Spending time with family in a country where people are courteous and helpful.
I haven’t travelled very adventurously in the past five or six years, partly because of Covid and partly due to being very much in the business of having babies. No one enjoys holidays with toddlers, not even the toddlers, so it is easier and cheaper just to stay at home. I also happen to be married to someone who doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere other than France, his criteria for a good holiday being basically somewhere you get to by car or train and somewhere where you can drink nice wine and eat a lot of steak and cheese.
While I utterly respect these requirements, especially the first one (which has mostly meant we have avoided the violation that is travelling by easyJet and Ryanair), my idea of a good holiday is rather different. I like to go somewhere by the sea, where the sea is warm enough actually to swim in, where I can eat a lot of shellfish, and where I know it will be 30 degrees and sunny every single day, no exceptions. As far as I’m concerned going somewhere with a climate similar to Britain’s is not relaxing or enjoyable no matter how good the wine is.
So the prospect of two weeks on Crete (which is from where I have just returned) was very exciting indeed. I went with my two children, my mother, my Polish aunt, a cousin, her child and a few friends. My husband wasn’t really invited, much to his relief, and instead went cycling with some friends in – you’ve guessed it – France.
My aunt, who has become a seasoned holiday-maker since her children fled the nest – quite a thing for a Pole who grew up during Communism when no one was allowed to leave the country – organised the holiday and was insistent that we go somewhere in southern Europe, like Greece, Albania or Croatia. This, she said, was her red line, because freedom does not exist anywhere north or west of these countries. In Greece, she pointed out, you can smoke anywhere you want (important for her, less so for the rest of us, but I appreciated the sentiment) and children are welcome wherever you go (most restaurants come with a playground attached, a genius idea).
I laughed at her eccentricity at the time, but I realised quickly on arriving in Greece that she is absolutely right about the freedom thing. Being Europe’s poorest brothers, the Greeks are not dominated by corporations or modern ideologies, and there really is an ease to how they operate. It’s not just the weather, it’s a mindset. Because most businesses are family-owned and run, shop and restaurant staff are polite, courteous and helpful, not snooty and entitled as they can be elsewhere.
For example, I just expect bad service now in the UK. Even in my formerly favourite shop, Peter Jones in London’s Sloane Square – which I always held was a great bastion of civilisation – the staff now, all sporting “pride badges”, seem to look irritated by the very existence of their customers and treat them like a nuisance.
But in Greece it really feels that you are welcome everywhere with the added bonus that there are no rainbow flags polluting the horizon, just heavenly seascapes and mountain ranges. As one hotel owner I spoke to said, the residents of Crete don’t have time for virtue signalling because they are too busy trying to make a living because the EU doesn’t give them any money anymore.
The same man, on learning that my cousin was from Poland, exclaimed: “Ah, you are rich!”, which must have been the first time a Pole has ever been met with that reaction. But it seems to be the case that Poland, one of the few countries left in Europe with low levels of inflation, is on the up, which pleases me greatly as I have a home there which I plan to escape to when the rainbow flags send me over the edge completely.
The most wonderful thing, though, about our holiday was spending time with my cousin who has had an interesting few years. Two years ago, at the age of 22, she became unexpectedly pregnant, and while there was no question about whether or not she would keep the baby, petrified about not being able to cope, she fell into a terrible depression while waiting for the baby to arrive.
The baby is now one-and-a-half and my cousin is possibly the happiest I have ever seen her, although her life has not gone at all in the direction she would have planned it. She says now that had she known how well she would cope and that the baby would not ruin her life, she would not have been so scared. I realise that my cousin’s situation was complicated and that she is very young, but I do wonder: have women always been so afraid of having children or has our modern world, which drives us to focus so heavily on ourselves, created this?
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