2nd November 2024

UnforgettableHi everyone,

Here is my final post from Athens. In fact, this isn't coming from the Greek capital at all; we are already on our journey home. Our final shift at the Centre was yesterday and I'm actually writing this on the ferry that we boarded in the Greek port of Patras which is due to get into Bari in southern Italy at 9:00am on Sunday. We will then take the 11:08 train that arrives in Milan at 9:45 in the evening. From Milan, we travel up through France on the TGV, but will break the journey to have the whole of Tuesday in Lyon. We hope to meet Emma (Liz's daughter) for lunch in Lille on Wednesday before taking the Eurostar to St Pancras. All being well, we should be back in Penzance much later that same night.

As with the other posts, some of the names have been changed.

Our final week went well, but Gillis, my roommate had a cold, a very heavy cold or something, and had taken to eating his meals in his bed. I'd asked him if he was okay and so had some of the others but he became uncommunicative and difficult. He was leaving the discarded tissues that he blew his nose into on the bedroom floor and never washed his hands. I would open the windows to let some fresh air into our room and he would get up and close them again! It was impossible. I mentioned this to Mary who was manning the reception desk one particular day and she suggested that I move into a room which had become vacant. I went to take my things to the room but someone was already fast asleep on the bed with their clothes all over the floor. I went back to Mary and she said that someone must have allowed them to come in without updating the system. I said not to worry about it, and Liz and I went out to a bar for the evening to watch the local football team Panathinaikos playing Chelsea in a European competition.

I'm not going to lie, it took me a while to warm to Athens. I recall a conversation with Kath (my daughter) quite early on, when I actually described it as being various shades of grim outside of the immediate tourist area of ​​Acropolis and Plaka. But Athens has an undeniable spirit. It has a streetwise toughness about it. Whilst being immensely proud, it has a sense of humour that recognizes where it currently is, and is self-effacing enough to laugh at its own shortcomings. It has frequent heated debates over its direction which escalate into disturbances so often as to necessitate a near constant riot-police presence. But despite all of its difficulties, and perhaps because of the endless struggle in which it refuses to concede defeat, I have became very fond of that crazy place. It certainly got under my skin.

Homelessness is obviously an enormous problem in Athens and we were constantly confronted by beggars. We saw countless men and women emptying the bins in the streets to extract anything containing plastic that they could then take to recycling points where you get a couple of cents for recycling plastic waste. You would see these poor people pushing supermarket trolleys around the city full of plastic bottles and packaging.

I must admit that on one occasion I completely blanked a young homeless woman who was pushing a filthy buggy containing her baby. We were seated at a table outside a cafe in Piraeus and since everyone else was was ignoring her, I'm ashamed to say that I followed suit. A few minutes after she was out of sight, I was filled with a terrible guilt and asked Liz to mind our things while I ran back in the direction of where she had gone. After a few blocks I finally caught a glimpse of her near the bus station. I ran through the traffic and called out to her. She eventually stopped so I could put a five euro note into her hand. She looked at it and then back at me with tears in her eyes. I then gave my other five euro note to another young woman whom I'd had to step over while searching for the first one. This second one had two very small children and looked too exhausted or too sick to beg any longer. It is a place that can break your heart several times a day.

When Liz and I came back in after watching the Panathinaikos/Chelsea game (a one-sided affair in which Chelsea won), Mark, a young man from Seattle who says that he wishes to be identified as "they" was in the reception area. They is/are(?) a pleasant young man of about nineteen or twenty and they asked if we'd had a good evening. Then Mary suggested that I could move into Mark's room if I wanted. She thought this would be good but added that she was sleeping in there too, so it might be a little cramped. She believed it would be better than me remaining in the dorm with Gillis and almost inevitably picking up whatever he had. I looked at Mark, they is/are(??) about six foot tall and extremely thin with masses of dyed red, permed hair. This evening they was wearing male clothing: their enormously flared linen trousers and a tie-dyed top. They were very enthusiastic about me moving in with him/them, which was kind. "Yeah, Rob", they said, "it'll be like ,totally cool, man".

To say that Mark's room (that they were already sharing with Mary) was "a little cramped", was something of an understatement. The room contained two pairs of bunk beds and Mary's things were neatly contained in her suitcase and her locker. She was on the top bunk and Mark was on the bottom. Mark's clothes were a curious assortment. I didn't want to look too closely to be honest but my bunk was only about four feet away from their's and Mary's, and some of Mark's clothes had made it the across the no-man's land in the middle and quite a few had taken up positions close to my quilt, with one or two dug-in under my bunk.

We have said our farewells to the boys at the Centre on Friday or at least Liz did, as I had unfortunately picked up a stomach bug. It was such a shame that I didn't see them on our final day but I didn't want to risk passing it on to them. It was especially disappointing as Liz and I had bought them each a 2025 diary and I would have loved to have been there to hand them out. They took a video them receiving them though, so I did sort of see them. I feel desperately sorry for them. When you're with them you can easily forget that they have virtually nothing; they have no money, no family, no home and no security. They have a future, but a future of what? ...as what? But when you're with them, they're just boys.

It had been a difficult week at the Centre; Azian, the lad I was doing the headers with a couple of weeks ago had absconded over the weekend. He had messaged the Centre to say that he was okay, but that he wasn't coming back and was doing some kind of agricultural work but he didn't say where. I don't know what will now become of him. Also, there were two near-suicides. Both were from another Centre for refugee boys, but the boys in our Centre knew them both as they attend the same school. Both were about to jump from a tall building but were grabbed and wrestled to safety. Life in that arena is both volatile and vulnerable in the extreme.

Mark, from Seattle had been right, it was totally cool sharing his room, or at least it was until they came back in at around three in the morning. They had been having an open conversation with themself (??) earlier about whether or not to do their laundry that evening. I later learned that while their clothes were in the washing machine at the laundrette around the corner, they had found a bar or a club or something, became distracted and a good few hours later remembered that their clothes were still in the washing machine before coming in the hostel. Needless to say, it was a fitful night after that with lots of snoring and shouting-out of random half sentences in their sleep in a croaky Seattle drawl, most of which began with "like" and ended with "man".

All's well that ends well, though. The original room that Mary had suggested that I move into became available after that, and they said that Liz could move in there too, and so for our last few nights in the hostel we had our own little room.

The thing I couldn't get out of my head on that last night however, was okay, let's hear it for the guys who made it to the very top of their chosen endeavour. Mucho chapeaus! to the Elon Musks, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Mohamed Salahs, the Rafa Nadals, the Tadej Pogacars and the Antoine Duponts. I mean it. They fully deserve it, if only for the inspiration they give to us mere mortals. They demonstrate commitment, dedication, patience, skill and tenacity. They make the most of what talent they were blessed with and also successfully capitalize on the good fortune that they undoubtedly had along the way.

This has been called The Age of the Celebrity, The Era of Success Worship ...but that's all a bit dangerous isn't it? Aren't we flirting with some rather dangerous ideologies? What do we make of the all the others, the bottom 99.99999%... the middling ones or the lower placed also-rans? Modern life is extraordinarily complicated and we strive for simplicity. We yearn for a more easily digestible narrative; there's a winner over here, and there's a loser over there. There's a strong one, there's a weak one. There's a superior one, there's an inferior one. There's a good one, there's a bad one. Franklin D Roosevelt famously said, "I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not enough the bad luck of the early worm."

And I think that this is where those feelings of last night came from: Athens was once so far ahead of its time that it was absolutely mind blowing. At around 400 BC Athens was The Cradle of Civilization. It had already established philosophy, fine art, democracy and sport, and all of that at around the same time as Clacton was being run by an Iron Age man with all the forward thinking of sludge (yeah, I know what I just did). But my point is, Athens blazed a trail. Athens showed the world the way forward. However, on those dusty streets, Liz and I witnessed a societal breakdown that kept me awake with the question of whether Athens is still showing us a future.

There are such extremes in Athens. Back home in the UK, it is currently estimated that the top ten percent of wealthiest people each own (on average) approximately 5.7 times more than the average person in the entire bottom fifty percent. That ratio has grown more extreme in the last twenty years, and is one that I find difficult to digest. But in Greece, which had a thousand or more years head start on us, remember, their wealth distribution is even more extreme; with the wealthiest ten percent owning a staggering 20 times more than the average person in the bottom fifty percent (source: Science Direct). And this, in a country where there is so much less to go around in the first place.

I don't claim to have the answers, but I don't believe that not having solutions should prevent me or anyone else from saying that things are bad, and saying it out loud. To protest, that we, a society that claims to retain any shred of compassion shouldn't expect more. The world faces enormous challenges going forward, and whilst they might simply be the same fundamental human dilemmas as we have faced for hundreds if not thousands of years, we are now so close to (if not already at), some irreversible tipping points, that we really should be sitting up and taking notice.

Do you want to see where this trajectory might be heading?  Visit downtown Omonoia or Attiki.  Do you want to know how that place feels?  Take a walk through the streets of Athens.

I'm signing off for a while now.  This has been an intense but unforgettable journey.