John Mole

When we westerners pray we join our hands, close our eyes, kneel, hunch up and put our hands over our faces to close up our bodies. Our God is inside us, his universe inside our heads. When Orthodox Christians pray they keep their eyes open. They hold their heads up and open up their senses to the universe. Their God is outside in a real world.

I prefer not to elaborate on the various stages of our dealings over the next few days - disbelief, anger, recrimination, the raking up of old sores, bitter silence and so on - but I can say that they gave lasting strength to our relationship, like a thick scar is stronger than the skin around it.

For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness.

Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as their subjects paid taxes and provided recruits to the harems and armies of the Sultan, they could have whatever religion they liked. Only when they joined religion with revolt did scimitars and stakes come out. Orthodox Christianity was under far greater threat from the Roman variety imposed by Venetians and Franks and Catalans. Jews too were safer from pogrom under the crescent than the cross. This is not a line of thought that goes down well in Greek company.

I drank through the buzz of befuddlement into perfect clarity and out again into the blissful confusion of true intoxication.

What troubled me most is that although I was an unwilling observer, I felt guilty myself as if something in what I witnessed touched a shameful and repressed desire.

It was my first dead body and I waited for the appropriate feelings. I didn't know what feelings to expect, which was worse than realising that I had none.

It was tempting to take refuge in feelings of British superiority, although I disliked myself for it and hoped it didn't show.

The American Club was for those who preferred to have dinner at six and brunch on a Sunday and avoid the stress of dealing with Greeks and their language.

For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.

Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker.