Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Tantrums and tabbouleh

Ergon House is an epicurean boutique hotel in downtown Athens. (I quote the blurb — I never write ‘boutique’ willingly.) Did Pericles know that Athens had a downtown? I shall dispense with the politics, except to say that we should return the Parthenon friezes, for it’s lonely on the Acropolis, and only a fool would insult Athena, the most interesting of the Olympian gods because she was less of a shagger than Zeus.

Likewise, the next time the Venetians complain about cruise ships ruining their mouldering city, remind them that they blew up the Acropolis during a war with the Turks. During the Grand Tour it looked like a Cornish garden, but nowadays they are trying. They lay rubble in rows, or in stacks, and put plastic tape around them.

I see solitary columns and wonder why Lord Elgin left them here. Perhaps he didn’t have room in his luggage. He was the sort of person who steals all the bath products in hotels and then asks you to give him a hand with the furniture.

Athens was a boom town in 450 bc and I love it. I love anything that is a lost cause. (This is why I browse the web page of NAMBLA — the North American Man Boy Love Association,  which wants to abolish the age of consent — while laughing.)

Aristotle’s Lyceum is a hole filled with poppies. Zeus’s temple — built by Hadrian, for the Romans happily shared power with the mythical — is felled. I increasingly hate the ancient Romans. They’re another lost cause, but the trouble is they remind me, dead and en masse, of George Osborne, who is currently doing to the Evening Standard newsroom what Titus did to the Jews. I can imagine him crucifying his hacks.

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