Greece – The Flâneuse Diaries

With the sap slowly rising, I’m starting to think about rejuvenation and the faint beckoning of foreign lands. It is only a tantalising whisper because hey, who am I kidding? W1 is another country to me right now. Having not opened a travel magazine or gratuitously googled a flight for months, I’m beginning to have thoughts. I blame this reawakened flânerie on an excess of French subtitles having blitzed four seasons of Call My Agent in under a week and revelled in its Gallic glory. I don’t want to be in ‘locked down’ suburbia I heckle at the TV. I want to be on the back of Gabriel’s scooter weaving through the Parisian boulevards.

Small wonder I have cabin fever. It took over six months of pandemic for me to venture out on my one and only staycation, or as I like to call it, holidaying in the UK. We chose Norfolk, the Kirstie Allsopp of the outer home counties (smug, jolly sensible boot room, probably drives a Porsche at weekends), in which to celebrate Mamma Flâneuse’s birthday. My solitary holiday goal had been to emerge reborn on Holkham beach like a radiant Gwyneth Paltrow at the end of Twelfth Night, but even that small dream was thwarted. Instead I looked more like a dying duck in a hurricane as Storm Odette battered us all into submission. Even a visit to Cromer pier to buy a stick of rock seemed ill-advised.

Mamma F, delighted as she was by her gifts of rainbow umbrella, Doris Day DVD and three nights in a luxury B&B run by Andy and Steve, flicked through her BBC weather app on the morning of her birthday trilling ‘London, sunshine, Hampshire, sunshine, Cornwall, sunshine…..’. I began a blog entitled ‘Very Wet, Norfolk’, but abandoned it when I realised that having been confined to our room due to the howling gales, I didn’t actually have anything to say. To be fair, we were just thrilled by the change of scene and the opportunity to eat someone else’s food.

Since then my first foray back into the world of armchair travel began recently when I moved my 6^th flight in a year. Having realised that – quelle domage – I would most definitely not be revelling in the aforementioned Gallic glory of the Cote d’Azur this Easter, it was now time to face the inevitable facts. I would not be visiting the Musée National Marc Chagall nor would I be nibbling on socca from a swarthy street vendor or channelling Leslie Caron at some charming bistro. For god’s sake, can I not make a plan? Can I not even make a plan to make a plan?

With booking holidays now like a craps game, I rolled the dice and came up with Santorini in early autumn. Why not? Weather still good, kids in school (fingers crossed), fewer seasonal crowds (again, fingers crossed), best track record for containing COVID-19 in Europe and odds for middle agers like me being vaccinated, more than fair. This is how we decide our travel for now, through a series of calculations we hope will get us to our destination.

I first went to Santorini ten years ago and stayed in Oia in a tiny studio apartment built into the cliff that was reached by going down nearly 200 enormous stone steps – a nightmare for luggage and heels. It had no air conditioning, only windows that opened straight out into the sea and one night I watched a total eclipse from my bed because the holiday was that kind of magical. Below me, a Susan Sarandon-like dance professor from Texas was staying with her teenage daughter in one of the stunning troglodyte houses for which the island is famed. I don’t remember their names, but I still recall our conversations vividly (‘It’s not ‘get into shape’, it’s ‘get into condition’, let’s get the terminology right!’ and ‘Darling, the only reason I agreed to live in Texas, was so I could save up enough money NOT to be in Texas’). I remember how we clutched our mojitos when volcanic tremors rippled through the bar one night and how the waiter gave us an insouciant shrug as we looked expectantly across the caldera. All these moments are inextricably woven into that glorious trip.

Holidays are like strings of jewels. They are made up of people we’ve met, food we’ve tasted, art we’ve gazed upon, snatches of songs we’ve heard and sunsets we’ve watched. These are the things we are missing and the things we need to get back to when it is safe. Until I can dive into the Aegean again and hear the applause as the sun sets, I can feast on these memories. Just as well because when I looked in my Santorini notebook, I was too busy being awed to write much.

I will remedy that next time.

In the words of Karen Blixen, I am a mental traveller. I have recently taken to cutting wistful pictures out of my Lonely Planet magazines and – when the pritt stick I ordered on Amazon Prime finally arrives – there will be a collage of a trip stretching from Malaga to Athens. I’m calling it The Flaneuse’s Great Depression Tour and, because the continent of Europe is so wide Mein Herr, I’m thinking six weeks, two carbon-busting flights and the rest navigated hobo-style by boat, road and rail.

The last time I attempted anything like this I was a scatty 19 year old. It was during the Kosovo War so the only direction you could go from Italy was west. The ensuing tour of Mitteleuropa wasn’t my dream itinerary, but I made the best of things, lurching from one interrailing nightmare to the next, attaching (and later freeing myself from) a conveyor belt of gap year Americans enroute to South East Asia.

One night I took a sleeper train from Vienna and woke up alone with no people, no buildings and not a scooby doo where in the world I was. The night before I’d been at an open air film festival near the Ringstrasse with a born again Christian from Illinois. Now I was trapped in an abandoned rail carriage, hyperventilating and looking like a refugee because twelve hours can be a long time in travel. I’d booted down the only unlocked door I could find and staggered down the tracks, frantically drawing on a Gauloise Blonde and crying like a silent screen ingénue. After an embarrassingly short amount of time I was rescued by a German train driver who shunted me back to civilisation on something that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Ivor the Engine. In his own Teutonic way, he’d found the whole caper hilarious and kept miming the international hand gesture for ‘schlafen’. It turned out I was in a siding 10 minutes outside of Munich.

Next time will be different. I have a bigger budget and I’m slightly less of a moron when it comes to planning. As the UK congas their way BEYOND THE THUNDERDOME, I predict the motivation to be elsewhere will become overwhelming. The question is will anyone want us? With my trip to ‘relatively unscathed’ Greece next month now in the can, the irony that it is we who are the most diseased country in Europe is not lost. After our visit to Palermo in early March, my friend and I sailed effortlessly through Gatwick without so much as a sighting of a poster about a public health emergency of international concern. Today we’re told in garish colours to ‘stay alert’ as if Covid-19 is a pervert loitering outside the school playground with a bag of lemon sherbets and the offer of a ride in a Datsun Cherry. I thought ‘stay safe’ was getting on my tits. The new government advice is the ministerial equivalent of Alan Partridge flicking two L-shaped fingers at you and saying ‘Be Lucky’.

With this in mind, I think 2021 is going to be magnificent for the British. Watch us as we catapult ourselves out of a V Shaped recovery like Roger Moore transcending the skies in a Union Jack parachute. Up we’ll sail, high above the wafting scent of fruit and veg rotting in the fields. I was thinking a move to New Zealand might be good, but it probably wouldn’t be quite far enough.

Being alone in my flat for nearly 9 weeks has certainly changed my attitude to solo travel. Before, my threshold to solitude would have been about 5 days and that’s with the company of obliging waiters. Now I could circumnavigate the globe without a companion, providing I wasn’t travelling in steerage and had an internet connection.

I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed about my trip to Greece. My happy place is sitting on the deck of a Blue Star Ferry, sipping a beer and listening to Bob Dylan as the islands rise up around me like ancient spirits. The plan – in the halcyon days of plans – was a week in Syros with a friend, followed by five nights channelling the 1960s bohemians on Hydra. It was going to be elegantly rounded off with a weekend in an artist’s apartment with an Acropolis view where I would blast the bejesus out of Maria Callas.

The host in my last Athens apartment knew how to make me happy

My last two week holiday was Santorini in 2011. I’d been fantasising about this island on the edge of Europe since I was a teenager and wrote in my journal about the headlong instincts of its residents, accustomed to living on the edge of a volcano. I wrote about the nightly applause for the sunset on the caldera and the man who rode his motorbike bareheaded, smoking a cigarette, with a white poodle under his arm. The resinous taste of retsina made me shudder, but I noted this was the only place I’d ever been where I could order a pina colada without embarrassment. Ultimately, it is our senses we appeal to and the snapshots of our travels we remember and store in our bank of memories.

The word is that domestic travel is going to boom later in the year. Sadly, it will be all the wrong people who will travel. Another excellent reason for the right people to stay at home and make a collage of better times.

Next Up: Memories of Andalucia.

Tag: Greece

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