The Daught declared it was too hot to go house-hunting. If she came, she said, she’d whinge all the way and be sick in my sunhat
Two bits of advice for people buying a second home: choose somewhere near a decent airport – and resign yourself to going there every year until you die.
Trust me, with lesser-known Greek islands it can take two days to get there, with life-threatening stopovers in the polluted hellmouth even Greeks call ‘killing Athens’, followed by wilting hours on a packed ferry or a nerve-shattering flight on a Meccano plane to a Scalextrix runway. Fine if you’re 18 with a thong and three tee-shirts in your shoulder-bag, but not so feasible with a seasick Daught and a Poet with half the Bodleian in his suitcase.
You can fly direct to our favourite island from Newcastle, and the beach we love is two hours’ drive from the airport.
As for going back time after time: we’ve taken this to neurotic extremes. For the past seven years we’ve booked the same room in the same hotel, eaten at the same taverna, and sunned ourselves on the same patch of beach, surrounded by the same motley collection of bods who are as besotted by the place as we are.
Actually the Poet has an autistic aversion to change. He wears the same clothes every day. Moving the kitchen table brings on a panic attack. He has 14 identical Black Watch tartan shirts, six identical pairs of navy-blue trousers.
The Daught has inherited this trait, so she thought looking for a Greek house was a terrible idea. She wanted to stick with the hotel. There were too many bugs in the countryside. Anyway it was too hot to go house-hunting. If she came, she said, she’d whinge all the way and be sick in my sunhat. You don’t mess with the Daught when her dander’s up, so I left her behind with the Poet, and went to meet Vasilios, the estate agent.
His office at Delagrammatica Properties was practically empty, with just a desk and a dusty Bakelite telephone. Vasilios liked to keep his equipment with him: mobile phone in one pocket, sheaf of chequebooks in the other. He fanned them out with a flourish: ‘English, Italian, Swedish, German. They open bank accounts for me and I sort out their houses.’ For some reason I found this reassuring.
We visited three old stone houses in quick succession: a tall house with a new toilet on the roof and an abundant garden for £65,000; a long house with a cobbled yard and salmon pink fitted kitchen for £55,000; and a cobwebby barn with a traditional sleeping platform and a distant view of a glittering triangle of sea for £35,000. All wonderful in their way, but not quite right.
‘English people love old houses,’ he mused as we set off for the last house of the day. ‘They even buy the old furniture inside. Italians prefer new houses on plots of land.’
Italians? ‘Of course! It is so cold in the North, and they can’t buy in the South because you have to bribe the Mafia to protect your property when you’re away.’
The final house was surrounded by olive trees. With chipped stucco features and faded blue limewash, it had a shambolic faded elegance. Downstairs were three rooms with traditional tiled floors; upstairs a huge wood-ceilinged studio opened onto a roof terrace. Outside there was a vine-shaded terrace, a shower-toilet and a little stone barn just begging to be converted into a study. It was on the market for £60,000.
I dragged Poet and Daught out to see it that evening. The Poet stood transfixed on the roof-terrace. ‘We can swig Metaxa and look at the White Mountains,’ he declared. The Daught preferred the barn. ‘We can have a donkey! And chickens! And a goat!’ Meanwhile I was poking about intently inside. I’d discovered a crack in the wall of the back room and, peering through, saw another room crammed with dusty old furniture.
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