Walkies

I woke early this morning and walked to Kassiopi. Leave any later than 8am and sun is already too hot to manage the hairpin climb up to the coastguard station. It’s only about four miles but I swear the first two are almost vertical. Stopping many times on the bare unshaded hill gives plenty of opportunity to look back down on the village, the boats in the harbour, and hidden in the olives, just visible if you know where to look, the roof, chimney and end window of our villa. This will be our last stay: it is too expensive in these straitened times. We could be on safari or having a tour of China or on a private hut on stilts over a lagoon in Mauritius for the same price, if not less. I fancy contemplating the abyss from a difference perspective next year.


Turn right after the path to the coastguard station and suddenly there are trees and shadows and a gentle downhill slope. I am surrounded by the sounds of birds I don’t recognise, the whirr of cicadas rising as the temperature climbs, the skitter of gekkos on the stones beside the road, and an occasional rustle in the bushes that might be a rabbit or even a snake. Pass the riding stables, through the nature reserve and Avlaki bay opens out round the bend in a dazzle of turquoise and white and silver. Sea merges into sky at the vanishing point, the stones are already hot through the soles of my trainers. I have the whole vista completely to myself.


Past the second taverna, I am an accompanied for a while by a white and brown dog of indeterminate breed. He is keen to show me the dustbins and lampposts along the route but I am keener to peep through the wrought iron gates at the villas up on the headland. This is an odd in-between stretch, not quite village not quite countryside. I chat amiably to the dog, ask him a few questions, but he doesn’t reply. I realise he probably doesn’t speak English. I’m not a fan of dogs generally, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, but this fellow seemed friendly enough despite his silence. He licked my calf as he turned back at the bend into town.


I remembered a girl I shared an office with once. I hated her in the way it is only possible to hate people with whom you must have enforced contact over a long period. Cell-mates perhaps. She was called Christine. She had a mess of frizzy strawberry blonde hair which she thought made her look like Nicole Kidman (trust me, it didn’t) and an Irish boyfriend whose phrases and Kilkenny accent she affected, even though she was from Norfolk herself. It was a constant source of amazement to me that someone who had travelled around the world (as she never tired of telling us) could still have such small horizons, such a narrow mind. She may not have liked foreigners (all sorts) but she had an endless love of and interest in dogs (all kinds). She had dog notepaper, a dog necklace, a hideous plasticised canvas book bag with dogs on it, read magazines, watched programmes about dogs. Although she did not have a dog herself as it was not allowed in the terms of the lease on their flat.


“Remind me what breed of dog you have, Chris?” I’d ask spitefully, when she was in full flow, usually some tedious interminable tale of her travels which involved an anecdote to illustrate her truth that foreigners were dirty, dishonest, dastardly or dumb. This summarises my general view of dogs, and she was always trying to convince me that I was wrong. I had given up long before trying to convince her that foreigners might have some points in their favour (even the invention of hummus and central heating had not swayed her) and moved on to sly suggestions that Irish people were actually foreigners too.


“I have a story here that proves the extraordinary and special powers of dogs”. She was triumphantly waving an article from a Woman & Home magazine. It was about a woman with face like a potato whose dog had whined and looked worried and licked at a place on her calf every day for weeks. Eventually she noticed that a mole in that place looked funny. Her doctor diagnosed a malignant melanoma, but was able nip its spread in the bud, having spotted it so early. “This is proof”, she stated, “that canines can divine things we humans cannot perceive or understand”. She had a smug smile on her face that made me want to slap her (although I often wanted to slap her, for all sorts of reasons, including nothing less than tossing her hair in an irritating way). “Bollocks.” I wasn’t even laughing. “It proves that dogs give you cancer”.


I was pleased with my morning’s lucky escape. The dog had failed to exact revenge on behalf of his species for all the mean comments I had made over the years about the licking of balls and the wiping of arses on the carpet (which dog-people ridiculously call sit-up-and-beg). No teeth had been involved, and one lick would probably not give me cancer. I tramped on through the souvenir shops to the small semi-circle of Kassiopi’s natural harbour. I sat for a while on a bench beside a cannon, trying to decipher the plaque, but my Greek was not up to the job.


The cannon was pointed directly at Sarande, just across the channel. From Kassiopi through the binoculars, it looks like an enormous jumble of half-built, half-occupied tower blocks. One year we went on a visit to Albania to see the amazing archaelological wonder that is the ancient city of Butrint. We travelled from Corfu Town on the Flying Dolphin hydrofoil and arrived at Sarande: which turned out to be an enormous jumble of half-built, half-occupied tower blocks. The inhabitants appeared to be comprised of stocky peasants, skinny girls with bad haircuts in ridiculously tight clothes, and frightening men driving black Mercs. The sole exception was our guide, an elderly university professor of history who spoke eight languages and whose father had led the excavations of the forgotten city. He explained many things, at length and in perfect English, including the fact that the most respected Englishman in Albania is Norman Wisdom. I found this impossible to believe but the internet agrees with him.


The cannon’s mouth was stopped with chewing gum, crisps wrappers and drinks cans. Attacking Albania by firing litter across the straits would be a wasted effort: the whole country is scattered with fly tipping. Rubbish lined the country lanes on our drive to the Blue Eye Spring, in the middle of an area that purported to be a national park. Magnificent mountains and very slightly less litter. Kassiopi is clean and lovely by comparison. When I first came to Corfu in 1998, warships plied up and down this channel to keep theAlbanians out, but lately the island has relied on summer workers from Sarande, double the number of Flying Dolphins plying the waters these days, to clean its apartments and restaurant kitchens. This will all be changing again, a third of young Greeks are out of work now.


There were fewer tourists in the cafes of Kassiopi than I’ve seen before, and several of the shops had not opened for the summer. But the sea and sun and sky are still beautiful.