After ten days on Ikaria the last, short, (as possible), leg of our Aegean Oddity is to connect with our flight from Mykonos.
We want to keep it short because Mykonos Town looks and feels like a copy of a perfect Cycladean village replicated in it’s entirety for the strip at Las Vegas and dressed and styled by the excitable love-child of Ivana Trump and Julian Clary. It throbs night and day with the rhythms of the pleasure seeking young, glamorous and rich and is riddled like Swiss cheese with the retail outlets of high-end fashion designers and Rolex and Patek Phillipe watch and jewellery emporiums, (and these are the real ones).
There are gay Italians guys, so incredibly toned, groomed, and sleekly dressed that they suggest the next evolutionary wave of perfected homo sapiens. Homo something else. And so many girls, so willowy, elegant and slender that one had to glide over to us on our terrace last night with a bottle of wine and ask us very prettily to uncork it for her because her willowy, slender wrists just weren’t up to using a corkscrew.
For a brief, slightly panicky, but tantalising moment we thought that we were about to get swept up in the beautiful and cool young drinking scene. After all, they don’t put their old people in care homes in other parts of the world but cherish and include them.
But no, we were only needed to provide access to the means of Dionysian partying for The Young, who sit around chatting, drinking and grooming until about 10.30 at night and then mount mopeds and quads and wobble off to Sodom and Gomorrah to return after dawn. Jane and I did feel a little left out but, Brexit means Brexit, so we rallied and decided to celebrate the evening in our own national tradition by drinking ourselves rapidly legless while bellowing “ENGERLAND, ENGERLAND, TWO WORLD WARS, ONE WORLD CUP” repeatedly and endlessly into the now empty and dark void around our terrace.
This time, when arranging our return from Mykonos, I chose accommodation inland, to avoid the insanity of Mykonos Town with its constant hubbub of frantic pleasure seeking and display. It turns out here to be largely developed and busy also but we did walk about a bit to try to get a feel for the place and to take nice photos in the beautiful early evening sun and prove once more that the camera is a seductive barefaced liar. Inland Mykonos is now all scorched, straw coloured grass and boulder strewn hills. Up most of these hills creep ever growing white ‘Cycladean’ style settlements of tourist accommodation of varying sorts.
It’s interesting to remember that just forty odd years ago this was an undiscovered rural hippy paradise where donkeys provided the infrastructure of haulage and logistics. Now it resembles what I imagine Israel to look like, all heat, rock, building, traffic and relentless activity. If Israel didn’t need to spend every penny on defence they could give each citizen, and the Palestinians, a large amount of money to spend on clubbing, cocaine, ecstasy, MDMA, high end fashion and beach wear, luxury 4X4 and sports car hire, and sexual services, and then, perhaps, Israel would feel a bit like Mykonos.
I am wondering if there is a club on Mykonos where old people can go and sip tea and take pills for their nerves.
But most of all we are looking forward to coming home tommorrow.