My Big Greek Holiday.

It’s my 70^th birthday and Mouthermouse it taking me to Greece for three weeks, one week in Corfu, one touring the mainland and the last in Parga our favourite place. Hours of planning and filling in on-line forms, but it was worth it. These blogs are the memory of it.

First morning Nassaki, it’s 7.30am. The sky is a white blue wash over the bay that appears a giant’s biscuit bite north of Corfu town. Mouthermouse’s aircon forms the industrial backing to the tunes of the swifts Top Gunning the sky their wings flapping bursts of gunfire between swooping aerobatic curves. And when it stops there’s still a mist of morning noise from lorried drinks moving towards their shelf space. The olive trees with their silver sheen bend like the misshapen years of a hundred lifetimes waiting for their next pepper black crop, their wood as hard and sinewy as God’s ancient muscle. The mountain flank behind me rises rock grey marbled with dark green shrub, sparrows fluttering like animated leaves between the trees. The sun, yet to strike its warmth on me, is already powering the white of the column not three feet away. I can feel the heat off it. I watch its light levered by celestial geometry inch its way towards my foot. I sense an all-encompassing equality, where the sun can move to my foot or my foot can move to meet it. The water of the bay, as flat and smooth as the sky, would, save for a sliver of darker land, meet it in brotherly harmony. And then as if circumstance insisted on breaking this exercise in sugary pros a church bell clanks the banalest of tunes on its two bells, ‘ding dong ding dong, ding ding dong dong’ and at 8.20 for some bizarre reason. There’s no accounting for the swoop of swallows.