Here and There

Last week, driving through the bleakly deserted centre of a small town in Crete, I mistook the civic Christmas crib for a bus-shelter full of bored teenagers. I put it down to a combination of my expectations (I would have been there as a teenager in such a town), deteriorating acuity of mid-distance vision and the disorientating effect of being in unfamiliar surroundings – the last of these being the least plausible: after several weeks in Crete, I should have become used to driving on the wrong side of the road.

However, I am back in the UK now, lapping up those things that I have missed about it while still pining somewhat for Mediterranean culture. First, however, I faced the menial task of taking down the Christmas cards and vacuuming up all the glittery stuff that fell off them. Then, with the festive residue dispatched and my outlook refreshed, I settled into the groove: not “new year, new you”, but more of the same – with a few efficiency tweaks to improve outcomes. One such tweak is avoiding the combination of booking connecting flights and taking hold-baggage: it is bound to fail at some time and so it did, during return flights via snow-bound Munich airport. A more fundamental tweak, however, is the need to cultivate the habit of setting dates in the diary for all the rendezvous I want to happen and journeys I would like to make, since this kind of kick-start is the best way that I know to ensure that things happen. Procrastination, after all, is the thief of time. The trip to Crete had been planned some eight months in advance. Had it not been, it might have been shorter – or squeezed out of the calendar altogether by other events.

For the first few days back in Manchester, I spent a lot of time at the cinema. There are plenty of films to see, especially during the ‘awards season’, and I had missed a few by being abroad. One I did catch, Free Solo, may appear to be simply a documentary about rock-climbing, a subject which is not of particular interest to me, yet the spectacular, death-defying feat of its hero, Alex Honnold, is more than a nail-biting experience for the spectator. It raises the questions “how?” and “why?” anyone would want to do such a thing and provides, in part, an explanation. Such feats are not for me, but I was left in awe of Alex’s ability to objectify fear by setting it against risk assessment. Can it be so simple, even for someone at peak technical and physical prowess?

Between the latest releases there was Bad Timing, a film by Nicolas Roeg that was lambasted at the time of its release in 1980, but which has come to be regarded as a ground-breaking classic. I had not seen it before and was engrossed in the emotional power of the story. Yet I was distracted and fascinated by the period details – the way that everyone smoked at every opportunity, the clothes they wore, their hairstyles, their cars and Theresa Russell’s under-arm hair! I have no equivalent first-hand experience of 18^th century fashions but later, watching The Favourite, was similarly distracted by the elaborately reconstructed period details. Nevertheless, the vile behaviour of the characters fuels the belief that human nature is constant, whatever affectations prevail at the time.

Still, like flashbacks in a film, glimpses of moments in Crete keep coming to mind: standing in the sunlit ruins of Ancient Lato on the hills above Ayios Nikolaos; contemplating the Byzantine frescoes in Panagia Kera; and driving along the scenic north coast highway, sandwiched between sea and mountains – which reminds me that I must go to the opticians and order some new specs.