Extract from a grown-up gap year on Corfu, Greece - paperback and ebook out now

Well, the book's arrived and the launch at Waterstones, Bridport, has been announced.

It will be this Saturday, 7 May, from 10am until 2pm. If you pop in after noon, you can have a taste of Thiasos wine, courtesy of Wessex Wines and made by one of the pioneers of the modern Greek wine revolution, Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, from vineyards in Nemea in the northeastern area of the Peloponnese peninsula.

There's red and there's white.

I'd planned to launch Good Morning, Corfu: A Year on a Greek Island  this Monday in my little village near Paleokastritsa. But I lost my dear dad a few days before so there was no way I was going to get on a plane and leave the family behind, especially after losing one of my lovely sisters suddenly in March.

So the launch in the plateia will just have to wait and I will keep my Corfu friends posted.

It's available as an ebook on Kindle, as a paperback or to order from bookshops.

In the meantime, here's a taster...

Good Morning, Corfu: A Year on a Greek Island

Maddie Grigg

The key was in the lock but the front door refused to open.

‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ the agent said, trying to push the door with her shoulder. ‘It was all
right when I came up yesterday.’

We were standing on the side of the road in a hillside village in north west Corfu. It was a warm day in June and the cicadas were chirruping as loudly as ever. We were about to view a third rental property and the search wasn’t going too well. While the agent struggled with the key and became more and more flustered, my husband tried to give her a helping hand. I sloped off and opened a side gate into the garden, with its view of olive trees and cypresses on a distant hillside, tumbling down to an invisible sea. I took a deep breath and inhaled the smell of pine, herbs and hot, dusty roads.

‘What a lovely place,’ I thought to myself. ‘I could write here.’

Five minutes later and still in a trance, I was back at the front door. They were no closer to getting inside. A man working on the neighbouring house ambled over and tried to prise open the lock with a screwdriver but without success. He shouted to his workmate, a young Albanian, who walked across and attempted to break in by forcing the handle with brute strength. But the door wouldn’t yield.

‘There have been a few problems with this place,’ the agent finally said, as we huddled around the door getting nowhere. ‘The owner wanted me to tell you she’s quite happy to put it back into the state it was in before the last tenant moved in.’

Alarm bells rang in my head. A few problems? The state it was in before the last tenant moved in? I turned away from the door and walked back into the garden to reacquaint myself with the view and the good feeling I’d first had about this place. I tripped over a long dog lead, narrowly missed a pile of mess belonging to the same animal in the coarse grass; and I became aware of a broken manhole cover on the lawn. And then the smell of herbs that had earlier wafted around so obligingly was replaced by the sickly sweet aroma of dog shit and Greek drains. How quickly a place can change.

The workman continued to struggle with the lock and screwdriver.

‘The woman who live here, she move out yesterday,’ he said. ‘Maybe she not want you to get in.’

Suddenly, his young friend declared that he had the answer. With the agility of a gecko, he shot up a drainpipe to an upstairs balcony, felt around the window, pulled up the mosquito screen and, hey presto, he was in.

From the outside, we could hear him coming towards us down the stairs to the front door. It sounded as if he was running. From the inside, he opened the door with ease. But instead of ushering us in, the young man rushed out, slamming the door behind him and slapping his arms and legs.

I shuddered.

Fleas.

And then the agent, my husband and the workman and I all began to itch frantically, a psychosomatic reaction to the teeming infestation inside.

‘We can get it fumigated for you,’ the agent said, rubbing the inside of her elbow.

We smiled as we scratched; but she knew she was out on a limb. Our list of possible houses was diminishing and we were running out of time. We had given ourselves three days to find the perfect house to rent for a year. But it wasn’t meant to be. It did not exist.

The despondency hung in our hire car like a Dorset mist as we drove back to Corfu Town, the lovely capital whose old parts are the prettiest in Greece.

My husband’s dream of letting our house in the UK and renting somewhere on Corfu for twelve months was ridiculous, especially with the Greek economy at its very worst and austerity measures beginning to bite, even in the islands. But it had seemed the answer to our prayers a few months earlier when we’d looked out of our English window onto a never-ending view of rain. And I had gone along with it, quite happily. Twelve months in the sun was the perfect antidote to the English summer and it would be good for his health, too. But both of us were agreed that it all hinged on finding the right house.

We knew we’d know it, if and when we found it. And if we found it, we’d do it. We’d been waiting for some sort of sign, not necessarily a dramatic break in the clouds and a big booming voice from above saying ‘this is the one’, but a sign nonetheless. This was Greece after all, the land of ancient magic. But, at this rate, it wasn’t going to happen.

Our hire car dragged its way up the mountainside, as downhearted as its occupants. Suddenly, behind us, there was a screech of tyres and the agent’s car came past. Like some sort of crazed hen, she flapped her arm out of the window in a signal which stated very clearly that she wanted us to stop.

‘I’ve had an idea!’ she shouted as we drew up alongside. ‘I’ve got to go to another house to take some photos. It’s in a village I always think of as one of my top three on the island. Would you like to come and have a look?’

That's about it.

Love Maddie x