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.
Day 4
Julia has decided to make a photomontage of the roadside shrines you see everywhere around the island, and has taken to jumping out of the car every time we pass one to take a roughly-matching picture. However, a flaw has become apparent. The shrines seem to commemorate tragic road accidents and are thus located on the island’s most dangerous corners. And getting to them has proved almost impossible without incurring serious risk to wind and limb, and the wrath of the local motorists who fly by hooting angrily and missing her by a whisker. I visualise a terrible circular situation where we are wiped out and someone builds a shrine to commemorate us. Then some tourist decides to make a shrine photomontage and is wiped out photographing it. And on it goes, until every spare roadside inch has a shrine, and people in the Greek Office of Transport are scratching their heads over the alarming mortality figures emanating inexplicably from their beautiful - and previously life-enhancing rather than life-terminating - island. Julia puts the project on hold after shrine three, deciding there are already enough.
Today I remember how to say ‘please’ in Greek. Which has increased my usable Greek vocabulary by 50%. I wonder whether to retrace my steps round the island and re-enact every transaction we’ve made in a more cordial fashion. Just for the sake of decency. Probably not much point given that everyone seems to be trotting out near-perfect English at us even before we open our mouths. It’s almost as if they know instinctively we’re not locals. Or Germans, or even Swedish. There was a time when I could pass as any one of these - the last two anyway - but not anymore. I find this disturbing on the basis that, like my parents before me, I foster a deep rooted disdain for English tourists the moment I set foot on foreign soil and spend the rest of the holiday pretending not to be one.
I wonder how I can add a little more ambiguity into the mix. So that at least people don’t start speaking English at me until I’ve tried speaking Greek at them and failed miserably. Some of it may be down to the tan, but that’s going to take a few days. More problematic is the wardrobe. Back in cold and dreary Scotland it seemed a good idea to jettison all notions of fashion and pack half a dozen roughly identical ill-fitting t-shirts, two pairs of shorts and a pair of sandals. This on the assumption that it would be blindingly hot and looking like an over-aged beach bum will be perfectly fine because we’ll be having such a great time that it won't matter what I look like. And anyway, everyone else will look the same. But it turns out that the highly self-conscious person who got on the plane in Edinburgh also got off it in Kefalonia and now finds himself in the middle of a surprisingly fashionable and tastefully dressed community looking like an arsehole. And without the means to do anything about it for a whole seven days.
The other thing that may be acting as a sign post with regard to my origin is a hitherto undiscovered level of acute incompetence and cluelessness. Again, I put this down to the mysterious reduction in brain capacity from the flight out. This morning the maid turned up at 09.30. The kids had had a late night and were still asleep so, in hushed tones, I ushered her in and explained the situation, asking her to start downstairs while I went up and roused them. She looked a little confused but seemed to be in agreement. She’d brought an ornate box of ice creams - an apology for the broken aircon she said - which I shoved in the fridge before dashing up the marble stairs to wake the kids. It was then that Julia told me she’d come to change the beds. I shot back down, worried that my garbled instructions may have been construed as a desire for her to leave. Reinforced by the fact that there are no beds downstairs, and the English term ‘okay’ sounds perversely – and often perilously - like the Greek word for ‘no’. Luckily she was outside watering the plants and, as Greeks so often do, seemed to realise instinctively that I’m an idiot and make the necessary allowances.
Later, Julia asked me why I’d put the ice creams in the fridge instead of the freezer.
"Well they were in a presentation box with ribbons. Would you put something in a presentation box with ribbons in the freezer?"
"I would if they were ice creams."
In the evenings we’re watching ET in instalments. I’d asked the oldest to choose some DVDs to bring and that’s what he chose. Just that. Perhaps because he knows I love it and thought it was time to try and love it himself. Or at least understand why I do. But it’s over now, and with that goddam John Williams music running through my head in a continuous loop, I’m combing the shops of Sami to try and find another. But amongst the dried starfish and penis shaped bottle openers there’s not a DVD to be found.
The eldest asked me why people here have ‘stuff’ when there’s none of it in the shops. Which is a good question, and one for which, like so often these days, I have no answer. I can only think that somewhere there’s a huge shop - probably in the capital Agistoli - crammed to the roof with 'stuff'. But for the sake of the tourists, and authenticity, they keep it well hidden. So I proposed an expedition there, specifically to find some DVDs.
“Nah, let’s just watch the special features,” says the youngest, and everyone agrees.
So that evening we watch a special documentary all about the young people Steven Spielberg had to mess up to bring magic to a generation. First, he hired a bunch of cranks who were mad enough to become best friends with a puppet operated by ten bearded men under the floor, then conducted a number of sadistic psychological experiments, filming every moment. But it wasn’t all weird. At one point, to make ET walk, he put a boy with no legs inside him and knocked him over with a fridge door.
I keep getting quizzical, slightly confused glances from the eldest, who’s probably thinking that admiring Steven Spielberg as a children’s film maker is a bit like admiring Adolf Hitler as a philanthropist.
Apparently, they filmed in narrative sequence, shooting the farewell sequence at the end after Spielberg had gone round all the kids and explained that this ET thing, who they all think is real and have grown to love as a surrogate parent and the only comfort in their tortured lives, is going away now and they will never EVER see him again. So all the blubbing, the snorting, the dribbling mucus - the pain - is real. But then, as Spielberg proudly reminds us, he is a perfectionist. So what’s the point of pretending to screw up a bunch of vulnerable innocent kids when you can do it for real?
I take my hat off to him.
@jesoverthinksit
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.
Day 4
Julia has decided to make a photomontage of the roadside shrines you see everywhere around the island, and has taken to jumping out of the car every time we pass one to take a roughly-matching picture. However, a flaw has become apparent. The shrines seem to commemorate tragic road accidents and are thus located on the island’s most dangerous corners. And getting to them has proved almost impossible without incurring serious risk to wind and limb, and the wrath of the local motorists who fly by hooting angrily and missing her by a whisker. I visualise a terrible circular situation where we are wiped out and someone builds a shrine to commemorate us. Then some tourist decides to make a shrine photomontage and is wiped out photographing it. And on it goes, until every spare roadside inch has a shrine, and people in the Greek Office of Transport are scratching their heads over the alarming mortality figures emanating inexplicably from their beautiful - and previously life-enhancing rather than life-terminating - island. Julia puts the project on hold after shrine three, deciding there are already enough.
Today I remember how to say ‘please’ in Greek. Which has increased my usable Greek vocabulary by 50%. I wonder whether to retrace my steps round the island and re-enact every transaction we’ve made in a more cordial fashion. Just for the sake of decency. Probably not much point given that everyone seems to be trotting out near-perfect English at us even before we open our mouths. It’s almost as if they know instinctively we’re not locals. Or Germans, or even Swedish. There was a time when I could pass as any one of these - the last two anyway - but not anymore. I find this disturbing on the basis that, like my parents before me, I foster a deep rooted disdain for English tourists the moment I set foot on foreign soil and spend the rest of the holiday pretending not to be one.
I wonder how I can add a little more ambiguity into the mix. So that at least people don’t start speaking English at me until I’ve tried speaking Greek at them and failed miserably. Some of it may be down to the tan, but that’s going to take a few days. More problematic is the wardrobe. Back in cold and dreary Scotland it seemed a good idea to jettison all notions of fashion and pack half a dozen roughly identical ill-fitting t-shirts, two pairs of shorts and a pair of sandals. This on the assumption that it would be blindingly hot and looking like an over-aged beach bum will be perfectly fine because we’ll be having such a great time that it won't matter what I look like. And anyway, everyone else will look the same. But it turns out that the highly self-conscious person who got on the plane in Edinburgh also got off it in Kefalonia and now finds himself in the middle of a surprisingly fashionable and tastefully dressed community looking like an arsehole. And without the means to do anything about it for a whole seven days.
The other thing that may be acting as a sign post with regard to my origin is a hitherto undiscovered level of acute incompetence and cluelessness. Again, I put this down to the mysterious reduction in brain capacity from the flight out. This morning the maid turned up at 09.30. The kids had had a late night and were still asleep so, in hushed tones, I ushered her in and explained the situation, asking her to start downstairs while I went up and roused them. She looked a little confused but seemed to be in agreement. She’d brought an ornate box of ice creams - an apology for the broken aircon she said - which I shoved in the fridge before dashing up the marble stairs to wake the kids. It was then that Julia told me she’d come to change the beds. I shot back down, worried that my garbled instructions may have been construed as a desire for her to leave. Reinforced by the fact that there are no beds downstairs, and the English term ‘okay’ sounds perversely – and often perilously - like the Greek word for ‘no’. Luckily she was outside watering the plants and, as Greeks so often do, seemed to realise instinctively that I’m an idiot and make the necessary allowances.
Later, Julia asked me why I’d put the ice creams in the fridge instead of the freezer.
"Well they were in a presentation box with ribbons. Would you put something in a presentation box with ribbons in the freezer?"
"I would if they were ice creams."
In the evenings we’re watching ET in instalments. I’d asked the oldest to choose some DVDs to bring and that’s what he chose. Just that. Perhaps because he knows I love it and thought it was time to try and love it himself. Or at least understand why I do. But it’s over now, and with that goddam John Williams music running through my head in a continuous loop, I’m combing the shops of Sami to try and find another. But amongst the dried starfish and penis shaped bottle openers there’s not a DVD to be found.
“Nah, let’s just watch the special features,” says the youngest, and everyone agrees.
So that evening we watch a special documentary all about the young people Steven Spielberg had to mess up to bring magic to a generation. First, he hired a bunch of cranks who were mad enough to become best friends with a puppet operated by ten bearded men under the floor, then conducted a number of sadistic psychological experiments, filming every moment. But it wasn’t all weird. At one point, to make ET walk, he put a boy with no legs inside him and knocked him over with a fridge door.
I keep getting quizzical, slightly confused glances from the eldest, who’s probably thinking that admiring Steven Spielberg as a children’s film maker is a bit like admiring Adolf Hitler as a philanthropist.
Apparently, they filmed in narrative sequence, shooting the farewell sequence at the end after Spielberg had gone round all the kids and explained that this ET thing, who they all think is real and have grown to love as a surrogate parent and the only comfort in their tortured lives, is going away now and they will never EVER see him again. So all the blubbing, the snorting, the dribbling mucus - the pain - is real. But then, as Spielberg proudly reminds us, he is a perfectionist. So what’s the point of pretending to screw up a bunch of vulnerable innocent kids when you can do it for real?
I take my hat off to him.
@jesoverthinksit
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