After fleeing the nutter, I explored an area I’d heard was cool – Plaka. It may well have been cool in parts, but the bit I saw of it looked a bit touristy – lots of shops selling little statues of Athena and blue ‘evil eye’ talismans. Plenty of cocks too, for some reason – wooden bottle openers shaped like dicks – and T-shirts with Socrates wearing sunglasses.
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Athens | A Quasi-Religious Experience And A Local Nutter
I woke up in the morning with a gentle hangover, and found Estelle in the midst of checking out: she’d gone through all her possessions to find she’d lost her passport. I helped her look, sleepily and to no avail. She had an onward flight to Vienna that afternoon, she told me, which would be fine because internal Schengen flights only require a drivers license for EU residents – but still. We searched everywhere, then gave up and went for breakfast downstairs. She was far more relaxed than I would have been.
Continue readingAthens | Back At It
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.
Continue readingAK ’23 | Last Legs Pt 1
On our final day together, Annie and I spent the afternoon in a relaxed fashion: we found a cafe near Leah’s place and sat down to write and eat cake. It was a trendy, young place, Scandi-chic, far less intimidating than the bistros of central Paris with their chalkboard menus covered in dense, illegible scrawl. On one of the cafe’s exterior walls, facing a sidestreet, somebody had spray painted a vaguely left-wing proclamation in French, translating roughly as ‘down with fascism!’. A little further down the street, someone else had written ‘hipsters fuck off’.
Continue readingAK ’23 | A Grassy Hilltop in Paris
“So you do all the maps and navigating and stuff. What do I bring to the table in this travel duo?”
We were in a taxi on the way to the airport, for an 11am flight to Paris.
“Don’t be daft. You contribute loads. You make me do things I don’t want to do.”
“Yeah,” said Annie slowly, looking out of the window as Lisbon’s trams and tiles flicked by. “Yeah, I do. I introduce you to a wealth of interesting new experiences.”
Continue readingAK ’23 | Butt Hose
“Why does God love to smite me?” I lamented. “And where’s Milky Boy?”
Continue readingAK ’23 | Ships in the Night
As the sun rose on our second day in Lisbon, I lay in bed dreaming a strange dream. It felt like an astral projection: I could see myself asleep in my bed, see Annie asleep across the room, but I was able to get up and walk around – and Annie too. I talked to the dream Annie as the real one slept.
“Let her sleep dude,” said the dream Annie. “Let’s go explore until she wakes up.”
Continue readingAK ’23 | Sweet Escape
It meant a lot to me, that little hotel room halfway between Bristol and the airport. Nothing particularly interesting happened: we just dropped our shit, showered in turn, and lay in our beds vaping and watching Peep Show until we fell asleep past midnight. But it was important to me because it felt like an adventure – and not like the adventures I’d known recently. Over the years, I’d come to associate adventure with being alone, and by extension with the fear that comes when you’re on your lonesome, far from loved ones, and you find yourself huffing up a dirty great mountain or darting through some alien humid cityscape and you realise that if you fuck up, there’s not a soul within ten thousand miles who gives a rat’s knob about you. I got such a kick from that crappy little four-hour bungalow nap because, for the first time in years, that adventurous feeling was there without all the bad stuff. I’d begun to believe they were welded together.
Continue readingAK ’23 | Liminal Chillin’
Annie and I arrived at my mum’s house in the same state we did in September of 2021: poorly, dishevelled and underslept. My mum likes Annie; she finds her funny and interesting and refreshing. I think Annie was a bit nervous to meet my mum again – as they stood chatting in the kitchen I noticed she was babbling a little, talking faster and louder than she had been with me on the bus. It makes me smile when Annie is nervous, worrying about being liked. Ironically enough it’s what made me like her so much in the first place.
Continue readingAK ’23 | What’s The Collective Noun For A Load Of Morons
It’s hard not to view Manchester’s EasyHotel as a sign of the times. Only a few years ago – what, ten? Five? – fifty pounds a night would have gotten you a large room with breakfast included. You’d have probably been given a trouser press, a television, and a mini fridge with one of those choded Pringle tubes and two tiny little bottles of wine you daredn’t drink for fear of the check-out bill. You might even have gotten a little bit of patio, and almost certainly a complimentary breakfast.
Well – not anymore, because in the United Kingdom we love to watch ourselves spiral ever inward and downward, grumbling and grunting but not actually doing anything to prevent it, nation of wet lettuces that we are. It’s almost schadenfreude, except instead of taking joy in the downfall of others, we bask in the tragedy of our own downfall – we get our kicks from it, we get our rocks off, like the people in that film who crash cars and then knob in the debris.
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