An epic journey

Taking a gap year at 40 did not initially seem like a very sensible idea. I had a good business, a nice flat and everything was relatively rosy — so it still beats me why I chose to jeopardise it all. I suppose I should blame my cousin’s girlfriend, for it was she who largely put me up it. Two years ago, over lunch on Mykonos, I blurted out that someone should write a book about travelling around the Greek islands. Don’t know why I came up with the idea, I just did. But of course it seemed a ridiculous notion really, totally impractical, so I thought nothing more about it and returned to London.

Then, one October evening, I scribbled an itinerary, from Venice to Istanbul — more a romantic ‘what if’ than anything else — and the more I doodled, the more the idea grew on me: 2,000 islands, the Aegean and all that history! It would be a modern odyssey. A few months later the project had begun to consume my every waking moment and London seemed like a prison cell by comparison, dull and tiresome. I talked about it to friends and discovered that far from being derisory, they were full of a furtive longing to come too. One senior partner in a top PR consultancy confided that were it not for school fees he too would have joined me. So I began to plan and to save in earnest.

The Greek islands were meant to be visited by sea. Why else would the Greeks have placed a folly like the portal for the Temple of the Delian Apollo on a hillock overlooking Naxos harbour? So it seemed right that I should begin my journey on a boat. I left Venice on a ship bound for Crete, looking the Campanile straight in the eye.