Pure Greek Honey
Start talking to me about about Greece and you might notice a slight tightening of the jaw. Mine, that is.
The photographer Adam Woolfitt and I had just finished working on Santorini making pictures for the Kodak Calendar. Adam had a call back to London and had to leave a day early. I booked a chopper to take us back to Piræus so that he could get his flight and I a hotel room for myself. I was utterly flogged after ten days of rushing up and down rugged hillsides and looked forward with childish glee to a quiet night in the Piræus hotel and then a few hours of swanning around in Athens before flying home.
At Santorini we were boarding our chopper when a man came rushing up, carrying two large bottles.
‘Wait! Wait - this is for you, please.’
We had met him earlier; he had helped us considerably over the past days on the island yet here he was, making us a farewell gift. He handed us each a two-litre bottle of transparent golden Greek honey, collected from his own hives on Santorini.
Adam got his flight to London. I went on to the hotel.
Over the last fifty years I have had to stay in some nasty places, but this place beat everything. It was very small, very smelly and filthy. In my room a single light bulb hung from the ceiling. The curtains were torn. The bed looked back at me and dared me to get into it. I dumped my flight bag on a stool and went out to find another hotel, but everything was full. I went back, undressed, and crossed the room to the shower. Halfway there, I stopped. Something on the floor twinkled up at me from under the stool upon which lay my flight bag. It was a reflection of the light bulb in a small pool of liquid. It was spreading very slowly on the dull, dark brown linoleum floor.
I went to the stool and unzipped the bag. My bottle had broken and two litres of thin Greek honey had seeped downwards through everything. I had honeyed files, honeyed books, shirts, underwear and shoes. Honeyed everything. My electric razor slithered honeyly out of my grasp as I picked it up, my hair brush was honey-heavy and dripped. Shirts dripped and socks sagged. My emergency loo paper was glued into a solid mass and gifts for the family were soaked.
Wonderful aromatic, transparent Greek honey, enriched by curved shards of smashed glass.
There are some situations that prevent cogent thought. For quite a long time I stood, my slowly-dripping razor in one hand and a sock in the other. Eventually I began picking individual items out of the swamp and laying them out on the floor, one by one. I carried on until the bag was empty. I got the toilet roll from the lavatory, dampened twenty yards or so under the tap, knelt down and began systematically to get the worst off each item.
Eventually, I swabbed the pool of honey off the dark brown linoleum. As I rubbed I was interested to see the brown surface beginning to lighten. The more I rubbed the more quickly it lightened. It ended up bright orange. It dawned on me that I was removing about twenty years’ worth of other guests’ dirt.
At home I knelt by the flight bag and, surrounded by my eager family, described our climbing into the helicopter. As I talked I slowly pulled back the zip. At the words ‘a two-litre glass bottle of Greek honey’ I pulled out a nicely-saturated shirt. I leave you to imagine the reaction.
The gifts survived, aromatic but whole.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010