Driving along the northern coast, westwards from Heraklion, is an odd experience: I feel I should explore a few places with interesting-sounding names, and the ones that the computer teacher has marked for me; but without exception, they're all ghost villages, entirely devoted to the tourist trade, and resting up for the winter. What makes it worse is that nearly half of all the buildings I saw are concrete shells of new houses-under-construction, perched up on impossible locations on the cliffs.

One main reason I wanted to come to Greece rather than Cyprus or a Canary island was to be in a real place with a history and an organic local life of its own, and I'm starting to wonder where I might find it. I do see a handful of goats in one place, lying disconsolately on the bare earth; it wasn't a farm, though, rather a tiny patch of land between tourist chalets, with a sign tied to the fence giving the phone number of the owner in case anything goes wrong ...

Of course, it really is Greece and it's Crete and it's the cradle of civilisation and it's been a Venetian colony and a Turkish province and it's the meeting place of Christianity and Islam and all that ... but I can't shake off the way the scenery and the roads remind me of the coast between Calais and Boulogne, though clearly more mountainous and more barren; and the pattern of settlement - I think that's what they called it in school Geography, I mean the way people have built their stuff alongside the roads - reminds me so strongly of Russian and Estonia ...