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.

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.