Shirley Valentine - Wonderful Woman No. 137

Shirley Valentine - Played by Pauline Collins in the 1988 film Shirley Valentine
Fictional British Housewife

This is a very personal and emotive addition to the album for me, even just thinking about this film brings the prinkly sensation of nostalgic tears welling in my eyes. I hope no-one will mind if this particular blog is partly Shirley Valentine's story but partly mine too.

In 2004, I went to work on the Greek island, Rhodes, for a travel company. I thought I would stay for the summer, have a great time and then move on. It didn't really work out like that.

I was posted in a resort called Afandou... which wasn't really a holiday resort at all, it was a working Greek village, with dusty streets, a pebbled beach, was filled with the smells of flowers and kleftiko carried on the warm evening breeze but in the summer it became alive with British tourists and people, like me, there to work in the sunshine. From day one, I was welcomed with open arms, the Greeks still remain the friendliest people I have ever known and I also met and befriended other people who had moved to spend their lives abroad. It wasn't just the people but the village itself that seemed to hold me in a warm, maternal embrace. In all my life, I have never been more at home anywhere or felt more happy than I did in Afandou.

I spent three years coming and going from Afandou, doing seasonal jobs, finding new places to live and so on. I wanted to make it my permenent home but try as I did, I could never find work for the winter and what I earned during the 8 months of summer was never enough to support me the rest of the time. After three years, I decided I couldn't live in constant transit anymore, it was time to grow up and accept things as they were. I have been back there for holidays many times and leaving always breaks my heart. Though I now live in picturesque Sicily, I still hold out hope that one day I will find a way to return to Afandou and live, like in films, happily ever after.

Which is exactly what Shirley Valentine did. She stayed and that is why she is so wonderful to me, she made the dream happen, she made it work, did the thing I most wanted but wasn't able to do.

On the screen she transformed from a drab, down-trodden Liverpudlian housewife to an independent woman, able to enjoy life with true abandon, a woman who embraced the beauty and culture and history of, what is to me, the most wonderful country on Earth. In the end, she is completely unrecognisable from the shadow of a woman she was before. She is a heroine to me.

Στην καρδιά μου είμαι Έλληνας!!!