The British holidaymakers and reps who have been arrested by the Greek police in Rhodes have expressed an astonishment which seems entirely genuine. Their drunken misbehaviour, including sexual acts in public, either spontaneous or staged for the benefit of an appreciative audience, didn't seem to them so very wrong. A girl was arrested for exposing her breasts in public, and it is fair to say that she is most surprised.
Underlying all this is the single conviction, or mitigating circumstance: Well, we're on holiday, innit? The question which one wants to ask them in return is this: where, exactly, did you think you had gone on holiday? My tales of Greek drunkenness are not quite like this, but they are enough to make me understand very clearly the big mistake these people have made in choosing Rhodes for their festivities.
A year or two back, a friend and I were travelling through the Peloponnese and stopped for the night in a most beautiful and remote village, deep in Arcadia. The village had one guest-house, and, attached to it, a little taverna: both very simple, but clean and pleasant. It was the sort of place in Greece where there is no menu: they simply invite you into the kitchen, and you point at what you want. He gazed at me in astonishment. My friend and I promised that if it proved too big to drink between us - we hadn't heard of these gigantic Arcadian bottles, but who knew?
Satisfied, he brought one over: it was, of course, exactly the normal size, and somehow the two of us managed to get through it.
Earlier this year, something rather more humiliating happened. I'd gone to Greece for two weeks to get on with a novel; first on a very quiet island, and then for a week back in the Peloponnese.
