BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Sarah Tucker
Forty years is a long time to hold a memory in place. It becomes less a recollection and more a position you have decided to defend.
I first came to Cyprus on a date. I remember breezes that made conversation difficult, food that made restraint impossible, and being fed with the quiet determination of a culture that does not entirely trust you to know when you have had enough. There were lemon and lime groves. I remember that very clearly. Which usually means I am at least partially wrong.
Returning now to Asimina Suites Hotel, which has been extended upwards as though confidence required an additional storey, I find an island that has not so much changed as adjusted its posture. It is owned by Constantinou Bros Hotels, a family group that understands hospitality without needing to perform it.
Next door, a small white church continues its work quietly. People arrive, kiss the saints, leave. No explanation required. Outside, an olive tree is surrounded by large white pebbles with messages written for loved ones. It is moving, but also faintly practical. Even sentiment here appears to have a system.
Forty years ago, I remember plantations. Today, they are fewer. Not gone entirely but reduced. Cyprus has had difficult years with water, particularly around the late 2000s and early 2010s, when drought forced a kind of agricultural realism. The response has been characteristically unsentimental. If rain does not arrive, one manufactures water. Desalination now supplies most of what is needed. Weather, here, has been quietly replaced by infrastructure.
The result is not dramatic. It is adjustment. Citrus sits alongside avocados, papayas, and whatever else makes economic sense. This is an island that has decided survival is preferable to nostalgia.
It takes about forty minutes to walk into Paphos harbour. The castle sits there with the relaxed authority of something that has been conquered repeatedly and no longer takes it personally. Cyprus has been ruled by almost everyone worth mentioning. Mycenaeans, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Venetians, Ottomans, and, of course, the British. Independence in 1960 feels recent because it is.
At the Tombs of the Kings, the presentation is refreshingly minimal. It reminded me, briefly, of Malta and Gozo. Stone chambers, columns, mosaics. If you have a guide, as I did, there are stories. If you do not, the place manages perfectly well without them. History here is not curated for emotional effect. It simply exists and expects you to keep up.
Nearby, Aphrodite’s Rock marks the birthplace of Aphrodite, produced from a sequence of events involving Uranus that one might prefer not to revisit in detail. The sea, however, is excellent, which resolves the issue.
The structured itineraries are built around the optimistic idea that one might return improved. Bread making at Sophia House in Letymbou is less about skill acquisition and more about being gently corrected. At Kolios Winery, wine is introduced with calm authority. You leave with confidence, if not necessarily knowledge.
Lunch at Spring of Life involves carob syrup, olive oil, and the sort of generosity that removes the option of moderation. Cypriot food does not ask whether you are hungry. It assumes you will be.
The nature itinerary is more honest. At the Lara Turtle Conservation Station, there are often no turtles. This is not an oversight. It is the point. Protection, not performance. One finds oneself oddly reassured.
The Akamas Peninsula offers views that are quietly exceptional. The birds require effort. Bee eaters, hoopoes, kestrels, occasionally something more ambitious. The cats, by contrast, are immediately available and appear extremely well funded.
In the Troodos Mountains, the island shifts tone. Cooler, greener, more reflective. There are waterfalls, monasteries, and reservoirs that remind you this is a place that has had to think seriously about water. At times, it has not been available. That tends to sharpen priorities.
What struck me, returning after forty years, was not change but awareness.
Jung wrote that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate. Cyprus seems to have taken that seriously. It has stopped calling drought bad luck and started engineering around it. It has stopped waiting for certainty and begun constructing it.
Safety, then, becomes less about protection and more about comprehension. Not the absence of risk, but the presence of understanding.
Recent headlines, particularly those loosely tied to tensions involving Iran and regional infrastructure, have not helped. A brief concern was reported with enthusiasm and nuance was misplaced. Tourism dipped. Communities noticed. It is a reminder that adjectives have consequences.
Walking through Paphos, you begin to understand that this is not a place driven by urgency. It is driven by continuity. Shops open, or they do not. Restaurants are either full or entirely empty. No one explains.
Even the smaller details carry weight. Donkey milk liqueur, which sounds like a mistake but is not. Paintings made with bark and olive oil. A guide explaining mythology as though it were current affairs. A tractor followed, improbably, by a Harley Davidson.
On my final evening, sitting by the sea, I realised that what I had mistaken for simplicity was, in fact, clarity. Cyprus is not trying to be anything other than what it is. It is we who arrive with the need for it to be something else. Safer. More dangerous. More defined.
Forty years ago, I would have called this place unpredictable. Now, I understand it differently. Nothing here had changed quite as much as I had.
And perhaps that is the point. We do not return to places to find them again. We return to see, more clearly, who we have become in the meantime.
