It is T shirt weather today at the Greek Hovel but my late Uncle Christoper Booker would have been delighted were he to gaze up to the high Taygetos mountains above us. Chris loved the Mani.
He came here on his first of his three honeymoons with wife Emma Tennant. They were accompanies by her cousin, my sister’s godmother, Georgia and her boyfriend. Chris said that, as happened with his second wife, he walked into a room, met a man and knew that he’s run off with his Mrs.
The second time around that man was the historian Norman Stone who thanks to Chris I got to know when I was at Oxford He was a charming fellow, a drunk, a busexual and an outspoken Thatcherite. These days he’d be sacked on the spot. Even back in the 1980s there were regular calls to boot him out. The first time was Georgia’s boyfriend. Emma rather glossed over this in her autobiography in the chapter, I married a satyrist. Anyhow, Chris was in later life a pioneering global warming sceptic and would have loved to see the snow still on the mountains in April.
It is melting and little streams are cropping up everywhere while the dry river which we drive across to get to our house is a babbling brook. But to see snow at all is something Al Gore and the Guardian would have thought impossible.
