As I have mountains of reading to be done in a very short time, I decided to escape far from home in the hope of making some inroads into the large pile of books – not so much on a writer’s retreat, more like a reader’s retreat. In my case, this has meant a heavy suitcase (hard copies only!) and four and a half days in a nice hotel in Greece, with a great sea view, and sufficiently far from any classical ruin (well, a couple of miles) not to prompt unquenchable feelings of guilt at what I am not visiting. It’s an option that I realize I am very lucky to be able to take!
The good news is that, by virtue of doing nothing else, with no one much to talk to, except casual hellos, and with no chores to be done, I have more than doubled my reading rate, while also keeping up the concentration. (It’s simple enough to double the rate by skipping but that is not what I am aiming for.)
At the same time, I have been struck how quickly I have become institutionalized by hotel life. That is partly a consequence of being here on my own. When you are with friends or family, it is very different: hotel routines get disrupted because people in your party have incompatible ideas about what they want to do, about what they want to eat or what wine they want to try. On your own, you unconsciously slip into a regular pattern after a day or so, or at least I have. I make it to breakfast at 9.30 after a couple of chapters have been finished, sitting at the same table with the same menu (double cappuccino followed by a single, and the same hefty selection of stuff from the buffet). My bedroom has a makeover while I am in the dining room, but then it’s back to that temporary library. I skip lunch, and at 5.30 go to the bar for a couple of glasses of assyrtiko and enough olives and cheese biscuits to make supper unnecessary – and to make a few hours evening work possible. By day three, they were not even asking me what I wanted in the bar, just bringing it. It’s the easy option of just giving in to the institution’s comfortable routine.
There has been only one disruption to this. In order to inject an element of surprise into my schedule, part of the family arranged online for me to have a treatment at the spa attached to the hotel (as a belated birthday present). They chose a foot massage, thinking that it might be compatible with holding a book up to my face. It wasn’t, but by this stage I was so far ahead with the work I didn’t really mind.
I should confess that I am not very experienced in spas. I love them, and as I write this my feet feel blissfully reinvigorated – but I have very little idea of their social conventions. Is it rude, for example, not to take the tea offered after the treatment? Are you supposed to use the plastic slippers they give you? And what about the conversation? It has taken me half a lifetime to work that out in a British hairdressing salon (yes, you have a bit of back and forth with the stylist, but you don’t jabber on all the time). But is it the same with a masseuse? I felt the expected thing was to keep my eyes shut (another reason for not reading), stay quiet and enjoy the music. I hope that was OK.
But anyway, I am grateful to the family for disrupting my unvarying schedule a little … as I observe, just before I go to the bar at 5.30 for those two glasses of assyrtiko that I am sure will be waiting for me!
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