IKARIA, SYROS, ATHENS IKARIA From Chios, we board the Nissos Rhodos to Ikaria.  Smart, with two flights of escalators.   Off.  The boat trembles outside a minor port off Samos, then we go like a straining animal past sea walls to the dark flecked sea beyond. (I remember Samian ware, figured, dug out of the mud of the Medway all those years ago. It came from here …).  We arrive at the tiny port of Evadilos in Ikaria. Icarus fell into the sea at Ikaria. Ikaria is a blue zone, one of the five places in the world where people live to ninety and beyond.  (Estate agents make use of this fact!). ...

Lesbos and Chios   October 2017 The islands – blue and white. Blue,  the sea, the sky, the domes (one shown here in Ikaria) and doors, the window frames, the squares of sky dotting the mountainsides, hives alive with bees like squares of blue on the mountainsides. The white of the houses, the sea horses, the wide circle of silver on the sea, the Greek flag. Cobalt, indigo, navy, aquamarine. And the myths. The head of Orpheus torn by the Maenads – could they not hear his music? Was it too modern – floated across the sea to Lesbos, and was found on a sandy shore with his lyre, still...

It was after seeing the Ring performed by the Met Opera in New York at the cinema in Winchester, and hearing those notes of the beginning of the world  in the Rhinegold that I thought, I must go to Bayreuth, I must hear and see it there! So, I downloaded a form from the web, and applied. Every year thereafter the Bayreuth Festspiele sent me a form, which I filled in, choosing dates for the Ring for the following year. Last October I included a pathetic note in my application, saying I was nearly eighty and did not want to die without having been to the Ring at Bayreuth. Did that work?  The...

So off we drove to north Wales, and after going through Llangollen on that ancient coach road to Holyhead we went through the Horseshoe Pass (why are views so uplifting, why is being reduced to an unimportant blip on the landscape so uplifting, and being reminded that one is nothing beside geological ages such a relief – maybe it’s that things just don’t matter, the earth will look after itself long term, and meanwhile I am part of it, fused into this body at the moment, but then off into molecules and atoms of everything else for eternity) and get to Llandudno.   Llandudno.   The...

ISTANBUL Taxi through takes us to the Bus Station, as always outside the dusty city.  Coach takes us to Istanbul, over valleys, winding over mountains and diving under them, and we are regularly given drinks and biscuits, and have a longer stop at a large station for us to have a bite – though so many buses are there, and being nervous of missing ours, we don’t.  Decide that public lavatories with ceramic feet are preferable to ones with piss wet seats. Along this spanking new road, over a narrow bit of the Sea of Marmara, and more urban now – new settlements with plenty of mosques (imagine...