We return to drenched grass and greyness. My wife and younger daughter in the back of the taxi changing all the colours of melon skins. Central heating on.....in August!
To counteract withdrawal symptoms I eat nectarines, walnuts, honey and Greek yoghurt for breakfast the next day ( my son C's perfect combo).
Only my mosquito bites relieved by the coolness.
It was our first time in Greece since Crete in the early 80s. At the time I'd won a Gregory Award saying at the interview that myself and my wife would visit Ireland with a view to translating Gaelic poetry ( we had done some already).
Well, at least I wrote several poems about Crete, which appeared in my first book 'The Common Land'.
Everything seemed planned to avoid the panic we experienced en route to Berlin last autumn.
Liquids kept to a minimum, see-through soap bags galore and I even weighed our hand luggage.
Nothing could go wrong.....actually, it didn't!
All down to Cardiff being a nationalised airport ( or possibly because we'd thought of eventualities).
In Kerkyra ( we call it 'Corfu') the heat hits you with the force of a sea-wind and not even Springtime in Merthyr had prepared us for this.
Everyone's pace became instantly slow-mo, except the traffic. Our kind host Teris explained later that everything moves ponderously here, but not on the roads.
Scooters were prevalent as night-time mosquitoes, zinging past with the bite of those insects and, like mosquitoes, nothing could stop them.
There were mostly Italians in the first place we visited Ypsos, he told us. Many of the scooterists had no helmets and, later on, we spotted one without lights speeding at night, with a child on the back holding a torch!
'Roads made for donkeys!' Teris declared and still pot-holed, narrow and, in the main, with no cat's-eyes or white lines.
A meal at a taverna beside Ypsos beach set the tone for the week.
I relish pasta and pizza in Italy, crepes and cider in Brittany and the sheer variety of the States; but here was veggie paradise ( and not bad for vegans also).
While the others could enjoy fresh sardines which had hopped onto their plates, we shared a veritable feast, typical of Greece : bread and dips, grilled veg, courgette balls, crisp oyster mushrooms, salad ( even my MacDaughter ate tomatoes there!) and stuffed vine leaves, peppers and tomatoes.
After that every meal was very reasonably priced and the locations atmospheric : near the stony beach at Avlaki, in the old town of Corfu or sandy beach at Agios Gordis, where the sand was so hot underfoot it burnt your soles.
What I love about Greek food isn't so much the quantity, but the freshness, plethora of tastes and the notion of sharing rather than having individual meals. They were eaten in the pace of the place and not the driving.
If they were devoured like they drove, Rennies would be the afters. Instead, the perfect dessert for sweaty summer : dishes of water-melons and other fruit.
Just once we ate Italian, at a rooftop restaurant in town with swallows skimming, dipping and circling around ( I think one relieved itself on my bald pate.....always a bird-target!).
Food shops are also excellent and illustrate just how much we've lost.
Bakeries and fruit/ veg shops full of delights. Fruit you can eat without cracking your teeth and bread which hasn't had the taste and texture frozen out of it.
Supermarkets have destroyed so much over here.
Many of the very good Greek wines are available for a few Euros and I wonder why they don't export more.
One day we journeyed north towards Durrell country.
I really enjoyed Gerald's 'My Family & Other Animals' when I read it at school, but the recent series on telly turned into a soap and , apparently, bears no relation to reality : the family were universally disliked on the island.
You don't get a sense of the stunning mountainous terrain on tv either and stark contrast between arid ground and lush greenery; the circular cactii and swishing bamboo.
From the road north east, you can see Albania, once ruled by Norman Wisdom ; so close that my phone welcomed me there and then proceeded to explain the extra charges.
It looked depopulated and forbidding, but that may have been a trick of eye-sight.
Teris told me that thousands of Albanians had settled on Corfu and they were excellent workers, but on the other hand there was also a mafia there which made the Sicilian one look like amateurs.
We travelled through the area known locally as 'Kensington-by-Sea', huge villas owned mostly by the English, who didn't mix with local people.
Carlo ( Pr. Charles) happened to be staying on the Rothschild estate at the time and jokes about rotten eggs and tomatoes were on-going.
At Avlaki we met Teris's friend Nikos and his wife Sophia ( originally from England), a Greek-speaker and thoroughly integrated into their society.
He is a renowned sculptor and jeweller with a shop in the old town and a childhood friend of Teris from the very early days of cricket and football in those dusty streets and alleyways.
Later in the week we visited his shop to view his marvellous creations and drawings for many more : each unique and with a style reminiscent of smaller scale Moore and Hepworth.
One evening we ventured up into the mountains to a village where we were the only tourists, Nimfes.
The atmosphere and setting reminded me of a Breton Fest Noz, only with souvlaki and retsina instead of crepes and cider.
We were there to witness a concert by Vasilas Gisdakis, well-known there ,but even Spiller's couldn't get hold of his cds to order. A woman sang with him and played keyboards, while a man played the distinctive bouzouki I remember so well from the film 'Zorba'.
In true Greek style it all began at least an hour later than advertised and was still carrying on when we left about 1 a.m.
Just wish I could've understood the lyrics, though they were less political than in the past according to Sophia. It was nevertheless a magical experience, his homecoming gig in the village square where families gathered and children played well past midnight.
My favourite beach was undoubtedly Paleokastritsa, because we went early morning when few were there ( my son C. taking us....he knows the island very well).
We swam in the calm cove, watching a convoy of coaches crawl up the hill to the monastery.
They must've been from a cruise because when they parked numerous tourists emerged of various nationalities to take photos of the sea as though they'd never seen it before ; a few dipping their toes in.
One day we went to Aqualand, the water-park not far from town.
It wasn't as brash as expected, with plenty of trees and wooden parasols.
I even enjoyed the slides I went on with my younger daughter, with the exception of a black tube which must have been modelled on some Medieval torture!
Without my glasses I wandered off in search of toilets and couldn't see any distance.
Forgetting where we'd parked ourselves previously, I felt like a little kid lost and even imagined handing myself in to security till luckily my daughter spotted my myopic meanderings.
This was a very touristy experience, yet mostly we'd seen the island in a different way and I was privileged to listen to Teris's reflections on Greece and his memories.
Though the island looked relatively well-off, most of the mainland is still greatly burdened by debt and unemployment and with no proper taxation structure or progressive policy to address the need for a national health system and the necessary improvements in infrastructure.
With crippling austerity forced upon Greece by the Troika, you wonder if Syriza can ever deliver.
I really hope to return there one day.
In a sense, I'll never go away.
THE SINGER AT NIMFES
We've taken the serpent road
into the island interior,
where the water nymphs
have grown legs for the evening
and time ceases to matter
as the night cools in.
Old women in black shuffling,
clutching charred sweetcorn,
children flitting back and fore
in the lights their wings
never burnt, the stage lit up
in the village square.
Songs of history and mourning,
songs from a time
before the tourists came :
the two men sit
harmonise and join in ;
the singer sweeps his arms
in gestures of tragedy.
From the audience, he calls children
to his platform and suddenly
his past in these mountains
meets with present renown
and hesitant young voices
splash in shallows of song.
To counteract withdrawal symptoms I eat nectarines, walnuts, honey and Greek yoghurt for breakfast the next day ( my son C's perfect combo).
Only my mosquito bites relieved by the coolness.
It was our first time in Greece since Crete in the early 80s. At the time I'd won a Gregory Award saying at the interview that myself and my wife would visit Ireland with a view to translating Gaelic poetry ( we had done some already).
Well, at least I wrote several poems about Crete, which appeared in my first book 'The Common Land'.
Everything seemed planned to avoid the panic we experienced en route to Berlin last autumn.
Liquids kept to a minimum, see-through soap bags galore and I even weighed our hand luggage.
Nothing could go wrong.....actually, it didn't!
All down to Cardiff being a nationalised airport ( or possibly because we'd thought of eventualities).
In Kerkyra ( we call it 'Corfu') the heat hits you with the force of a sea-wind and not even Springtime in Merthyr had prepared us for this.
Everyone's pace became instantly slow-mo, except the traffic. Our kind host Teris explained later that everything moves ponderously here, but not on the roads.
Scooters were prevalent as night-time mosquitoes, zinging past with the bite of those insects and, like mosquitoes, nothing could stop them.
There were mostly Italians in the first place we visited Ypsos, he told us. Many of the scooterists had no helmets and, later on, we spotted one without lights speeding at night, with a child on the back holding a torch!
'Roads made for donkeys!' Teris declared and still pot-holed, narrow and, in the main, with no cat's-eyes or white lines.
A meal at a taverna beside Ypsos beach set the tone for the week.
I relish pasta and pizza in Italy, crepes and cider in Brittany and the sheer variety of the States; but here was veggie paradise ( and not bad for vegans also).
While the others could enjoy fresh sardines which had hopped onto their plates, we shared a veritable feast, typical of Greece : bread and dips, grilled veg, courgette balls, crisp oyster mushrooms, salad ( even my MacDaughter ate tomatoes there!) and stuffed vine leaves, peppers and tomatoes.
After that every meal was very reasonably priced and the locations atmospheric : near the stony beach at Avlaki, in the old town of Corfu or sandy beach at Agios Gordis, where the sand was so hot underfoot it burnt your soles.
What I love about Greek food isn't so much the quantity, but the freshness, plethora of tastes and the notion of sharing rather than having individual meals. They were eaten in the pace of the place and not the driving.
If they were devoured like they drove, Rennies would be the afters. Instead, the perfect dessert for sweaty summer : dishes of water-melons and other fruit.
Just once we ate Italian, at a rooftop restaurant in town with swallows skimming, dipping and circling around ( I think one relieved itself on my bald pate.....always a bird-target!).
Food shops are also excellent and illustrate just how much we've lost.
Bakeries and fruit/ veg shops full of delights. Fruit you can eat without cracking your teeth and bread which hasn't had the taste and texture frozen out of it.
Supermarkets have destroyed so much over here.
Many of the very good Greek wines are available for a few Euros and I wonder why they don't export more.
One day we journeyed north towards Durrell country.
I really enjoyed Gerald's 'My Family & Other Animals' when I read it at school, but the recent series on telly turned into a soap and , apparently, bears no relation to reality : the family were universally disliked on the island.
You don't get a sense of the stunning mountainous terrain on tv either and stark contrast between arid ground and lush greenery; the circular cactii and swishing bamboo.
From the road north east, you can see Albania, once ruled by Norman Wisdom ; so close that my phone welcomed me there and then proceeded to explain the extra charges.
It looked depopulated and forbidding, but that may have been a trick of eye-sight.
Teris told me that thousands of Albanians had settled on Corfu and they were excellent workers, but on the other hand there was also a mafia there which made the Sicilian one look like amateurs.
We travelled through the area known locally as 'Kensington-by-Sea', huge villas owned mostly by the English, who didn't mix with local people.
Carlo ( Pr. Charles) happened to be staying on the Rothschild estate at the time and jokes about rotten eggs and tomatoes were on-going.
At Avlaki we met Teris's friend Nikos and his wife Sophia ( originally from England), a Greek-speaker and thoroughly integrated into their society.
He is a renowned sculptor and jeweller with a shop in the old town and a childhood friend of Teris from the very early days of cricket and football in those dusty streets and alleyways.
Later in the week we visited his shop to view his marvellous creations and drawings for many more : each unique and with a style reminiscent of smaller scale Moore and Hepworth.
One evening we ventured up into the mountains to a village where we were the only tourists, Nimfes.
The atmosphere and setting reminded me of a Breton Fest Noz, only with souvlaki and retsina instead of crepes and cider.
We were there to witness a concert by Vasilas Gisdakis, well-known there ,but even Spiller's couldn't get hold of his cds to order. A woman sang with him and played keyboards, while a man played the distinctive bouzouki I remember so well from the film 'Zorba'.
In true Greek style it all began at least an hour later than advertised and was still carrying on when we left about 1 a.m.
Just wish I could've understood the lyrics, though they were less political than in the past according to Sophia. It was nevertheless a magical experience, his homecoming gig in the village square where families gathered and children played well past midnight.
My favourite beach was undoubtedly Paleokastritsa, because we went early morning when few were there ( my son C. taking us....he knows the island very well).
We swam in the calm cove, watching a convoy of coaches crawl up the hill to the monastery.
They must've been from a cruise because when they parked numerous tourists emerged of various nationalities to take photos of the sea as though they'd never seen it before ; a few dipping their toes in.
One day we went to Aqualand, the water-park not far from town.
It wasn't as brash as expected, with plenty of trees and wooden parasols.
I even enjoyed the slides I went on with my younger daughter, with the exception of a black tube which must have been modelled on some Medieval torture!
Without my glasses I wandered off in search of toilets and couldn't see any distance.
Forgetting where we'd parked ourselves previously, I felt like a little kid lost and even imagined handing myself in to security till luckily my daughter spotted my myopic meanderings.
This was a very touristy experience, yet mostly we'd seen the island in a different way and I was privileged to listen to Teris's reflections on Greece and his memories.
Though the island looked relatively well-off, most of the mainland is still greatly burdened by debt and unemployment and with no proper taxation structure or progressive policy to address the need for a national health system and the necessary improvements in infrastructure.
With crippling austerity forced upon Greece by the Troika, you wonder if Syriza can ever deliver.
I really hope to return there one day.
In a sense, I'll never go away.
THE SINGER AT NIMFES
We've taken the serpent road
into the island interior,
where the water nymphs
have grown legs for the evening
and time ceases to matter
as the night cools in.
Old women in black shuffling,
clutching charred sweetcorn,
children flitting back and fore
in the lights their wings
never burnt, the stage lit up
in the village square.
Songs of history and mourning,
songs from a time
before the tourists came :
the two men sit
harmonise and join in ;
the singer sweeps his arms
in gestures of tragedy.
From the audience, he calls children
to his platform and suddenly
his past in these mountains
meets with present renown
and hesitant young voices
splash in shallows of song.
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