Young and beautiful

Spetses

I was filled with unbearable nostalgia. There I was again, boating, swimming, sunning, drinking wine with good friends, feeling the ecstasy that only a Mediterranean afternoon can arouse in me. Transforming one’s feelings into language is difficult. One has to avoid sounding corny. Byron wrote about the Isles of Greece, and the sea that murmurs softly ‘Come again, and again’. I, too, have heard such voices, mostly when very young, swimming off my father’s boat, checking out the girls lolling on the beaches. The Med’s a drug hard to give up.

Later, by now quite drunk, I floated around Bushido, all in black, its 90-foot-plus masts gently rocking in the swell. Where did all those years go? I asked myself. It seemed like yesterday I began sailing around the isles looking for excitement and romance. Alas, it’s all rear-view-mirror stuff from now on, but not quite yet. Having spent the past 40 years charting the slow decline of Western civilisation, I’ve now come to the conclusion that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development. It sure stayed arrested last week off the island of Spetses, where a Greek royal wedding took place and where the poor little Greek boy had the time of his life.

Prince Nikolaos of Greece married the hyperborean beauty Tatiana Blatnik, as good-looking a couple as any that were described by, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novels about the young and the beautiful. Watching them come down through the clusters of whitewashed houses lined by cherry and pine trees on a balmy late afternoon my thoughts raced to…Ayn Rand. Ms Rand had something against ugly people. She thought them evil. (I wonder what she was doing hanging around with Alan Greenspan, the architect of the credit crunch, but I guess it was for the money.)