Another positive day. Really grateful to be able to live this kind of life. Enjoyed the sunny day, blue skies and slow pace.
Found a cafe where the locals go (instead of all the waterfront touristy places) and enjoyed sitting on the periphery not knowing what they were talking about. Annoying clack-clack of rosary beads though.
Did a stroke of work, which mainly involved playing around with needless ancillary tasks such were fun and felt good. Added a perceived sense of order to my life, but didn't actually finish the work though.
Popped by a boat agency and booked a trip to Delos (and Mykonos). The birthplace of Apollo! Early start tomorrow to get there.
Went for a longer swim as the sun set. A beautiful calm sea with no one else in it. Probably the first time in years I consciously did some exercise, inspired by a guy I saw yesterday who had a not inconsiderable belly but just dived in and did nonstop lengths of front crawl, way more than I thought he would.
Relaxed with a spot of TV tonight - Andrew Graham Dixon's High Art in the Low Countries, which was excellent. I really love the eye-wateringly labour-intensive detail of Rogier van der Weyden and Van Eyck, and I loved seeing the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Breugel. Having just sat and contemplated the inexorable sunset and the world's indifference to individual fate the meaning of the painting really resonated with me. The poem is nice too.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W. H. Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts
Also reminds me of the idea I had today of an anti-holiday-snap album, where I would take photos of all the things people ignore and block out of their holiday idyll. The photos that show your paradise is just a place like any other. Like the overflowing wheelie bin on the beach, or the disused wasteland to the side of the resort or the huge cement slabs dumped in the sea just around from the postcard-perfect port, or the children begging for money or the ruined houses one street back from the busy main drag.
