RETURNING

Day 6

It seems that as a family we can only maintain our interest in something for five days. Sometimes in the UK we can use the weather as an excuse and go home early. Not here. So we all sit on the balcony overlooking the wooded slopes of beautiful Kefalonia as the goat bells jingle and the cicadas rattle, but our minds are all somewhere else. It feels like the holiday’s over, but we’re still here. That we’ve gone home in every sense other than actually going home. Which is going to happen tomorrow. Someone has switched the enthusiasm switch off: we do not want to eat, nor do we want to swim. And seeing as that is pretty much all we’ve done for the last five days, we’re at a bit of a loss.

To liven things up the youngest drops half an oregano crisp on the floor and we all watch the ants carry it off. I wonder what we’re going to do when it’s safely down the hole under the kitchen window.

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.

MOLLUSC

Our final afternoon on the Greek island of Kefalonia, and we’re snorkelling around a cluster of giant mushroom-shaped rocks sprouting from the sea opposite Ithaca. Apparently thrown by Cyclops at invading pirates. As if being half blind is an excuse for not tidying up after yourself. Anyway, they’re great to jump off and, especially when the sea is calm, the most photogenic objects on the island. Which means I take the same photos of them every time we’re there, in the mistaken belief that one of them will be perfect, and I will look at it often, even though it’s exactly the same as the last, and I won’t. That’s the problem with always having a high quality camera in your towel bag. When you have the opportunity to preserve that perfect moment for all eternity you tend to take it, thus missing it completely.

The eldest lets out a gurgled exclamation and points down to a huge snail moving surprisingly quickly over the rippled sand below. With the magnification effect of the water it’s hard to tell how big it is, although it looks about a foot long. It’s decided that I’ll dive to get it, having the biggest lungs. Also we’re all slightly worried it might be dangerous.

BATTLE FOR BEACH 8

Never sure how to take being trained. I’m just not comfortable around people whose sole purpose is to know more about something than I do. It makes me nervous. I guess I’m just out of practice. I think the last person who taught me something useful was my driving instructor. Everything since then - largely useless - has been picked up through trial and error. Mainly error. So it feels quite novel to be in a small boat in the middle of a harbour being shown how to make it go and, more importantly, stop, without killing everyone involved. 

We’ve hired a Yellow Boat for the day on the promise of accessing one of twelve Beautiful and Secluded Beaches just up the coast. Beaches that no one without a boat, or hooves, can reach. But first I - and my fellow trainee, a wiry cockney with a nicotine croak and scarlet polo shirt - need to learn the ropes.

I don’t much like our teacher. If Ben Affleck was asked to play a Greek sleazeball this is probably how he'd do it. I don’t think he likes me either. I suspect he’d just as soon drop me to the bottom of the harbour in concrete flip-flops as teach me how to use his boat. 

Anyway, unlike my co-trainee, I have prior boating experience. Which is why I’ve not bothered looking at the video before we came, and he has. We’re shown how to moor the thing off a Beautiful and Secluded Beach. I ask what happens if the anchor gets stuck. Scarlett lets slip that the video covered that and sends his eyes briefly skyward. Point made. He gets to drive the boat back to shore, I don’t. I take this as our mentor acknowledging my innate nautical aptitude. Or possibly he wants me dead.

GREEK LOAF

Our luxury villa has been laid waste, pulverised into little more than a pile of gravel on an arid hillside. Either that or the sat nav got it wrong.

"Ring the number."

"I’ve tried, it doesn’t work. Just goes to beeps."

Despite our best efforts we’re both thinking the unthinkable. That we’ve been taken in by people who dupe people far less intelligent than us. That we might have to go on the telly and sit side by side holding hands to relate our sad and tragic tale for the amusement and edification of people to whom this kind of thing never happens. People like us.

Nearby a goat bleats insensitively as if nothing’s happened.

"What do the directions say?"

"Turn left before the Shell garage." 

But this doesn’t feel like the kind of place you’re going to find one of those. In fact it feels like we're the first motor vehicle ever to pass this way. Other than the one that brought the gravel.