Pame!!

By Phil Newton

This is the story of Phil Newton's coach journey to Greece back in 1974 before there were cheap flights and package holidays.It's a hilarious Odyssey to a strange, unknown, alien land...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447615354

Book preview

1

THE TRAVELLERS DEPART

A coach!? Three days on a coach to Greece? Good idea! Well done.

Well, it was a good idea – seemed like it anyway. I think it cost something like ₤26 which was excellent for 1975; before the days of cut-price cheap never-come-back air fares. To fly would have cost hundreds of pounds.

Ok, meet you at Euston next week.

We seemed to be taking this journey to Greece a little more seriously…but as it turned out not seriously enough…

According to my diary I didn’t do any packing until the day before I left which is really being a little too relaxed when you consider I had to pack for a whole year. In the first suitcase I packed my stereo - padding it in with a couple of sheets – and then a few records which I did not think I could live without for so long. A few people had said at university that it was a bit dangerous taking stuff like stereos into Greece because the customs were very hot on it. Apparently there was a big market for people bringing stereo equipment, TVs, other electrical goods and even cars into the country because they were all so expensive in Greece and you could flog them for huge profits.

"Ah, I’ll be ok! Why should they want to look in my case?" was my standard reply.

In the other case I packed everything else I would need for a year; clothes and erm…more clothes. Actually I hardly had any clothes but I had just been on a cheapo cheapo shopping trip through town to get shirts and trousers and stuff. And finally there was my guitar. I had to improvise a kind of shoulder strap for the guitar case having realised at the last moment that I only had two hands and that two cases needed at least a hand each to carry them.

It was my dad who pointed this out. Casting a sceptical eye over my kit as he called it he said, how in the name of Christ are you going to carry all this? We carried less stuff when we landed on the beaches of Normandy.

What is hard to remember these days is that something like going off to Greece for a year then was seen as something ranking alongside Captain Cook’s voyages of discovery in the South Pacific or Scott of the Antarctic’s doomed attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. People just didn’t go off for a year…especially as far as Greece and if they did there was a distinct possibility that they would never come back.

And so the neighbours and relatives had been discreetly visiting over the couple of weeks prior to my departure, as if it were some kind of pseudo-funeral, to express their condolences, take their leave of me, remind me of their moral support and sort of imply