The family dream was of "a little whitewashed house with a blue door and blue shutters on an unspoiled island in a picturesque village next to the beach with a taverna round the corner . . . " The reality was a road to ruins! After falling in love with an incredible view, John Mole found himself owning a tumbledown ruin on a hillside, with no water, no electricity, no roof, no floor, no doors, no windows and twenty years of goat dung.
The ideal of Greece comes up against the harsh reality of making a home. Want to put up a traditional ceiling? First cut your reeds in a snake-ridden marsh. Invite the neighbours round for a barbecue? First pick out your lamb from the flock that comes past the door! At the same time the Ancient Greece of myth and history - the simple, rural Greece of thirty years ago - is disappearing before their eyes as a new European Greece emerges.
From Pan to pandemonium, 'It's All Greek To Me!' is filled with cultural and linguistic mishaps. There is plenty of Greek sun and sunstroke, sea and sickness, sand and cement. Anyone who has been to Greece, if only on holiday, will have met in one guise or another the warm, generous and garrulous characters that cram the pages.
