This is not a piece about writing directly, although I might use elements of the experience some time in a future short story or novel. It’s a recounting of some of my thoughts on a recent short holiday on the island of Zante, or Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea. I had purely by accident booked myself into a hotel that happened to be on resort. I’d never been to a resort before, and there were both really enjoyable and really horrible aspects to it.
The hotel itself was a blousy old thing that was meant to be splendid and I imagined swimming in the beautiful pool that you can see in the photographs of the place, except that when I got there, I discovered that the pool was right alongside the main road, so anyone swimming in it had no privacy at all from gazing glazed-over eyes. I never swam in that particular pool, there were other more secluded pools I could’ve used, many of them empty of people due either to the fact that it was close to the end of holiday season, or because the remaining holidaying adults were ‘non-athletic’ and intent only on frying themselves to cinders in the sun. And it was hot. Some of the sun-worshippers were the colour of barbequed sausages and pretty much the same shape and I couldn’t look at people like that without thinking of meat, and whether they looked edible or not. Mostly they didn’t. Some were very, very large, others stick-thin. But it was still hard to keep my sick cannibalistic thoughts at bay.
I could’ve done with more sleep; most nights were fairly noisy, and on a couple of occasions fights took place between frazzled couples in rooms close to me. One of the fights involved a lot of violent door banging, and it was going on between Sue and her wolfish-looking man from Birmingham. I get the idea that these type of holidays are meant to provide a kind of heaven on earth for the people who go in for them, so perhaps if something small goes wrong and you’ve had a load to drink, it can make you very angry… like why didn’t Sue open the door when I banged on it, why did she keep me waiting outside, who the hell is in there with her? These package holidays in resorts on the other side of the world are a kind of wishful game I think, in which all those involved must play their proper parts and not step out of role. For example, you’re a middle-aged bloke from the cold north of England on holiday with your wife, and you can go outside wearing only shorts, and this means that everyone in the street can see your tattoos and your gold jewellery and your body. Your wife … I mean you could never do this at home… can come out in bright orange lace shorts and a little halter-topped skimp of a thing on top. Importantly, you know the name of that Greek man standing outside the sixteenth restaurant in the street — your favourite restaurant. He’s called Giorgos and his son is Yannis. You greet him like he’s an old friend, expansively and warmly, and he returns the greeting with equal enthusiasm, although it’s the end of the season and he’s deadly tired now. When these four months of earning money are over, he’ll be working on his smallholding growing vegetables, looking after his chickens and goats and harvesting the olives from his trees. I found all that posturing very sad for both parties; for the Greek men having to be servile to the …I’ve got to say it… pretty rough-looking English people, (although there were people from lots of different countries trying to live the same dream of sun, sea, far too much food and drink, and no work to think of for the next couple of weeks), and sorry also for the resort tourist who could maybe no longer even see that the whole ‘village’ was fake and composed entirely of whatever would serve the tourist industry and nothing more.
But at the end of that long week, I’m glad I found myself there. I did wallow in the strangely calm sea, extremely salty, oddly difficult to swim in, but special for all that. I did eat endless Greek salads with chips. I drank beer for the most part. I took about 150 photos, and going through them the other night, I was really pleased to find that the majority were good ones. I went for walks, that is to say ‘escaped’ from the resort up a back road through an olive grove and met some sheep and saw a kind of hidden dereliction… leaking water pipes and plastic rubbish.
Two really exciting things happened. On one of my walks I came across a plant with one huge open trumpet-like white flower in the centre of which around the stamen, several bees were behaving as if they were drugged. Other flowers had shut down, closed up in the most peculiar way, like one of those paper fortune teller devices we all made as kids… (back in the day)… I saw a solitary bee trying desperately to enter the closed flower and it looked as if she would die in the attempt. I didn’t want to touch this plant because instinct told me it would be poisonous, and that something as extraordinary as that must have been a plant spoken about in mythology. I reckoned it was a type of Datura. When I got back to the blousy hotel, the woman behind reception helped me look the thing up and it turned out to be Datura inoxia, the Devil’s Trumpet, or the Zombie’s Cucumber, a friend told me on description of it. And yes, there is a whole world full of mythology about it. The other interesting natural thing that happened was that on one night, at around 5.30 I woke up to find my room shaking backwards and forwards. It went on for about thirty seconds. I did not suspect the people in the room next to me were responsible for such vigour. I had it down as an earthquake and almost as quickly as I had woken up, I fell back to sleep again, and awoke still alive the next morning.
I read two novels, both picked up from my local second-hand shop for a quid or so. Since there are so very few novels I can tolerate, I hesitate to pay full money for them in bookshops. The first one was a thriller, and I’ve never read one of those before. I quite liked some parts of it, but of course it was too long as most novels are. But certain bits of it became silly and I thought the author a bit like a cheap comedian. The second book was/is fabulous –The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle. I used to love his writing, and I’d forgotten how excellent a writer he is or was. Difference between the first book and the second was like the difference between gone-off milk and double cream.
