories don’t exist in a vacuum, I point out; they’re reflections of things that really happened. Is he telling us to falsify our memories?

He shifts in his chair excitedly: “But see, look, every memory is a false memory”. Memory is selective and, as he puts it, “adjustable”. Have you never sat around with your family and recalled something from childhood, only for your parents or siblings to remember the same thing totally differently? Or how about this: think of the front door of your house, then change its colour and visualise it in a new colour. It’s the same door, but now you think of it differently.

But nothing’s really changed, I protest. It’s just a mind game.

“That’s the point! Your memory is just a mind game.”

Listen, says Robert, noting my doubtful expression: “When I was 11 years old, I was beat with a hammer by my dad”. Another boy chased him up a tree, then his father arrived and young Robert ran to him – but Dad “had a bad day apparently, and he beat me with his hammer”. For decades, the story used to trouble him: “Matter of fact, I wouldn’t even tell you about it” – but now he’s able to recall it without resentment, without emotion. “It’s like, is it really my story? Before, it was always real”.

The story of that childhood beating has changed in his mind. Now, when he thinks about it, he thinks of a different story – one where “my dad put his arm around me, we went inside, we went fishing and I caught the biggest fish. That’s my real story. I can see the fish, I can feel it. The other one, I don’t feel it, I don’t see it… What you need to do is experience [FasterEFT], really,” he adds, probably noting that I still look unconvinced.

I’m sure his method works, I say uncertainly, it’s just – well, shouldn’t what really happened be more important?

“Only if you want to be depressed. Only if you want to beat yourself up. Only if you want to be tormented”. He’s not denying the beating happened: “I know it happened – but it’s not true anymore”. He’s moved on, he no longer feels it; he has no hatred of his dad anymore. “I love my dad, my dad was my greatest teacher. He helped me to do this job I’m doing today. Now granted, at that time, growing up – well, even the day he died [in 2001] I said ‘The bastard got what he deserved’. I was angry at him still, because I never worked on it”. Later, however, he realised that “my dad loved me the best way he could. He too was beaten, he too was abused”. Changing the memories opened his mind to the bigger picture.

‘Dad’ was actually Robert’s stepfather, part of a rough and unpromising background. His mother ran away from home at 14, came back pregnant and gave birth to him; “I don’t know who my father is”. Mum remarried, and had three more kids (there were six overall) by the time she was 19; his stepfather did odd jobs, always coming home tired and grumpy. “We were poor. Very poor”. Robert listened to his parents fight every night, and did badly at school. “We were a bunch of kids,” he recalls. “I mean, we were poor! Our parents didn’t show us how to write or read. We rode a small bus to school, that was the kids with learning difficulties”.

Was he in trouble with the law, growing up?

“Oh yeah, I been arrested before, of course, several times. Stealing…” He tails off, shaking his head. “I mean, I’d go to church camp and bring alcohol with me, and we’d all get drunk. Get saved, get laid, all in the same weekend.”

Did he ever feel crushed by this hopeless environment?

“See, here’s the deal,” he replies. “When you’re growing up in this stuff, you don’t feel like you’re unusual. It’s normal. I mean, it’s normal to be miserable. It’s normal to be angry”. He did meet people who tried to help, from an early girlfriend to a high-school wrestling coach. He started reading “the Book” and ended up going to Bible college, planning to become a minister – but dropped out in his early 20s, finding himself with a wife and two kids. (A third, Matthew, was born in 1990 and experienced a whole other dad, Robert having changed as a person by that time.) Just before they got married, he recalls, his wife dropped the bombshell that she’d been sexually abused as a child – and in fact that’s why Robert first became interested in EFT, hoping to find the tools to exorcise her memories.

Two decades later, those tools have profoundly (not to mention profitably) changed his reality. He bills himself on Twitter as an inspirational speaker and “stress expert”, and is hugely in demand as a self-help guru: just this year he’s been to Spain, Australia for almost a month, now Greece and Cyprus and next month Hawaii, to train practitioners at a drug rehab clinic. It should also be noted that Robert has enemies, or at least people who don’t appreciate him: you don’t have to go far on Google to find detractors (including Gary Craig, founder of EFT) calling him a charlatan – a charge he calmly dismisses as professional jealousy, pointing out that Craig has launched similar attacks on other EFT “masters”. He seems calm, I note, but surely it bothered him when he read that article. How did he deal with the anger? “I tapped a lot.”

Tapping, you’ll recall, is a way of relaxing the body – but only as a way of solidifying what’s already happened (or concurrently happening) in the mind. “Your mind is the creator of your pain,” claims Robert; most problems are essentially psychosomatic, even those that seem uniquely physical (I think back to Andreas Mesarites and his Parkinson’s). FasterEFT seems designed to encourage “being at peace” – though of course that could also be a mixed blessing, the emphasis on not being “tormented” also implying a certain detachment from the world, and over-attachment to oneself.

Robert doesn’t follow current affairs, for instance, nor does he plan to vote in the US elections this year. “Honestly, I don’t watch TV. I know there’s a presidential race with three people involved. That’s all I know”. Watching the News is “a great way to worry yourself. And it’s not worth it”. He refuses to let others’ problems affect him, nor does he fret about wars and hunger in the world: “Is there any benefit to you being tormented and can’t sleep at night, and does it fix anything or change anything?” He says he’s spiritual, but doesn’t know if there’s life after death and doesn’t particularly care; why should he, when he can’t do anything about it? Robert’s method seems like an excellent way for troubled people to regain control over their lives by fencing off the things that might trouble them. Haunted by bad memories? Turn them into good memories. Worried about the world, your friends, your kids? “Don’t be tormented”: you can’t fix them anyway.

Isn’t there a recipe for apathy here, though? Isn’t there a recipe for narcissism? Narcissism doesn’t mean despising others, he points out; Jesus Christ himself urged his followers to “love your neighbour as you love yourself”. Jesus knew that loving yourself means you’ll like your neighbour better. “So He was a narcissist too,” he adds cannily.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Robert G. Smith. Like all public speakers, he seldom departs from his public persona (unsurprisingly, a couple of lines from our interview also turn up in his seminar the next day). He does claim to be shy as a person – and also seems a bit slippery, stumbling over details like how many grandchildren he has (seven, apparently) or whether he is in fact an ordained minister, like it says on his website. Still, it’s hard to argue with the basic truth that unhappiness, low self-esteem – even, perhaps, physical pain – have their roots in the mind, and positive thinking inevitably breeds greater confidence.

Life can make people feel helpless, but not Robert. “I don’t feel helpless,” he says. “I feel feelings, and I tap and I change them. This is a coping skill that I’ve learned, and this is what I teach.

“Life always changes without your permission. If you learn how to adjust and release and let it go, and not let it bother you – not ignore it, not pretend like it didn’t happen, but change how you respond to it – [then] the world changes”. Is he making sense? I think he is.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a local photographer and looks back on a life once lived at the forefront of the swinging 60s in London

You could drive up and down the street a hundred times – a quiet Nicosia street in a part of town so sleepy it still has the occasional empty lot – and never suspect who lives there. Even if you went up to the second-floor flat belonging to Tony Moussoulides, and noticed all the photos on the walls – models glancing at the camera with an ethereal expression, old Sunday Times Magazine covers, a photo of Andy Warhol finished in such vividly unreal lines and colours it looks more like a painting – you wouldn’t necessarily surmise that this 82-year-old man actually took all these photos, in the 60s and 70s and 80s, that he lit and posed the models, making as much as $3,000 a day in 70s money, and even flew to New York by special invitation (on Concorde, no less) to take that remarkable picture of Andy Warhol.

Not that he’d be shy about telling you. Look at this one, barks Tony, pointing to a photo on the wall beside the giant TV, I won the Bill Gibb Award for this one. It’s a photo of a girl in a white dress, presumably an ad or magazine cover. The girl is twirling, in motion, daylight and shadow undulating in the folds of her dress – but not heavy shadows, he points out, the urgency in his voice making me stop and look closer. The light behind her is hot, the front of the dress soft as milk. How was such lighting accomplished, outdoors, with 25 ISO film and a model in motion? “I’ll give £1.000 to anyone who can say how it was done,” offers Tony smugly. It’s not just technique, he explains a little later, in front of another photo – it’s a glimpse into the mind of Tony Moussoulides. “No-one else ever took such a photo.”

He’s not, it must be said, an easy interview – not because he’s unfriendly, quite the opposite, but because his life doesn’t flow smoothly in the telling; his memories tend to erupt in jagged chunks, like random pieces chipped from a statue. He rambles a bit, as one might expect from a man of his age. I have a couple of hang-ups, he declares before we start, using the Cypriot word “aipi” (we speak in Greek, which surprises me since he spent 40 years in the UK): I have only one eye – the right one is half-shut for most of our interview – and I tend to forget things, “I go into a room and wonder ‘Why did I come here?’”. But there’s something else too, something one often sees in very successful men whose success is a few years behind them: a kind of relentless self-assertion, a rather strained swagger, a vigorous delight in drinking from the fountain of the past that may also be a way of trying to compensate for Time moving on – as if he himself had trouble picturing the enormity of his own success, from the vantage point of this cluttered flat on a Nicosia side-street.

Again and again he circles back to the one thing he hates about Cyprus, deception in general but especially the “lying words” artists often use to pump themselves up, “‘I did this, I did that’ – a tissue of lies, to upgrade themselves”. I can see how it might be annoying to endure this or that local photographer bragging of their achievements when Tony did so much, back in his day – when he photographed Kate Moss and hung out with Peter Sellers and Peter O’Toole, when he won the Art Directors Award (“the Oscar of photographers”) for his groundbreaking photo ‘Water Nymph’, when he represented Britain at the MIFED festival in Milan with Spliffs, Joints and Pot, a 1965 documentary on London junkies which the British Film Institute is now in the process of digitising. “They’ve written to me, saying it’s a classic,” he explains proudly, leafing through a sheaf of papers to find the relevant email.

He’s been in the Sunday Mail before, nine years ago, when an exhibition of his work titled ‘Moussoulides: a 40-Year Journey With Light’ opened at the Kasteliotissa Hall in Nicosia and the estimable Zoe Christodoulides did an admiring write-up. “Zoe couldn’t believe who I was, because I wasn’t on the internet!” marvels Tony – but of course he pre-dates the internet, and besides the kind of work he did doesn’t leave much of an online imprint (though a Google search throws up several examples of his work). Tony was a fashion photographer and fashion, by its nature, is transient; the photos remain, but their context – the campaigns and magazine covers – are long forgotten. For a time, however (especially in the 60s), he was the highest-paid photographer in London. “Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Sunday Times – um – give me the names of some newspapers…”

The Telegraph?

“The Telegraph! The best newspaper, if you ask me. The Guardian. I worked for them all. You understand? They wanted me.”

It hangs in the air as we talk, this mosaic of a different time, shot through with memories. Peter O’Toole adored Irish whiskey; Tony knows this (granted, it’s not exactly a state secret) because his house in Mayfair, next to a venerable 16th-century pub called The Guinea, was a favourite haunt for O’Toole and his fellow actors. Almost every night, after the pub closed they came next door to his place, for drinks and parties. “I had a big hall upstairs, with a very well-stocked bar. That actor – the one who played Dracula?”

Christopher Lee?

“Christopher Lee. He was obsessed with my daughter – he loved playing with her, and telling her jokes”. Tony’s daughter, it should be noted, was about two years old at the time. She now lives in Ireland (his ex-wife was also Irish), working for a local charity.

One piece leads to another. The place in Mayfair was a massive three-storey affair that also included his studio – not just a house but a vital link in his successful career, making him known. He found it through Dame Moura Lympany, one of the top British pianists of the time, whom Tony had photographed; “You brought out my youth,” said delighted Dame Moura (who was in her mid-40s) and asked if she could do something for him. “I said look, I’d like to get out of Fulham Road, with all the drug addicts, and go to Mayfair for my work,” he replied, so she found him the three-storey pile (previously occupied by Eric Clapton and Cream) and even put down some cash for the deposit. Then again, those Fulham Road addicts also contributed to his life, having previously agreed to go on camera and talk about their lives for what became Spliffs, Joints and Pot.

A few more fragments: Warhol in ‘The Factory’ (his famous New York studio), telling our hero that he wanted to check all the photos himself, pick the one he wanted and burn the rest. He selected the one you see on my wall, relates Tony – the head has a halo, like a Byzantine emperor, with the Stars and Stripes in the background – despite the artist’s objections. “You look stupid in that one,” said Tony; “I want to look more stupid, and more savage, than Salvador Dali,” replied Warhol cryptically. Another fragment: commiserating with Peter Sellers, a celebrity friend who’d even asked Tony (for some reason) to write one-liners for his comedies. Sellers jealous because his girlfriend, a German princess, had been invited to Buckingham Palace and he hadn’t; “Re Peter, you’re a half-Jewish son-of-a-bitch, I said to him. They don’t want you, mate!”. Sellers coming by for his one-liners, and Tony joking that he can’t write except when he’s on the toilet (he has quite an earthy sense of humour). Sellers coming by the next day, with his Rolls Royce and chauffeur, toting a bottle of cod liver oil which he poured down Tony’s throat, as a laxative. “Oh, he was terrific! A good guy.”

Many people say he was neurotic, I point out.

“Well, he was a nutter. But I don’t have a problem with nutters. When you respect someone, when you don’t see their hang-ups and try to see the good side, they’ll respect you too.”

Was that the secret of his success – that he didn’t judge people? Maybe. A lot of his friends were gay, for instance (Tony wasn’t: “I liked models”), and of course that was never a problem. But the secret of his success was probably, quite simply, that he wanted so much to be successful – that he was “hungry”, as he puts it. Again and again, he recalls how aggressive and competitive he used to be as a young man, obsessed with becoming the best in his field: “I’ll beat him, and I’ll beat him too,” he recounts with a laugh, his fists pounding furiously as he acts out his inner thoughts from 50 years ago. “Someone said to me, ‘Who do you think you are, Avedon?’, I said to him ‘What name did you say?’. ‘[Richard] Avedon, the best photographer in the world’. Write it down” – he mimes writing the name down – “I’m gonna beat him!’.

He credits his dad for that hunger – a well-to-do Nicosia merchant who was perfectly happy for his son to become a photographer, but warned him not to expect a penny in financial support. “To succeed,” explained Dad, “you have to go hungry” (literally so: during Tony’s first few weeks in England, every meal was a cheese toastie with a single anchovy on top). Then again, maybe his competitive side came naturally, being the youngest of six – his oldest sister is about to turn 100 – and having to fight for attention as the runt of the litter. Photography was always a hobby, though he credits Anis Fuleihan (a famous Armenian-Cypriot musician who lived most of his life outside Cyprus) with having mentored and inspired him as a teenager. Before that, his interest had been sincere but not entirely serious: one of his first photographic endeavours was taking secret snaps of the girls at the Pancyprian Gymnasium doing PE, which he subsequently sold to the boys.

Then again, photographing women has always been what he did best. “Women were always running after me,” he sighs. “They thought I was Jesus Christ – that I just had to bless them, like that, and they’d turn into famous models”. (Easy to see why he never remarried.) ‘Water Nymph’ was something else, however – his most acclaimed picture, a two-page spread for Honey magazine in the early 70s that broke all the rules by cropping the model’s face, going in so close that you got half the head instead of a head and shoulders (“You will mutilate the lips! You will mutilate the ears!” protested the art director). Tony leafs through his notes – he’s prepared for the interview – and gives me a quote from poet Odysseas Elytis, the “three T’s” which hold the key to success: boldness, talent and luck, all three words beginning with ‘T’ in Greek.

‘Water Nymph’ was boldness, daring to try something new. Dame Moura Lympany was luck, perhaps (though you also make your own luck), an encounter that opened doors unexpectedly. And of course there was talent: you can’t do without it. The man knew – and presumably still knows – how to light an image. “I had a great talent for lighting,” he affirms, a little wistfully. “Lighting speaks, it has personality… I was the No. 1 bastard, when it came to that.”

Looking back, it’s been quite a life. “When you hear my story, you will shake your head,” he boasts early on (it’s that old man’s self-assertion again) and he has a point, the only regret being perhaps that he all but stopped making films after Spliffs, Joints and Pot. And now? In his later years, he’s rediscovered his compatriots, called back to Cyprus by his old friend Pefkios Georgiades (then Minister of Education) in the mid-00s. The plan was to launch a film and photography school, with Tony among the professors – but Pefkios died and the project was shelved, then came his smash-hit exhibition at Kasteliotissa, then came the move back from Mayfair and the flat on the quiet Nicosia street. A Filipina housemaid brings us a drink of water, presumably unable to claim her £1,000 by guessing how her boss contrived the lighting for the girl in the white dress.

“I have no secrets. I’m an open book,” says Tony Moussoulides. At 82, he owes nothing to no-one – except perhaps himself, the hungry young man who pushed his way to the forefront of Swinging London and must now be recalled from a distance, the power he wielded over advertising agencies and beautiful women now dissolved, inevitably, into glorious memories and advice for the young. “To be an artist, you have to do things – write it down, if you like – that other people haven’t done… In all my work, I was always a pioneer”. I walk past the glamorous photos on the walls and down to the street, to the empty lot where I parked my car.

THEO PANAYIDES meets the man who stood in the recent parliamentary elections with a single issue on his ticket – to legalise marijuana

Look at this, says Giorgos Christoforou, pointing to the ashtray on the table between us. We’re in the half-empty lobby of the Londa Hotel in Limassol on a Monday afternoon – the outdoor area, where you can smoke – and I duly take a look in the ashtray: there are two cigarette butts (he’s been smoking steadily since we started talking) and another little stub, thin and white, like the end of a roll-up. “I was here five minutes before you,” he explains, “and I still had my joint, I was just putting it out. Right now, basically, I’m what you might call – well, I’m stoned. Okay. For me, that’s become a daily reality.”

Just a few years ago, such an admission might’ve seemed too risky in public. Even now, every week sees a new report of people in Cyprus being arrested, remanded, charged or imprisoned for growing or using marijuana (pot, weed, cannabis, call it what you will). Even Giorgos, though he quite happily walked into the Londa holding a joint, is reluctant to light up another one now with strangers around (he’s worried about the smell) – yet Giorgos is the most obvious proof that things are changing, having stood in last month’s parliamentary elections as an independent candidate with one message only: “Legalisation Now”, as it says on his banner.

How did he take the decision to go into politics? “Let me explain,” he says portentously, then pauses and takes a long sip of water. That’s the way he speaks, in a heavy, deliberate fashion, like a man in a village coffee shop making a point. He’s 58, bull-necked, bespectacled and usually silver-haired, though he’s dyed his hair and beard on the day of our interview – and of course you watch someone closely after they admit to being stoned, but I really didn’t see much evidence. He’s a bit verbose and hard to interrupt, but that’s probably just his character. His expression seldom changes (even when I ask him to smile for a photo, he remains implacable) but he is, after all, a public figure, and has to project a certain gravitas. He seems to be a man in constant need of stimulation: as well as smoking tobacco – and the just-finished joint – he’s drinking an espresso, and later orders another one.

“Let me explain,” says Giorgos, and does so. “I have been smoking – to be honest with you, and with all the people reading this – I have been smoking cannabis for 40 years. I’m 58 now, I started when I was 18. That’s 40 years.”

So he’s been smoking almost every day?

“Not ‘almost’ every day. Every day! If you exclude certain times when I was arrested, or in prison – for this very reason, for cannabis use. And I smoke a quantity, let’s say, which is… Well, I might have three or four grams of weed every day.”

He has a joint every morning, with his coffee, then another at work, around 10 o’clock – “and from then on it’s a question of friends and acquaintances. So a friend might drop by, have a smoke, then he might leave and another one might come five minutes later”, or alternatively he might not get any visitors and go for hours without indulging. “But three grams a day is a given,” he concludes.

That’s all well and good – but it doesn’t explain why he’s decided to become a politician now, after all these years in the shadows. Well, he demurs, he wasn’t always in the shadows: he did go on a few TV shows with the late Dr Yiangos Mikellides, whom he met during his time inside (Mikellides was working as a prison psychiatrist) – but that was in the 90s, before medical science began studying cannabis in earnest and reporting “all kinds of wonders”. Giorgos puts it succinctly, using a metaphor he’s employed in other interviews: “If you don’t smoke at least two cannabis cigarettes every day, and you’re over 40, it’s like you’re standing in the rain without an umbrella. This is what science has discovered”.

Has it? Trying to reach a definitive answer on the science is something of a minefield, not least because information so often gets filtered through particular agendas. A Google search shows, for instance, that a recent study of New Zealand users earned the alarming headline ‘New Study Reveals the Health Risks of Smoking Marijuana’ – but in fact what that study showed was merely a higher rate of gum disease among long-time smokers, without any more serious adverse effects. “Overall damage to physical health is not apparent in this study,” the Duke University professor who co-authored it is quoted as saying – though another co-author admits that “other studies on this same sample of New Zealanders have shown that marijuana use is associated with increased risk of psychotic illness [and] IQ decline” (so maybe a better headline would’ve been ‘New Study Reveals Fewer Health Risks Than Old Study’). Giorgos, on the other hand, links on his Facebook page to an article headlined ‘There Are Now 100 Scientific Studies That Prove Cannabis Cures Cancer’ – but that article appears on a fluffy-looking pop-science website called higherperspectives.com, where a current top story is titled ‘New Research says Smelly Farts can Prevent Cancer and Benefit the People Around You’. Who can you trust?

All that said, no-one’s ever claimed that cannabis causes cancer, like tobacco, or makes people violent, like alcohol (more on this later). The main fear has always been one of addiction – which is nonsense, says Giorgos, pointing out that he never had a problem when forced to abstain during his two stints in prison. It’s a mental craving, he shrugs, like Nescafe, or halloumi with watermelon: “It’s a habit that gives you pleasure – but if you don’t get it for a period of time, nothing happens”. And of course there’s ample evidence that cannabinoids can fight disease, from epilepsy to Parkinson’s, MS, Alzheimer’s and indeed cancer. THC, the active ingredient when you smoke or eat cannabis, “cuts off the blood supply to the carcinogenic cells,” he claims, citing Israeli scientist Raphael Mechoulam, “with the result that it forces them to commit suicide, that’s what Mechoulam says”. It’ll either destroy them or at least shrink them, so the cancer is unable to metastasise.

The Israelis are apparently on top of this particular game, exporting cannabis-based drugs to the US and offering 100,000 hospital beds for cannabis-based treatments. Cyprus, unsurprisingly, is way behind. At the very least let’s think of the economic benefits, he pleads: medical marijuana is huge in Europe, currently imported from Holland where the plant is grown in greenhouses and sold at premium prices – yet, if we only legalised cultivation and supply like he urged in his manifesto, we could grow better-quality, sun-ripened stuff (our local weed is superb, he says knowledgeably) and make loads of money before bigger countries got in on the act. Not to mention medical tourism, not to mention all the young tourists who currently shun Cyprus because they’re afraid of getting into trouble. Giorgos shakes his head, with the air of a prophet without honour.

He only received 561 votes in the elections (mostly, he admits, because those who might’ve voted for him are the apathetic young, who don’t bother voting), and is unlikely to run again unless he can find the resources to create a proper party with multiple candidates. He is, after all, just a struggling small businessman with a wife and 12-year-old son to support – his wife knew him for years before they were married, he adds parenthetically, and has never asked him to change his lifestyle – and in fact we’re interrupted a few times by his phone ringing with questions and mini-crises from his shop, the Paphos Pawn Shop. (“You tell him that for €50 we’ll give him all three. And he can do what he wants with them!” he tells whoever’s minding the shop in his absence.) He doesn’t need the aggravation of having to fight for TV time, and implicitly being dismissed as a nutter along with the other independent candidates.

Maybe they’d have taken him more seriously if he wasn’t just a one-issue candidate, I suggest.

He scoffs: “No way would I ever want to be part of their coffee shop – the parliament, in other words. I don’t want to be with them, nor do I respect them, nor do I want them”. He has no interest in becoming a politician; his only aim is legalisation – after which, were it ever to be achieved, he’d immediately resign his seat.

Giorgos strikes me as a man who bears grudges. He’s furious with the TV channels for having ignored his candidacy, and has even approached a lawyer for a possible lawsuit; all he got were three and a half minutes on CyBC, plus a five-second sound bite on Ant1 (neither of those channels would be part of any suit) – vastly less coverage than the big parties, who of course had vastly more resources. He’s scathing on the Drug Squad cops with whom he’s tangled over the years, calling the Squad a creature of the Americans and most of its officers “fascists”. He despises the media, whom he calls biased: “Go to the channels, if you get beaten up – go and tell them ‘The cops blackened my eyes, they caught me with a joint and beat me senseless’ – and see what they do. They’ll probably beat you up themselves, then throw you out!”. He’s also been sending angry letters for three decades regarding his first conviction, in 1986, when he did six months for possessing 380mg of hashish (about the size of two matchstick heads, he says), insisting even now that the drugs were planted. You’d think he’d be less enraged, given that he has in fact been using drugs every day for 40 years – but he won’t let it go.

Maybe it’s because that 1986 arrest was connected – according to Giorgos – with an earlier brawl in a Nicosia cabaret, after which he was charged with GBH (having pushed the other guy through a shop window) and fled abroad for a few years, becoming a student in order to avoid a custodial sentence. The owner of the cabaret was the father-in-law of a top cop, which was why the police had their eye on him (he says) when he came back to Cyprus – and it’s hard to know if that’s true, but the more intriguing fact is that Giorgos, in his teens, was apparently a frequent brawler and troublemaker. The problem, he recalls, was that he drank, and drinking made him anti-social. “We’d get into fights – young guys, you know. ‘Why did he look at me the wrong way’, that kind of thing… I was angry in those days. All that’s disappeared, mate”. He pauses again to field another call from the pawn shop, this one from a customer: “No, my friend, we don’t have any television sets…”

Marijuana may not be for everyone (some folks “freak out”, he concedes, and become paranoid), but it’s easy to surmise that marijuana was – and is – for Giorgos Christoforou. “I believe that it saved my life,” he says simply. “Firstly from the drink, secondly from my bad temper. I mean, how many people can you beat up? Eventually, you’ll meet your end”. Alcohol is the worst drug, he reckons – but fondly recalls the first time he tried hashish, how he laughed all night and laughed even more to find no hangover the morning after. “We’re the lucky ones, those who’ve ended up with cannabis when we could’ve ended up with something else. In fact we even feel like we’re better off than you lot, who don’t smoke at all.”

It’s a constant battle, of course, staying within the limits of what’s considered recreational use – though he insists his drug use was always recreational: “Never a business, never!” – and always pursued by the police, who’ve not only searched his house many times but also made life difficult in his previous businesses (before the pawn shop he used to own a bookmaker’s; before that, he sold vending machines and pool tables). And of course there’s the expense, the street price of marijuana being more than twice what you’d pay in Europe – though I assume someone with Giorgos’ knowledge of cannabis horticulture has some access to raw materials. You need to cut and dry the plant as soon as it flowers and begins to get sticky, he warns, that way you get the psychoactive ‘high’ associated with THC; otherwise it’ll turn to CBN, which just makes you sleepy. I’m always learning something new in this job.

Is cannabis really an amazing plant, “the Jesus Christ of plants” as he enthuses? Will we someday look back on today’s attitudes with embarrassment, and wish we’d followed Giorgos’ advice instead of voting in the same old party apparatchiks with the same tired ideas? Time will tell – but you don’t have to approve of Giorgos Christoforou to feel that he’s led an uncommon life, stubbornly doing his thing on the fringes of what’s legal and socially acceptable. As for legalisation… well, 561 votes was a disappointing result, but he believes it’s just a matter of time. “There’s no doubt, it’s coming. It started in America, now it’s in Europe – it’s coming. They’ll open the doors [in Cyprus] whether they want to or not. Whether they want to or not”. He looks around as if for confirmation, at his half-drunk espresso and the contents of his ashtray.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a theatre director determined to change the way other people’s worlds are brought to life in Cyprus

Theatre directors come in all shapes and sizes, but you won’t find many others who spent 10 years – between the ages of five and 15, practically their whole childhood – appearing on TV every week with their mother and older sister. Unfortunately, Athina Kasiou doesn’t want to talk about that. “I’d rather talk about the work,” she mutters with a touch of embarrassment – though she doesn’t refuse point-blank to talk about it, merely brushes it off as a blast from the past, no big deal.

“For me, and for the team, it was a fun activity that we did on Fridays and Saturdays,” she shrugs. “We were not professionals, we were children, we were singing and talking and having these adventures–”

Yes, but wait a sec. This was the late 80s and early 90s – a time when we barely had TV channels, let alone YouTube and Facebook – and there she was on TV, the whole country watching her grow up in Paidika Hamogela (‘Children’s Smiles’) and Gela Hamogela (‘Laugh and Smile’) on CyBC and Logos. Surely everyone at school watched these shows, or at least knew about them?

She laughs nervously. She’s bespectacled and fine-featured, her round face so thin and alert it appears jam-packed, like every square inch of it is occupied. She leans forward, speaking fast and sometimes stumblingly. “They did, but I never felt – it was never – because we’re a small community in Cyprus, everyone knows each other, it was never a big deal, never affected me.”

Surely it made her feel special, though?

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way we were brought up, but this was very much part of our everyday – I never felt – I don’t know, maybe now, but I never felt it was something…” She shakes her head: “We were enjoying ourselves, we were having fun. It was like you’re going to a dance class, or music class. And because it was in a family environment” – her mum, who runs a kindergarten, used to write the scripts – “it was just like doing an extracurricular activity.”

Maybe so. I suspect there was slightly more of a buzz to being on TV than going to a dance class, and I reckon there must’ve been times when she felt like a mini-celebrity – or alternatively when she told her mum ‘I’m 13 years old now, I don’t want to be doing kids’ TV anymore’ – but no matter. The main takeaway here is that Athina doesn’t like to talk about herself, which is obvious in any case. She cringes a little when I ask about her personal life, and lifestyle in general. “I don’t like sports,” she replies in desperation, as if trying to come up with something. “I like shopping! Going to the theatre. I’m a little boring like this, I’m very – one-dimensional, maybe”. She’s been married for three years (she’s now 33) to Haris, a civil engineer. They live in the old town of Nicosia – and she tells me where her home is, but declines to do the interview there. Instead we meet at Kala Kathoumena which is literally just around the corner, the better to keep things impersonal.

It’s fair to say that most of her energy gets poured into her work. “We enter – I enter – a project so much that nothing else exists outside this project,” she admits – and, in the six years since she came back to Cyprus from her studies, she’s made a name for herself with the Open Arts theatre company, directing a series of productions including, most recently, Love and Information by Caryl Churchill. Those studies were extensive (she did a BA at Emerson College in Boston then an MFA at Middlesex University in London, along with stints at the Russian University of Theatre Arts in Moscow and the ISI Indonesian Art Institute in Bali), and the shows she stages are known for conceptual inventiveness, specialising in so-called “site-specific” productions.

For instance? Well, for instance A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged not in a theatre but the orange grove of her family home in Strovolos – a conceit inspired by the “experimental immersive theatre” she used to watch in London, the point being to create not just the play but a facsimile of the world of the play. There were two simultaneous strands, she recalls, the world of ‘the Mechanicals’ and the world of the Fairies, the audience guided by the voice of Puck on a pirate-radio station as they made their way from one to the other – but the main ingredient was the sensual excitement of actually standing in a forest (or close enough) while watching magic unfold in a forest. Or take her production of The Cherry Orchard staged, ingeniously, at Tivoli Luna Park, the venerable (and now defunct) amusement park in the grounds of the old State Fair in Nicosia: a play about old and faded Russian aristocrats forced to sell their family estate to pay the mortgage, experienced by the audience in an equally faded setting – an obsolete shell of a place, haunted by the ghosts of forgotten glories and already in the process of being evicted.

It’s a slight paradox that Athina, who seems fairly diffident as a person, appreciates boldness when it comes to her art. I find her reading a book called The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, Ostermeier being a German director and former enfant terrible whose style is known for taking no prisoners; his ‘capitalist realism’ aesthetic “forces his audience to watch the gritty violence of reality caused by a ruthless capitalist system,” according to Wikipedia. (I browse through the book, embellished with Athina’s notes; on one page, the phrase “grasping the very core of our human community” has been underlined.) When I ask for the stage productions she recalls most vividly she mentions the Ostermeier-directed Crave, by Sarah Kane, at the Barbican – Kane, who committed suicide at 28, was another pugnacious and aggressive artist, famous for so-called ‘in-yer-face theatre’ – and Strindberg’s Dream Play staged by Katie Mitchell, probably her single biggest influence as a director. “I couldn’t believe that theatre could do such a thing.”

Her own personality, as already mentioned, isn’t much like the reckless audacity she appreciates onstage. Any bad habits? Does she drink too much, smoke too much? “Maybe this is my bad characteristic,” she replies with another nervous laugh, “that I don’t smoke too much or drink too much. If I have work, I go to sleep early”. What does she do for fun? “Hang out with friends. Go out, watch movies. Nothing too crazy.”

What if we were in a large group of friends? How would she behave, what would be her role? Her reply is revealing. She’d try to “keep things moving,” explains Athina. If, for instance, a sudden silence descended on the group, she’d be the one to break the silence – “to keep the momentum”, and prevent the evening from deflating. She might make some comment, just to get everyone going again – but then, having got the conversation back on track, she’d fade into the crowd: “I don’t need to be the centre of attention”. She works best, in short, as an enabler of others – not a bad trait for a director who doesn’t write plays or (despite her TV childhood) view herself as an actress, her job being to facilitate the bringing-to-life of another’s imagined world.

Her style as a director is similarly empathetic and unselfish; she doesn’t try to impose herself on the actors, that would be wrong as well as out of character. The first step is always to “break it down” together – research the life of the writer and the life of the play, “try to find what’s behind this play”. Then she starts setting up situations, both actual scenes and invented situations which may shed light on the characters. “You start finding freedom when you understand how the play is working,” she explains – so they keep rehearsing, and “every time you do it, there are little windows that start opening up… I think it becomes real with the communication onstage, when the people onstage know what they want from each other, so it becomes human”. Love and Information went through two months of daily rehearsal, including a fortnight of research and analysis; the point is to create “a common page”, so the actors feel included in the process and accept her judgment when she guides or corrects their performance. “I don’t like – I mean, no-one likes conflicts in rehearsal”.

Some people do, I point out. Some artists thrive on them.

“Yeah, I don’t. I’m the opposite. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but everyone [should be] here because they want to be here… I think I am sensitive to the people in the group – especially when we have a focus, a play. I believe, as a director, I know how to bring everyone’s focus back to our work.” Her style is methodical, a long way from the stereotype of the director as martinet. “I’m not gonna be the director who’s going to shout, or push someone – because I’m not such a person”.

What kind of person is she? A low-key person, a civilised person. Selfish drivers always used to infuriate her by parking on the pavement right outside her house, she recalls – but the most she ever did was leave a note on their windshield. When’s the last time she lost her temper? She blushes slightly, as if embarrassed to keep answering my questions in such boring ways: “I don’t lose my temper”. She’s very calm, she gets that from her dad.

Well, what would she do if she saw a man beating a dog in the street? Would she intervene? Yes, she replies, but “I would be calm”. First she’d check that the dog was okay, then she’d ask the man why he did it – seeking motivations, like they do in theatre. “You start to think OK, why did that man hit that dog? Why is he being driven to treat animals like this?”. She’s obviously in the right job, I note with amusement. Yes, she agrees, it’s good for her job – “but then, for [creating] change, maybe it’s not”.

That’s the point, of course – because the likes of Sarah Kane and Thomas Ostermeier are (or were) political artists and Athina too wants to bring about change, both aesthetically and, by extension, socially. What she’s doing, after all, is fringe theatre (Open Arts is a small venue, holding no more than 100 people) that aims to shake up local audiences with radical plays or, in the case of Shakespeare and Chekhov, radical stagings. She hopes to make the audience more “present”, she tells me, make them more awake, less complacent: “I think more and more – because we’ve seen so much as people, we have internet, our speed of mind is so much faster – I don’t think anyone wants to sit and be spoon-fed”. She’s part of a new generation that looks beyond Cyprus – and, implicitly, isn’t going to be satisfied with the old ways of doing things. “We’re not locked in an island,” she says, not in 2016 and the Age of the Internet. “It’s really easy to be European”.

Fine; but change requires a certain anger, and perhaps a certain boldness – not just in theatre, but in real life as well. “I think we are a repressed people,” she says of her fellow Cypriots, “I think we hide away” – but of course she herself does it too, more or less, the creative, cultured, well-educated, consciously ‘European’ artist who loves avant-garde theatre but leads a sheltered life because what else can she do? “I think this is a problem we are all facing, not only in Cyprus,” she muses. “The pattern of our society now, what has it led us to do? Find a little job, make sure we have a good night’s sleep in our good beds – because that’s where we feel safe. That’s the measure of what it is to be OK”.

At least Athina is trying to change things, bringing creativity and imagination to her own little patch. Still, the struggle goes on – not just the struggle to be true to one’s art, but simply to make a living from it. Fringe theatre isn’t really sustainable here, despite her success, and the future of theatre is uncertain in general, with so many other distractions – though it stands apart from most of the others, being the only form of mass entertainment that offers a live, communal experience (apart from football, she adds ruefully). What are her own future plans? Does she want children with Haris? Another nervous laugh: “Do I want kids? Yes, sure, maybe one, someday”. Just the one? Just the one, she replies firmly, adding her reasons for that preference to the list of things she’d rather not talk about.

Just a few hours after the UK voted to leave the European Union, we asked a selection of Britons in Nicosia for their first reaction to the news. The only requirement – apart from agreeing to talk on camera, which not everyone was willing to do – was that they should’ve been eligible to vote in the referendum.

Their answers were revealing, even if their political beliefs were surprisingly uniform. No ‘Leave’ supporters were willing to talk, though we did find one person who claimed to have been “on the fence”.

We asked questions on four main topics: (a) How they felt about the result of the referendum; (b) Which side of the debate they were on, and what were the arguments that convinced them to be on that side; (c) How they felt about the campaigns by both sides in the run-up to the referendum; and (d) What they thought was likely to happen next, both in the UK and for British people living in Cyprus.

A cow scientist who has spent much of his life in Italy now tries to bring some of the finer things here in the form of a wine shop and pizzeria. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man with expensive taste

The shelves are stacked with wine bottles, the CD plays ‘Nessun Dorma’. Nicos Charalambous pauses momentarily as his wife Maria Teresa says something in Italian. “Si,” he replies, nodding vaguely, then gets back to talking as she busies herself in the back of the shop – the Enoteca Italiana in Nicosia – and returns with bread, cheese and wine. The bread is a crispy Sardinian flatbread known as ‘pane carasau’, the wine a Montassu, the cheese a complex pecorino sardo (“One of the 10 best cheeses in the world,” claims Nicos). Maria Teresa lays out the mid-morning feast. “Bread from Sardinia, wine from Sardinia, cheese from Sardinia,” she notes with satisfaction.

Thereby hangs a tale – because Maria Teresa is herself from a well-known Sardinian family and Nicos spent nearly three decades in Italy, working for a big dairy company called Granarolo Latte before coming back in the mid-90s. He’s 67, with small unblinking eyes and a very firm handshake; his hair is dyed black, his conversation peppered with wry, rather mirthless chuckles. “I’m a veterinarian, my wife is a lawyer,” he explains, though in fact that description is wildly reductive. “As you see on my card, when you turn it over” – I do; he’s the General Manager of N.C. Ezootechnica Ltd., the company logo being a happy-looking cow with a straw in its mouth – “my business is cows, and the reproduction of cows. I have a factory, in partnership with a younger vet… I deal with dairy farmers, with halloumi, with animals – like I said, with reproduction, genetics, feeding, with the soil, with fertilisers, with seeds. We have the knowhow in dairy farming”.

It feels a bit strange to be talking cows while sipping wine and nibbling pecorino, then again our whole conversation is tinged with a certain disconnectedness. He is, you might say, in the food industry, since his business involves producing pre-mixed fodder for cows with added vitamins and supplements – but he’s also in the food industry because he and Maria Teresa own Enoteca (a high-end wine shop, specialising in wines from small Italian producers) and he also co-owns Isolani, the Italian pizzeria and restaurant in Ayios Antonios Market. And there’s also another disconnectedness because he was born in Cyprus, lives in Cyprus, came back to Cyprus to lend his expertise to the dairy farming sector – yet he also (let’s not mince words) looks down on much of Cypriot culture and society, which is partly why he opened his Italian food and wine shops in the first place.

“I like to eat well,” he tells me, “because someone who lived in Italy for so many years is accustomed to something different from the Cypriot way of life. Cypriots these days – well, they don’t even know how to eat. They always eat the same thing. I mean, if you go to any taverna, you’ll always eat exactly the same. It’s not easy for me, when I know for instance that in Italy we have pasta and every 10 kilometres, when the region changes, the pasta changes too, and there might be 2,000 different kinds of pasta”.

It’s not just the food, either. “Ours is a conservative society, very closed. What I mean is – well, we lack culture,” he blurts out with one of his wry chuckles, “and it’s a problem. Thank goodness for planes, so we can travel once in a while”. Foreigners often find it hard in Cyprus, he reports – especially perhaps Maria Teresa who is actually Maria Teresa Murgia and the daughter of Francesco Murgia, a pillar of 20th-century Italian politics who even had a hand in drafting the country’s post-war Constitution. Τhere’s something covertly – almost resentfully – aristocratic about this couple, like those sulky Russian émigrés who’d hang out in European salons in the years after the Revolution. ‘Isolani’, for instance (the name of their restaurant), means ‘islander’, which I thought might refer to the fact that both Nicos and Maria Teresa are islanders – but it actually refers to a Lusignan prince who moved from Cyprus to Bologna in the 13th century, birthing a new line of royals (his current descendants are the wine-producing Cavazza Isolani family). Enoteca, similarly, makes no bones about being aimed at connoisseurs: “We’re not a wine shop that sells to the masses,” says Nicos, “but to people who understand quality”.

Who are those people? Cultured people, people (implicitly) like themselves – people from abroad, or who’ve lived abroad. “Let me repeat, I’m not 100% Cypriot,” Nicos makes clear a little later. “Because society in Cyprus isn’t the society I knew when I was a boy, it’s totally different. Just to give you an idea, I live, so they say, in the best neighbourhood in Nicosia – maybe in Cyprus. Ayios Andreas, it’s one of the best neighbourhoods in Cyprus. Would you believe that I don’t even know my neighbours? Yes. It’s very strange to me. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people [i.e. Cypriots], that they like to hide. Is it because they’re not educated, and can’t hold a high-level conversation?

“I really find it hard to understand. I’m fine in the countryside – I get along much better with the people I collaborate with, than I do with the nouveaux riches of Nicosia. I’ll say this very loudly, even though I’m sorry to say it – because when I was a kid our doors were always open, and the neighbours would come calling out ‘Where are you, koumera?’. There was such a connection, such a need in people to live together. Now, everyone just wants to show that they’ve got a bigger car, or a bigger house”.

On paper, Nicos Charalambous might come off slightly arrogant. ‘Who does he think he is?’ some may splutter, reading his criticisms – but in fact he knows very well who he is, viz. a self-made man who embraces his own elevation from the mass like a badge of honour. I suspect it’s a key to the man that Nicos’ own background is working-class: his dad was a butcher and he’s the oldest of six siblings, most of whom never went to university – but Nicos did, studying veterinary science in Bologna. “I’m a very decisive person,” he tells me – and illustrates that with a story from his youth, when he went to Italy in 1968 only to find that his high school (Terra Santa in Nicosia) wasn’t officially recognised by the authorities, meaning he wouldn’t be allowed to study. His response – as a mere 19-year-old, alone in a foreign country – was to jump on a train to Rome and plead his case before the Minister of Education himself, a wildly ambitious plan that actually worked (though he ended up meeting with another high official, not the Minister per se). “Imagine that – how immature, you might say. But I was determined!”

His life has been a series of successful projects. His company is probably the biggest of its kind in Cyprus, with a dozen employees and a turnover in the millions of Euros; banks are throwing money at him at the moment (he says), offering loans at good rates so the company can grow. He’s worked on cows – “It may be hard for you to understand this, but there’s a tremendous amount of science surrounding the cow” – and worked on cow farmers, whose sector he effectively transformed by teaching them new techniques and taking them on expeditions to the US and Italy (“If we have 200 producers, I must’ve taken 100 or 120 – and I still do, so they can see how people work abroad”). His first marriage, which ended in 1982 after seven years, was admittedly a less successful project – but it did produce a son, who lives in Italy. What does he do? “My son is an artist,” replies Nicos, stifling a slightly embarrassed chuckle. “He’s in the theatre.”

He also has a daughter, Marina, now almost 18 and about to embark on her studies – and it’s obviously absurd to refer to a person as a ‘project’, yet it’s also true that second-time fatherhood was a conscious choice for Nicos. He was nearly 50 when he and Maria Teresa adopted Marina from a Ukrainian orphanage – but the project has been highly successful, Nicos rising easily to the challenge of middle-aged parenthood. “I’m 67, and I still feel like a kid inside,” he beams. “When we took our Marina into our home, I felt even younger”. She now plans to follow in her father’s footsteps, studying in Parma and specialising in horse medicine, which was always his own dream (it was only the need to earn a living that forced him to settle for the less distinguished cow). “But now she also wants to study to become a sommelier!” adds Maria Teresa, Enoteca having clearly left its mark on the girl.

Whether the wine shop is successful too I have no idea – though Isolani seems quite busy when I pass by later to meet Massimo, the Italian chef plucked from a restaurant in Umbria after years of culinary globe-trotting from Japan to Saudi Arabia (he once cooked at the Saudi king’s palace in Medina, he tells me; obviously a future profile waiting to happen). At the very least, Enoteca seems to match Nicos’ description of a place intended as “something special”, with wines ranging from good value to very expensive (the latter tucked away in a back room) and an emphasis on small producers. “The problem in Cyprus is that we have good soil, good grapes, [but] when the product is good and we put 2,000 bottles on the market, three years later they become 10,000 bottles, or 20,000”. Greed is the enemy of quality, and bigger doesn’t always (or ever) mean better. Nicos learned about wines from the dairy farmers he dealt with in Italy, who made their own wine and always offered him a little tipple; he was quite embarrassed when he took their Cypriot counterparts to visit, he recalls, and our local farmers asked for Cokes and 7Ups. It’s different in Italy, there’s a real food and drink culture there; even McDonald’s was forced to close in Bologna, he claims – “not like us now, with Jamie’s Italian opening…”

That’s a constant refrain, in between the excellent cheese and Sardinian bread, and Nicos using a mini-decanter to pour us all a generous measure of wine: the shortcomings of Cyprus, and the evident superiority of Italy. When he goes to Bologna (he kept his home there, and still travels back and forth), many people assume he never left; when he’s in Cyprus, on the other hand – even after 20 years – casual acquaintances often ask ‘So you’re in Cyprus now? Where do you live?’. He feels like a stranger here, he admits ruefully. “When people come to my factory they say ‘You’re not Cypriot at all’. Because I have a little garden in the factory, I have a 17th-century chest in my office… Because I can’t live –” he begins, then makes it more general: “I want to live well. I mean, you won’t see me in a bow tie or something flamboyant, or a Versace – but I want to have a good life”.

Some may wonder why a good life depends on the country where you live, as opposed to the person you are inside. Some may accuse him of snobbery. Some may also have other questions, wondering for instance if his work is really so noble. The “science” of cows, after all, is a major part of agri-business, its rather scary aim being – as Nicos freely admits – to perfect a breed and eradicate any differences between one animal and another. Wouldn’t it be better if cows didn’t eat his vitamin-enriched products, and instead grazed freely? (He himself prefers organic, he agrees, but there are just “too many people on the planet”.) And what about the fact that Cyprus has the most expensive milk in Europe – a problem he puts down to high production costs and our relative geographical isolation.

Maybe so. But the more intriguing story is the thought of Nicos Charalambous with his hand halfway up a cow’s uterus – even with all the science, there’s only one way to make sure the reproductive bits are healthy – then coming back to sip excellent wine at Enoteca and commiserate with Maria Teresa over memories of Italy, the land that nurtured and beguiled him. “First you’re born, then you develop,” he explains philosophically. “And it all depends on what kind of people you’ll meet in your life. If you meet the correct people, you’ll become a correct person”. Just as long as they’re Italian, and appreciate a nice glass of red.

Muslims around the world are currently celebrating the three-day Eid al-Fitr festival, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. During Ramadan, Muslims are required to fast from dawn till sunset, not even allowed to drink water.

A few days ago, we went to the Omeriye Mosque in Nicosia and spoke to a selection of worshippers as they were about to break their fast with Iftar (the evening meal) and prayers.

We also asked them if it’s more difficult to observe Ramadan in Cyprus – where no allowance is made for the fact that they’re fasting – than it is in their native countries.

Note: the mosque also has a women’s section, however no women were present at the time of our visit.

Sound of Thieves are a band, but also a couple about to take on Europe from the back of a van after establishing their sound in Cyprus. THEO PANAYIDES meets a real unit

By the time you read this, Sound of Thieves will have left Cyprus. I catch up with Jan Bures and Phoebe Pope just a few days before they depart, on their way to England where – as their fans already know – they plan to buy a camper van, using money that’s been raised through online crowd-funding, then use the custom-fitted ‘house on wheels’ to go on an indefinite tour of the UK and Europe in their guise as Sound of Thieves. It’s a new chapter in their lives, and a bit of a risky venture – but that’s okay because Jan and Phoebe are 25, a good age for taking risks as well as the subject of some affectionate banter, the duo being an offstage couple as well as a duo.

“You’re not 25 yet,” points out Jan, with the air of a senior partner.

“Uh… In a week!” retorts Phoebe.

“Not in a week.”

“What do you mean?”

“What date is it?”

She gives a theatrical gasp: “You forgot my birthday?!”

All in good fun, of course – though it turns out Jan didn’t mean ‘What date is your birthday?’ but ‘What’s the date today?’, so as to calculate whether it is in fact a week away. He doesn’t seem the type to forget people’s birthdays, and also seems the type who’s usually right in his calculations (as indeed in this case, albeit pedantically: her birthday is in 10 days, not a week). Then again, Phoebe herself is by no means as dizzy as that exchange makes her sound. The very next thing she says reveals her practical nature, speaking of 25th-birthday presents: “Whatever you buy, don’t spend a lot, because we need to save it”.

You wouldn’t know it from their music, which tends to be ethereal and atmospheric – or maybe you would, because it’s very practical music beneath the hippy-ish trappings. Phoebe sings in a warm expansive voice that ascends fearlessly, floating above the furrows and ridges of sound, Jan plays guitar and looks very serious – he looked even more impressive with his trademark Mohawk, unfortunately lopped off a few days before our interview – and they also use a ‘looper’, a machine that plays pre-recorded snippets of music; a typical song might involve half a dozen loops, all cued at different moments. Their sound is rich but also “self-sufficient,” as Phoebe puts it: they can travel light and be ready to play in 15 minutes – an important asset as they prepare to conquer the world beyond Cyprus, which will involve street performances as well as living out the back of the aforementioned van.

Won’t they get sick of each other, living at such close quarters? “We’ve been living here, in this living-room, for the past two years,” shrugs Jan, pointing to a double bed in a corner, so a space of their own – however tiny – is actually an improvement. We’re in the front room of a house in the boondocks of Nicosia (Ayios Dometios, very near the Green Line), surrounded by out-of-sync clocks which all chime at different times, so a clock seems to be chiming every few minutes. Jan called it their studio on the phone, and there is a studio attached – “Where the magic happens,” he says in ironic quote-marks then berates himself, like any good 20-something, for being so cheesy – but in fact the house belongs to his mum, who plays viola in the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra, and the bed in the corner is their own little haven. “This is our corner,” he explains. (“This is our corner,” echoes Phoebe.) “We’ve got a little folding partition, we fold it out when we want to shut ourselves off from the world. And yeah. This is where we stay”.

He must’ve felt a bit awkward two years ago, buying a one-way ticket from London to move back in with his mother; Phoebe must’ve felt even more awkward – though presumably she’d been here before, since they’ve been a couple (though not a duo) for the past five years. They met in Bolton, her hometown, when they were both bartending in the same bar. Jan was doing odd jobs, Phoebe was on holiday from university (she has a BA, specialising in Film Composition; he’s tried for a Music Production degree, but dropped out twice). This was not a sophisticated bar, but Phoebe used to work summers there, “and one summer, Jan was there. And how we bonded was that Beck’s Bier had a picture of Mozart on [the label], and I said ‘Oh, they’ve got Mozart on’, and he’s like” – shocked expression – “‘Oh, you know Mozart?’. ‘Yes, I used to play the cello’. ‘Ah, I played the cello as well’. Then we kind of became connected.”

“Yeah, I think we were the only people –”

“We were the only people, definitely, in that bar, who knew who Mozart was! So it was really like” – she trills, as if quoting Shakespeare – “‘Oh! You under-staaand me’.”

It’s a slight paradox that Phoebe is by far the more dramatic of the two in conversation (she acts scenes out, laughing uproariously and often) but claims to be much shyer when it comes to performance. “Because I’m really into the creation of music,” she explains (she plays the larger role in ‘composing’ the loops that drive their sound), “I think maybe I saw myself as a bit of a geek. But actually, because of Jan – because he loves being onstage – he kind of pushed me to do it. In the beginning I remember sitting in a car, before we went for a gig, and I was like ‘Jan, I’ve forgotten all the words, I can’t do it!’ and he was like ‘No, come on’, and he literally booted me out of the car and pushed me onstage”. Oddly, given her pellucid voice, she’d never sung in a band before. Even more oddly, given that both Jan and Phoebe were unemployed musicians and living together on the same double bed, it took them six months to figure out that it might be an idea to form a band together.

What happened next is remarkable, and perhaps a cautionary tale for local musicians who set out to try their luck in a big city without giving Cyprus a chance. Jan had played in a few bands in London – but in fact it was more a case of attempting to play in bands, “because everybody was so busy with just trying to survive and paying the rent that if you managed to get four people in a room once a week, that was a miracle”. Here, on the other hand, Sound of Thieves flourished. The set-up helped: living in a house next to a studio, without any day-jobs to distract them, allowed the couple to polish and perfect their music – but they also played live, 106 gigs in the first year alone, winning fans “one by one” as Jan puts it. “We made friends with them, and they follow us.”

Local audiences tend to be receptive, and are unlikely to throw bottles. (It may be different abroad, he admits; “I’ll need my baseball bat.”) The local scene offered frequent opportunities to hone their craft. They made mistakes, had some disasters and “messy situations” – last year, at the Farma Project festival, their looper’s screen died when it fell off a table five minutes before showtime – played one show while crippled by food poisoning, and steadily gained in confidence. Two years later, the experience has paid off: TC-Helicon, the company that makes their machine, has featured them on its website, online music show BalconyTV has included them on a compilation, they’ve had offers to play in festivals as far away as Chennai in India – and they also have a list of gigs and YouTube vids to ensure they’re taken seriously as they look for venues in Europe.

London was a low-point, however; they agree on that. “If you’d seen how we felt when we were in London,” muses Phoebe, “travelling on a train every day, going past Canary Wharf. I was on the train – and every morning I’d see these guys in suits, looking like they wanted to end their life, and it was just…” She shudders at the memory. “Even though there are millions of people, it’s a very lonely city”. During their two years in Cyprus, on the other hand, the lowest point was maybe “when we were broke, and we had to eat lentils”. It doesn’t compare.

It’s instructive that she chooses that image of those stuck-in-a-rut London suits to illustrate despondency – because that would be Sound of Thieves’ nightmare, losing the freedom to change their lives and/or do things their own way. Jan and Phoebe come from different worlds: he’s a Pole raised in Cyprus, she’s from the north of England. Still, they have a few things in common. Both come from slightly unsettled families – she has two half-sisters, both much older; he has three half-sisters, all much younger (the youngest, aged six, lives with them in his mum’s house, along with a cageful of guinea pigs and a blind dog named Muka). Both have dads who’ve done a lot of different jobs: Phoebe’s father was an aviation engineer who also owned a chip van and a mortgage company, Jan’s has been a landscaper, estate agent, marketing director of a toy company, and is now an English teacher in Germany. Unsurprisingly, the couple themselves are also restless and unimpressed by convention, especially when it comes to handling their careers: “Whatever the norm is, in the management sense, we just said, ‘Well, that just kind of sucks. Let’s not do that’.”

Maybe that’s an aspect of being 25 nowadays, that suspicion of a ‘right’ way of doing things – partly a result of the recession, which of course has cast a pall over their entire adult lives. Art grows in a recession, reckons Phoebe, because it makes you say ‘This is rubbish, so at least I’m going to do something I enjoy’. Open-mindedness is another aspect, this being a notoriously globalised, “chilled” generation. We chat a few days before Brexit (their joke, says Phoebe, is that if Britain leaves “I’m going to have to marry him for his passport!”), and she makes it clear that she wouldn’t vote for it. “Now, with Brexit, thoughts come out from people that you might not expect, and it makes you think ‘I don’t think like that’. I don’t see a disconnect between anybody. We’re all the same… I just hate people with any kind of prejudice – for any reason, age or race or sex or whatever”.

“We’re all much less tribal now,” adds Jan, ‘we’ being his peers. “It’s not based on ‘This is my geographical location, and these are my borders, and these are people I know and these [other] people are bad’. It’s more like ‘I’ve got my friends and family – from wherever the hell they are – and we stick together’.”

There’s another aspect to being 25 nowadays, especially the kind of 25-year-old musician who plays 106 gigs a year and decides to live on the road: succeeding in a time of recession means you have to be focused, determined, driven. Phoebe quotes her older sister, who’s amazed at how “responsible” 20-somethings are these days. Do Jan and Phoebe have a social life? Not really, they laugh. What do they do for fun? “We practise!” They go out for a beer now and then, and mingle with fans after a gig – “but really our life is about getting this whole project off the ground”. The rock’n roll lifestyle doesn’t really appeal. “I don’t think we really enjoy that, to be honest… For me, and I think for Phoebe, I can entertain myself with what I’ve got here. With music, or talking, or reading a book. We’re not really extroverted in that sense”.

Sound of Thieves are practical people. To be sure, they get a little mystical sometimes; it’s hard not to, when playing their kind of ethereal music. “There are moments when you feel something being channelled through you,” muses Jan. “You tap into something different. And there are moments when you feel almost invincible…” But mostly it’s a question of practical things – saving money and making music, and moving forward one step at a time. They’re a team, you can see that. (Don’t they get on each other’s nerves? “Minimally.”) Phoebe laughs more, Jan seems slightly bossier – but they’re on the same page.

“How often do you meet another person,” he asks rhetorically, “who’s going to not only be in a band with you, but be your partner and go travel the world, sleeping in the back of a car for god knows how long? The more we get into this adventure the more excited we are, and the more we want to do it, and the more we feel it’s going to work”. Phoebe nods firmly, thinking ahead to their new chapter: “It will come together”.