It’s about 2 PM. It’s hot, just under 30ºC, but the fresh sea breeze is pleasant and comfortable. I walk past a row of parked cars and enter the taverna. It’s called Oregano. Under the awning, all the tables are empty, but inside the taverna itself about half the tables are occupied. The chairs are made of wood, and the tables are covered with sheets of brown paper.
I look for a waiter and ask if I can sit down near the window. He nods and goes to get me a menu. The menu is big, pages and pages long — each item has a name and description in Greek, English and Italian.
While I’m leafing through the menu, the waiter approaches and asks me if I want to come with him to see the day’s specials. I say yes.
I follow him through the restaurant and into a massive dark kitchen. A lot of people are working here. There’s a row of bains-marie under glass, and behind them, skewers of roasting meat. The waiter rattles off a list of about a dozen daily specials — osso bucco with farfalle pasta, meatballs in tomato sauce, moussaka, roast lamb, Greek fish, beef stew, meatballs again, beef in risoni (orzo? kitharaki? I didn’t hear), chicken burgers, I can’t remember the rest. Perched on a shelf above the bains-marie there’s a plate of the meatballs with mashed potato.
“Can I have the meatballs?” I ask.
“Mashed potato, rice or pasta?”
“What’s best?”
He gestures at the plate on the shelf. “Mashed potato,” he says.
“I’ll have the mashed potato then.”
I go back to my table and and wait. The waiter brings me a plate of pita bread and some horrible chilled red wine in an anodised aluminium jug. The man at the next table lights up a cigarette. Surprisingly, I find this charming.
I arrived in Mykonos yesterday and went straight down to the old town, which is called Hora. It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike — white walls, blue accents, stone pathways. A lot of shops selling expensive designer clothes and jewellery. Little secluded bars. It was much fancier than the old town in Paros, fancier than Antíparos, fancier than Naoussa.
And crowded! There were two huge cruise ships in the port when I got there, and so the streets everywhere are full of people. Older people, mostly, but a few gay men who weren’t saving their strength for the evening’s clubbing.
I checked out a few restaurants: pretty, with extensive outdoor seating and elegantly typeset menu boards, and dishes all about twice the price of the food in Parikia.
While I’m waiting for the meatballs to arrive, I look out the window at the shop across the street. It’s a supermarket. I should really go to the supermarket to get some breath mints, and maybe just to see what it’s like.
The sign on the wall of the supermarket calls it a Βασιlόπουλος, which I suppose is like a megastore, only royal. The text underneath it is trickier: και του πουλιού το γάλα. And the milk of something? I ask Google Translate. And bird’s milk as well. I look the up the phrase and find an article in Greek about its origin. It means that the shop sells absolutely anything you might want. Even bird’s milk. (It’s possible that πουλί comes from the Latin word pullus, which means a baby bird.)
The food arrives. It’s savoury and delicious. It even manages to complement the terrible wine.
Accommodation in Mykonos is expensive, unsurprisingly, and so I booked a cheaper hotel about a mile away from Hora, further up the hill. The area is kind of suburban, with busy roads and roundabouts, and lots of big shops — toy shops, pet shops, medical centres, local restaurants like Oregano, bakeries, fruit shops. All in low, white flat-roofed buildings like the buildings in Hora, but without the heritage theme park vibe.
And unlike the cramped and grimy hotel room in Ermoupoli, this is a suite, with a spare bedroom, a kitchenette, and a balcony with a table and chairs and a sun lounge. And the shower is huge, with reliable hot water and proper satisfying water pressure.
Tomorrow morning, I’m going down to Hora and the Old Port to catch a boat to the nearby island of Delos. It’s the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and the ruins there are extensive and important: temples, a theatre and the Terrace of the Lions. It’s been on my bucket list for a long time.
On the way back to my hotel afterwards, I’ll pick up my laundry and then check out the supermarket. Bird’s milk. Why not?
I arrived in Athens on Wednesday evening, after nearly two whole days of travelling. To explain: Calvin found and paid for all of the flights, using points as much as possible, and making sure that I had a pleasant, if somewhat indirect trip from Sydney to Athens. The first leg was Sydney to Taipei, the second was Taipei to London. Then an overnight stay at a hotel near Heathrow, where I had a terrible dinner and a brilliant night’s sleep. Then London to Paris, then Paris to Athens. I had lovely seats, and lounge access at all the airports, but by the time I landed in Athens, I was tired and grumpy and in no mood to put up with the inexplicable lack of signage at the airport metro station.
Athens
So I caught a cab to my hotel in Athens. It was near Syntagma Square, right in the middle of everything, and surrounded by Japanese restaurants, not far from the Plaka and the Acropolis and basically all of the places that I wanted to visit.
But the first place I wanted to visit was the barber. It’s always fun to get a head shave and a beard trim when you’re abroad. This time, there were hot towels, a straight razor disinfected on an open flame, lotion, a massage — the whole thing. A fast way to recover from a slow voyage.
The food was good, and to my surprise there was a cute little gay bar just behind the hotel, with cheap two-for-one low-alcohol cocktails starting at 7 PM. A nice way to wind down before bed.
I was only in Athens for a couple of days, just to orient myself before heading off to unfamiliar places. I went to Athens last year with the School’s Classics Tour, and so I didn’t feel much pressure to visit every museum and every archaeological site. But I had to visit the Acropolis again, didn’t I?
Paros
Parikia
On the Saturday morning I caught a ferry to Paros. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I really liked it. I stayed in the main town — once called Paros but now known as Parikia. It’s touristy, sure, but it’s a little town full of those white and blue buildings characteristic of the Cyclades, and there’s a long strip of inexpensive restaurants lining the bay. This is where, for the first time, I accomplished my mission — to sit by the water, read a book, drink beer and eat souvlaki.
I got to see some other places during my four-day visit. First, Antíparos. This is a much smaller island facing Paros across a narrow strait. I caught a ferry there one morning on a rare whim and walked the length of the shopping district. It’s very pretty, but much fancier than Parikia and a bit less chill. I kept walking after the shops ran out, and I came to a beach on the other side of the island. It was 30ºC, but I had no swimmers, so I stood in the cool blue water for a while before heading back to the ferry.
Sifneiko Beach
Also fancier than Parikia was Naoussa, a beautiful fishing village in the north of the island. Nick and Dina suggested that I should go there at night, when there are dancers and nightlife and young people, but I’m on holidays and I absolutely insist on being in bed by then, so I went there first thing in the morning. It was beautiful, and definitely worth a visit, but I ended up going back to Parikia in the early afternoon for a beer and a late lunch.
Naoussa
I liked Paros a lot. The hotel was really pleasant, and the young man who ran it was friendly and generous and full of helpful advice. The food in Parikia was simple and inexpensive, the water was beautiful, and once you got away from the port itself, everything was quiet and relaxed. Four days wasn’t enough: I would definitely like to go back.
Syros
‘Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think so.’
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Chapter 4
I arrived on Syros late — the ferry from Paros was delayed by over an hour, for a journey that was only supposed to take just over an hour. Still, I have an app, which tracked the ferry’s slow journey from Naxos and which set my mind at rest during a brief panicked moment when I thought I had failed to get off at my stop. (Clearly neither Douglas Adams nor St John of Patmos had access to this app.)
The Church of the Resurrection of the Saviour, Ermoupoli
Ermoupoli is the biggest town in Syros and the capital of the South Aegean region. It’s not a tourist spot like Parikia, it’s a proper town where people live, with shops and offices and a port full of massive cargo ships. And it doesn’t have those blue and white Cycladic buildings: instead, it consists of a pile of neo-Classical buildings set on the side of a hill so big that I have no intention at all of climbing to the top to visit the two enormous churches there.
I’m in my hotel room now. It’s very small and grimy, with a minuscule bathroom and very slow wifi. It does have air conditioning, which means I can retreat to it every few hours for an awkward shower when everything starts to get too sweaty.
I don’t really plan these trips at all. I still don’t know where I’ll be staying at the end of next week. Which is why I ended up in a terrible hotel room in Ermoupoli with no real idea of what I would do for five days.
It’s basically 30ºC every day, and the sun is relentless. But before I got to Syros I had only been swimming once, at a bar in Paros just a mile from the hotel, where I had a beer and went for a swim while the bar staff guarded all of my precious electronic devices.
But this grimy hotel has beach access, if by beach you mean an old concrete jetty jutting out into the bay. And so I can leave my devices in my hotel room and walk down and swim in the cool blue waters of the Aegean, which I’m doing twice a day. In the morning, after my first swim, I go to the terrace on top of the hotel where I can dry my clothes, look down at the beach and read my book.
It’s my last day on the island of Paros. It’s quiet time in the hotel, between 3 PM and 6 PM, and I’m sheltering from the heat and brightness for a couple of hours before heading off for an evening walk.
According to Greek Wikipedia, Paros is the third largest island in the Cyclades, about 150 kilometres southwest of Piraeus, which is the port near Athens where I boarded the ferry that brought me here. Paros is an island made of marble, which is how I first heard of it.
In this passage from Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas, the son of Venus, appears out of thin air before speaking to Queen Dido for the first time. He is beautiful.
Aeneas stood there, shining in the bright daylight,
like a god in shoulders and face: since his mother
had herself imparted to her son beauty to his hair,
a glow of youth, and a joyful charm to his eyes:
like the glory art can give to ivory, or as when silver, or Parian marble, is surrounded by gold.
Fifteen years ago, when Calvin and I lived in Marrickville, our next-door neighbours were Nick and Dina. When Nick told me he was born in Paros, and that he spent a few months a year there, I told him that I knew about the island and its marble from its mention in the Aeneid. He told me about the quarries there, and after his next visit, he brought me back a little figurine of Parian marble, a bust with a round face whose only feature was a long straight nose.
Yesterday, I went and visited Nick and Dina in their home near Marmara, a small village on the other side of the island. (In both Greek and Latin, the name Marmara means marble.) Nick showed me the house where he was born and drove me around to show me where he grew up and to give me the chance to take some photos.
After that, Nick and Dina took me to lunch outdoors at a taverna in Marmara — a massive lunch of Greek salad and grilled meat. And then Nick drove me back to the port of Paros in Parikia, when I’m staying. But not before he carried out a plan he might have conceived more than fifteen years ago.
In Marathi, about five kilometres from here, there is an extensive complex of marble quarries, where Parian marble was mined as early as the 7th Century BCE. There are open cut mines, and a complex of underground mines, including the mines of Pan and the mines of the Nymphs. Sadly, these are too dangerous for the public to visit; they apparently extend hundreds of metres underground, supported by pillars of marble that have been left there to support the roof.
The marble from these quarries was famous for its translucency and used in sculptures throughout the Greek world, including the pedimental sculptures from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, which I was lucky enough to see during the School’s Classics Tour last year.
A week ago, I left Sydney’s wettest August in thirty years. Here in Greece, it’s blisteringly sunny every day. After Nick dropped me off in Parikia, I stopped at a bar for a drink and then walked back to the hotel. An hour or two later, before the sun set, I was asleep.
I’m in Taipei, waiting for my connecting flight to London. Just a few minutes before I’ll have to board. But I thought I’d say hi before I go.
I’ve got a six-week holiday ahead of me. I arrive in London this afternoon, where I’ll be spending the night in a hotel near Heathrow Airport. Tomorrow morning I fly to Athens. After a few days there, I’m getting a ferry to Paros, and I’ll be spending about three weeks visiting various Cycladic islands. The plan: to sit by the water, read a book, drink beer and eat souvlaki. With the occasional visit to an archaeological site thrown in.
After that, a couple of weeks in the UK. Visiting Joe for a week or so, then catching up with friends, as well as a brief trip to Amsterdam with James.
This essay was first published in Outside In Regenerates, a collection of essays published by ATB Publishing in 2023 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who and the 10th anniversary of the Outside In book series.
For this collection, each author contributed an essay on a single story. My essay is based on Death to the Daleks, the first Doctor Who story I ever saw.
Many thanks — again — to Stacey Smith? for the commission, and for her patience.
Wednesday, 23 June 1978
I’m about to watch Doctor Who for the very first time tonight. I’ve known of it for years, I think, but I’ve only started to get interested in the last few weeks. My friend Luke and I have been reading his copy of The Doctor Who Monster Book in class instead of solving maths problems, and although I’ve never even seen the show, I know all four Doctors by name, and I can already identify his most formidable enemies — the Zarbi, the Wirrn, someone called Steyr, the Exxilons, the Sensorites and Bellal.
But I’m watching tonight because Luke has told me that there will be Daleks.
We skip the first scene of Terry Walsh staggering through a misty greenish landscape, being shot by an arrow and tumbling into a puddle full of dry ice — it’s a scene apparently too horrific for the nine–year–olds in the [Australian] audience. Instead, we open with a spinning beach umbrella — the Doctor and Sarah are talking about the beach holiday that he has promised her on the planet Florana. “You can’t sink on Florana,” says the Doctor. “The water’s effervescent.”
I won’t get to see the Doctor luring Sarah into the TARDIS with this promised holiday until many years later: Channel 2 in Sydney won’t screen Invasion of the Dinosaurs until 1984, and Malcolm Hulke doesn’t include the scene in his 1976 novelisation. But it’s one of the best final scenes of any Classic Doctor Who story. The Doctor is describing Florana to a reluctant Sarah, who is determined not to board the TARDIS again because of the dangers she’s faced in this story and the previous one. But the Doctor perseveres. “The streams flow with waters that are clearer than the clearest crystal,” he says lyrically, as she laughs and covers her ears, convinced already of her own defeat.
Sarah is the first companion we see lured onto the TARDIS by the promise of wonders, and she’s also the last companion in the classic series to hear the Doctor’s Florana speech. (The Doctor has promised Jo that the air of Metebelis is like a fine wine, but we never get to see that conversation; all of the later companions are dropping out of their lives in some way, except for Harry, who is tricked aboard by the Doctor, and Romana, who is there on a special assignment. Oh, and Mel, whose first trip in the TARDIS occurs offscreen.) But when the show returns in 2005 as the New Series, the Florana Speech is back too — again and again we hear that the companions travel with the Doctor in order to experience wonders. The Florana Speech looms so large in our memories of the Classic Series that we assume that its underlying idea was always a part of the show.
– Why do you do it? Why do you fly off in the box with him? The truth. Please, just this once.
– Because it’s amazing. Because I see wonders.
Of course, Sarah never gets the Florana holiday that the Doctor has promised. (The Doctor also fails to get Amy and Rory there many years later, in a different medium.) Instead, she is captured, drugged and nearly sacrificed by the Exxilons. She is frightened by Bellal, pursued by the Daleks and set to work mining parrinium. Promised wonders, she is confronted by horrors.
It’s obvious why this is. Watching Donna sunning herself by the pool on the planet Midnight is fun for one scene, but we’d much rather watch the Doctor under attack by a group of terrified humans. For us, the sightseeing tour of Argolis only really kicks off once Earth Visitor Loman has been dismembered. And way back in 1965, or AD 64, it’s the arrival of the slave traders that piques our interest, however enjoyable it has been watching Barbara and Ian relaxing post–coitally in Flavius Giscard’s villa. We watch Doctor Who for the monsters, the dangers, the cliffhangers. Maybe Jo is right in Carnival of Monsters. Maybe we are evil and horrible people.
– You know, the thing about a time machine, you can run away all you like and still be home in time for tea. So what do you say? Anywhere. All of time and space, right outside those doors.
So why does Sarah stay with the Doctor? It’s still early days for her, but next year’s adventures will be full of monstrosities: corpses and Nazis; torture, peril and venom. And yet, when Harry, the Brigadier and the Duke of Forgill refuse the Doctor’s offer of a trip home in the TARDIS, Sarah joins him. “Providing we go straight back to London,” she says.
My friend Brendan says it’s because she loves the Doctor. “I worry about you,” she tells him in her second last episode. But can that possibly be enough? Is her character just distorted by the demands of the format, by our desire to watch her undergoing horrors?
– Someone’s got to be the Doctor.
– They’ll kill you.
– Never stopped him.
The New Series answers this question by creating a life for the companions that isn’t just peopled by horrors. It alludes to unseen adventures in which the companion sees wonders — Rose travels to Woman Wept, Martha visits the moon landing three times, Clara gets to snog her favourite Regency novelist. And it can now afford to put wonders on screen — the fish over Sardicktown, the creation of the earth in The Runaway Bride.
But there’s more to it than that. The horrors of Doctor Who are an occasion for heroism, and by confronting them the companions themselves become heroes. “The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life,” says Rose. “You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand.”
And perhaps the Classic Series provides this answer as well. Death to the Daleks isn’t much interested in the heroism of its female characters: in the last moments of the story, our eyes are on Galloway, whose cold pragmatism requires him to sacrifice his own life to destroy the Daleks. But perhaps the real hero here is Sarah, whose courage and ingenuity have provided the Space Marines with enough parrinium to save the lives of ten million people. Some things, even fictional things, are more important than a holiday at the beach.
Nathan Bottomley is a Latin teacher living in Sydney with his husband and three small fluffy dogs. He podcasts about Doctor Who on Flight Through Entirety.
