Bitch!

Scorpios Beach Hotel nestles peacefully between the tomato cannery and the transformer works with the oil-powered power station set back from the main beach road. For those interested in 90’s archaeology a little further on are the remains of disco night spot full of flaking paint and fraying concrete that must have opened and closed quicker than Springtime for Hitler. Across the wide windswept beach road, optimistically marked for three lines of coaches, a verge of white trunked trees leads to the beach formed by the ground up coking plant slag that Santorini is famed for, unlike Barnsley, and which appears to be 50% iron filings judging by the room key magnet’s ability to create an afro from it. Monolithos has one other hotel, two tavernas and a sparsely stocked mini market. The road to Kamari is as straight as the airport runway and barely 50 meters from it and bejewelled with glistening green Heineken emeralds. Kamari is much bigger and a wonderful place to view the rivets on aeroplane undercarriages. Its mile long beach front has countless variations of the same thing. Waiting in a bar for the hire car a brown and white dog sits by my hip for companionship as sax-twiddling jazz accompanies silent ski jumpers vying for length on the TV. The following morning we drive 300 yards and park by a fish taverna: so much for tourism. The beach is empty. There is nothing here that hasn’t been here for millennia. In the taverna there’s a dog that one might role against a door to stop draughts, a man whose daily inert meditation has done little to enlighten and a woman trapped by some historical circumstance, who appears from the kitchen like a beaten dog but bursts into smiling gratitude with the smallest kindness. This place as in every place has its stories but their sparsity tells them as clearly as any novel. I like places where I can count the number of things with the fingers of a hand and innumerable things that don’t lend themselves to counting. Two twin tweedle dumpsters in a permanent state of readiness hang their lids akimbo in the dirt by the metalled surface watching the dust rise and fall from cars. On the beach appear a handful of people and dogs dancing morris with leads. They belong to a dog and donkey sanctuary up a path at the back housing Santorini’s stray dog problem. Where possible they export them to tourists befuddled by sentiment I righteously conclude to Germany and the UK. The following day late in the afternoon she appeared. Medium sized, feathered tail, glossy figured mahogany, all friendly and eager. She had decided we were her mother and father and she would never leave us. I was no longer righteous; I was loved, as was Mothermouse. She walked with us home into the hotel passed the swimming pool, up the steps and into our room. It was a prodigal homecoming commemorated by half a pork pie I’d stashed for the journey. This was our dog and she would fit right in with our four cats back home. We had a nap and she licked and squiggled in bed beside us and we were besotted. We took her for a walk on a length of flex in the evening and she slept on the floor content. In the morning we were greeted and Mothermouse gave her a slice of yesterday’s pizza. She trotted down the steps, over the wall and we never saw her again. The bitch! I can tell you we felt used. We looked, we walked up to the dog and donkey sanctuary and took two for a walk on the beach like the other tourists befuddled by sentiment but it wasn’t the same. It was empty somehow. And now back home perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to take her home with us but I can still see her lying by me on her back in bed legs spread, her warm body next to mine panting as she licked my ear and wagged her tail. No she wasn’t a bitch, just a little likeable lesson in love, and we all need that. As for Fira and Iuo they’re very pretty but best viewed by Kodak at home in retrospect. Too many stories, too little love.