I booked Athens a few weeks ago. It was a long winter, and at the back end of it I found myself feeling inarticulably diminished. I dunno, just – lesser, somehow. I found myself looking in the mirror increasingly often and shaking my head, lamenting my hair and the shape of my body and my crooked teeth and the pores of my nose and the bags under my eyes. Standing on train platforms in the morning, thick grey clouds hanging low as mist, rain pattering my hair and face – by the end of winter each year, I’ve long since forgotten what the point of any of this is. Joy feels thin on the ground.

So I booked Athens to give myself something to look forward to. I heard it was an artsy city and a free-spirited place, and since I was a kid I’ve always had a strong aesthetic fascination with Ancient Greece. It’s the hoplites, mostly. I was fixated as a child on the helmets in particular – the ones with the bright mohawk plumage. I remember watching a film called The 300 Spartans at my gran’s house when I must have been around 8 years old. Not the oily-abdomined Zack Snyder one, but the 1962 version, brimming with the era’s typical gravel and dust – a soundtrack not of guitar solos but instead the empty clack of rocks and horsehooves, the creak of leather against the breeze. I remember sitting in quiet awe at the end of the film, watching uncomprehendingly as this small group of soldiers stood, shields aloft, and waited calmly as ten thousand arrows crashed down upon them. This might be a mis-memory, but as I recall it, this portion of the film is in near total silence. The Spartans in that retelling didn’t roar in defiance, hurl spears, laugh at their doom like Gerard Butler and company – they simply stood and braced and died, one by one, until there were none left. Bodies in red cloaks lying in a quiet heap, wind moving the branches of olive trees. Roll credits. It left an incredible impression on young Dan. I’d never seen a film where the goodies didn’t win.

I don’t know a ton of Ancient Greek history, but I know the basics: the warring states, the gods, the myths, the heroes, the monsters. It always hit harder and deeper than, say, Ancient Egyptian history, which seemed more scary and mystifying – brains pulled out of noses and all that stuff. There was a joviality to Greek history that I’ve always found satisfying – magical creatures and casual nudity and lightning bolts. Plus, Ancient Greece is one of the few ancient civilisations in which it seems you might actually be able to have quite a nice time. Not the scorching intensity of the Egyptians, not the mud-spattered squalor of the Norsemen, not the clinical brutality of the Romans. Just sitting on the steps of the arena in a toga, eating grapes and chatting to your friends while you watch the local sprinters train ahead of next week’s race. Sanitation, education, open space, good weather, stunning architecture, art, nature, regular exercise, fresh food, wine, sexual liberation, fucking togas – what’s not to like? We really ought to have stopped there, to be honest – a time-traveller would do well to hop back 2500 years and let them know: lads, this is basically as good as you’re gonna get it. Someone tell Archimedes to pack it in.

I considered getting a hotel or an AirBnb in Athens, but these options seemed A) needlessly expensive and B) lonely. So I booked a hostel, a bunk in a dorm for €16 per night. I was a bit nervous about this, being 32 and all; I hadn’t stayed in a hostel since I was 29. You don’t want to be the oldest – the old man you see in every hostel who’s always got a bald head and a big yellow-white beard, and he’s always topless for some reason, and he eats rice out of a plastic bag with his hand and never talks to anyone or moves from his perch on the hostel patio, only sits there all day and smokes angry cigarettes, glowering at the young people coming in and out. I told myself it would be fine, but it was a scary vision: sitting in exile in the corner of a hostel bar, having attempted to make friends and been laughed away because I have crows feet and too much forehead. It’s funny – people used to call me brave when I was in my mid 20s and travelling a lot, quitting jobs left right and centre to roam. But it never felt brave to me, because I was never scared in the first place; I was only ever excited at the prospect of the unknown. At 32, however, it really is scary. Still – you’ve got to try, haven’t you.

I flew out of Gatwick, which is actually quite a pleasant experience compared to the potent fuckery of Stansted. I bought a book in the airport – Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut – and on the plane I had an aisle seat. The man in the window seat put his blind down immediately after takeoff and spent the 3-hour flight watching videos of streamers playing computer games on his phone, which incensed me, obviously. I just can’t fathom having the gall to decide for the other two passengers beside me that none of us should get to see any kind of view. 30 minutes before landing I couldn’t take it anymore and leant over the woman between us to prod him and ask him to open the blind. He obliged, looking shocked, and the woman beside me gave me a quiet smile of approval.

Stepping off the plane, I found Greece smelled exactly as I always imagined Greece would smell: the air had that warm, calming Mediterranean scent that instantly lifts your heart. Visions of adventure played behind my eyes, and with a sudden ache of longing and a rush of eagerness I paced through the airport, bought a pouch of holiday tobacco, and hopped on the long bus into the city.

The outskirts of Athens, like most cities, are a bit shit. There’s a lot of graffiti and closed down shops and crumbling clothing emporiums with janky mannequins. In England, streets like this depress me. I was surprised to note, however, that the exact same signs of economic deprivation here felt exciting – liberating, somehow. In a foreign land, it doesn’t sting the same – the streets don’t define you; you’re not bound to them, they’re not a symbol of your own failure to ascend the wealth ladder – you’re just passing through, witnessing. And if you were to move here, start again – who knows. Maybe things would go your way this time.

I got off the bus after an hour or so and walked slowly through grimy highrise streets busy with people and motorcycles. London is busy too, but here it felt different: a little slower, perhaps – and more personable, though there’s every chance that’s my own projection. But no – here’s a waitress on a smoke break, talking to her boyfriend as he rests his arms on the handlebars of his moto-scooter. Here’s a jovial argument between two rival shoestall owners with hairy forearms. Here’s an elderly man on a mobility scooter with a chess board and an empty chair positioned before him, beckoning passersby to play. It has a different air to it. There’s a distinct feeling that if you just sat here for half an hour, you’d get swept up in it – embroiled in the chats and the chaos, somehow. In London, I feel, you’re more transparent.

I found the hostel easily enough and checked in, using the quiet, apologetic, stilted English I always do when I can’t speak the local language. I’d researched a few phrases on the bus – hello, thank you, sorry – but had forgotten every last one in the half hour since. The hostel lobby was large and airy, and I was given a keycard and paid for a towel in a tote bag I was told I could keep.

This was it – the moment of doing, of overcoming. I took the lift to the seventh floor, buzzed into my dorm, and found it completely empty – no backpacks, no discarded sandals, no lumps beneath duvets. I dropped my stuff and admired the view from the balcony – a sprawling white city in the great basin of an arid mountain range, ten thousand little rooftops and TV aerials. And again came that sensation – the giddiness. Oh yeah, I heard my heart whisper, as though emerging from a nap. I’d forgotten we could feel this way.

I’d only been in the dorm a minute or so when the door opened, and a girl in a leather jacket with glasses entered.

“Hey,” I said, panicking slightly and trying to remember how backpackers talk to each other. “I’m Dan. Nice to meet you.”

She said something back, obviously, but I didn’t hear because I was too busy thinking about how important it was to not balls this up.

It was fine, of course. We sat on our bunks and chatted for fifteen minutes – her name was Estelle and she was French, living in Belgium, at the end of a week-long trip around Greece. We both had a film camera, and we both thought the view from the balcony was splendid. She told me she was heading out shopping soon, and would go to a big hill for sunset in a couple of hours. I asked if I could come along – for sunset, not shopping – and she said of course.

When she left, I lay on my bed for several minutes, reeling. The last time I spoke to a backpacker in a hostel was February 2023. I’d forgotten how much of a kick I got out of it – the sheer fulfilment, the absolute human joy of meeting a total stranger and agreeing to hang out. You just can’t do that back home. I tried it so many times in London when I first moved here, and always I was made to feel like an oddball – people only ever said maybe, or else stalled and changed the conversation, or didn’t text me back, or didn’t show up. Eventually I stopped trying, accepting that here, things were tougher, denser; you can’t go around chatting to randos in cafes and asking if they fancy catching the sunset. People think you’re weird – and of course, when you try to exercise the most beloved parts of yourself and continually meet rejection, it drains you. So, slowly, you stop, and you close that little bit of yourself off. Opening it again – feeling the thick, built-up wariness dissipate like smoke – was such a joyful sensation that I let out a small involuntary laugh, running a hand through my hair in shock. The sunlight through the window was warm on my feet.

I spent a couple of hours reading on the hostel roof – you can see the Parthenon from there, but I’ll talk more about that later – then walked to meet Estelle on Lycabettus Hill later that evening. I was late and got lost on the way in some winding hillside forest, cursing God as usual, but even that felt good. When was the last time I got lost? I arrived at the top, drenched in sweat from the hike up, and found Estelle. We’d missed the sunset – it was already dark – so instead we took in the 360-degree view of the twinkling Greek city at night. I woke up in Clapham today.

Winding back into town after half an hour of gawping, we told travel stories – of the northern lights and Mexican cantinas. We stopped off at a cocktail bar someone had recommended to her, a place called Clumsies, and I drank a beer and some sickly-sweet vanilla strawberry drink while we talked about writing – she’s taking classes, and she read me a poem in French about a tree. Back at the hostel there was live music and dancing, and we talked more there and ate dinner, both of us growing full and sleepy, until there was nothing left to say and the bunks were calling. On the seventh floor we said goodnight, and she climbed into her bunk and drew the curtain across. I didn’t have a curtain – for some reason my bed was not a bunkbed at all but a single bed at the other side of the room, dooming me to have my slack sleeping face exposed to whoever walked in – and I lay back on my pillow and thought about the day I’d had (rather vaguely, because I was quite drunk by then).

As my eyes grew heavy, I thought about something I used to say many years ago, a sort of catch phrase I often used when I was ensconced in the indefatigable optimism of my youth: a lot can change in a day. I must say, I think I had the right of it.