High life
Hit or myth
Taki
Gstaad right shin while competing in a Greek karate tournament. It was a compound frac- ture, with some bone showing through the skin, making it obvious even to a Greek doctor that there was something amiss. Needless to say, there was no doctor nor an ambulance in the stadium. The organisers would have felt un-Greek if they had spent good money in case of an emergency rather than pocketed it, which they had.
A taxi driver finally took pity and drove me to a hospital, demanding double the fare in case I bled all over his 1952 Chevrolet. I then lay on the filthy floor of a Calcutta-like ward, waiting to be attended to. One of my team-mates made a big fuss — being very big and tough himself — which had the wrong result. Doctors avoided me as if I had Ebola.
In the end, a moustachioed medic ordered my team-mates to load me on to a dirty stretcher and I was taken into an examining room straight out of the scene in Gone with The Wind where soldiers are dying and screaming 'Don't cut.' First he dropped his cigarette ash on my chest, which led me to call his mother a name we good Greeks use to describe Papandreou's various wives and mistresses, which in turn made him squeeze my broken shin as he paid back the compliment in spades.
Eventually I was flown to England where a nice and gentle Mr Tucker in Park Street operated on me. I spent six months in a cast. The Greek doctors had set the leg badly and put on a plaster so tight I used to have nightmares that I was Jean Moulin being interrogated by the Gestapo. When my father told one of them that he would take me 'to Europe in order to have a sec- ond opinion', a Freudian slip still prevalent among neo-Hellenes, the doc told him it was a waste of time. 'We know what we're doing better than those queer tea drinkers.'
So, Vicki Woods, or rather your hubby, don't feel bad. Like the Japanese, who treated their own as cruelly as their ene- mies, Greek doctors are not xenophobic in the least. Greeks and foreigners alike are allowed to bleed at their leisure after car smashes, in which the Olive Republic leads all European nations.
Oh yes, and another thing. Last Satur- day's Daily Telegraph reported how Greece is suffering a terrible tourist season, and how sun seekers are avoiding the Olive Republic not unlike the manner Jean Vali- jean stayed out of inspector Javert's way. 'The airports are appalling. The public sec- tor has not invested in them. They have had lots of money from the EC and it has myste- riously disappeared,' reported the Telegraph. There is no mystery in the disappearance. The Socialists in power have stolen it.
Poor service in hotels and restaurants has also deterred visitors. Yet Greeks were once known as the most polite and hospitable of people. What happened? I'll tell you. Ali Babandreou happened. A friend of mine recently told me why he hated him as much as he does: 'He managed, by his 60s' Social- ist dogma of hating anything old, not only to break up the Greek family, but also make young Greeks the rudest and most recalci- trant in Europe.'
Yet these are the same people who 55 years ago were led by King George and John Metaxas to resist the Axis powers longer than France, Denmark, Holland and Belgium did, a heroic deed wonderfully told in a new book, Greece 1940-41, Eyewit- nessed. It was co-written by a childhood friend, Costis Hadjipateras, an academic who is also a shipowner, and as nice a per- son as there is. Perhaps the author can explain what has happened to the Greeks. How does one turn from a prince into a frog in 30 short years?
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