a nomadic tribe called Colin...

It's the 12th of June.

How on earth did it get to be June already. I feel like Rip van Winkle, I went to sleep just the other night, it was March, and now it's mid-bloody-June already. Stop the world I want to get off.

So, Greece.

Greece has it's own schedule too, everyone seems so laissez faire about life in general and especially deadlines and the passage of time. Certainly if you order something in a Greek restaurant it's not a good idea to wait until you are hungry, chances are that it won't arrive for a very long time and it's quite likely that it won't be what you ordered either. So just chill, order a bottle of wine not a glass, and if you insist on ordering a Greek wine then make sure it's either a). expensive, b). very, very, very cold...otherwise you might taste it and that wouldn't do.

Ferries, by far the easiest way to get around the islands, and also their commercial life lines are notoriously unpunctual. I once caught a ferry from the port in Piraeus which was stunningly on time - only to be told that it was actually yesterdays ferry. The timetable had eventually righted itself by virtue of being progressively 2 hours later each day for the past 2 weeks or so.

So why in God's name the taxi drivers feel the necessity to hurl themselves ferociously into traffic at mach 3 I'll never know. Unless of course it's some genetic trait that only taxi drivers have - part lemming perhaps? (I'm a bad passenger, I sit in the back seat sullenly refusing to offer any further distraction to the gormless maniac who is apparently happy to negligently damage me. I also have an imaginary steering wheel and brake pedal that I use to will us around corners and other road users).

I spent the whole of last week in stinky, sweaty, smelly Athens, 32 deg, no air conditioning and a dark blue suit. I lost so much liquid that my eyes made a rasping noise when I shut them.

Prior to that I spent the weekend with friends on a boat on the Norfolk Broads - a lush green fenland dissected by a network of canals, sprinkled with bright, thatched villages hardly accessible by car and beautiful old pubs. The whole experience is conducted at a wonderfully indolent pace of 3 miles per hour, just the ticket for a drunken, miserable fart like me.

So I desperately need to get some washing done, all three of my pairs of underpants are dirty (I hesitate to say "soiled"). You know it's 30 degrees here in London too? In an extended period of hot weather my place begins to resemble a fire brick, we're British you see, we don't do air conditioning. The air is hot and leaden. The dogs, who are panting continuously, have managed to find a relatively cool spot on the quarry tiles on the bathroom floor, so I leave the door open for them - I'm half inclined to leave six inches of cold water in the bath for them while I'm at work.

And I will apologise now, but there's a small matter of the World Cup going on at the moment, so reports from chez Fish may be intermittent, at least while England are still in it.