What was my idea?

Life had become simply work: very varied work, indeed, but still big parts of every day go to doing things for other people at times which are determined by their diaries. The reality for the free-lance worker of course, is that you don't ever dare to say 'no' to anything, because you never know where the next job is going to come from: so it can very easily drift into a situation where you really have no work, but still you're working all time there is ...

The opportunities I had during much of the 1990s meant that I've travelled quite enough to satisfy any wanderlust I might have, and the treat has always been to stay at home; but for the last three years I've been working rather intensively for the local churches, just one job at a time but cumulatively taking up part of most weekends. The summers in particular have been almost non-stop, based on the work with visitors to the old church of Ytterlennes, and as soon as last summer's three-month contract was finished, it was followed by another four-month one for planning and providing music and conducting a choir up until Christmas. The likelihood was that that would continue after the new year too, so it felt I simply had to get away for a little while.

Another aspect of the whole thing was that in recent months I've had so many opportunities to produce things in my little Mac-based studio - web-sites, magazines, CDs, databases, posters - that there hasn't been time to learn anything new about all those creative programs I have waiting to use and which are such an exciting and central part of my life-satisfaction these days. So I thought I would go for walks to explore Greece in the mornings and sit in my room and explore my own learning with a variety of Macintosh tutorials on Jenny, my lap-top Mac iBook, in the evenings.

It might have been nice if Dagmar could have come too, but she felt she couldn't take time off from her database training course, so the choice was go alone or not at all.

The end of November was the only time I could be away without missing something important, so the question was simply where can you go in November for a restorative break which doesn't cost an arm and a leg?

From other people's post-cards and stories, I had developed the impression that there were attractive old fishing villages on various Greek islands, that life was relatively cheap there, that you could eat delicious lamb-meat with a Greek salad every day, that you could get around on quaint local buses, and that it would still be warm in November, and that you could always get some kind of package tour rather cheaply if you left it to the last minute and weren't fussy about where you went.

Everyone was also saying that journeys were even cheaper since the combined efforts of Islamic fundamentalists and Italian air-traffic controllers meant that people weren't flying much at the moment.

It all felt pretty positive, really.