Tuesday 17 September 2024
It was Tuesday morning and I was driving both of us down to Gatwick Airport, a journey we have made many times. Some retired people like to spend their retirement on the sofa watching daytime TV and bitching about their friends. We like to explore the world through the medium of EasyJet, it’s cheap and I can sit for four hours bold upright as long as there is the promise of an Aperol Spritz and some crispy calamari at the end.
The M3 motorway was fine, the M23 was fine, but on the M23 things started to get a little dicey..
“Ooh I want to go to the loo”
“OK love we’ll be there in twenty minutes”
Five minutes later
“Ooooh, my stomach is cramping up, I really need to go”
This was a potent combination of a bean-based diet and pre-flight anxiety.
“Oh God I think I’m going to poo myself”
I was driving and was in no position to do anything apart from get us to the North Terminal as swiftly and safely as I could.
But the tortoise’s head had started to emerge, and my encouraging words were not helping
“We’ll be there in five minutes, can you err… suck it back ?”
I opened the car window and braced myself for the worst. If a major accident did happen, at least she had a suitcase full of clothes. I felt like I was driving an expectant mother to the hospital, and a particularly ugly baby was on its way.
Fortunately our arrival at the airport did not coincide with an epic in-car Poonami, and Julie was able to go to the loo and successfully “drop the kids at the pool”. We got through security quickly, and everything seemed to have calmed down.
The EasyJet flight to Rhodes was blissfully uneventful, and we got a cab to our apartment, which was above some shops close to the Old Town.
In the evening we walked to the harbour and heard some music in the distance. In the distance I saw a stage and some ballet dancers who appeared to be in their … birthday suits. Naturally we were curious, maybe naked dancing was “a thing” in Rhodes, after all the ancient Greeks did enjoy their gymnastics “sans culottes”.
When we got closer we could see they had beige body suits on, and there were several rows of seats with a polite audience. I am as interested in ballet as I am in Premier League football, so we continued walking to the beach at the pointy end of the island.
By good fortune we arrived at sunset, and got the mandatory selfie with the sun going down.
Wednesday 18 September
Wednesday was a proper lovely Greek holiday day, spent exploring the Old Town of Rhodes. It is a very well preserved medieval city with massive walls built by the Knights of St John, who bought Rhodes from a Genoese pirate when they had been turfed out of the Crusader states in the Levant by Muslim forces.
The Old Town is a maze of narrow streets and cobbled alleys built of stone. It really does look unchanged for hundreds of years. The houses along the streets are supported by flying buttresses which cross from wall to wall.
The walls of the city are incredibly massive, with a huge surrounding dry moat. There are piles of enormous stone cannon balls about 60 cm across, relics from the Turkish siege of 1522.
The main streets are packed with souvenir shops and restaurants, but there are many side streets and alleys where the people of the city live. The main form of transport are noisy, smokey scooters that speed past anxious tourists.
Little did we know at the time, but a nasty little virus was brewing inside of both of us like John Hurt’s Alien which was soon to make its presence felt in an explosive manner.
Thursday 19 September
I slept like a log that night, but it was hot in the room. Julie had barely slept at all. She had been feeling sick most of the night, and all our investment in Greek food was wasted. Julie was “Talking to God on the Great White Telephone”, while I slept very well, apart from polluting the air from both ends.
“Good morning darling”
“Ooh I feel horrible, I was up most night being sick”
“I didn’t hear anything”
“That’s because you were snoring and farting all night”
“Sorry about that, it must be the rich food”
“Then I was woken up by this terrible bang bang banging and people shouting, I didn’t know what it was and I was frightened”
Whatever the banging and shouting was, I slept blissfully through it.
Julie was feeling sick and tired and not at all happy. I was a dutiful husband and went out for the day into Rhodes Old Town
I explored the busy shopping streets packed with restaurants and souvenir shops, and the quiet residential areas and quaint cobbled alleys. Strangely, I didn’t feel hungry at all, which is most unusual for me.
For lunch I had an apple and a bottle of water, while I sat on a bench under a tree watching other tourists scoff enormous souvlaki and chips. Not having an appetite was most un-Harness-like, and not fancying a beer was unfathomable.
After a few hours I wandered back to the flat in Lampraki Street. The residents lift which we had been using to get to our 4th floor flat had a smashed window which had blood on it. The window was made with toughened glass with wire in it, it must have been very difficult to break.
While I was looking, a lady from one of the shops told me that at 4 in the morning, 6 young people had squeezed into a lift designed for 3 people and it had jammed. Hence the shouting and banging and blood. There was a sign on the lift in Greek saying something about “3 atom”, which I guess means 3 people, so 6 people would have overloaded it by 100%.
Julie was in bed, still feeling ill and she got up to let me in.
“How are you darling ?”
“I still feel like shit, I’m going back to bed”
So I lay on the sofa and had a little siesta. When I awoke at about 5pm, I thought I ought to eat something. I got a Greek yoghurt out of the fridge and sat on a bar stool to consume it while watching a YouTube video on my phone.
Empty stomach, plus virus, plus creamy yoghurt was a big mistake.
The next thing I remember was..
“Tim Tim are you alright, I heard a big crash!”
I had fainted and fallen off my bar stool, Julie found me on the floor with a big cut on my head at the front, next to my hairline.
I wiped my head, and saw blood on my hand, bloody hell I had properly hurt myself!
Julie found some tissues and mopped my split head. She took a photo to show me a 4 centimetre cut, which looked quite nasty. What the hell had happened to me? I reckon that I had the same bug as Julie which suppressed my appetite, and then that few mouthfuls of yoghurt made my blood pressure drop very suddenly and I fell off my bar stool and banged my bonce on the tiled floor. Thank goodness I didn’t feel my head connect with the tiles.
I moved onto the sofa and felt very sorry for myself. Julie got on her phone and found a private medical centre close by. They could see me straight away, so we walked, slowly, straight there. I put a hat on so that I didn’t frighten any children.
Look at that cut, it’s like someone has taken an axe to my head! Who knew that yoghurt could be so dangerous?
At the clinic I sat in a low reception chair and told the receptionist and a man in dark blue scrubs my tale of woe. But worse was to come.
“Julie, I feel a bit queasy”
“Excuse me, Tim is feeling a bit sick, have you got a bucket?”
Julie’s appeal for a receptacle was not in time. Moments later I erupted in a massive gush of projectile vomit like when Mr Creosote erupted in Monty Pythons Meaning of Life. Once again, I was not conscious during my finest moment, and woke up covered in puke. I guess that was concussion showing its effects.
There was mashed up apple in the ejected material, the remains of my meagre lunch, and it was all over me.
The receptionist found some paper towels to clean me up, they should have been quicker with a bucket!
I took off my tee shirt and shorts and Julie carefully put them in a carrier bag. I went through to the treatment room, and lay down on a couch which was covered in a long sheet of paper.
A doctor (at least I hope he was a doctor) came into the room, wearing pale blue scrubs. He took my blood pressure, then attached cables to my arms and legs for an ECG. All this medical business was looking serious.
My blood pressure must have been low, I think fainting twice was a strong indicator of that. So he cleaned the inside of my left elbow, and stuck a needle in my arm attached to a bottle of saline, hung from a rack
Bloody hell, this was just like in MASH, except I had a Greek doctor with little English, rather than a wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce.
He took a good look at my head, and then cleaned it with a tissue soaked in Iodine solution. It wasn’t a gentle dab like your mum would do to your knee when you fell over as a kid. This was the sort or vigorous rubbing you do when you are cleaning some tomato ketchup off your jeans when you are sloppily eating a burger.
“Owww” I whimpered while trying to maintain a manly silence
Once I was sterile, he said
“I’m just going to put this paper over your eyes while I stitch you up, it doesn’t look nice”
I braced myself, I have never had any stitches before.
I felt a few sharp pricks, which I guess was a local anaesthetic, but he could have been stitching, I couldn’t see. I definitely felt it when he pinched the edges of the cut together and stuck the needle through both sides and pulled the thread. It was painful, but not intensely so.
After a few minutes of pricking and pulling, he snipped off the thread, and the job was done. I had been patched up like an old teddy bear in The Repair Shop.
The doctor left me with the saline continuing to drain into me. This me with a pathetic smile, I wanted to be a brave little soldier for the camera.
Julie returned from our flat with some clean shorts and tee shirt, so that I didn’t have to walk home in my baggy black underpants.
The doctor gave me an injection in my hip to relieve my nausea, I expect he didn’t want his treatment room to be redecorated with whatever was left in my stomach. He put a big plaster on my head, and gave me a few spares.
Julie sorted out the bill with the receptionist, at which point I almost fainted again. As well as losing the Winter Fuel Allowance, I had to pay about 50 Euros for each stitch of Greek embroidery. My bank balance was less healthy than my scalp.
I bought some plain biscuits for dinner from a supermarket, I didn’t fancy any barbecued pork on a stick with a pile of chips.
When I got back to the flat I noticed that my Casio watch (a timeless classic design which is great value for money) was stuck at 3 minutes past 5. That must have been the time I whacked it on the floor, at the same time as my head, forever immortalising the momentous event. The same thing happened during the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, the clocks were frozen at 9.40.
I don’t suppose historians will categorise my head-meets-floor event in the same order of magnitude as the Lisbon earthquake. But from my point of view it was enormously significant. From now on I will have a scar on my forehead which will be a talking point for years to come, and I can have some empathy with Harry Potter, who was similarly disfigured.
As you can imagine, our Rhodes holiday was somewhat spoiled, and it wasn’t the joyous, carefree experience that we anticipated. But there is the small consolation that it wasn’t as bad as when Julie broke her leg on a mountain in British Columbia in 2012
Now that really was a clusterfuck.
Friday 20 September 2024
The day after my collapse, we both still felt awful, and didn’t want to do anything to exert our minds or exhausted bodies. Fortunately we were a short walk from Elli beach, a strip of gritty sand almost completely covered in recliners and umbrellas.
Since we didn’t want to actually be in the sun, we chose some light-weight recliners that we could move into the shade cast by the thatched umbrella. So every so often we shifted the beds round to follow the shade, like a human sundial.
This was not our normal holiday habitat. Julie has a distaste for sand because “it gets everywhere”. I suggested she wore a Still Suit like Paul Atriedes in Dune, but that idea was not appreciated.
Doing nothing was actually very pleasant, I enjoyed reading my Sci Fi book interspersed with discreet people watching. The beach was mostly occupied by retired folk from all over northern Europe, many of them decorated with a rich selection of tattoos. I’m sure you’ve seen those David Attenborough films of Elephant Seals on the beach, it was very similar but with colourful swimwear
The sun somehow managed to penetrate the umbrella, and cooked me like sausage on a barbecue. By the end of the afternoon I was as pink as a shrimp, and wished I had kept my shirt on like a Proper Englishman.
Now I was sunburned, a stiff neck from hitting the floor, and a wounded head.
Saturday 21 September 2024
I had an appointment back at the clinic at 12 to have my head dressing changed.
The doctor asked me how I was
“How do you feel?”
“Er, fine, I think”
“It looks OK, I’ll clean it up”
He was a man of few words, but didn’t say “Infection” or “gangrene”, so that was a good thing.
He took the plaster off, vigorously rubbed some iodine in the stitches with his customary gentleness and put a fresh plaster on. The receptionist gave me my ECG which the doctor took at the last visit. It was a zig-zag line on a piece of graph paper and she didn’t tell me there was anything wrong, so I assume I hadn’t had a heart attack or something else life-threatening.
We walked back to the Old Town and paid 8 Euros each to go into the Grand Masters Palace. Originally this was a fortified castle belonging to the Grand Master of the Knights of St John. It looks very impressive, like one of those big castles that Edward the First built in Wales. But it is mostly a modern fake.
The mediaeval castle was destroyed in an explosion 1856, and most of what is there now was built built Italian colonisers in the 1930’s. Rhodes was part of the Ottoman empire until 1912, then the Italians took it over. It’s only been part of Greece since 1947.
Inside the Palace there are a series of large empty rooms with some mosaics on the floor, all quite dull. It does feel like the city authorities can’t be bothered to do anything with it apart from taking the admission at the door.
We wandered around the Old Town, and at lunch time thought we should eat something, I didn’t want to pass out again. There are a huge number of places to choose from, and I selected a place called Zizi. It has a bizarre statue of Winston Churchill in a chef’s hat outside, so being a True Brit, it was the perfect place.
I was actually properly hungry and ordered burger and chips and a beer, what could possibly go wrong?
About a third of the burger I started feeling dizzy, oh dear.
“Sorry Julie, I feel a bit peculiar again”
Julie called over the waiter. He practically carried me to a bench seat at the edge of the restaurant and I lay down with him holding my legs up high. Fortunately I had chosen to flake out in a restaurant employing an aspiring para medic.
“Don’t worry Tim, just relax, I’ll keep your legs up”
I was very embarrassed at flaking out in a busy place at lunch time, but he was such a kind man, and said all the right things. His name was Ari and he had family in England. He wanted to take a medical qualification in Ipswich. Ari wanted to call an ambulance, but we declined since we were in the middle of the Old Town, so the transport would be very tricky and I didn’t feel that bad. He brought our food over and I ate a few chips, but I left the burger and beer.
After 20 minutes or so we paid our bill and thanked Ari for his kindness.
That was one helluva powerful virus, and it still wasn’t clear of my system.
Sunday 22 September
Sunday was a re-run of Friday, doing nowt on the beach . This time I kept my tee shirt on. I’ll bet all the other Elephant Seals on the beach were secretly laughing at me, but I was happy reading my Kindle and necking the occasional Fanta.
In the evening we dined at the Napoleon Restaurant and I was very happy to demolish a pizza. Julie struggled with her spaghetti, I expect the virus was still fighting back. I made a major ordering error by selecting the “local wine”, which was possible the worst wine I have ever paid for. I suspect it had been syphoned directly from the tank of one of the vile scooters that tear around the old town. I think it was the first time that I have not drunk all of the wine I have paid for.
Monday 23 September
During the first glorious 36 hours of being in Rhodes, we had expectations of visiting Lindos to see the Acropolis, and take a boat trip to the nearby island of Symi. After our major conflicts with an aggressive virus, long bus and sea journeys did not feel like a wise choice. Our options were:
A) Old Town
B) Elli Beach
Having finished the Sci Fi epic on my Kindle, the Old Town was the best choice. The Rhodes authorities are not great at explaining the long and fascinating history of their incredible city. Some of the exposed Roman and Greek remains have a small scruffy board saying what it is, but for the most part the city is used as a means to sell tat to the tourists.
There are splendid city walls, but the only time you can walk around them is between midday and 3 in the afternoon, exactly coinciding with the hottest part of the day. But I mustn’t grouse too much, because the level of preservation of the Old Town is amazing.
There are several mosques complete with minarets, but they were all being restored and not accessible, which was a pity. The town was Turkish until 1912, and Turks, Greeks and Jews lived in relative harmony together.
Near the southern wall of the town on Omirou street we found the Minos cafe on top of a terrace with wonderful views of the city. I had a meagre chicken baguette and a very average beer, but it was worth it for the views of the town and the harbour.
Tuesday 27 September
Our last day on Rhodes, and somewhat of a relief to be going home. Being really sick on holiday is a lot of a bummer. I wanted to go home with a bottle of Ouzo and fridge magnet, instead I had 8 stitches and a medical bill.
But you have to look on the bright side of things, the beach and the Old Town were entertaining, and at least I didn’t fall on my nose, that would have been really messy, which is what I did while running (and falling over) in 2021.
So what happened to me?
I think I had the same virus as Julie, which is why I had no appetite on Thursday. Then I started to eat a Greek Yoghurt (damn you Greeks) and the blood in my head rushed to my stomach very suddenly. That caused a very sudden drop in blood pressure and I fainted.
I think I was concussed, and after I walked down to the medical centre, that caused me to pass out again and gush like a Thames Water overflow.
On Saturday at the restaurant my stomach still wasn’t better, but fortunately I didn’t pass out that time. I hope Ari fulfils his dream to work in medicine in England.
So how did I get the bug? Possibly Julie had it first, and she could have literally picked it up from a door handle or a rail on a bus, its a mystery.
You will be pleased to know that my head is healing nicely, and I’m still available for any modelling jobs if Saga need me for some cruise holiday shots. It was a terrible holiday in many ways, but bits of it were pleasant and I enjoyed a few good meals. But the beer and wine was terrible every time.
timharnesstravels 