My brother was dragged out clothes shopping today. He's growing at a ridiculous rate - he's currently 5'5"? 5'6"? Each time I get back from Durham he seems to have extended again, and it's always upwards, never outwards. This is a good thing, as at the current rate he'll easily be taller than me by the age of sixteen or something, but the fact remains that his clothes have not grown with him. So he came to supper wearing a blue stripy casual shirt, new trainers (size 7), and jeans... and he just looks... so much older, somehow!

 

I must admit to being a little envious of the fact that seven or eight years have endowned Mum with a bit more of an appreciation of street-cred, not to mention the fact that I had my first pair of jeans aged 16 because it has always been such a nightmare finding them to fit, forget flatter. Some of the trousers that I have worn over the years are mistakes not asking to be repeated. I think the worst phase was when I was around nine or ten or eleven - leggings were in, and Mum got me some on the basis that they might stretch and be long enough that way. They didn't, and I was left with cold ankles as usual, along with the indignity of being made to wear leggings.

 

Still, back to Peter, it's just another step on from the weirdness of him walking about in KEFW uniform!

 

 

We are going to Bletchley Park tomorrow, as a day-outing, before going to stay the night with Lis as it's her birthday on Sunday and the vague hope is that we might escape a bit of rain by heading south and east!

 

I am looking forward to Bletchley. It will be absolutely fascinating, both for the history it carries and for the mathematical appeal of all the code-breaking stuff - I have, as I may have mentioned before on here, always held a rather geeky attraction to codes and ciphers and the like. 'Codes and Geometric Topology II' was not a difficult module choice to make for next year!

 

But it will also be quite a big visit in personal terms - my maternal grandmother was one of those enlisted to work there for the duration of the war, a secret she was only able to reveal in 1985, forty years after the Allied victory. She hated it by all accounts - she rarely spoke of it, even before the dementia took hold, and was once heard to remark that "It was quite hard work.", which for her was a powerful statement indeed. In fact, when someone mentioned to her that they were turning the huts and machines into a museum, she reportedly looked astonished; "Why would anyone want to visit there?". She'd been wanting to train as a teacher after finishing her degree in the summer that war broke out. She never did, although in later years she taught anyway. It is a cruel irony that when she finally died eighteen months ago, it was in Milton Keynes hospital, barely three miles away.

 

We all want to visit, to understand more if nothing else, especially Mum. It's something that we feel that we have to do, a personal pilgrimage if you like.

 

I admit, I bought it. And having been considerably restrained about when to read it (i.e. I read on trains - down to London, London to Cambridge, Cambridge back home - and for much of today in the garden. On previous occasions I have read until one o'clock in the morning, while I was meant to be doing the washing-up, and while other people have been trying to talk to me.), I have only just finished it.

 

And it may well not be great, fluently written literature - but my God, was it clever, my God, was it exciting, and my God, did it get emotional at the end! I will concede that much!

 

Who here reads the Guardian? In Saturday's Review section on page 5, there is a picture of a girl reading Harry Potter. Give or take, that is pretty much what I used to look like! So the legs need to be longer, and the face would probably be different if she was looking up.. but the posture, the expression, the whole air of that girl is, I guess, how I looked when I spent hours at a time reading - not an uncommon occurrence - and my parents' first reaction on turning the page was "Why is Lucy in the paper?!"

 

It isn't me, by the way!

 

I have a confession to make. At midnight last night, I was not getting soaked to the skin outside Waterstones, or Borders, or any number of large and small shops around that are selling the new Harry Potter. No. I was in bed, reading a different book, and listening to a combination of Eva Cassidy and the pouring rain outside. 'Cos to be honest.. I just couldn't be bothered!

 

I do want to read the seventh instalment and everything, not least 'cos I want to find out for myself what happens before somebody else tells me - no spoilers here, please! - and I did particularly enjoy the earlier books, before they started getting darker and thicker in equal measure. Just the recent ones haven't been so... good, really. The writing is pretty poor, when all's said and done (apparently quoted on of Mum's courses as a good example of Level 4 attainment in the National Curriculum! Miaow!), and while the plots are undoubtedly imaginative and clever, I can't remember for the life of me what happened in books five and six and I've realised that I don't care enough to warrant re-reading the damn things. In a way I feel quite sorry for JK Rowling, simply because I think that the constant media hype has destroyed whatever magic there was left.

 

But yes, in the next couple of days I will very probably be at the till with the rest of them before I disappear of into a corner somewhere with my proverbial tin of condensed milk! I admit it!

 

 

On a completely different track, do you remember the entry(ies?) I wrote about Paul Milling, the peace protester who used to go to Cotteridge Meeting who was on trial for breaking into Fairford Air Base four-and-a-half years ago? Mum told me that a verdict has finally been reached:

 

£250!!!

 

 

It's always good to know when the weather-man has you in his target-sights...

 

 

They were right. It's been raining HARD, constantly all day. At 15:00hrs, BST, our lawn is starting to flood. We live on a hill!

 

 

17:00hrs BST, Mum returns from work and reports that Bournville Park is flooded. As in, people are canoeing on it! Selly Oak Road's closed down that end, and the chances are that Linden Road will be soon as water always gathers in the dip just by the entrance to Cadbury's, where the stream goes under. And the bridge under the station's probably closed as well.

 

Please stop raining! It's so depressing! Rachel and I went for a half-hour walk in a slightly lighter period just because we both needed some exercise and had been stuck in the house all day, but we came back to a complete change of clothes despite everything. Gah. I want to go back to Greece!

 

Here is the diary I kept in Greece. It is a darn sight longer than it looked in the notebook, let me tell you - for a week-and-a-bit's holiday, it seems ludicrous that I wrote enough to necessitate two blog entries due to character limits! But having written it and typed it, I may as well put it on here. I fully expect that not many people will read the whole thing, so don't worry if you can't be bothered!

 

 

9th July '07

 

When discussing what to take with us to Greece, Maddie broached the idea of a diary - to record what we do, places we see and things that we thought at the time. She made one on her gap year in Nepal and says that she's really glad that she did - looking back on it brings back all the memories that she might have otherwise forgotten. Callan also made one on Everest and it made very interesting reading, so I will endeavour to do the same.

 

I have never been very good with handwritten diaries. The entries always feel stilted, self-conscious, and I usually give up after a few days because I just forget. If this ever gets as far as my blog, I will be very surprised [aha!] - I don't know why hand-writing a diary feels so much more cumbersome than writing stuff on the internet; it just does, somehow. Maybe because there is a greater level of self-censorship on the 'net. Anything I write there can and will be read by friends...

       Just pulling into Leamington station - in a car park next to the railway line was parked a Green Bus, y'know, Mr Trigger and Mr Mack's company! Quite surprised!

 ...so I don't feel under pressure to record my innermost thoughts and feelings (as to be quite frank, there are some things that I'd rather people didn't know).

 

Enough for now. I hate Virgin Trains.

 

 

10th July '07   22:55 BST   [the first, last, and only occasion that I record the time of an entry. May as well leave it in there.]

 

The lights in the plane have just come on and the seatbelt signs turned off after takeoff. We are going. We have no choice in the matter anymore, which is quite scary! It hasn't really sunk in that we are going yet, mainly (I suspect) because I for one have very little concept of what we are going to.

 

Maddie and I stayed at Rhiannon's last night so we could have a day to sort out any last-minute purchases (- a useful by-product of having booked the flights a day later than originally intended!). Last-minute purchases turned distinctly hairy when we discovered that Rhiannon could not, as supposed, buy an Inter-Rail pass at Heathrow or indeed Reading station, prompting a trip to London. Waterloo, surprisingly, turned out to be useless as well - but a jaunt to Piccadily Circus sorted us out, and we got back comfortably, if somewhat fatigued, to Reading. It was very satisfying, if nothing else, to get some more use out of the Oyster card which I had been persuaded into buying last Friday!

 

So we've gone. I must admit that I am strangely calm at the minute. We have the first three nights of hostel booked (in Athens). We have photocopies of passports, embassy numbers and travellers' cheques galore. We have agreed on a rough plan, but really to take the days as they come. I am the baby of the three of us - chronologically (just), but also in terms of independent travel experience - so the presence of the other two is reassuring; although travelling like this is a step out of the comfort zone for all of us. None of us speaks any Greek, but we have decided not to be shy of making use of tourist information offices for booking hotels ahead and the like. It should be fine!

 

It should be awesome!

 

 

11th July '07

 

We are having a rejuvination break on our first day in Athens. It is very hot here, although we all had expected worse; provided we take cover regularly and drink lots of (bottled) water, it is not completely debilitating.

 

The hostel we are staying in is really good. It is in a slightly dodgy part of the centre of Athens - we got out of the taxi at 4.30am to come face-to-face with a woman advertising her, erm, wares, and the Center Erotica is but three doors down. It is also on a very noisy road junction and Athenian drivers could best be described as maniacs, but hopefully it'll be better at times where people are actually meant to be sleeping. I have dug out my earplugs in case! But while it is noisy, it is also quite safe - there is 24hr portering - and while it is basic, it is clean and has everything that we need. So for €18 a night, we reckon that we are getting a pretty good deal.

 

This morning we walked towards the centre - or rather, the tourist centre - of Athens. We visited a museum of folk art, which was particularly interesting for the fact that it was housed in an old mosque, with sections of the plaster decoration still intact. The building itself, if we're being honest, was more interesting than the exhibits it housed! We then moved on to the Roman Forum, had a very nice late lunch in a café, and explored some of the surrounding by-streets before returning her to take stock.

 

Tonight we plan to go to a small theatre where (Plato's) Socrates' 'Apology' is being read in English. As Maddie (our resident philosophy student) points out, it doesn't get much better than hearing a performance of Socrates in Athens!

 

 

12th July '07

 

The Socrates didn't happen last night :(. We got there to be told that it was playing in Greek tonight - and the English version wouldn't be until Friday and Saturday, by which point we will have moved on to Kefalonia. What did happen, however, was something that none of us could have planned or predicted, and it was magical!

 

We were walking back past the Roman Forum, debating about where to get something to eat (having just consumed some tasty Greek ice-cream, melon flavour in my case!), when we passed an English/American lady who we had met earlier; it had been her who had tolk us about the Socrates. In the Forum, they were setting up for a concert - some Greek opera star, apparently - and she was trying to persuade the café staff to let her go on a table of four overlooking the audience. Once three more of us were there, they didn't need persauding! So as the sun set, we ate aubergine stuffed with garlic and feta cheese, drank icy water, and listened to live accompanied opera hits, the floodlit Acropolis as a backdrop. And this lady was fascinating. She told us about her life as a part-time tour guide in India and as a part-time travel writer; she told us about her sons, one of whom has also just finished his first year at university, and went to boarding school in Winchester; we discussed dresses and alcohol, Islamophobia and Gordon Brown; we found that she has a god-daughter of our age at Durham, and we told her about life at the university. All in all we couldn't have asked for a better evening!

 

Then this morning, after a considerably better, earplug-assisted sleep, we rose at 7am to go to the Acropolis before the day heated up too much. Especially for one who has studied Classics, it is very easy to envisage modern-day Greece as it was 2500 years ago; one forgets that since the days of Solon and Cleisthenes, since Euripedes and Aristophanes had their plays performed at the Great Dionysia, Greece has been subject to a whole mêlée of cultural influences: Macedonians, Romans, Christian Byzantines, Ottoman Turks, and much more recently, Italian and German Facists. All of this has of course left its mark on Greek culture, mostly for the positive - but it has still been fantastically exciting to see at first hand the Acropolis and the Parthenon, to sit in the Dionysian theatre, trying to dredge back up quotes from Sophocles, to wander through the agora and to touch the jars with slots in where members of the ekklesia must have have cast their votes with shards of pottery. With the possible exception of a large amount of scaffolding on the Parthenon itself, it is all very, very beautiful!

 

We returned to the hostel mid-afternoon for a late lunch, quick shower and to make travel arrangements for the next few days, then came out again late afternoon. We had *the* most amazing ice-creams from a shop in the tourist centre (- I even took a photo of the array, they were that good and that artistically arranged! One scoop lemon, one scoop yoghurt with honey and orange. Oh yes!), and then recovered from our exertions by sitting under an olive tree in the agora.

 

As I write, we are sitting on the Areopagus, a rocky outcrop next to the Acropolis. A breeze is blowing, bring the temperature to a comfortable mid-twenties, the cicadas are singing, and the sun is setting. Our supper consists of fresh bread with feta cheese (flecked with olives) together with the most enormous, ripe cherries that we bought at the market. As Maddie points out, now would be the appropriate time to declare our love for each other. We haven't, as all of us are straight I believe, but it's that sort of evening. :)

 

 

13th July '07

 

I write this on a train running along the northern coast of the Peloponnese, from Kiato, a small town just to the west of Corinth, to Patrai, where we will catch the ferry to Kefalonia from this evening. And it is simply beautiful. Greece can seem very barren in places - rocky mountains covered in rough scrub covered a lot of the land from out of Athens. But now we are travelling through olive groves; lemon trees, grape vines, and bright flowers just over from the railway embankment. All of the houses round here are the low, angular kind that you associate with the Mediterranean, cream walls and terracotta rooves being offset by the brilliant blue and green, sparkling sea. Over the water, mountains rise up once more. The beaches, as we pass them, are sandy and golden. It is breaktaking, there is no other word for it!

 

On a side note, the (new, air-conditioned, spacious, comfortable) train from Athens to Kiato earlier passed through Megara. I have a feeling that this is significant, but two years' learning seems to have been dribbling out of my ears in the meantime and I can't for the life of me remember why. It's incredibly annoying!

 

 

We are having a diary stop, waiting in Patrai to board the ferry to Kefalonia. I'm afraid that I haven't been a very good travelling companion this afternoon - tiredness and heat have been getting to me, along with the fact that my back has started playing up. It hasn't been too bad in general, although I've always been conscious of it - so long as I remind the other two on occasion to slow down, that I can't walk up steps and stuff as fast or as easily as they can, it has been all right. The mattresses at Hotel Lozanni were very comfortable (by which I mean firm and supportive without feeling like the floor) and I've been doing my exercises and stuff. Just a day on trains and carrying my big rucksack around has been taking its toll.

 

We spent the afternoon here sorting thing outs. Patrai is much like any other town centered around a port, I suspect - distinctly functional. However, after a quick drink in a café (- mine did not really deserve its name of 'Ambrosia', I will admit), we found an internet café, deposited our rucksacks in a locker at the ferry terminal, and things looked up! The others were finding out information about ferry and trains for Italy, where they head on Monday, leaving me to return to Athens and catch a flight back to Heathrow. I checked emails, discovered that all of my attempts to send messages home had been either bounced by Yahoo or blocked by the bham.ac.uk spam filter, and checked that nothing was amiss at my Durham account. Despite theoretical 24hr access at the hostel in Athens, 'theoretical' had been the key word and I'd only checked for stuff once before (the time when I'd tried to message my parents). It's funny. I spend way too much time on the internet at home. Some people's instinctive reaction to boredom is to watch television or a film, or do some cooking or something; mine is to log onto the internet, a bad habit which my back has actually been quite good at restricting. But I don't miss it out here. It didn't even occur to me to log onto Facebook until near the end of the session, and it hadn't collapsed without me, surprisingly enough! So I sent a message home and left it at that.

 

Then after collecting out bags again, we decided that food was of the order. We agreed to go to a café that we'd passed earlier, where the female owner had been standing outside like at so many of these places, calling for custom. It looked cool and airy, even if its 'Center Europa' banner didn't do a lot for me. However, you should never judge a book by its cover, and inside was the most fantastic café-cum-restaurant this side of Megara (and no, I still can't remember why Megara is significant. Something to look up at home.)! There were hanging signs advertising sandwiches and crèpes, and a huge rectangular glass-covered counter with the most stunning array of dishes in. Fish, meat, pies and vegetables were all laid out, with a large fruit section - and the fruit in Greece is beautiful, huge and fresh, how fruit should be! Rhiannon has cheese pie and vegetables; Maddie mixed vegetables and an aubergine selection; I had swordfish and vegetables, and it was some of the tastiest fish I have ever eaten, mopping up the juices on my plate with the chunks of fresh bread that it is apparently customary to provide at the start of meals in Greece. We drank fresh orange juice, sweet and fleshy (and with a couple of pips in, just to prove that it really was fresh!). For a total of 40 Euros, it was a sumptuous meal, and we have every intention of going back there when we return to Patrai on Monday!

 

That 40 Euros also included three large slices of watermelon, wrapped and packaged individually. We intend to eat them on the deck of the boat going to Kefalonia. This is gonna be goood!

 

 

14th July '07

 

I am sitting in our 'studio apartment' in Kefalonia. Rhiannon is currently committing mosquito genocide, egged on by me (too squeamish) and Maddie (an ardent vegetarian - she won't wear leather and that sort of thing) because neither of us are so keen on being bitten. Rhiannon is strangely enthusiastic about it, although I think that that derives more from a bad experience of mozzies in Tanzania than from a particular desire to stain the walls red. There are a lot more insects here than in Athens, but that makes sense if you think about it - we are now on the coast, not engulfed by traffic fumes. Out of all of us, I seem to have got off lightest so far, possibly due to the fact that my suncream contains insect repellent. I hope I haven't spoken too soon!

 

Kefalonia is stunning, there's no other word for it, although I suspect it's a word that I'm in danger of overusing in reference to this holiday. As we sat on the top deck of the ferry, watching the sun go down in port (while eating our watermelon!) and then sailing west into the glowing colours, we knew that we were in for something special. The boat ride itself was great. Not many people were out on the top deck - many, I suspect, were locals, returning home after a day on the mainland - and as we got further out from Patrai a good wind got up, cool and refreshing after the heat of the day. I wished, actually, that I'd had one of the several scarves that I have acquired in my time at Durham, so that I could stand facing into the wind with material billowing out behind me... I did stand with arms outstreched for a while, and Rhiannon quoted something that apparently is from Titanic (- no, I haven't seen that either!). Then the stars came out, huindreds of them in a perfectly clear sky: I used the bicycle-light-cum-torch that Dad brought me back as a present from Frankfurt to find the hoodie that came with me as a single piece of warm clothing, and we played a variety of twenty questions to pass the time (eventual answer: Miss Piggy).

 

On reaching Sami, the port, we found a taxi driver to take us to the hotel. He actually spoke reasonable English, though we employed our previous tactic of showing him a piece of paper with the address on and looking confused. (As a side note, I always assumed that the most useful words to learn in a foreign language were 'Yes' and 'No', 'Hello' and 'Goodbye'. This is not the case. The most useful word that you can learn is the word for 'Thank You'. Efkaristo.) This was, fortunately, a very nice taxi driver, who neither nicked our luggage nor charged us an extortionate amount, unlike the guy in Athens who charged us €65 for a trip the wrong way round the ring road at whatever-time-it-was in the morning. You win some and you lose some.

 

In any case, he dropped us off at our hotel, and my mouth has been open in amazement ever since. We have been given a 'studio apartment' - basically a single large room with three beds (or rather two beds and a camper), a small table and chairs, a sink, cupboards and a fridge, and a small bathroom next door. Everything is very white and clean, and works fantastically. It is the sort of place that I have always dreamed about staying in, the sort of luxury that my parents have always been adamant that we don't need. Breakfast is included in the price (a very reasonable €30 per person per night), and there is a swimming pool that we can use, surrounded by sun loungers that look out across the brilliant blue sea to Ithaca. I have never stayed at a hotel with a pool before. It is... fantastic!

 

So we had a lie-in this morning (- we were all done in after travelling), and we spent the middle part of the day, somewhat peversely, walking into Sami to buy water, food, postcards and small gifts. Then on getting back, hot and sweaty, there was nothing for it but to change into bikinis and to head down to a small, rocky cove that we had espied on our way into town! And it was... it was beautiful. The water was perfectly clear and just the right temperature - warm, with bands of cold as the waves from a ferry came in. An unfortunate incident involving feet and some unidentifiable spiky things meant that we had had enough after a quarter of an hour or so, and we were all in need of some food by that point anyway, but we definitely intend to head down to another, perhaps more inhabited beach tomorrow.

 

This afternoon has been spend mostly in the hotel pool, reading books and writing postcards that will probably get back to England after I do, tomorrow being Sunday. But never mind, better late than never!

 

What a hard life we lead, being on holiday!

 

 

15th July '07

 

Here I am, woken and breakfasted, with my feet in the swimming pool, writing my diary once more. We are fairly sure that the unidentifiable spiky things from yesterday are reasonably harmless - despite varyingly unsuccessful attempts to remove them using tweezers and a needle sterilised in Rhiannon's lighter (no, she doesn't smoke, she's just a pyromaniac!), our feet have not swollen up and we have not acquired Green Monkey Disease. Our heels are just a little sore when we put pressure on them, Maddie's especially, so we figured that not walking too far anywhere and soaking them in salt water for a bit couldn't do them, or us, any harm!

 

As my holiday, at least, draws to a close, I am still vainly attempting to get tanned (using the word 'vainly' in both senses). My shoulders have gone a little browner, but most of me is the same mottled hue as ever, with the exception of my stomach and the tops of my legs which look, if anything, even whiter than normal. I don't think that they have seen the light of day since... two years ago? Possibly. Ah well! It will remain my fate to be the 'pale and interesting' one of the family!

 

 

16th July '07

 

And so back on the ferry to Patrai, back onto the trains, back to Athens. I am on the second, more comfortable train, the one from Kiato to Athens, and slowly but surely the beautiful villages of rural Peloponnese are giving way to the more perfunctory and populated plains of Attica.

 

I said goodbye to Rhiannon and Maddie at Patrai. This evening they will take an ovrenight ferry to Bari in Italy, before catching a train to Pompeii; then they will work their way up through Rome, Verona, and eventually Switzerland, where Maddie will stay with Fiona (a lovely Swiss-American girl from Trevs) and Rhiannon will explore by herself. Eventually they will catch trains home (- they have InterRail passes), taking the Eurostar from either Brussels or Paris by two weeks' time. This holiday has not been about meticulous forward planning. It has been about seeing Europe (or in my case Greece), booking hostels one or two nights ahead and seeing where our whims take us.

 

I must admit that I wish I was going on with them. As nice as it is to have the security of a flight back to Heathrow, as necessary as it will be to get on the phone to Office Angels about giving me some god-awful temping job, as much as I know that I am getting another holiday this summer, in France with my family... as much as all these things hold, I have tasted independent travel with friends, I have lain about in the sun. I have seen beautiful places with two of the most lovely people to grace Trevs with their presence (and trust me, that's saying something), I have coped in a land where I don't speak the language and have had to get used to reading a different alphabet, I have inspected at first-hand buildings that we studied in the OS Block every Monday morning and Thursday afternoon for two years. I have discovered what it is like to lie on an inflated lilo in a swimming pool, thus fulfilling a life ambition and rendering my life complete! But seriously, I have caught what Maddie calls 'the travelling bug', and I am on my way to returning to Birmingham. Damn.

 

(I am down after parting with the others. They have been such fantastic company. But I am also hot, thirsty, and tired after a night when I had approximately four hours sleep and got up at 6am. I may write more later when I have recovered my spirits a bit).

 

 

Just passing through Megara, and I still can't remember what it's famous for! Maybe it isn't, and I just know the name from one of Homer's vignettes... Gah. Stupid brain. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megara . Hmm!]

 

 

I write this in bed at Hotel Lozanni, the hostel in Athens where our stay began and now mine shall end. I discovered, after phoning home and reassuring people by email that I was thoroughly safe, that I have in fact been placed in a dorm room with two men. To say that I am not comfortable with this would be putting it mildly.

 

It is true that the one of the two that I have met seems nice and harmless enough. It is also true, as the guy on the desk pointed out (when I went down to enquire if there had been a mistake, knowing full well that there very probably hadn't), that the people who stay at the hostel are in the vast majority genuine, mostly students in a very similar position to me. As far as I am concerned, it is easy for him to say that because he is male - but there were no better room options when he looked down the list, so here i am and there they will be.

 

I can hear Dad now indignantly pointing out to me that being male does not make you inherently more likely to be a thief. Most guys, too, are as shocked and as repulsed by rape as women are, and it's not like I've never stayed in a room with male members of my family. I'd just have rathered, as a lone female traveller in a capital city of a country where I don't speak the language, to have been put in a room with other women. That's all.

 

'Night.

 

 

17th July '07

 

The guy was right. It was fine. I am fine, and it is very easy at this point to dismiss myself as paranoid and untrusting. Hindsight is a fine thing!

 

I am sitting at the final gate in Athens International Airport, waiting to board the flight. And unlike how I usually would be at this stage, bored and chafing at the bit, I am quite enjoying the chance to sit and be, and take stock.

 

I had a brief lie-in this morning, 'til 9 o'clock, then spent two hours trying to get up and out, mainly due to an infuriating shower that alternated between releasing no water whatsoever and dribbling cold streams down my back (- it had worked fine, needless to say, for the first two minutes, long enough for me to get thorougly wet and have lathered up with shampoo. C'est la vie.). Next followed a fairly unpleasant two hours in which I tried to obtain enough cash to pay for my night.

 

The money had worked out really badly this holiday. It's not that I haven't had enough. It's been that I haven't had enough in the right form at the right time. Following the advice of those more experienced than I, I had split my funds between cash and travellers' cheques, with a Post Office electronic Travel Money card for emergencies. The problem, when it came down to it, was that Greece and travellers' cheques do not mix favourably. Hardly any banks would exchange them. You needed a National Back of Greece, frequently cleverly disguised as 'Trapeza something-or-other' and with opening hours to rival those of the HSBC in Cotteridge before it was shut down. Then you would have to wait for a good hour on a ticketing system only to be told that you needed the desk over there. I think that everyone in Greece has to pay all of their bills at the bank? I don't know, but those places were bloody inefficient, with staff everywhere until you actually wanted to speak to one. Over the course of the holiday, I paid €20 commission on €200-worth of cheques, and the slightly dodgy looking exchange shop in Patrai actually charged me three times less than the bank. Bastards.

 

  ...on the plane...

 

So the result of all this was that I spent a good proportion of the week paying Rhiannon and Maddie back later, a feat which I just about accomplished. The second result was that the Vachis Branch of the National Bank of Greece found themselves this morning in charge of an increasingly stressed and teary English teenager, attempting to obtain in cash the last €20 of her travellers' Visa card so that she could pay her hotel bills and buy a Metro ticket to the airport. It took phone calls to England to prove I was who I said I was, even though I had my passport on me, and then, after a load of fussing, they still couldn't get the cash off the card, €40 being the standard minimum withdrawal amount from a hole in the wall. So after a lot of discussion between staff, none of which, disconcertingly, I could understand, the wonderful people lent me €30 in cash, along with an address to send the money back to when I get back to England. By that time I was crying properly, from relief if nothing else. It is what I would call a lesson learned.

 

The rest of the afternoon I spent walking round more of the centre of Athens, to one or two parts where I had not been with the others earlier in the week. I walked past the Greek National Library, the stunning façade of Athens University and past a Catholic Church, an odd mixture of Romanic and tradtional Greek styles. Carrying on past various little souvenir and clothes shops - clearly intended for the wealthier tourist - I came out opposite the modern-day Athenian government buildings, complete with changing of the guard in the most wonderful traditional uniforms (tunics and pom-poms on their shoes!) and hordes of pigeons (a mandatory feature, it would seem, of centres of government). I then crossed the road by means of using the subway of a conveniently placed Metro station, unaware that his would be worthy or tourist attention in itself.

 

The whole of the Athens Metro network is very impressive. Admittedly they have it slightly easier than London with only four lines to manage, and admittedly it was probably done up very recently in anticipation of the 2004 Olympics - but its efficiency, its feeling of spaciousness, its cleanliness are all sights to behold. At this particular station (Syntagma), there was a veritable museum just in the ticket area. A whole section of wall had been screened over with glass, revealing layers of earth that corresponded to Athens from the 4th of 5th centuries BC (the Golden Age), right through the Roman time, the Byzantine period... there was even an exposed grave, complete with 4th century BC skeleton! That person was very short, assuming they were a full-grown adult at death. There were also artefacts on display - a section of Roman-style mosaic, column heads (in the Ionic style), amphorae... Quite a nice surprise for a safe means of crossing the road!

 

Then after a much-needed late lunch, my last Greek salad at a small café in a mass of old little streets, I walked back to the hostel via the Roman Forum, in order to pick up my big rucksack and make my way to the airport.

 

18th July '07

 

Looking back on what I have written, it really doesn't seem very much, and will no doubt reduce even further once it is in type [OK, so that's what I thought...!]. I keep thinking of things that I have omitted to mention - like the fact that we got into everything in Athens free with our NUS cards, or accounts of rising to watch the sunrise in Kefalonia and getting dishtinctly tipshy when we went for a meal out in Sami. I have not recorded bogsheet-style quotes like Rhiannon did. I have not raved about the food to its full due, or mentioned quite how tempting it is to simply gorge on fruit whilst in Greece (; despite feta cheese and ice cream not being at the top of most dieters' menus, I think I may have actually lost a bit of weight over the holiday, simply from the fact that a single plum over there constitutes half a meal in itself!). As the holiday has progressed the diary entries have become more plentiful and the photos more landscape-orientated, a direct correlation with the amount of time we spent in bikinis.

 

I have finally finished reading 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' - our inspiration for going to Kefalonia in the first place - and I would heartily recommend it to anyone. Apparently the film is rubbish so don't be put off by that. It is a historically accurate, emotionally rendering, sarcastic masterpiece of a book that thoroughly deserves its acclaim. There are many, many lines worthy of quotation (one that particularly appealed to me was, '"You shouldn't be so tall," said the doctor. "It shows lack of foresight and good judgement."'), and it has added to my severely limited Greek vocubulary those words for 'Good morning', 'Go fuck yourself', and 'Son of a whore', the latter of which, incidentally, is remarkably similar to the same thing in French. Either way, if you haven't read it then I strongly recommend that you go do so!

 

The flight back was fine, my stay at Helen's last night very pleasant, and we have just passed through Acocks Green going into New Street. I am nearly home!

 

To holidays! To Maddie, Rhiannon, and Irma! To Greece!

 

 

My family are mocking me. This is mean. I don't care if it's raining, I fully exercise the right to wander about my own home wearing a skirt, hoodie, ankle socks, cat slippers and a sunhat. Honestly...!

 

I PASSED!

 

Thank god for that!

 

I got ten minor faults, three of which were for undue flimmin' hestitation, but frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn! I passed! Shows it was worth taking the gamble when that rogue slot at Kings Heath came up on the DSA website eight days ago - and it shows that even though I hadn't driven for the majority of the ten weeks beforehand, I'm now into driving enough that it didn't matter.

 

Wasn't even postponed for anything, which is a first.

 

It still hasn't quite sunk in yet...

 

 "Coming to a road near you, unsupervised!" Mwahahaha.

 

 

I couldn't agree more!