An ode to the blues
For author and naturalist Gerald Durrell, the island of Corfu was a zoo. But for me, it will always be a colour.
For author and naturalist Gerald Durrell, the island of Corfu was a zoo. But for me, it will always be a colour. My friends and I, student nurses then and ridiculously innocent as only young adults could be in the early ’80s, were eager to exchange the trials of night duty for a fortnight of sun, sea, and sand.
The day was for the beach; the night for feasting and dancing. We ate moussaka and honeyed yoghurt, drank cheap retsina, danced at the local disco, and retired to our non-airconditioned room, ready to repeat the whole glorious process the next day.
The hotel maids placed little chocolates on the pillows and we thought we were princesses.
I gave a sharp intake of breath when I first saw the sea around Paleokastritsa in the island‘s northwest. The sky had met its match. The water was lapis lazuli around the pale neck of the coast and drank us into the depths of its colour; the ocean was as vibrant as the land was bleached.
Cool as a jewel and dripping with the lustre of precious gems, the bluest of blue sea lapped the beaches; a rainbow of topaz, turquoise, aquamarine, of twilight and dawn, of midnight and day. The sea off Paleokastritsa lay in the heart of the rainbow. Even now, some 40 years later, a splash of turquoise leads me back there.
But blue was for the night too when the shadow of a dusky grey sea, almost purple, rippled in the setting sun as we looked out from that beachside taverna. I show my youngest child my photos of Corfu and am dragged back to reality as he asks: “Who is that girl?” He can’t believe it‘s me and I can’t either.
We swam, we sunbathed on warm caramel sand. We ate and drank and were merry and so very young.
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