Low life
Captivated
Jeffrey Bernard
Segos So far, the Greek interlude has been slightly less Byronic than I'd hoped for. In spite of affecting a club foot I find myself being regarded by the natives of this land as a sort of harmless eccentric. This could quite possibly have something to do with my rather limp grasp of the language which for the first three days made me say 'octopus' in reply to everyone's 'good morning'. The difference in Greek — fairly minimal — between octopus and good morning is a lousy two letters.
Anyway, last Sunday night was a little bizarre. I met a charming couple who were sleeping rough and living nude on a remote beach about a 20-minute walk from my taverna. They very kindly invited me back to their settlement where, armed with bottles of wine, tomatoes, olive oil, cucumbers, potatoes and freshly caught fish we grilled and baked a splendid meal over an open fire. Four other middle-class hippies joined the throng and we sat around our sweet-smelling, crackling fire well into the dark, chatting away as the moon rose over the sea which was by then as calm as glass and gently stroking the sand. As I gazed out on the idyll it occurred to me that I might write a history of the decline and fall of the Greek empire, God, an education and a publishers' advance willing.
It was with these well-intentioned ideas in my mind that things started to go wrong. Casting aside my Byronic cloak — a Shaftesbury Avenue blazer in fact I was suddenly attacked by jet black bees the size of budgerigars. No wonder the Greeks boast that their honey is the best in the world. After that, there was an ouzo-soaked and painfully blank interlude such as I haven't known since between 1968 and 1974. I suddenly found myself captive in a sleeping bag occupied by a French-Canadian lady who'd consumeden ough garlic to keep a flock of satyrs at bay. I tried to keep my mind on Canto the Second of Don Jim that I'd written that afternoon but I found myself unobtrusively seducing my companion. Suddenly, at a lyrical moment, she said, 'Do you by any chance happen to know a man called Bruce Bernard? He works for the Sunday Times.' That my dear brother should be mentioned at such a time brought me not only back to earth but the earth which is the womb of democracy and aesthetic thinking. I was nearly sick.
Three hours later I woke up with my face and hair in the sand. Nude bodies, smouldering ash, empty ouzo bottles and an unpleasant bee sting lodged in my arse. I crept home to my hotel feeling less like Byron than I'd ever wanted to. He is, after all, my hero. What on earth, I wondered staggering home, could he have possibly wanted to liberate these crazy people from?
My own infatuation with Byron has led me to instigate a fund to liberate the Greeks from German and Scandinavian tourists. What did touch me just before ringing the Spectator was the fact that a very, very old fisherman walked up to me outside a bar and gave me the present of a lovely pink rose. Perhaps, with luck, I might be getting nearer Byron every day.
Previous page
