I know how Eve feels. When you are thrown out of paradise where do you go? We weren’t exactly thrown out but on early Sunday afternoon the coastguard, a lovely woman, came and told us that we couldn’t stay overnight as there had been a complaint from the monastery. She was extremely polite and sweet about it, as were the others to her, although somewhat perplexed as to why they couldn’t stay. I guess I’m more pessimistic and jaded as I think every person coming near is going to ask me to leave.  I hadn’t realised until then that the truck had been there for more than a week and I suppose two other random vans pitching up did raise a little panic in the monks overlooking the beach, maybe thinking a new hippy commune was about to establish itself.  I was keen to stay until Monday morning. I was just so happy there I didn’t want it to end, and I think the coastguard was hinting that would be fine, but the other couples felt we couldn’t stay and asked if I wanted to go with them. We all headed off on the next ferry to the mainland and followed the stunning coastal road down towards Porto Cheli to a beach park up they had stood a previous year. The sunset was beautiful, as was the sea and the mountains, but the vista was wide and the easy cosiness of Poros’s seafront with the nightly chirp of cicadas was behind us.

I think I mourned that night. I had strange vivid dreams, one of a child from my first school, who wasn’t even a friend. In the dream I said to myself, if she says my name I will go to her and she called out to me from fields away and I ran, ran so fast, and when we came near each other we held out our arms and cried and hugged. I found myself waking up crying with a deep sense of irreplaceable loss.

The limestone from the Island of Poros was used by the ancient Greeks as their foundational building material and maybe, metaphorically, that is what I will take from their too, to build on what I learnt from the wonderful people I shared an unforgettable few days with.

I still have the sand on my stepping stool from Poros as I put it out somewhere new…