I’d expected the flight we booked back in January to be swiftly cancelled by the airline over the summer, and was somewhat surprised and, if honest, rather stressed, to discover that it wasn’t, because it meant trying to find an insurer that would pay out in the event that we contracted COVID, and checking my emails (spambox too!) constantly to see if there would be a last minute cancellation. We were very surprised to arrive at Newcastle airport at 5 in the morning and find, after check-in and security, a very busy departures lounge, and a mass exodus of tourists rising in unison from the (socially distanced) metal seating to descend down the escalator to Gate 25.
The stag dos were out in full force, decked in tracksuits and colourful sunglasses, and draining the bars of beer before breakfast. More surprisingly, the retired couples were still there, in linen shirts and walking trousers, the only difference from usual being the bottles of hand gel clipped to their bags and their faces hidden behind masks.
One thing that I hadn’t thought about was how warm it would be wearing a mask for 8 hours from door to door, and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who gets claustrophobic or is susceptible to migraines and/ or anxiety. The plane was packed and we were very aware of how close we were sitting to broad number of people.
(I accidently pissed on my foot during a nasty bit of turbulence whilst I happened to be inside the aeroplane toilet), but other than that things were pretty swift and went by without a hitch. I would venture to say even, pretty normal.
Where to go walking in Corfu in August 2020?
Notwithstanding the difficulty finding the apartment and traipsing up and down hills in the midday heat (I recommend anyone who hasn’t used Airbnb before ask for the specific apartment numbers ahead of time, as the post codes are pretty general), – notwithstanding this, the village of Barbati was stunning. You approach it from a hillside road that curves around the edge of the coastline, so that you get a birds-eye view of the bay, ensconced in parched mountains blanketed with olive trees and those stereotypically Mediterranean terracotta roofs. The beaches are stony, and the pebbles are varying shades of winter, desert, peach, yellow-white, and sea-bleached white, and on the horizon is the suggestion of Albania, peeking out of the haze. The water is striped where the white wine colour is ribboned with light and bleeds into turquoise and then thickens into deeper blue. I love that signature blinding light out there – it’s not an anaemic white leeched of colour, but rather everything is crafted and smoothed by the sun and the sea that gift each pebble with a small drop of one of their many and perpetual colours. I love how the heat also regulates not just the colour of the buildings and stones and plants but the pace of life, the closure of the shops in the middle of the day, the way the place comes alive with music and lights and the screech of scooters in the evenings.
What do you do on a holiday where you can’t do anything?
In the evening it was like something out of a film. We showered outdoors on the blue painted stones – brackish blue – like a whale – then we sat out on the decking under the oleanders, palms, and pomegranate trees and drank St Lucia cocktails from a bar built into an ancient olive tree, and listened to sultry covers of songs like ‘Purple Rain’ and talked about the prescience of the Isherwood novel ‘Goodbye to Berlin’. When I looked down at the table I saw someone had carved the word ‘PAIN’ into it.
We skimmed stones, and a little ways down the beach stripped in the shadows of an olive grove and picked our way over the cooling stones and slipped into the water – now the colour of octopus ink blue and soothing to our insect bites and floated on our backs looking up at the stars and faraway temples glistening.
The moon cast an ethereal snail’s trail which led suggestively out to sea. It seemed to be saying ‘come on come over here, the lakian water’s like a cooling bath, float along this path to the horizon, look it glistens like sweat’. You’d keep swimming, realising too late you’d gone too far, but it was like you’d be hypnotised and simply wouldn’t care, and finally the moon would whisk you up in its opalescent light and vapourise you. We watched it in the water for some time and held each other. I can see how some people would call this PAIN. Perfect moments like this are rare and life is only really the pause between lips. And then we have to go back –
We are always going back, away, returning, on planes, cars, trains, waving at family, mothers in whom we used to live, siblings that curled their tiny baby fingers around yours in a hospital and formed your first memory, friends whose vomit you cleaned up and who cleaned up yours and with whom you drained countless bottles of wine and had conversations about things you can’t remember but that you know must have changed you both, saying goodbye to them, goodbye to perfect realities in favour of imperfect ones, for reasons which, in this landscape, seem beyond understanding.
A strange thing happened. I got a call from my mum to check I wasn’t dead, which I thought was weird and a little existentially impenetrable. It turned out a woman had been hit by a speedboat in a bay not too far from where we were staying, and died, and she’d read about it on the news and wanted to know if it was me. Looking up more about it, it actually seemed like a suspicious death – her family were being questioned in relation to it and bystanders reported they’d seen the speedboat accelerate towards her even though she was waving madly. She’d been cut up and died at sea of her injuries. It was a sort of hit and run – the boat had been found abandoned on a neighbouring cove. What a horrible death. She’d gone on holiday looking forwards to swimming in such a peaceful idyllic sea – a sea where you can’t imagine something like that happening. She could have been any of us, none of us. It was too random a death. I had a bizarre thought that what if you’d found one of the limbs? What does one do with something as abject as that when the person has already passed – do you put it back in the water? Do you take it to the family to bury along with the rest of them? Would they see it as a part of her or as simply a limb? Would they want it? What is it that anyone really wants?
When we returned there was a reporter waiting at the airport and she wanted to know what it was like travelling in Greece at the moment. I think she was hoping for a rather more melodramatic and disparaging anecdote than the one I gave, which was perhaps why it wasn’t featured. But then again, perhaps it wasn’t featured because Corfu wasn’t in fact, contrary to expectation, taken off the travel corridor list the following day, though many other Greek islands including others that fly from Newcastle, were – so it looks like we cut things fine, and were lucky. Luckier than we’d realised, in more ways than one.
