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{ Monthly Archives } July 2015

Sorting out another Will

My Gran died at Christmas, having surprised everyone (including herself) by living well into her nineties. She had very little to leave, and made a very simple Will, but there was one clause in it that has been causing me no end of trouble. She wanted to leave a sum of money to her great-great-nephew, […]

Back to reality

It was overall a thoroughly interesting and enjoyable holiday, but it was then back to earth with a bump. I got back from the airport to a phone call from my neighbour, saying that my burglar alarm had gone off while I was away. She’d had a good look around, and couldn’t see anything suspicious, […]

The Windmills of Mykonos

Even Mykonos wasn’t all bars and tourist traps. If you looked hard enough, there were faint signs of the small sleepy fishing village that it must have been before the cosmopolitan jet-set and the party-goers discovered it. This row of windmills is the iconic “picture postcard” view of Mykonos, and was between the harbour and […]

Visiting Delos

As I mentioned, the open-air museum island of Delos is only reachable by ferry from the neighboring island of Mykonos. It really is the archaeological highlight of the Cyclades, and even some of the cruise-ship passengers were persuaded to forgo the hedonistic delights of Mykonos Town, Paradise Beach, and the allegedly even better Super Paradise […]

Lunchtime conversations

The group on holiday was the usual mix of interesting people, with just two whom I tried my best to avoid. The holiday was fully inclusive (including apparently unlimited wine most lunchtimes and every dinnertime!) so we always ate together as a group. Which meant that there were lots of opportunities for stimulating mealtime conversations. […]

Mykonos and Delos

The last few days of the holiday were split between the neighbouring islands of Mykonos and Delos. I’d wanted to visit the latter for many years – it is one of the most important archaeological sites in Greece. In Antiquity the island was sacred to Apollo, but was completely abandoned after the rise of Christianity, […]

Tourist Traps

The coach driver on Naxos spoke good English, and was very eloquent about the problems facing the Greek economy. His take on it was that the islands have coped much better with “austerity” over the past few years than the mainland. He reckoned that was partly because the islands’ economy is heavily reliant on tourism, […]

Temples and Giants

I thoroughly enjoyed Naxos, the next island we visited. It was larger, more fertile, and less touristy than either Santorini or Mykonos, and had a very relaxed atmosphere. We caught a SeaCat ferry there from Santorini, and arrived in the little harbour in Chora, the main town on Naxos. The first sight we saw on […]