All Cretans are liars !

Not perhaps what Patrick Leigh Fermor would have said but he would have recognised the paradoxical saying of Epimenides the Cretan two and a half millenia before he was born. Reflecting on this road sign, I realised that it is the same paradox. The sign says "Sign not in use" which means that we cannot take the message on the sign to be true, in which case the sign is in use which means that we can use it, which means that "Sign not in use" is true which means...and so on. Who would have thought it, a Cretan in the Highways Department !

Patrick Leigh Fermor dead

I was talking about this man only last week, not really sure if he was still alive and now he has died. In March 2009 the BBC4 showed an episode of the series Traveller's Century sadly not available now. A journalist followed Leigh Fermor's 1930s journey across Europe but also told the story of his wartime adventures and finally interviewed him. The most extraordinary part of the programme was an excerpt from Greek television's version of "This is your life" in which Leigh Fermor met not only his old Cretan resistance friends but also the German general they kidnapped. The story was immortalised in Stanley Moss's book and the Powell and Pressburger film Ill met by moonlight. The Independent Review of the programme is interesting.