ITHACA

Day 5

We’re on the sun deck of the morning ferry to Ithaca waiting to depart Sami. The family next to us take out hotel breakfast boxes and start rifling through to see what they’ve got. Presumably they ticked a box the previous night, alongside the one asking if they’d like a knock on the door so they don’t have to think about having to wake themselves up either. I can’t see what they’ve got but I don’t care, because I’m too busy thinking how stupid they look, and how great I am for holding out for an indigenous Americano and pasty in Vathi.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the propensity some people have for eating the moment they set foot on public transport. Especially trains. It’s not just something they do to pass the time after a spell of looking out of the window. No, it’s immediate. As if their life depends on it. When the first steam locomotives were introduced people thought they might suffocate over 30mph. I wonder whether these people think they might starve. That the train will drain every scrap of energy from their sorry arses and discard them like spent Duracell's at the next station. So it’s sit down, crack the Coke, pop the Pringles, rip open the Honey Roast Ham and get gorging.

The father is wearing a turquoise polo shirt and has a small and perfectly spherical head. There’s very little above the eyes, as though the bit that normally houses the brains has been left off. If it weren’t for the mature female mate and two normally proportioned children sitting beside him, you could easily pass him off as a grotesquely over-sized toddler. He’s bald and shiny except for a narrow shaved strip at ear height, and a couple of fleshy folds around the back. Around the front there’s a little beard-moustache combo, circling the mouth area like the muzzle of an unimaginative soft toy. His paws fumble with the play food in the box wedged in his groin, and it looks like he’s found something good to eat. By the time we pull out of the harbour they’re all munching happily; daddy bear, mummy bear and both baby bears.

EXTRA-TERRIBLE

Day 3

The mood is lightening. Presumably at least partly because we slept in a bed last night. We hadn't been able to the night before because the aircon was broken in our bedroom, so Julia and I encamped in the lounge. With one thing and another, things didn’t get off to a good start. The youngest decided the apartment was nowhere near as good as last year’s and went into some kind of terminal sulk. Which drove Julia and I crazy, not because he was behaving like a spoilt 6-year-old, but because he was right. And shouting at him was a lot easier than accepting the fact we’d chosen a shit apartment.

But now things are easing, and problems that seemed insoluble when we arrived are getting sorted. For example, we’ve found that, despite there being no toaster, we can make perfectly adequate toast using the oven grill. And closing the wooden shutters is a good way of stopping the early morning sun blasting into the bedrooms and waking us all up.  I don’t know why the act of flying from Edinburgh to Greece is so detrimental to the act of rational thought, but it is. We may not be tired and befuddled when we finish work, but by the time we get to Kefalonia we certainly are. We’ve come to accept that the act of going on holiday demolishes you. It’s just a matter of whether you can put yourself back together before it’s time to come home.