For childfree people like me, the tail end of August is possibly when you most keenly feel the disconnect between you and the rest of the world. At work everyone’s back from their holidays, preparing for the beginning of the academic year, already mourning their week or fortnight on a sunbed, by a pool or in a villa. My Instagram has been full of holidaymakers squeezing the last few drops out of the month. They have got excited, packed and prepared, touched down, drunk cold beers or glasses of rosé, topped up their tans, raced through some novels. And now they’re all coming back, like migrating birds, refreshed but, most likely, a little sad.
I’ve watched everybody embark and return, seen the Instagram posts and stories, and told myself each time that my time will eventually come. And it will, soon, but not quite yet: by the time you read this I will be hours away from setting my out of office and closing the laptop, but as I write this I’m running on fumes. The rhetoric at work will all be about how everybody is full of beans and ready to go, to close out the year: I am depleted, and ready to go to the airport. Our timelines won’t synchronise until I return, when we all prepare to put the clocks back, put the central heating back on, contemplate the end of the year.
Anyway, the last day of August found me with a day on my tod, feeling a little melancholy and looking for some feeling of escape. So I decided to make my way to Mon Chéri, the Greek café on West Street, to see some Hellenic sunshine might illuminate my mood. It opened at the end of last year, I think, and has been on my list ever since, but it’s taken a little while to reach the top of it.
And when I say Mon Chéri is open, I mean that it’s very open indeed: if Google is to be believed, they start trading at 6am every day, not closing until 8 in the evening. When I commute to work, my bus trundles down West Street around half-seven. Mon Chéri is always open by then, awning out, with some customers in already. Is any hospitality business in Reading open quite that long, with the exception of Gregg’s and Wetherspoons?
So. yes, I partly picked Mon Chéri this week because I’m so very ready for a holiday and, for me, Greece is the place I most powerfully associate with holidays, even now. The first time I ever left this country I was thirteen years old and my parents, heady with the rush of having remortgaged our suburban semi-detached, took us to Corfu to share a villa with some friends. I had never been on a plane, never known sunshine like it, was fascinated by the way Greek lemonade tasted different, couldn’t get enough of the music of the cicadas – when I could tear myself away from a book or my chess set, that is.
Early on in our stay we found a taverna, run by a chap called Tassos, and it was love at first sight. The food took forever to arrive, but nobody cared because we were sitting outside, on those balmy evenings, and my parents had access to a steady supply of Retsina. Tassos had an ancient stereo that played Greek music, but it was on the blink so it was always randomly speeding up or slowing down, some kind of weird bouzouki remix. The overall effect was of an establishment inches from collapse.
Sometimes customers at a neighbouring table would be so angry about the interminable wait that a blazing row would ensue. My parents’ friends Carol and Frank wanted the earth to open up and swallow them; my dad found it hilarious. We went every night, and by the end we were such regulars that after other customers complained, as they often did, Tassos would come to our table and say something to the effect of What was their problem?
As a trip, it had a lasting effect on me. It was the only time I remember my family going out for dinner more than once a year, and I think it made me fall in love with food and restaurants. Specifically, it made me love Greek food. My dad was keen that we enjoy ourselves but not go financially mad, so we were limited to the least expensive things on the menu, the souvlaki, the sofrito – veal in garlic – and the stifado. And I became addicted to the last of those, the rich stew of beef braised to surrender with tomatoes and soft, whole shallots. I can’t remember if it was Tassos’ wife or mother in the kitchen – or even his grandma – but whoever it was, the chef was a genius.
Since then I’ve been to Greece many times. I’ve done Rhodes, which I liked even more than Corfu, although I’ve only once managed to stay in Lindos, the bit of it I adored the most, once. I went to Kefalonia just after the Captain Corelli film, and had dinner with a pre-fame Simon Pegg, sporting a Beckhamesque mohawk, at the next table. I’ve stayed in Mykonos, which I loved despite a nagging feeling that I didn’t see the best of it. I’ve holidayed in beautiful, scruffy Athens, walking among the city’s ruins just before my first marriage went the same way.
And then there’s my very favourite part of Greece – Parga, just around the coast from Preveza airport, a beautiful harbour town full of winding lanes where you can completely forget about the world, sit in one of the many tavernas, eat fresh fish and drink sweet rosé and, for a little while at least, become a twenty-first century lotus eater. One one holiday there I took a boat trip to Corfu Town, strolled the Napoleonic esplanade of the Liston, felt the whole thing coming full circle.
All that said, I’ve not been to Greece in nearly a decade. At first it was Covid’s fault – my trip to Lindos, booked in hopeful ignorance at the start of 2020, was shifted back again and again until we accepted, reluctantly, that it just wouldn’t happen. But the world has gone back to normal since then, something has stopped me returning and I’m not sure what it is.
Analysis paralysis, possibly: I am never able to pick the island, pick the resort, pick the accommodation. I see everyone else going there and I envy their certitude but that magic combination of the right airport, the right flights, the right place to stay has never jumped out at me. I’ve contemplated Chania, or Agios Nikolaos, or going back to Parga, but I’ve always chickened out and booked a city break instead. For many years I wanted to go to Hydra – because Leonard Cohen – and someone I knew on Instagram who went every year even sent me her guide, but the sheer faff of getting there just put me off. You’d need to be there two weeks for that journey to be worth it, and I never take two weeks off.
So the closest I would get, this year at least, was Mon Chéri. It’s always saddened me that Greek food has never really gained a foothold, either in this country or in Reading: we had Kyrenia, which I revered, but since then it’s been Spitiko, which I ought to visit. We had The Real Greek, which left the Oracle before it could be pushed, and we still have Tasty Greek Souvlaki which is indeed tasty, and Greek(ish), but not the full taverna experience.
But Greece is better represented by cafés, with our branches of Coffee Under Pressure and now with Mon Chéri. And I truly love Greek cafés and bakeries – in Parga, most mornings began with breakfast at a place called the Green Bakery, on a sun-dappled terrace with coffee, pastry and a paradisiac, indolent day ahead. When I came in off the drizzle-spattered pavement of West Street, I guess that’s what I was hoping to recapture.
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