Two weeks of ashtanga yoga bliss on Crete was the perfect way to touch base. Now enjoying one more day of stillness, with Cretan mountain herbal tea and Gerald Durrell’s memories of summer days exploring nature on Corfu. This battered, faded, and apparently much-loved copy followed me home from the marine research base in Kenya last September (replaced with a book of my own). I had no idea then that I would be going to Greece in a year. This year a book on Istanbul followed me home from Greece so who knows what 2015 will bring.

But never-mind the present and future – I so wish I had been with Durrell and his eccentric family on sun-drenched Corfu in the 1930s.

“Each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us glossy and colorful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”

(Gerald Durrell)