Just back from another summer holiday to Corfu, where we did our bit to re-liquidate the economy by buying a lot of Taverna dinners and reducing the feta cheese mountain. The pair of us being news junkies and lefties, we were worried about the crisis in Greece, and addicted to our daily sightings of the sexy Greek government guys on Newsnight. We were concerned about how it might affect the people on Corfu, the businesses we’ve come to treasure while we’re there, and indeed wondered how easy it would be to get home – our holiday, booked in a dark and dreary January, turned out to finish on the day when Greece was likely to default. With no TV or internet where we stay, we walked along to the next beach most days, where the beach bar had a TV. Staff young and old were clustered around 24 hour rolling news, but when we asked about it the reply tended to be sanguine. “Greece is a productive country,” the bar man said, with a super-cool air of being bored of the whole long saga, “if we leave the Euro it will hurt for a while but we’ll survive.”

Since our return the situation has become all the more convoluted and confusing, changing by the hour, but one thing was that the scare stories spread by the British tabloids are as yet untrue. Corfu airport didn’t close at 8pm because they couldn’t afford to keep the lights on, and although Greeks are now restricted to withdrawing just 60 Euros a day from the banks, tourists can still take money out and use their credit cards. Don’t cancel your trip, is what I’m saying – just take lots of cash and spend it freely. As the holiday was essentially a rerun of last year’s – the best way to not feel sad when we leave is to know we’ll be back doing it all again soon – my I direct interested readers to this post from last year on surely the most beautiful, peaceful, spiritual bay on the whole island. Here the water is so clear that writer Lawrence Durrell used to throw cherries in for his wife to dive and pick up from the sandy floor. She must have been some swimmer – it’s deep and I just got water up my nose.

One last thing – the colour trend for the holiday was sparked by my new Primark jelly shoes – blancmange pink shoes, red nail varnish and turquoise sea. When I find my olive grove shepherd’s hut to buy, that’s the colours I’ll paint it.