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.