Greece July 9 to 24

After a brief interlude in Teddington with the Houlston family, during which we explored their new allotment, and did essential maintenance such as haircuts, we left for Greece. We won’t bore you with a day by day account of lying on the beach and eating delicious food but will leave you with a Hellenic sampler.

Appetiser: Athens, where we were met by Michaeli, my stepbrother and his wife and Svetlana what a lovely couple! Staggeringly intelligent, enquiring of mind, quick of wit, and generous of spirit. We visited the new Acropolis Museum which had been open only one month. The fascinating exhibition, although a little light on detail, even included a space reserved for the Elgin Marbles, poignant in its emptiness given that they have been residing in the British Museum since Lord Elgin’s agents spirited them away some 150 years ago. The Museum itself is light and airy like a temple, with glass floors through which (at the lower level) one could observe the archaeological diggings and if you looked up, you could see the museum visitors in the floor above (note to the ladies ...wear trousers).

In the afternoon (5pm by Greek standards) we went to the coast for a fresh fish lunch and a peek at how the Greek upper classes live, before catching our delayed flight to Skiathos, in the Aegean Sea.

Entree: Skiathos, an uncharacteristically green Greek island in the Aegean which found fame from the Greek poet Papadiamantis in the early 1900s and most recently from Mamma Mia, which was filmed there and on neighbouring Skopelos. It is a real renaissance story as the open air cinema has been reborn with bi-nightly performances of the Abba movie complete with beers and disco lights, while the houses in the busy but neat little town gleam in their whitewash, now proudly applied annually as the holiday and day tourists flock in.

We stayed with my father and stepmother in their 11 room bed and breakfast nestled in a steep hillside overlooking the tourquoise sparkling Aegean Sea. Our daily routine consisted of some time in town, lunch at a cantina on a secluded beach (sometimes with Suzie, an old friend from Cape Town but really part Skiathian), a couple of long swims, feeding the cat (Plume) and her kittens and a late dinner on the balcony star and moon gazing. The routine was broken only by walking the dogs from the nearby dog shelter, sailing to Skopelos on the one windless day in fourteen, and treating ourselves and Katarina to a night of Mamma Mia at the outdoor cinema – not to be missed!

Desert: Alonissos, the largest and least accessible of the Sporades islands equals very few tourists and a lot of natural beauty. We spent two days here in a small fishing village just to get the taste of old Greece back, eating delicious fish overlooking the small harbour and deciding on which fishing boat we would buy.