While we’re perking our pansies on Ithaca, I’m reposting something from the time we first tasted the wine on Odysseus’ fabled isle. So ladies, gents and everyone in between, take a walk in my shoes all over again…
I gloriously misspent my youth trawling the sleazy dives of many of the world’s great metropolitan sin bins – London, Amsterdam, Paris, New York and Los Angeles among them – and cruising the hedonistic no-holes-barred gay fleshpots of Europe – Ibiza, Sitges, Gran Canaria, Mykonos. My dance card was rarely empty and I had a ball. But, there comes a time when the spirit is no longer willing and the flesh is in bed by midnight.
These days, a gentle week around a cool pool with a good book, a glass of something local and Liam by my side is what gets the pulse racing. Let me take you on a walk through laid-back Frikes, our latest tranquil bolthole, a cute village on the northeast coast of the pine-dressed Greek isle of Ithaca.
A few years back, we spent a truly heavenly time on Crete celebrating our 10th anniversary. It was so peaceful, so life-affirming, that we’re thinking of doing it all over again for our 20th next year. As I wroteat the time…
“Our Cretan idyll delivers unexpected familiarity. If I close my eyes, I’m transported back in time to another land of randy insects, loose goats, old men in tea houses and pine-smothered hills.
Ok, no headscarves or hassle, and the call to prayer has been replaced by the chimes of the local blue-domed monastery, but looking at the following snaps – the first of our Cretan digs, the second of our old stone house in Bodrum – you get my drift.”
That was then…
Aphrodite Guest HouseBodrum House
This is now…
Then, guess what we stumbled upon at the end of our recent modern-day Greek odyssey in a hidden corner of our Aegina hotel? We took it as a sign from the gods.
So we’ve decided to return to the place where the original odyssey of Homeric legend ended. Yes, we’re going back to Ithaca and, unlike Odysseus, it won’t take us ten years to get there.
A 2020 post I wrote about a game old bird waddling around our modest smallholding took off last year, and it’s been pulling in the punters ever since. The post is called ‘I’m Not a Pheasant Plucker’. A cheeky nod to the deliciously smutty tongue-twister, it’s remained inexplicably popular. So I did a bit of digging. Google now uses the magic of AI to summarise search results, and when I searched for the post’s title, Google Gemini returned the following AI Overview…
“I’m Not a Pheasant Plucker” is a well-known tongue twister, often repeated as “I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s son, and I’m only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes.” Some sources say it’s a favorite for those learning to speak quickly and clearly, though it can be tricky to say without tripping up. There are also variations and related phrases, such as “I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s mate, and I’m only plucking pheasants ’cause the pheasant plucker’s late” according to Perking the Pansies. The phrase highlights the challenge of rapid and clear articulation, and some find it particularly difficult when spoken in a specific accent or with a certain cadence.
Fame at last? Even I have to admit that citing me as an authority on tongue twisters is a tad far-fetched. And anyway, as AI is constantly ‘learning’, my fame has been fleeting. When I recently repeated the search, Gemini returned an entirely different AI Overview sans pansies – sad face. So I’ve been cancelled by AI. But then, won’t we all be in the end?
“Grab your man bag,” Liam said. “We’re off to Sainsbury’s.” It wasn’t a pint of semi-skimmed and a sourdough loaf on his mind but something altogether more highbrow – the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
The museum was opened in 1978 to show off the art collection donated to the University of East Anglia by Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury (of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain). Robert was made a knight of the realm for his services to the arts, not for the quality of his Jersey royals or his juicy plums.
The impressive Norman Foster-designed building sits within the leafy university grounds and houses an eclectic miscellany of paintings and sculptures spanning 5,000 years, with artefacts from prehistory right through to the late 20th century. As you meander through the exhibits, there seems to be a particular obsession with the human form.
Lady Lisa and Sir Robert Sainsbury
The building itself was put on display in several scenes from the 2015 films Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man.
And continuing the movie theme, we weren’t expecting to witness a half-baked Lord of the Rings re-enactment as we sank a bottle of plonk in the museum refectory. How times have changed. In my day, students misspent their days getting pissed in the Students’ Union bar, not mucking about in Middle-earth. Or to paraphrase Gandalf: “You shall not pass out.”
Our modern-day Greek odyssey came to a sweaty end with a few days on the pretty island of Aegina, just a short ferry hop from the Port of Piraeus in Athens. We arrived at the port on the hottest of days and everything was overheating, not least Liam’s mobile phone, which decided enough was enough and shut down without warning. Unfortunately, our ferry e-tickets were loaded into his Google wallet, so blind panic started to set in. A nice young sailor felt our pain and let us board anyway.
Liam had booked the gorgeous Bamboo Cottage in the lush grounds of the Rastoni Hotel, and it was perfect – just the ticket for winding down and resting our weary bones after all that exertion clambering over tumbledown stones perched on hilltops.
Being so close to Athens, Aegina is popular with city day trippers and weekenders who like to party. Come sundown, the fancy harbourside bars and restaurants fill with trendy young things doing what trendy young things do everywhere – chatting, flirting, larking about and having fun. We preferred the backstreet bars where the ambiance is less frenetic for those of us longer in the tooth.
On our last night, just after the waiter had taken our food order, there was a sudden power cut, plunging us all into darkness. Memories of long lights-out nights in Bodrum came flooding back. After a few moments, a generator fired up. As the courtyard filled with diesel fumes, a small lapdog in a massive pink bow at the next table yapped in competition with the mechanical beat. Mercifully, mains power was eventually restored, the air cleared and we were able to eat our meal without the restaurant smelling like a petrol station or us choking to death.
We left the Rastoni Hotel the next day with fond farewells from our kindly hostess. She asked us to come back again. That would be a big fat yes.
I’ll leave you with an image of the Alps as seen from the window of our return flight. Missing Greece already! I feel another trip coming on.
Perking the Pansies 