Its over. As I sit here at Athens International Airport, I’ve swam my last swim, walked my last beach, eaten my last fava-bean and drank my last ouzo. Which would have been my first in fact cos I’m not a lover of the stuff cos it tastes so strongly of aniseed and makes me dance the Zorba.

So the last night. we stayed in a fairly randomly chosen resort. I googled ‘Lavriou’, where the ferry lands and ‘hotels’ which we needed and came up with a bunch of contenders. None of them actually near the ferry port as it’s so horrible round there. So we crossed the most southerly peninsula of mainland Greece, just below Athens, and stayed ‘on a beach’ resort. The beach was in fact the other side of that part of Greece’s version of the M25. So, clever resort builders that they are, they built a little tunnel under the road to enable their residents access to the beach without getting killed by speeding motorists. They all speed here. It’s not just legal to exceed the speed limit, it is mandatory. Which, because they invented irony here, makes perfect sense.

The resort had all sorts of fab things. It was massive, involved lots and lots of walking, up hills, along walkways, down stairways. It had 2 fabulous swimming pools. The ‘big one’ where all the fabulous and the obese felt they needed to be, fighting for sun beds and drinking beers, and the ‘lesser one’ which was fabulously quiet and every person had 6 sun beds to themselves. But here’s the odd thing. The pools don’t ‘open’ until 10.00am for one and 11.00am for the other. Oh, we said, you mean that’s when the lifeguards arrive, right? No, they’re gated and locked until those times. Ah, well we like to swim before breakfast… ok, Mel likes to swim before breakfast and I’m the witness. Errrr, how you say ‘tough shit’ in English?

Fortunately, they can’t lock the beach. Even stupid, time-restrictive, no-idea-when-real-people-swim, jobsworth Greeks can’t stop you swimming in the sea, can they? And, due to our recent (ie, since Tuesday) vast experience of ‘open water swimming’ in our little bay in Kea, we were up for it in a tiny little bay on the mainland. It was just as clean, just as calm, just as wonderful. Almost.

So as we fly home, I’m thinking Hampstead Ponds (temperature down to -5 by November), the Serpentine (minus anything is all you really need to know), Southend on Sea (just need to get past the latest oil slick to get to the proper, sewer-enriched, water beyond), or Docklands (The Thames; the conservation area for 97% of the world’s bacteria). And I think instead: Netflix.

Happy return home,

Andy