Greek Myth

Serifos - Image  ©The Guardian

Way back in the mists of antiquity, well 1979 to be exact, a pair of young travellers from Birmingham decided to embark on their first foreign adventure. It was me & Jane actually. Having decided that Greece was to be our destination for a variety of reasons and being in possession of a brand-new credit card, I went and blew the entire credit limit on two return flights to Athens; BA scheduled flights no less. From bloody Heathrow. Which meant the biggest and most painful part of the journey was getting down to the capital and across to the airport by train and tube. Which took hours.

The plane we flew on was a TriStar, which was very commodious, being of the wide-ish-bodied long-haul variety of tube with wings. So far so good. My sister Karen and her husband George, who were old hands at travel, particularly to the Med and the Aegean, Ionian etc.; suggested that we just get a taxi from Athens airport to Omonia Square in the centre of the city and wing it from there as there would be plenty of hotels to choose from.

So it turned out. We got a room for the first night in what seemed to be an establishment frequented by what used to be called 'travelling salesmen' - a bit shabby, but as it turned out OK. Our first night we spent around the square - delicious pork souvlaki from a street vendor and beers and retsina in a bar obviously not frequented much by tourists - noisy and smoky; stress and the latter prompting me to buy Greek cigarettes and break a two-year-fast from the habit.

We moved on to another hotel the next day and Jane promptly broke the drainage by doing the classic toilet paper in toilet thing. We were new to Greek plumbing, after all. We watched Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights or something that evening on the TV, overdubbed in Greek; eating gratis salted nuts and drinking cold beer at the hotel bar.

Having visited the Parthenon and other obligatory sights, we decided to quit town and get a ferry somewhere - anywhere - so we checked out and got the wonderful old wooden-carriaged metro down to the port of Piraeus and booked a couple of one way tickets to Serifos. Boarding what turned out to be an ex-WWII tank transporter called the Kanares: battleship grey and sounding and feeling like it was powered by the largest Perkins diesel known to man, this thing had iron-rivetted bulkheads like something out of the Cruel Sea; the heads were holes in the steel floor with grab-handles to the sides.

After some hours at a very stately pace, the lights on the harbour of Serifos hove into view. Slowly, inexplicably, we simply sailed past the destination we had booked to reach. Puzzled, if not a little alarmed, but by now getting used 'The Greek Way', we consulted our map to see which island in the group we were likely to stop at or simply pass by next. It turned out to be Siphnos, the historical home  of Greek cuisine and pottery, as it turned out. The Kanares did manage to stop this time and we disembarked into the complete unknown, very late in the evening with nowhere to stay and not a clue what to do next. So we just went with the flow and boarded the bus that everyone else got on as there seemed to be no real alternative - stick with the crowd and see what happens next becoming our mantra at this point.

I'll come back to our subsequent adventures in another post, as the point of all this is that our booked destination, Serifos, which we still haven't managed to visit, is currently on the list for Covid-19 isolation, along with a number of other Greek islands across the region. We just can't figure out the logic at play here, as the only way to get to Serifos is the way we should have, had the captain of the Kanares decided not to make the stop there: by ferry from Piraeus. You have to fly to Athens first. The Greek mainland is not on the quarantine list. By what Byzantine mental process have the government and/or their (mis)advisers arrived at such a surreal conclusion? It just mirrors the entirety of the last four-plus years' bizarre and frankly unsettling mismanagement of events. Brexit - total fantasy island, Covid - epidemiological travesty: what next? All that is plain is that we are truly being led by donkeys, to use that well-worn phrase. Where we go from here, I have no idea, but as I've said before; I strongly suspect our salvation, at least from the current Star Chamber of lunatics and psychopaths, will come from the unlikely depths of the Tory party's noisome back benches. As unholy as that seems and as much as I hate to say it: it might be our only way forward out of this fiasco.