The Italian segment of my shadow journey drew to a close with a post about Gianrico Carofiglio's Le perfezioni provvisorie, a final bottle of Prosecco, and another batch of those pizza-dough hotcakes that real Italians would probably regard as a dreadful travesty.



But already the Greek segment had sprung into life.

There's no weight of nostalgia to draw on here. Last year was the first time either of us had been to Greece. As I noted on that first, excited day in Patras, the closest we had come to the Hellenic lands before that was Cyprus and Melbourne...

We're due to move to Norwich on Thursday, and my hand still limits me a lot, so we're at a stage in our real-life journey that doesn't lend itself to complex Greek culinary experiments (although we have fallen in love with the roasted halloumi pictured at the top).

And as I don't know any Greek (apart from the alphabet, via a short spell of learning New Testament Greek), I won't be diving into any language-appropriate novels.

Instead, for this bit of my shadow journey, I've opted for the theme "the English and Greece".

First up, I've embarked upon Stephen Fry's Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold, published in 2017.

The initial few chapters were hard work, frankly. The gods of the First Order were primordial deities, without much in the way of personality, and the material that covers them boils down to a lengthy recital of names.

But in the Second Order there is more of a narrative to work with, and some familiar characters -- Aphrodite, Zeus, and so on -- start to emerge.

Luckily, Fry doesn't linger long over the Titanomachy, the 10-year war that left Zeus triumphant.

But at the end of that, Atlas is condemned to hold up the sky for all eternity, which is where the mountains come from (and the Atlantic, for that matter)...



Meanwhile, Kronos -- the gaunt figure with the scary sickle -- was doomed to ceaselessly travel the world, "measuring out eternity in inexorable, perpetual and lonely exile". I wonder how he's doing in coronatimes.

At the end of the big war, we also get a new order, of the Olympian gods, and this is where the story really takes off.

As this review notes, "Fry’s gods and heroes exchange banter in an endearing style resembling his own posh but colloquial metropolitan argot. Indeed, despite his excellent knowledge of the topography of Greece, especially the Olympus mountains, that informs the narrative, the episodes themselves often feel as if they are set in north London."

But it's all very entertaining. And given that my classical education had been pretty much limited to politics, it's also proving very informative. Wish I'd read it last year...