Saturday 2 August 2008

Crete

Spent a week in a part of the world where a bit of sun could be relied on.
I will always remember the most paradoxical verse of the New Testament, probably put in there to show witless evangelicals that you can’t just treat it all as the literal truth. St Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that “all Cretans are liars”, and claims the Cretan is telling the truth. Well, given that most of them are now in the business of fleecing tourists, I suppose the principle of biblical inerrancy has been given a bit of a boost.

In any case, don’t listen to any of these wise saws. On the second evening I went to a beach restaurant offering fresh whitebait. When the sea is about 50 yards away one tends to assume this is all right. But somehow a large part of the next morning was spent hughing my guts up.

On only one morning I went out without my sun cream - ten days later the skin is still peeling off my sunburnt forearm.

Also took with me Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which contains a fictionalisation of Waugh’s own experiences in the Battle of Crete in May 1941. I hired a car to drive over the mountains from Chania to Sphakia in the tracks of Waugh and Guy Crouchback, whose transport had been less reliable, though not, as it turned out, much less. As it happened, on the way back from Sphakia a tyre burst on us while in the mountains miles from anywhere. I couldn’t reliably find my way much further, so tried to get back down the mountain road to Sphakia. Fortunately I managed to flag down a car full of practical Bulgarians who changed our tyre for us. I should add that by this time it was 7.30 p.m. or so and it gets dark early in those parts. And I’d almost rather be stuck in a hair-raising transport crisis with Corporal-Major Ludovic than with the Iron Buddha.

But you can’t deny that an inhabitant of the North of England needs the odd Vitamin D boost every now and then. And I certainly got that.

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