A Very Greek Adventure

Almost four decades after her first true teenage escapade, Miranda McMinn returns to Crete to see if she can recapture the moment

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Looking back, I can hardly believe our parents allowed us to do this, but in 1982, when my two best friends and I had just finished our O levels and worked for a summer to save up, we booked tickets from the back of Time Out, got on a “Magic Bus” on our own and travelled to Crete. We were gone for three whole weeks – four, if you include the journey, which took 60 hours each way. The three of us sat squished up on the back seat of a clapped-out coach that wound through France, Switzerland and Italy, then bumped through Yugoslavia, which was still behind the Iron Curtain then.

We finally made it to Souda in northwest Crete, and from there to a hippy hangout with a beach called Paleochora, which I’d been told about by a friend of my mum’s. We hung out with cool Italians and Swedes, and an embittered Mancunian called Kev, who was always complaining that he couldn’t compete for female attention with “them Flash Harry Greeks”. Old ladies in black sat outside doorways smiling toothlessly and greeting us with kalimera, and we ate constantly – yogurt, honey and melon for breakfast, Greek salad and chips for lunch, and souvlaki for dinner. The rest of the time we were mostly drunk.

It was the days of Bergasol (remember those ads – we all wanted to be the Bergasol girl). It was only factor 2 so we all suffered blistering sunburn staked out on the beach under the Greek August sun, but SPF wasn’t a thing then. There was an outdoor disco, we saw phosphorescence on the night sea, and I had the Milky Way pointed out to me for the first time (by Doriano from Milano, who then told me he loved me).

When we got back my mum was furious because apparently I hadn’t phoned home once – well, phone calls cost money and I’d spend all mine on retsina and souvlaki, hadn’t I?