High life | 6 September 2018

Some jerk know-nothing writes in an unreadable American newspaper that Greece is back — Athens, actually. He would, he’s an American who probably thinks that the lack of starving beggars in the streets à la Calcutta in the 1920s means we’re back. Have another hamburger, asshole, and stick to Trump-bashing. I knew Athens before it went down, and the city’s not back, just we rich, who are back for the summer.

Take my friend Irene Pappas, wife of a Golden Dawn Member of Parliament, who edits a national newspaper. She has three children, all doing brilliantly in their schools, but lives on her salary of €1,050 a month. I wish that some of those people I hear complaining about their lot lived on such a sum. How does one do it, when one has three children who need to be clothed, fed and provided with books and other school necessities? I had a drink with Irene, who did not complain once. She was positive about the future, and asked only for fair coverage — there is none — by the powers that own the private channels of Greek television.

I walked around the city looking for my old haunts, which are all gone. There are still some streets in the old part where the scent of jasmine creepers and orange trees mixes headily with that of car fumes and honeysuckle. But the old tavernas and their owners (all good friends) have disappeared, replaced by slicker joints catering to tourists who are both a curse and a lifeline for a place strangled by Franco-German banks. I prefer the hundreds of stray dogs and cats sunning themselves around the Acropolis.

In The Spectator two weeks ago, Martin Vander Weyer pointed out that the new era for Greece is nothing new, given that the Greek public debt has gone from 100 per cent when the crisis began to the present 180 per cent of the GDP debt.