The beach at Kato Gouves in the morning

One of the undisputed pleasures of taking a holiday is ‘getting away from it all’.

This can just mean a change of scenery and getting away from all the familiar places, but I also interpret it as getting away from a lot of life’s daily routine and away from the television, radio, internet, telephone, newspapers and all that.

I don’t even drink tea while I am away.  I drink endless cups of tea at home, but when I am away I stick to black coffee.

It is now getting harder to escape the modern media – or looked at another way it is easier to stay ‘in touch’.  Satellite TV is everywhere, as are internet cafes and wi-fi.  The hotel bar had a PC and also wi-fi but I resisted that temptation.

I remember my first holiday abroad: there was a long queue for the phone booth in the hotel reception and any call home had to be planned.  Back then I couldn’t see the point in calling home, and even now I can’t really.  I took my mobile phone with me just in case the kids burnt the house down or anything, but didn’t use it, except as an alarm clock.

I am already used to not reading a newspaper, having weaned myself off that habit back in February, and didn’t mind at all not seeing any headlines.  I know that if anything really important happened then somehow we would have known: big news finds its own way through.  It appears that the big story of the week was a Tory saying the NHS is a bad idea, so I didn’t miss much.

I did crack on the last day though.  On Saturday evening I got one of the brothers who runs the hotel/bar to look up the West Ham result for me, but on the whole I rather enjoyed the break.

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