The world from my window

For eleven years, this was my holiday. Not bad for a confirmed landlubber. It all began in 2004 when Mr Grigg and I were looking for a holiday home on the beautiful island of Corfu. The place we wanted, on the edge of a village called Kavalouri, fell through. So on the last day of our fact-finding holiday, we called in at Gouvia Marina where my husband had an appointment with a man selling yachts. I'd sooner sit by the sea than sit on it. And then I saw an advertisement for a partnership scheme with the aptly-named Odysseus Yachting Holidays. We'd pay half the price for a boat and the company would pay the rest and charter it out. At the end of five years, it would be ours and, in the meantime, we could use it for up to five weeks a year.  Mr Grigg is crazy about the water. I am not so. I prefer rolling hills, cows and agriculture. However, I am pretty passionate about Greece, its islands, its people, ancient history and culture. And those azure waters are pretty inv...

We've got a table reserved for four and we're in poll position. Once we've feasted we'll be out of the starting blocks and sitting on the wall overlooking the beach. We're in Paleokastritsa in north west Corfu and we're getting ready for the Varkarola. I've blogged about it before and all the background you need to know is right here . I am a sucker for ancient mythology and the story of Odysseus is one of my favourites Tonight, it's a re-telling of one of the hero's many adventures on his ten-year journey from Troy to the kingdom of Ithaca. In the bay at Paleokastritsa, to the soundtrack of 1492: Conquest of Paradise by Vangelis, he has a massive fight with Poseidon, the god of the ocean, played by a diver who pops up from nowhere out of the sea and then sets Odysseus' raft alight. Odysseus is shipwrecked and surprises the Phaeacian princess, Nausikka, who had been playing on the shoreline with her handmaidens after doing their washin...

Back in the Shire, the verdant green foliage and hedgerows waved hello as we drew into Dorset. We arrived in Lush Places to find for sale and to let signs plastered all across the front of our house. I think our friends and neighbours were trying to tell us something. A week and two days on and it's like we've never been away. There was Mr Grigg barking orders in the village hall kitchen as a team beavered away to serve up one hundred and twenty breakfasts at the start of the Lush Places fun weekend. There were scarecrows on show all around the village (naturally, we chose Odysseus tied to the mast), cream teas in the old people's home, a barn dance that took me back to the days of learning country dancing at primary school, a church service for Pentecost in which the vicar used a bottle of bubble mixture as a prop (I can't imagine our priest in Agios Magikades doing that ) and then the annual parade of shields bearing the names of village organisations, l...

That's about it. Love Maddie x

As the clocks went back, so did we. A wild old ferry crossing was predicted as we headed across the English Channel back to my beloved Dorset after twelve, adventure-filled months in Corfu. I felt like Odysseus. Would our friends in Lush Places be held captive by new 'suitors' eating them out of house and home? Would Mr Grigg lash himself to the mast as he listened to the Sirens' song? Would we have to go through various tasks before being accepted as the rightful heirs to our home? No Scylla or Charybdis crossed our paths on the journey home from Corfu. No cyclops outwitted us, no witches turned those close to us into pigs, although on Calypso's Isle we were tempted to stay for more than just a year. This time, it was an interesting, but, thankfully, uneventful trip home. We stopped in Italy outside Faenza...     In the Italian Alps...   In France...   At an old school friend's...   And not far from the ferry...  ...

There is something very special about sailing around the Ionian islands . I'm a reluctant sailor. I scare easily and would rather be attached to the earth by an invisible umbilical cord than be immersed in the wine dark sea. But there is much to be said for bobbing gently around at anchor in a secluded bay, with only cicadas for company during the daytime and a family of five large owls at night. Sleeping by the light of a supermoon on midsummer's eve... ...and waking up to a Homeric dawn... This sun and moon, this sea, these mountains, these islands, they all connect us to the magical and lyrical but brutal times of years gone by. You just have to close your eyes to re-emerge in the age of myths. It is there in your head, in your heart. You just have to believe. The ancient, mythical past is all around us, in place names like Ithaca, in ancient ruins of temples to the gods, in our offerings of broken pottery on the mantelpiece, a gift to Hestia, the goddess ...