(TEL) The Wine That Used to Keep Me Cheaply Sozzled (but Als

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AKR
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(TEL) The Wine That Used to Keep Me Cheaply Sozzled (but Als

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The Wine That Used to Keep Me Cheaply Sozzled (but Also Turned My Toe Numb)
2020-10-21 11:28:20.523 GMT


By William Sitwell

(Telegraph) -- I was pretty sure it was the retsina. I had been drinking
fairly steady amounts of it for several months and had discarded the idea of
most other drinks. Wine was too pricey, there was only so much Amstel beer I
could drink and you couldn’t trust the water.

In the mid-1990s, the island of Leros, a pretty ink splodge of a place
somewhere in the Aegean Sea, was my home during a long, long summer. I was
working as a holiday rep for a firm called Laskarina Holidays and retsina
seemed to sort most of my problems. If well chilled, it kept my clients happy
on boat excursions, me economically sozzled, inured from life’s tribulations
and, if I consumed enough of it, it seemed to ward off mosquitoes.

I loved the piny tang one got from the taste. Historically, pine resin was
used to seal the amphorae, but the added flavour was so popular that, after it
was technically unnecessary, the resin was added to maintain that uniqueness.
It can be an acquired taste. Some find it intolerable outside Greece. For me,
it just brings happy memories of Leros and Greek holidays.

On Leros, such was my thirst for the stuff that I had a t-shirt printed for me
with the words “Captain Kourtaki” (after my favourite brand) emblazoned
across the front. But now I was wondering if I’d overdone it. I didn’t seem to
get hangovers, and a siesta or the night were always just a morning or an
afternoon away, but then I lost the feeling in one of my toes.

It was the afternoon. I was whiling away the time in Lefterry’s Bar, which
hovered on a cliff over the beach of Vromolithos. It was a lively spot,
manifested by the wonderful, handsome and witty Lefterry. I would sit chatting
to whoever was there, locals played backgammon and we looked out over the
beach below and out at the warm, green sea.

A few months into my new job and life was good. I recalled breaking the news
of my forthcoming adventure to my mother the previous year. The original
newspaper ad had been too hard to ignore: “Holiday representative required for
small Greek island”. I had applied, got the job, went for a training day and
was due to fly out in a couple of months. “Oh no, you aren’t,” replied my
mother (I think her ambitions for me at the time were more Cabinet minister
than beach bum). But I won out after promising to learn the language and by
August I could order coffee, ask for the bill and “another bottle of retsina,
please”.

Leros was beautiful, rugged, remote and mysterious. The old capital in the
south, Lakki, was an unfinished art-deco gem, designed by the Italians, whose
sojourn in Greece was about the length of a travel rep’s season. Old military
buildings used for political prisoners during the rule of the Colonels in the
1960s and 1970s, now housed the mentally ill and the forgotten.

There were pretty beaches, idyllic villages and white churches and a wild,
inhospitable northern part of the island. There were tavernas, bars and one
nightclub. It was in the latter that the island’s postman would hand me my
mail. My address was simple: William, Leros, Greece.

I played the drums in the Leros Blue Band, and this afternoon our lead
guitarist, Manolis, who doubled as a pharmacist, was on his usual patrol of
the beach. With thick, white longish hair and a voice deeper than Barry White,
he would stop at the sun lounger of a pretty girl. “Your skin is burnt.
You must come and see me at my pharmacy…” He came up to the bar.

“Yassou, Manolis,” I hailed. “Yassou, Williams,” he said, like everyone else,
adding an “s” to my christian name. “How are you?” “I’m fine,” I said, “but
for some reason, I can’t feel my toe.” “Show me the toe,” he replied. I put it
on a stool. He looked at it, drew on his cigarette and then stubbed it out on
the toe. “You have a numb toe, Williams. Stop drinking so much retsina.”

So I added the occasional ouzo to the mix and was quickly cured. How far, far
away those days and that island feel now.
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