An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 1: Prologue

I could say it all started with a Greek woman called Helen. Or Eleni... She helped me fall in love with her island, Syros, a few years ago. And then the island of Tinos. And then the idea of travelling from island to island to island...

I'd already visited 25 or so Greek islands over the years, yet there were so many more still to explore...

But of course it goes back much further than that. To another Greek Helen and to a war against Troy. And to a trickster and rogue and hero called Odysseus.

And probably back to Kettering Public Library in the days of my childhood when your local library had what seemed like books unlimited and gateways to worlds way beyond Kettering, Northamptonshire, the Midlands and the UK.

As a little kid, I read about ancient Athens and Sparta; and I read Homer's Iliad and then his Odyssey, and well... the effects of those have never worn off.

Odysseus it was who came up with the idea of the Trojan horse – an idea so ridiculously simple, or simply ridiculous, that they fell for it.

But because he pissed off Poseidon, Odysseus found his journey home to Ithaca took a little longer than he anticipated. After 10 years at Troy, he was to spend another 10 years trying to get home to his wife, Penelope...

The face of Poseidon...

Like so many others down the centuries, I loved the tale of Odysseus and fantasised about one day doing an odyssey of my own. But you need time for these things. Not 10 years necessarily, but certainly a few weeks... a bit longer than your average holiday trip. And certainly longer than any time off that I'd had since I started work as a journalist 48 years ago.

With semi-retirement, came the opportunity to do it... and, although it wasn't planned of course, a global pandemic did quite a good job as a stand-in for the wrath of Poseidon. An odyssey isn't supposed to be easy; and in the year of the Covid-19 plague, every step would prove to be unpredictable.

The monsters, maelstroms and sorceresses that Odysseus had to face and overcome had their places taken by microscopic entities that really didn't care about anything – least of all killing thousands of humans...

In March 2020 it became clear that my plans were not going to go smoothly. So that is when I began writing the journal I'm publishing here to chart the unfolding of An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague... 

...the face of Covid-19