The text message I sent to th_esaurus early on in my holiday:

The colours in Greece are very bright and warm, like someone's turned up the saturation. On the downside, today I had literal ants in my literal pants.

The message I sent towards the end:

I'M IN ITHACA, FUCK YOU ODYSSEUS


So, yes, I've spent the past week in Greece! On the extremely beautiful island of Kefalonia, specifically. I could swear the shore nearest us was the shore from the opening video of Final Fantasy VIII. The waves breaking on the beach looked exactly the same. I never thought the sea could actually be that colour, but apparently it can!

Here is the traditional write-up of things that amused me during the holiday. Cast: Harriet (me), Mum (my mother), Dad (my father), Joseph and Fred (my two younger brothers), and Eleanor (Joseph's girlfriend).



We went to a restaurant on our first evening. Mum sat opposite Joseph, me opposite Dad, Eleanor opposite Fred.

Eleanor: Fred and I are the only age-appropriate couple at this table.
(pause while what she's saying sinks in)
Harriet: WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT ELEANOR DON'T BE CREEPY


The second morning of the holiday, the entire family woke to find we'd all contracted Fred's sore throat.

Mum: Shall we all go and kill Fred?

We're all still coughing our throats to shreds. Bizarrely, Eleanor, who is ridiculously illness-prone, managed to escape it entirely. She was extremely bouncy and smug about being the only healthy person in the party.


Joseph: If Jesus wanted to do an AMA, how would he prove that he was him?
Fred: Verified account.


When Dad was driving us on a winding mountain road and Fred was not feeling his best:

Eleanor: Fred's put in a request for you to stop turning left.
(Fred, lying down in the back of the car, is unable to see the turnings)
Joseph: Oh, Fred, you won't like this.
(car turns sharply left)
Fred: Ugh, that's such a left!
Eleanor: It's okay, Fred, we're going to compensate for it now.
(car turns right)
Fred: I don't like rights. I just can stand them. Just fucking drive straight! Is that so much to ask?

Shortly afterwards:

Joseph: Okay, Fred, gentle right upcoming.
Fred: I don't care about rights.
(car turns left)
Fred: This is a left, you son of a bitch!


Eleanor: (bitterly) I met a great girl at a party, and we talked for forty minutes, and then I thought 'oh, I'll introduce her to my boyfriend'. So I brought Joe over—
Joseph: She worked for a major app developer—
Eleanor: —and the first thing he said—
Joseph: Look, I didn't even pitch the worst idea I could have, which was the Blowjob Techniques app.
Fred: (indignant) That was my idea!
Joseph: So I just told her about my Meet Market app idea, where you scroll through pictures of people and say how much you'd pay to go on a date with them, or how much they would have to pay to go on a date with you. If it matches up, you go on a date and the company takes a cut of the cost.
Eleanor: I don't think she was impressed.
Mum: Well, there must be something wrong with her if she didn't like Joe.
Eleanor: Not if his first impression was telling her about his prostitution app.
Joseph: I think the bigger problem is that it made me look like a raving free-market capitalist.
Eleanor: (very unhappily) I gave her my e-mail address, but she never contacted me.

(Harriet: I suppose I can't put the Meet Market discussion in my holiday write-up, can I?
Joseph: What, because someone might steal the idea? Honestly, I just want to see my dream realised, so go for it.)


We saw a couple of loggerhead sea turtles swimming around in the harbour, huge (huge - I had no idea turtles could be so large!) and ancient-looking and beautiful. One of them was veined with bright blue. I found it quite a moving experience, largely, I'm ashamed to say, because it felt like I was looking at Pokémon.


Driving through mountains:

Mum: There's no sign of civilisation here at all, is there?
Dad: Well, what could they do with this land? (mostly to himself) They could have more goats. Could they have more goats? Obviously you can only have a limited number of goats.


We went riding! I wanted to feel like John Marston, but, although the scenery was suitably Red Dead (at one point we passed a dilapidated tin shack with a goat's skull mounted on the wire fence), it's hard to believe you're a badass former outlaw when the person leading you on a strap keeps shouting 'Momo!' at your misbehaving horse. (Then again, what did I expect from Aang's lemur reincarnated?)

Harriet: John Marston's thighs must be so sore all the time.
Joseph: It's not his thighs I'm worried about.


Dad ran out of reading material and resorted to Being Binky, the autobiography of a Made in Chelsea star, which someone had left in the villa.

Dad: Binky is starting to annoy me. She's always complaining about her life.
Harriet: If you don't like hearing about Binky's life, have you considered reading something other than Binky's memoirs?

Later I overheard Mum (who does not, as far as I know, watch Made in Chelsea) getting bizarrely impassioned about Binky. 'How do you think Binky feels about that? You don't know Binky.'


We drove quite close to the entrance of a monastery and then drove away again, rather than paying the fee to visit.

Dad: So, how was that?
Eleanor: It was a religious experience.
Joseph: How much did we save?
Dad: Well, we didn't save our immortal souls.


Fred: Do you know why these trees are all painted white?
Joseph: There was an explosion at a Tipp-Ex factory.
Harriet: Was it covered up?


Joseph: Did you know our great-great-great uncle invented the Frisbee?
Eleanor: No, he didn't. You're bullshitting, Joe.
Fred: His name was Arthur B Fris.
Harriet: The Fris A was a terrible failure.
Eleanor: You guys, I think Harriet's funnier than all of you.
Fred: But we're providing the set-up for her jokes! She's paying us to do it!


Eleanor: We saw an eel. It was really gnarled and horrible.
Fred: It was probably an old octopus tentacle that broke off and came to life.
Eleanor: When we were in the sea I told Fred about my fear of an octopus grabbing my leg, so of course he started swimming underwater when I wasn't looking...


I found a pretty blue stone on the beach and returned to Eleanor with it.

Harriet: Eleanor, I got you a rock.
Eleanor: Yay! Ugg smash rock! (passes it to Joseph, who immediately slams a much larger rock down on it)
Harriet: NO


Eleanor: (to Joseph) I just found Fred in our wardrobe, leafing through my lacy underwear.
Joseph: I'm going to have to hit you for that. (approaches Fred)
Eleanor: Wait, wait, do you want the context? He was going to hide in our wardrobe to scare us, but he broke a hanger and everything fell on top of him.

A little later, I heard a roar from Joseph and investigated to find Joseph and Eleanor emerging from Fred's bedroom.

Eleanor: We thought we'd hide in his wardrobe.
Joseph: Maybe we should have waited until he was naked.
Fred: (putting his hand on Joseph's shoulder, with the smug air of a man one step ahead) What you don't know is I'm in your wardrobe right now.



On our last full day of the holiday, we went to Ithaca by boat. I wanted to go to Ithaca solely to stick it to Odysseus (I think Odysseus is a great character but don't much like him as a person), but I actually got strangely emotional looking at the island from offshore, thinking about him seeing it again at last after all those years.

(And then Poseidon sent a storm to batter us. That guy is really weird about people going to Ithaca.)