Sun-drenched days and too much wine: my summer on Patmos

Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, monkeypox plague is afflicting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings are becoming a way of life in the US, there’s a war of attrition in Ukraine and Taiwan is being threatened by China. Gloom and doom are everywhere but here in the holy island of Patmos, where Saint John wrote the Apocalypse 2,000 years ago, the backward natives are still using pronouns such as ‘his’ and ‘hers’, and they even identify women as a biological reality.

And it gets better – or worse, actually: the only conflict on this beautiful isle is the one between your intrepid correspondent and a young woman who demanded my table at Vaggelis, in the square where the elite meet to eat. She turns out to be the daughter of Ahmed Chalabi, the man who convinced truthful Tony and genius George that Saddam Hussein was about to nuke us, so we went to war, killed about 200,000 Iraqis and upset the applecart, and his daughter complains about the rude way I wrote about her father. Daughters should defend their fathers, although Svetlana Stalin (Uncle Joe’s little girl) denounced her dad and happiness eluded her. I hold no grudges, though a few Iraqis might.

Never mind. The crisis-strewn world stops here, way out in the eastern Aegean, with sun-drenched days, cool nights and much too much wine at dinner. American and Brit trans zealots would find the place blasphemous. As I said, the locals are backward, still using words such as ‘woman’, ‘breastfeeding’ and ‘pregnant’, and there are even public conveniences with signs on them depicting the two sexes. Despite such peccadillos I have yet to meet anyone objectionable on the island.