Image by Simona Ciraolo from Hug Me

It takes a particularly brave person to be the friend of a parent with a rare disease. We are not always the easiest company. I sometimes close in on myself and turn my back on everything. I get angry that life could be this way and shut down. When I shut down, I also shut people out.

It’s a brave friend who takes the time to ask “How are you?” knowing that that simple question could unleash a tirade of everything I think has gone wrong, or me tearing myself open for them to observe all the pain I am in: see here? This is my heart, see this spot right there? That’s where the pain never stops because I can’t make my child better. See this part of my stomach? That’s what clamps up so I don’t eat because I’m in a panic about the future. And here, in my mind? Do you see these ash-coloured dreams I dreamt for my child before the diagnosis? Sometimes I go back to them and poke them about, stir the ash around them a little, for no good reason, just to make more of a mess in my mind. See this part where my worry lives and doesn’t let me sleep? Do you see all of this? Are you taking in this anatomy lesson in my personal sadness?

The friends I have know this. They know that I’m sometimes like a simmering volcano because I am so tired, so hurt, so confused, that just asking how I am makes me erupt.

Brave friends are willing to stand in the gale force of my agony and face how bereft I feel. Because apart from the positivity and the determination to give both my children as normal a life as I can, there is also a lot of raw sorrow.

I am in awe of such friends, because the easy option, as I’ve seen several times over, is to not ask. The easy option is to not check how I’m doing, because my answer might be too much for them to handle. Self-preservation is a simpler solution, and I don’t begrudge people that.

I have had people who I thought were friends step out of my life and vanish as if we had never met, and it just makes me value my friends more, because they can ask me “How are you?” and they can take it when I reply “Not great. My son is getting worse, and I don’t know what to do. And what if he asks me if he’s going to die from this and I don’t know what to say? And what if his brother clocks on that this whole thing goes downhill? And what if it makes him go off the rails as a teenager? And what if I forget his medication? And what if, what if, what if?” Other times, these friends will read into my silence and know that something is wrong. That they can pick out the conversation hidden inside the words that I don’t speak never ceases to amaze me.

I don’t know if I thank these brave friends enough. I probably don’t. But they are a priceless asset to rare disease families, because they are the ones who see you trapped in the tornado of your life, and they willingly step into it with you. They choose to be at your side even though they know they can’t fix things for you. They talk to you about their lives outside the tornado and the things their own children do, and they do this with sincerity and honesty, even though they know that the milestones they talk about might make you burst into tears because your own child will never meet them. They ask me how the last appointment went, hoping for good news but ready for hearing about how it all went wrong.

If they are afraid of all this, they hide it very well. Without brave friends, this whole journey would be so much harder.

By now, anyone who knew who she was has heard about the sudden death of Bollywood superstar Sridevi. For those of us who grew up with her movies, the news was even more of a shock, because out of a gigantic movie industry which turns out over 700 movies a year, with just as many wannabes, hopeful stars and pretty-faced hopefuls, very few ever leave a mark in the way that Sridevi did.

There was something about Sridevi, I understood this even as a little girl. She appeared in some 300 movies across her career before taking a break in the mid-90s. The following are some of my favourite, and act as cultural landmarks in my childhood and teenage years.

The first Bollywood movie I remember loving was Nagina (1986). In it, Sridevi played a form-shifting female cobra who can’t resist dancing to the sound of a snake-charmer’s flute. Her famous snake dance became a favourite of mine, and as a child too young to understand how contact lenses worked, it seemed like magic to me that Sridevi’s enormous eyes were blue in the movie.

This was followed in 1987 with Mr India, another fanastical jaunt in which Sridevi played a snobby but well-meaning girl who of course eventually falls in love with Anil Kapoor’s broke-but-happy character. Along the way, there are orphans, a bomb hidden in a doll, a magic watch that turns you invisible and a bad guy with a pit of acid.

In it, Sridevi performs a dance sequence which either delighted or insulted all of Hawaii, but we didn’t care.

She also falls in love with Mr India after he rescues her, leading to this fantastic kiss scene.

I mean, who needs Stanley Kubrick with special effects like that?

In 1988 came the follow up to Nagina, Nigahen. As is always the way in Bollywood from the 80s, both of Sridevi’s character’s parents died in a car crash, one of those parents being the magical shape-shifting snake played by Sridevi. So now it’s down to the daughter (Sridevi again) to beat the bad guys with her magic snake dance and contact lenses.

But none of those movies even comes close to Chandni (1989), the epic love story which we all adored, the soundtrack from which I still listen to today.

Sridevi was an expert at iconic dance sequences,and Chandni is no exception. In this movie, she delivers one of her best performances to Mere Haathon Mein, the lyrics of which translate to “I have nine bangles on each hand”.

Naturally, within days of the movie releasing, replica outfits appeared at the weddings, the dance was executed at henna parties as quickly as you could nail down the choreography, and nine bangles on each hand briefly became the standard, even if in the movie dance sequence, Sridevi is actually wearing many more than that.

On a revisit, there is a lot wrong with the movie. Off the bat, Rishi Kapoor’s character, Rohit, a slick city boy, spots Sridevi’s character Chandni (moonlight) at a wedding and immediately professes his love by stalking and sexually harassing her.

Nothing says love like unwanted physical contact after ambushing you on a dark stairwell. *swoon*

She responds in the only way possible for a 80’s Bollywood heroine by falling in love with him.

But there’s a problem. She’s from humble roots and Rohit’s family won’t have any of that. Like he cares! The movie goes on to set several impossible-to-meet standards for young men in the 80s. The sweaters for a start.

Nope.

Then there are Rohit’s insane declarations of love, one of which is when he flies a helicopter over Chandni just so he can shower her with rose petals.

The moment he reveals to Chandni that he has plastered an entire room in pictures of her is forever preserved in the amber of Bollywood cinematic history. I honestly feel a little sorry for any young men who were on the dating scene at this time. I’m sure many a relationship fell apart because of a lack of a wall of pictures of you.

“Well, it makes up for the sweaters you wear, I guess.”

It’s the visual representation of falling in love, mirrored with the reverse sentiment when Rohit has an accident and tries to drive Chandni away, so invites her around to see how he has whitewashed over all her photos.

Crap.

This movie was also among the first to heavily feature Switzerland in a fantasy honeymoon dream sequence, giving us the gold standard of 80s Bollywood cinema, the sari-clad heroine dancing in the snow, and everyone suddenly wanting to go to Switzerland on honeymoon.

The 90s saw Sridevi going from strength to strength. In 1991, she starred opposite Anil Kapoor (Viren) as Pallavi, and then Pallavi’s orphaned daughter Pooja when Pallavi and her husband are both killed in a car crash (naturally).

Again, it’s a slightly strange film which we consumed without question because we just didn’t question whacky Bollywood plotlines: Viren had fallen in love with the older Pallavi, but she loves someone else. When she dies, she leaves behind her daughter Pooja who Viren becomes the guardian of, providing all she needed but never visiting until Pooja grows up and then – gasp – she’s the spitting image of her dead mother! After some twists and turns, Viren and Pooja fall in love, which is not at all strange considering the 18 year age gap, guardianship etc.

This movie contained two iconic dance sequences, the first is Megha Re Megha.
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And the second is Chudiyan Khanak Gayeen. This second dance sequence is one that we all tried to copy, and Pallavi’s yellow and blue outfit made a guest appearance at many a henna party for months afterwards. Fifteen years later, it was the dance I copied and performed at my big sister’s henna party.

Sridevi’s death will be greatly mourned in Afghanistan as well, thanks to her portrayal of a fierce Afghan woman, Benazir, in the lavish 1992 epic Khuda Gawah. Shot in Afghanistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, The film earned her a huge fanbase in Afghanistan through its depiction of Afghan culture at a time when the country was no more than a footnote in the Cold War, and Sridevi’s Benazir was cheered for toppling the stereotype of the downtrodden and disenfranchised Afghan woman.

There were no fabulous dance sequences to copy from this movie, but it did give South Asia a taste of Afghan melodies with this song:

Bollywood is an industry spun out of dreams. It thrives on them. To this stage, Sridevi brought a kind of charm and natural comedic timing we’d not seen before. From the 50s through to the 70s, Bollywood was happy to feature strong female leads. That changed from the mid-70s onwards, and especially into the 80s, when female leads were universally beautiful, coy and always stumbling into some sort of disaster from which they needed rescuing.

Sridevi was one of the first actresses to break that mold. Of course, she appeared in plenty of demure roles too. But for the most part, the reason she is so loved, remembered and now mourned is because she was different. She’d deliver punchlines with perfect timing and danced like a dream. More often than not, she played three-dimensional characters who were clever and witty. Whatever she wore in a movie set the trend for the next few months, and even beyond her movie career. Just a few years ago, I bought a replica of a sari because I’d seen Sridevi wear it. 

This one.

There was a kind of easy naturalness about her that made you feel like she could be your friend, even if that was all concocted for the silver screen, and watching her videos again today is a rare chance to see an hourglass figure which movie houses now seem to run screaming from, even in India.

Try as we might, we could never recreate those enormous eyes, and unlike on-screen Sridevi, we did not move in the world with a fan constantly blowing our hair into a billowing cloud away from our faces so that it didn’t get stuck to our cruddy 80s lipgloss.

In losing Sridevi so suddenly and at only 54, it’s not just Bollywood royalty that suffered a loss. Those of us who grew up with her movies feel like a part of our childhood just vanished. She left behind her on-screen self, which has stood the test of time well enough that we still risk wrecking our knees and tripping on our lenghas copying her peacock walk in Chudiyan Khanak Gayeen. We are older now, and we can’t make the same exuberant entrance that she did, her face popping on screen suddenly between a frame of her bangled arms in Mere Haathon Mein.

But we still try, and we still think we can pull the dances off, and that playful, crackling on-screen aura of Sridevi is part of the reason why we feel that way, and why nine bangles on each hand is a code that every 80s girl from the subcontinent will silently understand.

Have you ever been talked about in a room while you were stood there in front of the people who were doing it? I can’t say I’ve had much experience of it, apart from the early days when I was still learning Greek and people didn’t know i could understand what they were saying. Not so long ago, it happened at a gathering of Pakistani women where a couple of the other women assumed I was Greek (I can’t win) and began talking about me in Urdu.

Now and then it happens on Greek twitter when trolls think that as a foreigner in Greece I couldn’t possibly have any working knowledge of Greek. Sometimes, I get nice Twitter messages in Greek too.

But if you combine being an immigrant with European elections and Twitter, prepare to be talked about as if you’re not there. A lot. 

The latest such election was that of Italy, where again, us immigrants got nice, thick lashings of why we’re to blame for everything.

Watching Twitter activity on the day of the election, I was not surprised to see nationalists from the UK and America jump on the Italian election bandwagon and urge Italians, who they’ve never met, and whose politically dynamics they are completely ignorant of, to “take back your country”. Let’s all take a short moment to remember how well nationalistic voting worked out for both those countries.

Even that well-known mutated offshoot of Trump, Katie Hopkins, grabbed the chance for a trip to Italy for some dolce vita and racism.

Us immigrants in Europe get talked about a lot. We are the go-to group of people to blame. Twitter trolls talk about us. Outright neonazis talk about us. Genuine concerned citizens worried about the direction of their country talk about us.

And political commentators talk about us, along with journalists, columnists and pretty much everyone else. By and large, except for a few notable exceptions, none of the people who like to talk about us and write about us are actually representative of our group.

In a political sphere, where immigrants have become the number one scapegoat, and where we’re apparently such a huge problem and a threat to everyone’s economy and existence, for some reason we rarely get asked to talk about it.

In the wake of the #Metoo movement, it has largely been women who have been writing and commenting about the everyday sexism which blights our lives. If the majority of editors allowed 80% of the coverage on this movement to originate from men, it would be nonsensical.

Not so when it comes to immigration.

What goes into the thought process of editors repeatedly commissioning pieces on immigrants in Europe to be written by non-immigrants in Europe? I’m not for a second suggesting that many of my peers don’t do an excellent job covering this issue, because they absolutely do. But, it would also be nice to get the chance to say “You’re all talking about me as if I’m not here. I come from this body of people you’re so terrified of. Do you want to perhaps hear what I have to say?” If you did, it might shock you that the economy, terrorism and integration issues are also topics that immigrants worry about as well.

It is the cheapest, nastiest type of populism that takes a minority group of people and marks it as responsible for the country’s ills. Our voices are not heard when we start to see this happening, and they are not heard when it is in full swing. We are not listened to when we see the growing danger, alter our way of talking or dressing to avoid confrontation and see people voicing a very dangerous rhetoric become ratified and established within parliaments as if their violence and bile was completely normal and valid. It is the normalisation of the abnormal, which began a few years ago in Europe and was given the seal of approval through the anomaly of the Trump presidency.

Taking the example of Golden Dawn, I and other observers were worried about them long before they gained any sort of real power. But immigrants were repeatedly told that they were no big deal, in a country where we around us could feel the hostility rising, and felt powerless because we don’t enjoy the right to vote. And since we can’t influence the vote, in Greece at least, political parties practically fell over each other to court the far-right voting pool into their own parties in their never-ending race to the very bottom. In doing so, they normalised racism to a degree that I had not seen before. “Yes, but” became standard fare in conversations with people who I knew, who knew me, and who still yes butted their way through discussions on immigration with me.  

Violence and the populism in Greece escalated hand in hand, and we know what happened next. With a neonazi group safely established in parliament, people still don’t believe us immigrants when we tell them about the racism we’ve experienced. I have been asked to list incidences of violence when talking about racism, as if being kicked, beaten, knifed or spat at is the only type of racism that counts.

One thing I’ve been told again and again is that racism is rising because “Greeks are tired of foreigners telling us what to do and bringing our country to its knees.”

There is no way to win that argument, and I’ve tried, because no matter how many times I point out that 30 years of bad governance by Greek politicians, not foreigners, destroyed the country’s economy, it will still circle back to the argument of the honourable Greek being humiliated by the rest of Europe.

In the case of Greece, the advent of the economic crisis brought about an escalation in nationalistic and plain old racist rhetoric. Politicians and the media talked about us all the time as if we couldn’t possibly follow their arguments or understand what they were saying. We were, and are, considered invisible to the point that all this can be said about us as if we’re too ignorant to understand the conversation.

I’ll admit that belonging to a group of people that gets demonised all the time is starting to get wearing. I now dread being asked where I’m from, because that once innocent question has become so loaded in the last few years. I’m tired of the elaborate process of constantly trying to reassure the other person that yes, I come from a country that Greeks lately throw around as shorthand for something grubby and unwanted, but don’t worry! Look! I fit in! I am a contributing member of society! Now please feel free to tell me your expert opinion on what my home country and its people are like, since I’m trapped in your taxi so it’s not like I would dare to contradict you anyway!

There will now be much commentary on the rise of populism in Europe, the danger that this type of nationalism poses and what can be done. To that I’ll say, us immigrants saw it all coming years ago, and we did raise our voices. We did try to warn about the danger, but we weren’t listened to or our fears were played down: it’s a non-party, Greeks/Brits/Americans/Italians are just angry, it’ll blow over, no one takes this seriously.

As immigrants, we have to be exceptionally good (doctors, scientists, token Muslim who saves someone during terrorist attack) or exceptionally bad (terrorists, criminals) for our narrative to ever make it into the press.

Beyond these two narrow frames, we are talked about very often, but hardly ever listened to. Economies and tax revenues to a degree function off the back of our labour contributions, and elections are fought and won on rhetorics that demonise us, but we as a group are otherwise ignored. And as long as we are working and contributing, all is well. Should we dare to claim something back (as if our right as taxpayers), we must again quietly listen to the hysteria about “immigrants claiming benefits”. It happened not so long ago in Greece, when it emerged that one in 10 of those who received a special payout from the government was a foreigner, sparking outrage, screaming TV debates and vicious online coverage. How very dare we work and pay our taxes fair and square, and then claim a benefit that we’re fully entitled to.

This will all be recycled and reproduced for the next round of elections. It’s happening already in Greece with the main opposition party, New Democracy, not feeling at all ashamed to court the extreme right, with the result that their position in the polls did not go up, but that of Golden Dawn did.

Source: http://www.macropolis.gr/i=portal.en.greek-politics.6729

Too bad for New Democracy, and even worse for us immigrants.

It’s easy to buy into this simple explanation of immigrants being to blame for everything, of us being the reason for you being priced out of the market (rather than unscrupulous employers who won’t pay a reasonable wage), because it makes the native population feel safe, and seeking safety is a natural human instinct.

That too is a trap, because if anything the pattern of how the far right and populism in general operates has taught us is that their narratives work inwards from the outside, moving in circles and increasingly giving the people in the centre new groups of the population to be scared of or to dislike – the unemployed, the homeless, the disabled, LGBTQ individuals, women, single mothers, the list is literally endless.

The thing a lot of white people don’t seem to understand is that the far-right will eventually come for them.

Sure, they go after minorities first. But then it comes for society as a whole. Yet, a lot of people enable the far-right, not realising the monster they’re creating.

— Sunny Hundal (@sunny_hundal) March 3, 2018

So you might think you’re securing your own future by voting for such groups, but it’s very likely that you’re not. And the next time this all swings around again, remember that you too could probably benefit from talking to immigrants rather than talking about immigrants.

There are certain slogans that we’ve all grown used to over the years. Along with the knowledge that success requires hard work, on our hard climbs up whichever ladder it is we’ve chosen, we silently repeat to ourselves that quitters don’t quit, and failure is not an option. We’ve all seen that silly cartoon of two miners in separate tunnels, both about to hit a giant load of treasure, but one gives up and walks away, defeated.

Don’t give up and don’t fail, we’re told. 

I believed this for a very long time. I believed that if i hadn’t succeeded, it was my fault. If I hadn’t reached the goals I had, it was because I must have not tried hard enough. And I dreaded failing.

For me, I don’t have a single spectacular fail which I can look back, more like a series of small mishaps and opportunities missed. While I watched my peers race ahead, I didn’t have an impressive head-over-heels tumble. Instead, I missed a few turns, didn’t pace myself correctly or just couldn’t run as fast as them. For a long time, I hated when this happened. I would torment myself with why I hadn’t been able to keep up. Wasn’t I good enough? If I hadn’t been able to keep up, then obviously I wasn’t. If opportunities I knew I could excel at kept going to other people, then obviously I was completely forgettable. People just didn’t remember me or my work when such chances came up.

I’m forgettable! I wailed internally, as if this were a fate worse than death. How could this be possible! I had networked myself to the point of exhaustion until I couldn’t stand the sight of mini sandwiches and glasses of drinks arranged in neat rows. And the results I had hoped for had not followed.

Could it be that I had… failed?

Failure has become such a terrifying prospect that we do anything to avoid it, and when we do fail, we dissect our every move until there is nothing left to pick apart but dust. We torture ourselves over what we did wrong and over the horrifying fact that we could have even been wrong.

Failure is a word that my generation has been brought up to be so allergic to that it’s become a key driving factor in what makes us so unhappy. Our quest for perfection and refusal to embrace failure has trapped us in jobs and relationships that are not working for us, because to bail out would mean we had quit. And perfectionists don’t quit.

I used to think striving for perfection and failing to fail were good characteristics by which to run your life, relationship and career. Now, I can see what a damaging approach avoiding failure is.

I like reading biographies of people I admire, and the parts I like best are where they outline the many and repeated ways in which they fail. It would comfort me to know that some of the people whose careers I aspired to come close to had messed up so badly along the way. Their failure gave me hope, but still I didn’t allow myself to fail. They had the luxury of failing, I told myself. I didn’t.

It took me until last year and a streak of bad luck to accept that I was okay with failing. I achieved what I considered the pinnacle of my career with a feature article in a major publication. This had been a dream of mine, but the fallout cost me dearly in terms of my belief in myself when a backlash followed. It also derailed at least one professional relationship along the way. I was stunned. I’d gone after perfection and it hadn’t worked where I really needed it to. This was meant to be my foot in the door, instead the whole door had come off its hinges and slammed onto my toes.

Soon after that, I lost a job, crashed my car, lost my wallet (but thankfully got it back due to three kind strangers) and missed a flight for one of my son’s medical appointments.

Some of these were events that just happen in the course of life. Others were because I had failed. I’d simply not been good enough. Missing my son’s medical appointments especially was something I metaphorically beat myself up over until I was black and blue. “It’s unacceptable, it’s unacceptable, how could I do this!” I sobbed. No one could comfort me, because I could not embrace the fact that as a human being, I had failed despite my best intentions.

In the months afterwards, if there is one conclusion I came to, it’s that our inability to fail is ruining our lives.

So it’s time to unlearn the mantras that have been drummed into our heads.

Failing is a part of life, and so is giving up. It doesn’t make you less capable, it just means you have the maturity to acknowledge that you are human, you have flaws and sometimes even your best effort won’t get you what you aimed for.

Try your best, but be okay with failing. Fail. Fail often and in varied ways. Don’t be so petrified of not succeeding. Sometimes you won’t. Failure is an option. It always has been.

It may seem that life demands perfection of you. You must look perfect, be perfect, have the perfect Instagram account, know all the perfect angles of your face and body which hide all your flaws. You must have the perfect career trajectory, you must tick all the boxes, doing X will lead to doing Y.

Well, that’s all nonsense. Sometimes doing X will take you back to A. People will hurt you or forget you, you will look horrible in your wedding pictures or your colleagues will think you did a terrible job when you thought you had done fantastic. Maybe you’ll have published a book in your 30s like everyone else seems to be doing, maybe you won’t. You will forget your child’s appointments, both minor and important. 

All of which is fine. Just take a deep breath, accept that you failed, and then carry on. Ditching the tyranny of perfection will turn out to be one of the healthiest things that you can do for yourself. Now and then, you should like yourself enough to be the miner that says “I’ve been at this for months now and nothing. You know, I’m done. I think I’ll go back into the sunshine.”

After all, if the lives of people who suddenly become very rich are anything to go by, you can’t be sure that the miner who got the treasure ended up happy.

On the list of things that I have to do, thinking about Greek politics doesn’t feature that high. There’s very little time for it, first of all, and secondly, I have two small children, so constant bickering, one upmanship and petty fighting is almost constant background noise for me.

Why add to it by seeing what the country’s two main parties are up to?

Because whether I like it or not, I need to know what’s being said, to keep track of the so-called leaders of this country and what they plan on doing so that my children, and all the children of Greece, enjoy a better future.

So far, I see very little of substance.

While my family in the UK despairs over the Brexit, I get to live through an economic crisis that’s technically over, but actually only just beginning, watch the resources my children have access to decimated, be left with less money in my pocket each month and have to fight, repeatedly and through both left and right wing governments, for the resources  my disabled child is fully entitled to on paper.

In between Syriza’s amateur hour politics where six months of 2015 were wasted because certain people thought they were living the plot of a Die Hard movie and not toying with the lives and livelihoods of actual people, which we’re still paying for today, and Mr Harvard Educated don’t-expect-an-equal-society , there is nothing left to choose from.

Neither left nor right in Greece has said anything which makes me feel that Greece is a country moving forward. Both sides are obsessed to an unhealthy degree with the state of pensions, which tells you all you need to know about where their priorities lie. Greece’s  demographic graphs are already a disaster, and will continue to be so in a society where an older generation dominates so much of political discourse. One side is content that pensioners will die soon anyway, so don’t worry too much, while the other thinks that a privatised pension system in the style of Pinochet is a great idea. That’s never failed before.

Our children go to crumbling schools with poorly motivated teachers, and outdated teaching methods and textbooks. Their standards of education are kicked back and forth between leaders like a football depending on who is in power. Take that out of the textbook, put that back in, ban morning prayers, reinstate morning prayers, and so on and so on like some ridiculous parody of what a stable education system is supposed to look like . Meanwhile Greece has repeatedly, and through various governments, tested poorly on international education rankings.

Young people in Greece aren’t having enough children. Thousands upon thousands have left in droves. In a country where education is free, a two-tier system has persisted whereby those who can afford it pay practically as much as private school fees cost to send their kids to cram schools to pass university entrance exams. Can’t afford the cram schools or university fees? Too bad.

Once they leave school, they’ll enter a job market that’s also outdated and highly concentrated in several sectors. Their parents will start calling around to see who they know where, because meritocracy is something no government in Greece can spell let alone foster. Fed up, many of them will leave. I’ve left home twice now, and let me tell you, no one likes doing it. You have to have a good reason, and when you are young and feeling hopeless, a better salary and a bit of recognition for your abilities is a pretty fine reason.

It’s not good enough. The children of Greece deserve so much better than this, and what bothers me, what makes me so angry, is that I see no one taking steps to make it better. In between fiscal acrobatics and promises made from stages, there is nothing to convince me that a child in Greece today will be better off in five years.

On a personal level, I am angry and I am tired. I have a child who has a disability. After months and months and hours and hours of getting all the right paperwork for him, there are certain things that children like him should be entitled to. The choice to go to a more accessible school. A helper to assist him so he doesn’t fall and get badly hurt while at school. Basic things. Yet through the course of three different spectrums of government – independent, right and left – almost nothing has improved for families like mine.

We have been failed by every government. A new school year dawns with us fighting yet again for the basics which technically should have been automatically lined up for us, while men in suits bicker over who they will and won’t work with before they’ve even got into power and squeezing an extra 1 percent GDP from anywhere but pensions.

Every time I express a view about Greece’s politics, I’m immediately attacked online as if I have no skin in the game by people (almost always men) who most likely have a lot less to lose with each round of elections. Every time a government changes or a cabinet reshuffles, they are not immediately making calls like we are. Who is the health minister this time? How can we meet him? Do you think he’ll make it a bit easier for the disabled kids? What’s going to be cut this time?

I may sound harsh in my line of reasoning, that the young of the country should have more focus on them than the old. Perhaps I am. My reasoning is not perfect, neither is yours. All I know is that the children of a country are its future, and so far, no Greek party seems to be taking their country’s future seriously apart from a few empty, crowd-pleasing statements which they don’t follow through with.

I also know that you can judge a nation by how it treats its most disadvantaged. The vulnerable, the sick, the disabled, those seeking refuge. And well, the less I say on the track record of Greek governments when it comes to that, the better. My mum reads this blog so I’m restricted in my swearing.

Do I sound angry? It’s because I am. Because while I lose sleep over who the next leader of Greece will be and what it’ll mean for the future of my children, the sick joke is that I don’t even get to vote in this country. I can only do my own homework, study the policies of the next person due to come into power and hope that they’ll at least try to make Greece a better country.

In the meantime, I have to put my faith in the voting public and watch helplessly as I get no say in decisions that directly affect my life.

I am neither a Syriza fangirl, a hater of right-wing politics, nor a fan of Mitsotakis – my allegiance lies where I see a job well done, where I see results and lasting change not token gestures. I’m just another person living in Greece, a mother and an employee who is tired of wondering what fresh new thrills lie around the corner as the circus of Greek politics rolls into town.

When I was younger and inevitably bitchier, I used to revel in a programme called America’s Next Top Model.

For those who don’t know, this programme was the beautifully clothed spawn of American top model, Tyra Banks, the everywoman’s discount Oprah Winfrey who gave away jars of Vaseline to studio audiences instead of cars.

The setup brought together around 20 young women and aimed to do what the packaging claimed – deliver us with America’s next top model.

The opening credits found queen Banks smouldering to the camera and asking breathlessly, “You wanna be on top?”

Be still our collective beating hearts and dirty minds! But relax, you perverts, she was only asking if we wanted to be on top of our game, as in do you want to be the top model?

There were tears and drama, everyone cried when they had their hair done, and white girls discovered the terrible, agony-ridden world of weaves. We all learnt the fine art of smising, which is smiling with your eyes. This would prove to be entirely useless in future job interviews.  

I like to make my own clothes but I’m not a fashion nut. I don’t buy fashion magazines, and I used to poke fun at models whining about how hard modelling is – ha ha, you just wear clothes and walk, what’s so hard about that? Until a friend asked me to help him with a photo shoot.

“Look at the lense like you’re trying to seduce it.”

“But it’s a lense…”

“I know, just pretend it isn’t.”

“Uh, ok then!” *Tries to smile with eyes*

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to seduce the lense like you asked!”

“Then why are you making that face?”

“I’m smiling with my eyes!”

“Stop doing that.”

“This is hard!”

Bear in mind that I had eaten, and all this would have indeed been harder on only a cup of cappuccino foam or whatever it is that models eat. But I digress. For those of us vertically and aesthetically challenged, the 22 seasons of ANTM were wonderful fluff. All those tall, thin, pretty girls vying with each other for the perfect picture while the rest of us plebs in the real world managed to take one good selfie every three years.

Back in the good old days before we could relentlessly torture minor celebs on social media, ANTM was harmless fun. Tyra Banks was a searing host, who talked so much nonsense that viewers compiled lists of all the ridiculous things she’d said.

It’s the kind of fashionspeak that sounds good if you’re always hungry from avoiding carbs the way powerful men avoid accountability, but for us well-nourished viewers outside the glittering circus of fashion and its thinner atmosphere (everything is thin in fashion!) the stuff she said made no sense. Powerful businesswoman and successful model she may be, lyrical orator she is not.

Anyway, ANTM was successful enough for international spinoffs to emerge, so imagine my delight when a Greek version hit the airwaves in 2009. Here was a show that combined my favourite garbage TV with homegrown nuances and the added advantage that Greek reality TV uses easy Greek, which made Greece’s Next Top Model one of the first shows where I was able to cross the language barrier and become addicted.

In Greece, Greek model Vicky Kaya took the lead. I like Vicky Kaya, she has a kind of soothing vibe to her while also being fair to the models. Out of the original panel of judges, she was the only one who had walked the walk as well as talking the talk, having built a successful modelling career walking in international catwalk shows and fronting major brand campaigns both inside and outside Greece.

She built her career from the ground up, and that makes her well qualified to lead the judging panel of GNTM. She’s also nice to all the girls and prefers to hug nervous contestants rather than go for Tyra’s brand of tough love. Where Tyra Banks made sure that the contestants knew she was on top, so forget about taking her place, Vicky Kaya seems genuinely happy to share her pedestal. 

Incidentally, her surname is also the name of a delicious, sweet and soothing coconut spread. I remember that every time I see her on TV. Vicky Kaya eating kaya out of a jar while sitting on a kayak would be a perfect synchronisation seen once in a generation. I hope she’s reading this, and I hope she makes it one of her GNTM bootcamp challenges.

It’s been a while, so I don’t remember much about the other two judges but the one who sticks in my mind is fashion photographer Harris Christopoulos. The way he looked at the contestants and the comments he made about their bodies came across as so unashamedly slimey that it made me want to close my eyes just so that my poor naked corneas would have something to cover themselves with as I watched.

At the time GNTM came out, Greece’s economy had started to tank spectacularly, so the show was the kind of escapism I needed. Back then, I used to write an anonymous blog where I would bitchily tear apart the contestants on GNTM. Age and maturity have taught me better, and now millions of people can savage anyone in the public eye with a few taps on their smartphone.

The Greek version ran for two seasons and then it was pulled off the air in 2011. By then, the crisis had started to get truly awful, and the networks no longer had the budget to produce such a show. So off it went, and in its place came endless budget-saving reruns of Steven Seagal movies. That’s how bad the crisis was. It’s one of the big tragedies that the IMF never even heard of.

The years rolled on and we forgot about GNTM and Vicky Kaya’s lovely hair and skin. The crisis grew deeper and darker.

And then miraculously, as if stumbling out of the desert after a decade of being lost to find a lovely oasis, there was GNTM again! There was Vicky Kaya again! I wanted to fall at her beautifully manicured feet in gratitude. “Why did you leave me,” I wanted to ask her, “Where were you when I needed you the most? You’re so skinny! Didn’t they feed you during the crisis?”

By wonderful coincidence, GNTM resurrection came as Greece was leaving its final bailout programme, which some analysts might say is the ultimate litmus test. So while the economy is still terrible, I can now once again escape into the glittering, pointless world of GNTM where no one cares if your fiscal policies make sense, as long as your butt looks good in a swimsuit.

The new brand of GNTM enters our lives at a time when smartphones are everywhere in a way that they weren’t in the previous seasons. As such, the show’s aesthetic is a lot slicker, and the majority of contestants boast the makeup look popularised by the awful Kardashian cult leaders, which can best be described as sex doll death mask.

So… much… makeup.

Having been exposed to countless camera lenses in the interim period, the new breed of contestants seems to need very little coaching when it comes to posing for a good photo. It’s what this generation does best.

Vicky Kaya remains as nice and professional as she ever was, which makes me wish I could have applied to take part just to troll everyone with my distinctly non-model age, height and everything else, and pretend that I cared about modelling and get a hug from Vicky Kaya.

Anyway, apart from making me feel my age because I’ve never tried to contour and walk around in the world with shamelessly naked and unlined eyebrows, the show has retained some of its original feel. There are a few moments where you buckle up your bitch belts for a bumpy ride, such as when a tiny contestant is told she needs to lose weight, and that she’s prettier when she doesn’t smile.

But it seems that GNTM has grown up a little bit. Sure, some of it is still horribly superficial. But this is a show where you know you’re going to get judged on your looks. And the show seems to have an awareness that its previous incarnation didn’t. The co-judges are more high-calibre. A plus-size model is enthusiastically approved for the next round, while on the previous show she would have been body-shamed into oblivion.

At the heart of it though, it’s still just a reality TV show. In all its seasons, ANTM failed to produce even one top model. There’s only so much Tyra Banks can do! No amount of learning to smile with your eyes is going to open doors for you in the way that having a very, very rich parent can. Just ask three ladies called Bella, Gigi and Kendall, who were almost born onto the world’s most sought-after catwalks and achieved the gold standard while bypassing all the hard work in the way that only privileged brats can.

Please, rich people, stop giving your children things they haven’t worked for.

If the girls on GNTM are hoping for major catwalk success, they’re likely to be disappointed. We can’t all be Vicky Kaya. But in the age of social media, they’ll get their 15 minutes of fame. And they’ll be on top, at least for a little while, stamping on their rivals in high heels while the rest of us try to keep our balance on Greece’s uncertain ground.

I’m not sure exactly what time of year it was in 1997 when I got the phone call that sent me sprinting into the back garden. When I look up the Wikipedia entry for the Hale-Bopp comet, it must have been January. Because I remember that it was really cold and I ran into the garden without a coat on, and yelled with delight when I spotted it.

On the other end of the line was my best friend in high school, Becky. When she called, all she said was “Hey! It’s out!” and I knew it was the comet she was talking about. That’s the kind of seamless friendship we had back then. We didn’t really need to explain anything to each other.

And there was  the comet, hanging in an unusually crystal clear winter sky. A visitor from so far away. Who knows how many times it had streaked over these skies, oblivious to two teenage best friends jumping up and down in the frigid cold, hysterical with delight at having spotted it. The very memory of both of us will be long gone by the time that comet glows over these skies again.

*****

When Becky started at my school in the September of 1996, the year I moved to the UK, I remember being so grateful that I wasn’t the new girl any more. I’d started school with barely six weeks left until the end of year 9, and it had been rough going.

A mega nerd, I’d made few friends since by then everyone had established their social circles. Geeky with glasses and frizzy hair I didn’t know how to tame, I was initially fascinating to my peers who interrogated me about whether I had lived in a shanty town and if I’d come to the UK on a boat.

But I didn’t know what the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was about. I’d turned up thinking that my thorough examinations of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers was all I’d need to get by in an English school. I was so clueless that I remember braiding my hair on the first day and thinking “Gosh, I hope some boy doesn’t dip the ends into an inkwell!”

At lightning speed, I fell further and further down the social ladder until I reached the very bottom. Here, in this social Mariana trench, friends were few and precious. So when Becky turned up, I remember thinking I would try my best to be nice to the new girl.

We hit it off instantly in the way that only two nerdy teenage girls obsessed with Japan and sci-fi can. Before long, we were inseparable, two manga-loving peas in a pod who turned our noses up at the other girls and their stupid obsession with boys. What did they know? They’d never watched Akira! Our language was so scattered with obscure references to Japanese culture and anime we might as well have been talking to each other in code.

Our idea of fun was pestering the librarian at our local library for more books on Japan, and when we discovered we’d read everything there was to read, we backtracked and started taking out the same books to re-read. There wasn’t enough Japan in the world, we would consume all of it, sitting in our boring little city in the West Midlands.

One day I looked up and said “Hey have you heard of a series called Robotech?” It had been my favourite cartoon series to watch just before we moved to the UK, beamed in on a wobbly satellite channel.

“Of course!” she said. I couldn’t believe my luck. When everyone in school reminisced about BagPuss, I had no idea what they were talking about. At last here was someone who was on my wavelength, who’d somehow grown up consuming the same material I had despite being on a whole other continent.

I’d found a best friend who was my perfect counterpart. We were exact copies of each other. Hours and hours were spent poking fun at boy bands and writing David Duchovny fake fan letters complete with his fake replies, or theorising about the plots of the X-Files series. We were MTV’s Daria and her best buddy Jane, but better. We were Kyoko Date fans before the internet was there to make our obscure fandom easy. Becky recorded a news bulletin off the TV onto a cassette tape and we tried to sing along to the virtual pop star’s hit, Love Communication.

Once during a free period, we took a sheet of paper and drew three big, balloon letters – K S O – the Japanese word for shit, and proceeded to fill it in with all the things we thought were stupid, like the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, makeup, the Spice Girls and more.

Becky seemed to have an endless capacity to surprise me. When she said she drew a little, and shrugged as she pulled out a few drawings, I was astonished. If you knew Becky, you know it’s not an exaggeration to say that her paintings were so lifelike they were like photographs.

Another time, she started belting out a Nazia Hassan song and my jaw dropped. She’d heard it and liked it, she said. So she’d listened to it until she knew it off by heart. Why was I even surprised. Here’s that song’s video clip which pays homage to – you guessed it – Japan:

Japan, we decided, was our dream destination. We even had a theory about why we were both so obsessed with the country, and decided that we had been two Japanese best friends who had died during an earthquake which made the cave we were in collapse on top of us. We never bothered to fill in the details about what our past-life versions were doing gallivanting in a cave. That wasn’t important. Things like that didn’t matter. It was just another pointless detail as far as we were concerned.

“Time is a concept well known to man. Just for today, be a sunflower!” Becky would say to me repeatedly in a silly voice. She’d pinched that phrase from the TV show Frasier. What did time matter anyway?

It was the perfect friendship. Until I wrecked it by falling out with her. One of those stupid fights that teenage girls seem to be so good at having out of thin air. By this time, we’d been glued to each other’s sides for almost three years. Becky wasn’t a nerdy 14 year old any more. She was nearly 17, and she was blossoming into herself. She was trying out makeup and cut her insanely long hair off into a stylish bob. Meanwhile, I was still as nerdy as ever. Her braces came off as mine went on. Boys still made fun of what I looked like and my prickly personality, while she was mellowing and becoming an approachable swan to my grumpy ugly duckling.

Maybe I felt she was leaving me behind. We were both meant to be nerds forever, always believing that boys are idiots until infinity. Here she was growing up and becoming a girl who wanted more than fake fan letters to David Duchovny. So I made a stupid teenage decision and incinerated the best friendship I’d had, after which, I was too stubborn to go back on what I’d done, even though I missed her terribly.

Time passed and we lost touch when we went our separate ways after sixth form. As I entered my 20s, I thought about her often. But I had no idea how to start looking for her. I looked on Facebook – Becky Kirby, Rebecca Kirby, Beckie Kirby. But nothing. Even if I’d found her, what would I have said? I’d acted like such a jerk to her for no reason. 

And then, she reached out to me after I’d already moved to Athens. A tentative little email that began like this:

“Dear Omaira,

Whilst watching TV this evening I remembered a song by Nazia Hassan of Young Tarang called Dum Dum Dee Dee which reminded me of you, that’s what made me think ”I wonder what Omaira is doing now?” and that’s why I’m mailing you now!”

She had found me, and I was handed a second chance to resurrect our friendship. We fired emails back and forth trying to catch up on each others news. And my mind was flooded with the memories of our endless, joyful days spent in each other’s bedrooms drawing. We couldn’t type fast enough, there was so much to learn about the years we’d missed in each other’s lives.

****

Time seems to have warped since yesterday. It goes too fast, then it goes too slow. I am trying desperately to remember everything I can about you. Why can’t I remember everything?

Rebecca Bennison, Becky Kirby to me, was only 36. She was kind, hardworking and dedicated. And oh my goodness, so talented as an artist that it made your heart hurt a little. She is basically every good memory I have from 14 to 16. She leaves behind her incredible husband Warren and two wonderful daughters.

Thanks, cancer. You have a real talent for taking the good ones.

So many things that we’d like to say, we just don’t know how. I see you at 15, standing on my doorstep on a gorgeous spring day and jokingly saying with a grin “Wanna come play out?”

I don’t really know why I’m writing this post. Actually, that’s a lie. I do. Tell the people you love that you love them. If someone is special to you, tell them that. I of all people should have learnt my lesson by now about how short life is, how we don’t get second chances. Don’t wait for a better time. Even if you don’t know how to say it.

It’s freezing cold in Athens and 22 years have passed since I looked up and saw a comet silently streak its way across a winter sky. The skies are cloudy here tonight. 

You have been on my mind all the time since yesterday. Japan seems to be everywhere I look all of a sudden. You were supposed to beat me to going there. I went on Instagram to try and distract myself, and I saw a picture of a cosplayer dressed as Sailor Moon.

It made me cry all over again. We were both nuts about Sailor Moon. And you were lucky enough to have all that super long hair which you’d sometimes style into Sailor Moon buns. I pulled up your old emails but I can’t get myself to read them. I see the last message I sent you on Messenger. I knew you weren’t well. Why didn’t I say more?

I was coming home on the metro today and the soundtrack from Lost in Translation started playing on my playlist. I started crying in a carriage full of strangers. You were one month, one week and one day older than me. Now, I’ll be older than you for the first time. 

I am so full of regret that I didn’t tell you how much I loved you as a friend when I still had the chance. And now you’re gone, and I will never get to say it to you.

Just for today, be a sunflower.

If only I could be a sunflower for a day.

*****

Becky’s family pulled out all the stops while trying to save her life, and it has decimated their finances. A fundraiser has been set up here.

I hope you’ll donate. Trust me when I tell you that Becky would have done the same for you. 

Comicdom, one of Greece’s biggest comic and cosplay conventions, is heading our way once again this weekend. Across three days, fans of comics and comic culture descended on the streets around the union to talk to comic artists, attend talks, workshops and dress as their favorite comic characters from all over the world. It might well be the only time that you could walk around downtown Athens splattered in (fake) blood and wielding a (styrofoam) axe, and the police won’t bat an eyelid.

Beyond a fun few hours with like minded people, Comicdom is one of the biggest dates in the Greek comic fan’s calendar. Over the years, it’s become not just a place to dig thrughthe boxes of comics for something obscure for sale. It’s become a showcase for Greek comics and comic artists, a burgeoning niche scene with a unique flavour.

The piece below was written for a Greek outlet, but in the end it was never published. The interviews I have described below took place in 2017, and in the two years since, one thing hasn’t changed – Greek comics have carried on going from strength to strength, the cons have got better, and a new crop of talent has emerged.

I went to my first comic con in Athens to write about it, and ended up becoming a huge fan of both the comics and the astonishingly creative Greek cosplay scene which merits an article of its own.

So this is my story about Greek comics and the magical journeys they can take you on.

Back to the 80s

If you were a Greek fan of comics in the 80s, pursuing your hobby was a somewhat complicated adventure, especially if foreign comics were your thing. If you saw a comic advertised in the pages of a magazine which you wanted sent to you from overseas, you had two options – a legal one and a semi legal one.

The semi legal route involved popping the money in an envelope along with a letter specifying which comic you wanted, then keeping your fingers crossed that it would arrived. The legal route involved going to the tax office to get a special certificate to take to the bank, where you’d be issued with a special receipt to send the money overseas, and then again you’d sit back and hope your comic arrived.

A lot has changed since then, not just because of online ordering, Paypal and a tech savvy generation. While foreign comics still enjoy a dedicated following in Greece, in the interim years, the Greek comic scene has blossomed and risen to gain both domestic and international acclaim.

The International Breakthrough

Alecos Papadatos is one of the people who has been there along almost each step to see how the Greek comic scene was changed and grown. The artist behind two Greek international breakthrough success stories – Logicomix, which made it to number one on the New York Times Bestseller list for paperback graphic books in October 2009, and Democracy – he knows a thing or two about the scene in Greece today.

“There is a lot of energy, there is a big appetite and the level of talent is very high,” says Papadatos. “What we’re still working on is the plot writing and the themes,” he explains. As he puts it, Greece has a way to go still until it reaches the level of the American, Japanese or French comic scenes. But, there is a confidence in the Greek scene which he feels has real potential. “In France they turn out at least 1,500 new titles each year, and around 3,000 sequels. Comics are over 30% of print output in France. But they’re not exported, their scene is a little insular. Compared to them, we’re doing okay.” he says.

The story of Logicomix was a sort of accidental success. “Apostolos Doxiadis who wrote the story approached me. He showed it to me, I liked the idea and the premise of the idea, of transferring knowledge through a story.”

In the beginning, they didn’t know if anyone would be interested in a graphic novel, but they went ahead, convinced the publishers and the comic’s reputation spread by word of mouth. It’s since been translated into around 25 languages.

American style

“Many Greek comic artists work for the American market, doing lettering, inking, pencilling etc. That’s why a lot of Greek comics are influenced by the American style such as Marvel comics.” says Papadatos. “The big thematic influencer remains America.”

“This type of comic, the American style, has very high standards,” explains Papadatos. Everyone working on those comics does just that – there is no day job. Meanwhile, in Greece, though the level of talent is high and several graphic art courses incorporate a module on comic art, there is still no dedicated art school teaching comic art. “Basically, everyone is self taught.”

“But the level is rising. Logicomix encouraged a lot of people to pursue comics because they saw was a project that could work overseas. There is an indie feel to the Greek comic scene and style. There is a kind of freedom to it. But we’re in a society that hasn’t learnt to read comics. And comics are expensive to produce and expensive as a hobby,” concludes Papadatos.

Inside the mind of Tomek

Tomek Giovanis is another long-standing star of the Greek comic scene. We meet in the Athens Comic library in Psyrri,  in the basement of Impact Hub Athens. The library came about as a co-collaboration between Comicdom Press and Impact Hub Athens as a place for people to continue enjoying comics without breaking the bank.

A large part of the comic collection was donated by other comic fans, but the backbone of the entire collection came as part of a donation from the brother of a lifelong comic fan who didn’t know what to do with his enormous comic collection when his brother passed away and so donated it in its entirety to the comic library.

Born and raised in Poland, which has a stronger graphic design and local comic scene, Tomek has a whackier style of illustrating and confesses that many of his drawings act as ways for him to release all the creative noise inside his head – one illustration shows a character quite literally gathering up his scattered thoughts after bumping into someone else. He shows me an original drawing on a piece of A4 from his Koulouri series of comics – it’s mindbogglingly detailed.

“I remember in the 80’s you couldn’t find Greek comics at the kiosks, everything was foreign. Especially outside big cities, you had to really look.” says Tomek, explaining how much easier it is now for comic fans, and more importantly how the number of Greek comics by Greek comic artists in their original language (and not translated) has grown over the decades.

“I can’t say that Greek comics have as yet created a recognizable identity for themselves outside of Greece, like Japanese comics or Marvel. We don’t have a long history with comics,” says Tomek when asked about the uniqueness of Greek comics. “We’re influenced by other styles, but there is also an independent style which includes Greek stories and issues within it,” he says. “Slowly, I think on its own Greek comics will come to be recognized as something different.”

Jemma Press

Both Papadatos and Tomek told me if there was one publishing house I would speak to about Greek comics, it should be Jemma Press. And so I ventured to Piraeus, where, along a narrow street lined with blossoming orange trees, I found the magical world of Jemma Books.

Memorabilia, original art, collector’s items, merchandise and comics both foreign and Greek lined every space in this humble store which is a powerhouse of the Greek comic scene. There is one large section dedicated just to Greek comics, and a mural by Tomek and another Greek comic artist dominates one wall. Neither artist knew the concept of the other, and yet somehow when their mural met in the middle, it worked.

This November (2017), Jemma Books will celebrate its 20th anniversary. Its publishing arm launched in 2003 and the black and green logo of the store is instantly recognizable at their sprawling kiosk at every Comicdom event.

Owner and founder Leftheris Stavrianos was preparing for the convention when we spoke and told me that the interest in comics hasn’t dropped because of the crisis, even if people can’t afford to buy comics as readily any more. “The Greek comic scene isn’t that big. Comicdom seems to be the catalyst that brings everyone together. There is a hype around comics, people dress up, they decorate their houses with merchandise, but it doesn’t mean that they read the comics they’re fans of.” he says.

“It used to always bother me that people would say “Huh, for a Greek comic it’s alright.’ That’s not the case now. We have comics that stand their ground in the foreign market.” explains Leftheris. “It’s a niche market which is becoming more targeted. There are comics for everyone now. You can find comedy, politics, adventure.”

In fact, over the last few years Leftheris says the submissions they receive as a publishing house are growing in both volume and quality, and in the end that thing that might not only save the Greek comic scene but help it take off is the same ingredient which makes Comicdom happen every year – the undying passion of comic fans.

“You have to remember that the people behind Comicdom are all volunteers. None of them make any money from it, and every year for years now they have put on a truly admirable convention which attracts a lot of people,” explains Leftheris. The comics, memorabilia, workshops, talks and the chance to meet comic artists face to face are for some a gateway into the comic scene, and for others, encouragement to develop their own passion.

Before I leave, he shows me one of Jemma Press’ bestselling Greek comics. It’s by Petros Christoulias and tells the tale of a retsina-drinking, rembetika-loving Greek Batman doppelganger set in 1950s Piraeus and his doomed efforts to win the heart of the singer at the taverna he frequents.

It is classically, quintessentially, adorably Greek, and it’s not the only one. It’s the embodiment of the quiet confidence which Greek comic artists are starting to express more freely in their work as they find their niche and break away from copying the American or Japanese style of comics, and it’s this sort of thing which will keep the crowds coming back to Greek comic cons again and again.

It’s funny how time is something so present in our lives and at the same time so abstract that we can’t really grasp it.

When I first read Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, I was in my early 20s. I picked up a copy of the book and would read it on the tube while I was living in London. I still love Murakami, though not his behemoth 1Q84 – to me that was like an unrecognisable brick of bad writing next to the organza-like beauty of Norwegian Wood.

This passage remains my favourite opening passage of any novel because it engaged my emotions completely. I was so young then, I didn’t have any concept of what being 37 was like. It was an abstract concept in my mind that I’d reach that age one day (if I was lucky) and I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like. At 21, the idea of turning 37 feels like trying to imagine what walking on Mars must be like.

This opening chapter took me by the hand and walked along with me as I felt the immense nostalgia and sense of loss that Toru, the main character felt. I felt his sense of longing, could practically smell the plastic insides of the plane, looking over the gloomy clouds on another journey to nowhere, as he bends over, overwhelmed by his sadness and desperately missing a time that he can never go back to.

And now, 37 has arrived for me. I no longer own the original version of the book. I lent it to a young doctor from Syria who wanted something to read to pass his time as he waited for a way out of Greece to Germany. I remember standing beside him at the bookcase and raiding it, but hesitating a moment before I gave him my copy for Norwegian Wood. It’s one of my favourite books, and I knew I would not be getting it back.

But in the end I reached for it along with a few other novels and said “Here, I think you’ll like this one. It’s one of my favourite.” And so I gave it to him, knowing I would not be touching that book again once it left my fingers.

In the past week as my thirty seventh birthday approached, I kept thinking about this book and this opening passage. I kept thinking “Here you are, and you couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like.”

Yesterday, I went to Public in Syntagma and asked them if they had a copy. They did. The cover art is from the (bad) movie of the novel, but it’s ok. The inside is all still the same. And in the decade and more since I bought my first copy of this book, my cover has changed too.

I no longer need to imagine that gut-wrenching feeling of loss and nostalgia that Toru experiences in the opening of the book. I no longer need to imagine what it must be like to try and recall the face of someone you loved who isn’t there any more, or to helplessly watch someone you love fall apart.

It’s something we all get to, in the end, one way or the other. So if you’re 21 and reading Norwegian Wood and thinking that 37 seems so old and so far away and so impossible, rest assured, it’s coming for you, and it’s not as strange as you think it’ll be!

*Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece that reflects solely my own personal views.

Imagine that you are on a ship. You have been on this ship for years. Maybe you were even born on this ship. Every day, you wake up and make your contribution to the running of the ship. You help clean the decks, check it for damage, contribute to its upkeep, pay your dues like everyone else on the ship so that new nuts and bolts can be purchased and the ship keeps sailing.

Because it matters to you that the ship sails steadily and is seaworthy. You live on it, after all! If it sinks, you go down with it.  When it sails in calm seas, you along with everyone else take a deep breath and enjoy the ride. When it hits a bad storm, you along with everyone else gather the sails and ride out your own seasickness with your fellow shipmates.

But there is something you’re very aware of – you belong to a minority that contributes just like everyone else, but you are not allowed to help choose who the next captain of the ship will be. From time to time, you pass other different ships in the sea. Some of them have old crew members from your own ship who left a few years ago, and they tell you that there’s talk of them being allowed to help choose the next new captain. They don’t live or work on this ship any more while you still do, but you are not allowed this same right.

Maybe one day when you’re on shore, you’re lamenting this situation at a seaside tavern, drinking ale with other members of your ship when a few of the turn to you and angrily tell you “You have no right to pick the captain. Go back to your old ship if you don’t like it.”

And you stare into your stein and sigh, because you get told this so often. Then you look back at the sea where your beloved ship is docked, and you wish that along with taking care of it and helping it run, the powers that be would let you at least help pick the captain, like the other crew members. Somewhere far out to sea are two old ships you once used to sail on, but they are not your home any more.

This ship bobbing on the waves just off the coast is. And you get tired of being told again and again that you are not as much of a contributing crew member to your ship, just because you have a different set of papers. So you finish your ale and slip out of the tavern to take a walk while the other crew members make plans for who they think they’ll pick for their next captain. Joining in seems futile, because it doesn’t matter how well you know the policies of the captain or whether your ship will stay afloat with their ideas. You don’t get to choose, because as those angry crew members told you, you are not of this ship.

****

In a few days, Greeks head to the polls for a general election, which once more were called earlier than they were due. The last time Greece went to the polls on schedule was in 2004, when Kostas Karamanlis’s government won on the New Democracy ticket, and even those elections were slightly ahead of time due to the Olympic Games.

Since then, parliamentary elections were called early in 2007, then 2009 when they were due to 2011 and called again in May 2012 ahead of schedule for 2013. That same year, elections were held once more in June when no government was successfully formed after the first round.

Fast forward to 2015, when again the country endured two general elections as well as a referendum, all held ahead of schedule.

And this takes us to July 7, 2019, when elections that were due in the third quarter of the year are being held earlier than they were scheduled, meaning that in 12 years, there has not been one instance of a Greek general election that was held on schedule. Twelve years of political and economic turmoil is a long time, and I have lived the fallout – the uncertainty, the rising costs, the friends losing jobs, me and my husband losing jobs, services cut, bone-headed bureaucracy, crumbling nurseries and schools, and more.

With no way to express my voice in a democratic way, since I cannot vote as a non-Greek citizen, social media has been a way for me to track developments and comment on the line taken of various political parties, notably New Democracy and their leader, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. No matter how deeply the crisis has been felt by me, it’s quite a common phenomenon for me to be slammed for expressing a political view, especially if it’s a strongly worded one.

A few months ago, I posted some tweets seemed to anger a lot of people, which appear below.

Ok it has to be said now. The Western press fawns over @kmitsotakis, the markets love him, observers consider him progressive. His party is predicted to win the election. But he seems very content, even happy, to be surrounding himself with terrible people, including open racists

— Omaira Gill (@OmairaGill) April 10, 2019

Let me preempt those who will no doubt say “If you don’t like it, leave, stinky foreigner!” I won’t be leaving, friends & frenemies. I don’t have a high opinion of SYRIZA either. But the barefaced joy of ND in courting Golden Dawn’s fanbase is shockinghttps://t.co/cZkjDCAnwE

— Omaira Gill (@OmairaGill) April 10, 2019

I don’t have the right to vote in Greece, so I have to watch as people like me are demonised by parties like ND to get into office. They win by using us to terrify their voters & once in office, we pay the price. My ethnicity is turned into a ND canvasserhttps://t.co/8UYCkPsQEq

— Omaira Gill (@OmairaGill) April 10, 2019

So since I’m doing all this canvassing for you, @kmitsotakis, by the mere fact of my existence in the country I have made my home in & which I love, it would be nice if I got a thank you card when you win the election, what do you think?https://t.co/1oa0qHJMBG

— Omaira Gill (@OmairaGill) April 10, 2019

I expressed an opinion, which is my right to do, but if there is one thing I would say I did wrong, it would be that I tweeted when I was angry, which is rarely a good strategy. Truth be told, once I’d calmed down I considered deleting the tweets, but they were out there so it seemed like self-censorship to remove them once I’d said what I said.

My views were dismissed as invalid and biased, because as I was repeatedly reminded, I’m not Greek. It set off something of a troll attack that prompted me to take a clean break from Twitter for a month. The quality of my work and my ethics as a journalist were rubbished on a public forum.

If I didn’t like it, I was told, I could go back to Pakistan. Why should I get to vote in Greece when foreigners don’t get to vote in Pakistan. To this I’d say if you want to make a comparison, surely that should be in an upward direction, rather than saying a poor, largely uneducated third-world country doesn’t do XYZ, so why should we, a relatively rich and educated first world country do it? Why should we be the better of the two?

It’s even more baffling when you consider that I’m having a country pushed in my face which I haven’t lived in in 23 years and whose politics I don’t follow. I have journalistic colleagues who have lived outside of Greece for longer than I lived in Pakistan, who I am pretty sure never get told to go back to the UK, Germany or elsewhere. This appears to be the magical Twitter-Troll Shield that a Greek name can offer.

In either case, the message from these attacks when I delve into Greek politics is clear – stay in your lane. Foreigners in Greece, especially the ones who are visible ethnic minorities, are ignored the 99 percent of the time we are living ordinary lives, working, taking care of our families, paying our bills and paying our taxes. When a minority steps out of line and does something truly awful, the rest of us take the fall as a whole.

The misdemeanors of a few get recycled and constantly churned out in our directions whenever we dare to call out the government’s immigration policies – your fellow countryman was responsible for that rape/murder/violent attack, why should any more of you be let in?

An ethnic minority immigrant in Greece has to be exceptional on both ends of the scale to get noticed by the Greek media and society at large – either we must be unfathomably terrible, or unfathomably talented. The rest of us in the middle are neither, and in a strange paradox, we never get to ride on the tailcoats of the unfathomably talented (here’s looking at you, Antetokounmpo!), but we are without fail forcibly stapled to the tailcoats of the unfathomably terrible anomalies that emerge from our communities and told that this is the benchmark for who we all are.

It is hard to witness us approaching this important democratic moment and know that I can do nothing but watch. It is even harder when there are few good options to pick from. SYRIZA, having taken their chance, are almost without a doubt heading for a resounding defeat at the polls, one which many argue is deserved. And having lived through more than four years of amateur hour politics, endless uncertainty and some colourful designer shirts in parliament, we can all safely see that four years can feel like a very, very long time.

It is excruciatingly long when your child’s disability has progressed during those years and when you have to fight all the time for his inclusion in society, to demand that he and others like him get their place and their chance. And you think all the time “Why is this still like pulling teeth? How come government after government either keeps it the same or makes it harder?”

Now we come to Mitsotakis. I would very much like the next government of Greece to succeed, but I cannot ignore the divisive rhetoric Kyriakos Mitsotakis has at times taken during his campaign. My feelings stem not only from being a visible foreigner. If I stay silent when Mitsotakis and others like him use the divisive language that he has used, I feel as if I will be paving the way for a whole array of discriminatory behaviour, including against the disabled.

Let’s be clear that the markets and outside observes seem to love Mitsotakis. He is well-educated and highly experienced in a corporate and international environment. But he also seems to have no problem at all in courting the votes of the far-right. When a supposedly reformist and modern leader like Mitsotakis is aligning himself with people like Thanos Plevris, who in the past has more or less called for the deaths of immigrants at Greece’s borders, what does it say about him and his party?

This is just one example. It goes without saying that SYRIZA’s track record has also been abysmal. For a start, they aligned themselves with ANEL and ex-defence minister Panos Kammenos whose twitter feed is a stream of barely veiled or not-veiled-at-all nationalist rhetoric. This was glossed over by SYRIZA, though, so long as it allowed SYRIZA to hold on to power. Because after all, everyone can say whatever they like about immigrants, including that the SYRIZA government is dishing out Greek nationality to Pakistanis like candy in exchange for votes (not true).

They can say that Afghans and Pakistanis are receiving text messages in their own languages telling them who to vote for and how, which completely ignore the fact that you cannot show up at a polling station with a text message and expect to vote if you are not a Greek citizen who is on the electoral register.

And in the meantime, issues which I have pointed out in the past remain unchanged, including grassroots education reform and, you know, just creating a country that’s good enough for the kids who grow up here. A country that deserves the kids that grow up here.

It has taken me a good few months to put this blog post together, because whichever side I pull up, I will get criticised for it. And I have to be honest – I’m getting tired of being told to stay in my lane, to be asked what’s going on in the country I left 23 years ago, to be told on one hand that I’m biased and on the other hand to be expected to have no opinions at all.

I was at an anti-racism press conference a while back where a young Greek woman of Nigerian descent spoke, saying “We are asked to prove constantly that we are more Greek than the Greeks, more loyal than a Greek. We are held to a standard that’s much harsher than a Greek.” In this same context, a Greek who was born in Australia and only comes to Greece for the summer is much freer to express their opinion on Greek politics than a non-Greek living, working and experiencing the reality of Greece.

The over-the-top reaction I get when expressing my opinion  on Greek politics is telling, since it appears that the opinion and not the issues they address spark a stronger rhetoric.

I am not interested in what the policies of Pakistan, or Zimbabwe, or Bangladesh, or Rwanda, or Guatemala or India are. I am interested in the policies of Greece, because this the ship I sail on, and this is the ship I care about. I do okay. I contribute. I add value to life here in my own small way, just like thousands of others like me. I’m not ever going to be the NBA’s most valuable player, but I do pay my taxes on time and the only crimes I have ever committed have been crimes against fashion and karaoke.

There is so much more I’d like to address, including New Democracy’s proposed 2,000 euro stipend for new born babies born in Greece as long as at least one parent is Greek (breaching EU discrimination laws) but this post is already long enough. On July 7, I will be watching and hoping for the best outcome for Greece. I hope the next leader will do a good job. I truly wish them the best and I’ll be following what they do with optimism. And perhaps one day, after I’m done swabbing the decks and checking the sails for tears, I too will get to have a say in who the next captain of this ship should be.

Strange as it may seem, these are one of the most unifying times we have ever lived in. No matter where in the world we are, almost all of us are doing exactly the same thing for the first time ever. 

I can call a friend in California and she’ll tell me she’s at home trying to do homework with the children. A friend in Pakistan will tell me the same thing. No one I know is doing anything different. We’re all at home, washing our hands and fighting with children about homework. 

In country after country, we’re all discovering that what our grandmothers told us was rue, that all you need, all you truly need, is your health, and the rest will follow. Not a single thing in this world is as precious as good health. 

My family is about a month into a self-imposed quarantine before it became official. We had limited our movements, but I was still going out for exercise and the pilates classes that keep my bad back and epicondylitis in check. Now those are gone, and each day feels like the next. 

It’s a strange thing to wish time away without wanting it to pass. I want this to be over. But I also know that time will pass one way or the other, no matter what. That’s what time does, it passes. It has one job and one job only. 

And with it, it takes away our trials and our pain, but for some of us, it takes away tiny pieces of the ones we loved. The grandmothers who told us that only good health matters, the children who were born with bodies that start to fail with their first breaths. With each tick of the clock, we lose fragments of them until one day we look up and notice that a whole chunk is now missing and we wonder where did the time go? Where did that piece of my child go?

Time passes, but its passing doesn’t come for free.

I can feel the weight of my son as he pulls on my sleeve, trying to steady himself as he walks. His mobility has got worse and worse over the past year. As we approach his ninth birthday, I am watching the slow, steady unravelling of my firstborn child. 

I hold on to him now to steady him. My aim is the same as it was the first time around when I stooped over him as a baby and offered him my hands to steady himself – I don’t want him to fall and get hurt. But this time around, he is unlearning how to walk. And it’s an agonising process to watch. There was a first step marked with cries of delight, phone calls to family and videos of the next lurching attempts. There will one day be a last step observed without us realising that it was the last one. 

We hobble over to the window and watch the empty streets. Outside, an epidemic is unfolding from which we are all in hiding. We weigh and measure our time. How many days? How many weeks? How much longer until we can go out? Is it over? Why is it over? Can’t I have just a little more time? 

“I guess I won’t have a birthday party this year,” Hermes says.

“You will baby,” I answer. “Just not on your birthday.”

“Hector is so lucky! His birthday is in the summer!” he says, grumpily. And Hector, who is always jealous that Hermes’ birthday comes earlier in the year, chimes in “Yes! I’m the lucky one in the family!”

I don’t mind being stuck inside with my children. I’m not a perfect mother. I lose my temper and shoo them into their rooms with screens to keep them quiet while I work. But time hangs heavy over us. I don’t want it to pass. Because with each tick of the clock I lose another piece of my child, I precious lose time to protect my younger son from the knowledge of what this all means. 

With the passing of time has come an awareness. My younger son dances around to cheer up his older brother. He rushes to pick him up when he falls over, even though he can’t. The steroids have added too much weight. My little blue-eyed anomaly. Few strangers believe he’s mine. We are constantly stopped at airports. But he is mine, and he’s a slice of sunshine. As time ticks over, I ask myself how will I console him when he begins to understand what it is his older brother is facing?

Months before a virus invaded our lives, I began to have panic attacks. My sleep fell to pieces. I saw dreams where I was constantly losing both my children, running through airports looking for them. 

I saw dreams where I was holding a baby, the much-longed for third child, cuddling it lovingly and then within the dream realising slowly that this child was a figment of my imagination and that none of this was real. 

There’s something dream-like about our lives now. We wake up with each day feeling like the last. Stuck in a loop. What shall we do today? What shall we eat? Should we get dressed or stay in pyjamas? Life has become abruptly, deliciously condensed. I have the most precious people in my life close to me all the time. No one has to go out into the world. Not without a good reason, anyway. 

I talk to my therapist over Skype and in the evenings I try not to fall over during yoga poses from YouTube videos. I’ve done one hot yoga class, that should arm me with enough knowledge to wing it the rest of the way, shouldn’t it? I watch cartoons while running on the treadmill. I hate running passionately, but I need those endorphins. I try to stay on top of my tricky mental health which seems determined to drag itself around with me for the rest of my life. “Go do something else,” I want to tell the depression. “Go take a walk or something. You’ve been here with me for months already.”

I close my eyes and picture the summer. I picture what I try to picture when I am doing very badly – myself a few meters under the sea, enveloped in silence, everything tinged blue, looking up at the mirrored belly of the waves. Summer will come, and we’ll be outside again. Life on pause will move once more. We will all be changed. But we will all have lost time which some of us can’t afford to lose. 

So within this nightmare there exists a dream, and sometimes when I’m lying next to my children listening to their slow, even breathing while they sleep, life feels simple, beautiful even, and somewhere inside me, I know I’ll miss this time when it’s over. You may not feel it, but you’ll miss it too. When you’re back to racing here and there, racing against time, tired of trying to beat the clock, you’ll remember this time when the clock became meaningless. 

After being stranded in Pakistan for a month, my parents are finally back home as of last night. Their journey is over but thousands of others are not. And I’m pretty angry about this whole thing. 

So let’s take a little look at who my parents are. My mum, Lorraine, is a nurse, my father, Manzoor, is a retired NHS doctor. In Pakistan, he used to be a professor of general surgery. My mum is Indian, and they met in the UK working at the same hospital after my mum’s family moved to the UK and my dad had already been there a few years specialising in general surgery. Both have British nationality and neither has ever claimed a penny in benefits from the government. 

In early March, they flew out to Pakistan for what was meant to be a short trip. On March 17, the British government began advising against all non-essential travel overseas, by which point they were already in Pakistan but planning to return soon. They were due to fly back on March 23, but by then the coronavirus situation had unfolded globally with more serious implications, and the Pakistani government shut its airspace for two weeks on March 21, automatically cancelling all flights. 

Here is where the fiasco began. It’s not the British government’s fault that the Pakistani government shut its airspace. But what followed was an epic failure on their part, one I’m not even sure I’m surprised by given the stance of this particular government towards anyone who is not British born and bred, oh, and the right colour too. Playing the race card, you say? Just wait and listen. 

In February, the UK government chartered a flight to repatriate a number of British passengers stuck on the quarantined cruise ship, the Diamond Princess which was docked at a Japanese port.

In March, the UK government chartered three flights to repatriate British tourists stuck in Peru. Foreign Secretary Domonic Raab said “The Foreign Office has chartered 3 more flights for British travelers in Peru – as well as domestic flights to help those in Cusco. We continue to work around the clock to help British travellers struggling to get back to the UK.” 

At a press conference in early April, Dominic Raab said “On commercial flights we have helped over 200,000 UK nationals come home from Spain, 13,000 from Egypt and 8,000 from Indonesia.  ‘We’ve also chartered flights from seven different countries bringing home more than 2,000 British nationals.” Around GBP 75 million was earmarked for Dominic Raab’s heroic airlift operation. Just one problem. Pakistan was left off the charter plan. 

The crucial word for me in Dominic Raab’s presser is ‘home’. 

For my parents and thousands of other British Pakistanis, Britain is home. It’s the place they made their lives and planned better futures for their four daughters. They, like so many others, thought that a British passport meant something, especially in times of crisis. 

But they forgot that this is a Tory government, and this is a post-2016 referendum world in which nationalism runs rife, often hand in hand with its ugly sister, racism. They forgot Theresa May’s famous ‘citizens of nowhere’ speech, delivered in October 2016. “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”

My parents like thousands others were effectively being punished for being from more than one place. Immigrants are repeatedly told that they must integrate, they must fit in, they must blend in, they must prove their worth above and beyond the native population. They must prove they earned their British passport. 

My parents did all of the above. My parents had bought their house outright, so they have never been in debt. They contributed taxes actively throughout their working life. They never so much as got a parking ticket. They raised their four daughters under the same philosophy, to give, not take from your country, to be independent, work hard, be kind. 

But when it came to the crunch, none of this was enough. For weeks we waited to see what would happen with our parents. Their flight was cancelled three times in a row and after the third time, my mum became depressed, and I became angry. 

I didn’t want to believe it but it’s become increasingly clear that this British government has made the decision for British Pakistanis as to where home really is. So they’re stuck in Pakistan, so what? They’re with family, the weather’s nice, the food’s good. They’d probably rather be there anyway, I mean, they’re not really Brits are they. 

The message began to crystallise for me: it doesn’t matter how hard you have tried to integrate, how hard you have worked or how much you have contributed to British society. If you made the mistake of having roots elsewhere, the British government will completely ignore the strong branches you have spent your life putting out into the place you consider home and shrug and say “Yeah but your roots didn’t grow in British soil so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “

As a result, despite all the work my parents put into being contributing members of British society, the Foreign Office basically told them that they had no right to be missing home (Britain) because they were home already. Not so much go back to where you came from, but now that you’re there, stay there. So why all the fuss? Citizens of nowhere shouldn’t complain when they get stuck in no-man’s land, am I right, Dominic Raab?

At this point I even wonder why I’m surprised, given that amid this coronavirus outbreak, a damning report on the Windrush Scandal was released which stopped just short of saying that the Home Office was plagued by institutional racism. 

To be fair, the failure to fly out Brits stuck in Pakistan may have been partly the fault of Pakistan’s current government, which is currently enjoying an extended amateur hour. But this is why embassies and consulates exist – to aid and assist citizens in getting home when they’re stranded somewhere without competent infrastructure. It’s what we all think our British passport means when we go travelling.  

I live in Greece, and I fail to understand how the smaller government of Greece with less economic resources available than the British government was immediately able to launch a drive to repatriate all its citizens who wanted to come home, as quickly as possible. 

I spent time screaming into the void on Twitter, trying to elicit responses from anyone, including the British high commission in Pakistan, to no avail. Others, including the writer and comedian Amna Saleem, took the airwaves to flag up the plight of their vulnerable parents. She wrote this blistering piece for GQ magazine. As it went to press, her parents’ flight was cancelled for a sixth time. 

This whole experience has been sobering and depressing for my family. While they were stuck, my dad’s license to practise medicine was automatically reinstated so that he could contribute to the non-coronavirus medical care that the NHS is now not able to immediately address. The private hospital where my mother works began accepting NHS cases for the same reason. But neither could offer anything from thousands of miles away. 

Now my parents are home, sleeping off their jet lag after my sisters and I spent the entirety of their eight and a half hour flight not daring to believe it until they landed.

The current situation the world finds itself in is being likened to a war. If you cannot help your citizens during a war, when can you help them? What use is a Foreign Office if it fails at the basic task of repatriating citizens in one of the biggest crises of our times? Is there some test somewhere that we can take to prove our worth?

How much harder do we have to try? If my parents had a holiday home in the Caribbean like Boris Johnson, or in the bleached concrete of the Costa del Sol, instead of a corner of Pakistan’s Punjab, would that have deemed them worthy of repatriation sooner?

So finally, how British is British enough? 

Remember the start of 2020 when we were all making plans, excited at the prospect of a new decade and a new year? 

It feels like a lifetime ago now, especially in Greece where people had been feeling more optimistic after a 10 year economic recession which we finally were starting to leave behind.

After several false starts, Greece at last seemed to be through the worst of it, but we know how the rest of the story goes. Rather than being the year Greece’s economy took off into blue skies and with a strong tailwind, 2020 would transform into the year the Greek economy crashed shortly after takeoff. 

In January, all we had were some mutterings of a new virus in China. As the virus spread over the holiday season with people returning home and travellers taking city breaks, parents chatted in the park. “Just a bad flu,” we said. “It’ll blow over soon.”

Then the virus came to Italy, and we watched in horror as it decimated the country’s older generation. Greeks and Italians like to say “one face, one race”, referring to the similarities between the two countries. So watching Italy be shredded by the virus was particularly distressing. If it could happen there, it could happen here. We stopped joking about this just being a bad flu. 

As carnival season rolled across Europe, Greeks continued to meet each other and gather at parties, but an unease had set in. Dressed as mermaids, superheroes and cowboys, people asked each other about the virus, how it would come here and when, and what would we do? It was an uneasy time, like having felt the earthquake and watching the shoreline to see how big and how bad the approaching tsunami would be.

On February 26, Greece recorded its first case, a 38-year-old woman from Thessaloniki  returning from Northern Italy. 

Things moved quickly from there. The first measures, the banning of carnival parades, was put in place only one day after the first case was detected.

The government had already set up a taskforce in January to tackle the issue, and it began to roll out wave after wave of measures. By mid-March, the country all but ground to a halt and everything shut.

A day before the first coronavirus-related death on March 12, schools and educational facilities were closed. Total lockdown was announced on the evening of March 22, when the toll stood at 15 deaths and 624 infections.

We entered a strange kind of wakeful suspended animation, watching the world slowly go by, dodging the virus as best as we could. The weather dipped between cold and unseasonably warm. We went to parks and beaches until those went into lockdown too. We wiped down takeaway containers with antiseptic and gave our groceries baths in the kitchen sink. 

The first 100 days

As of June 4, Greece marks the 100th day of its coronavirus pandemic, and there are some things which stand out compared to other countries. 

While other countries dithered about the hit to the economy, Greece decided that economies can be rebuilt, but lives lost cannot be won back, and so the country entered an early and stringent lockdown. This is why I personally don’t accept the excuse of some other bigger and stronger economies about harsh lockdowns and the damage to their economies, economies which are pushing against all common sense to reopen their countries before they are even done with the first wave of their virus, or never shutting them down at all to begin with. If there is one country in Europe that absolutely could not take the hit to its economy, it was Greece, but it took the hit anyway. 

Going back into crisis mode was not that hard for Greeks after a decade of jumping from crisis to crisis. This latest crisis was one that wouldn’t only take out the economy, it would take out Greece’s elders, too, a price that Greek society was unwilling to pay. With grandparents in the crosshairs of the new virus, Greece pulled out all the stops. Losing your job would be unfortunate and stressful, but losing Yiayia was non-negotiable. 

Even Professor Sotiris Tsiodras, the respected epidemiologist put on the frontline of designing the Greek response, grew visibly emotional when, during one of his daily televised briefings, he talked about another scientist saying the measures were over the top for a relatively small section of society. 

“Some people say this is a lot of fuss for a few old people,” he said on March 21. “The answer I give and leave to your judgment is that the miracle of medical science in 2020 is the prolongation of the quality of survival of these people, many of whom are our mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers,” he said, struggling to stop his voice from breaking. 

It goes without saying that if death rates from the virus are indicative of the value a country places on its elders, it would be insulting to suggest that Italians love their grandparents any less. But Italy was desperately unlucky in becoming the first European case study which the rest of us learnt from. 

After Italy, there was no excuse. No one could say “We didn’t know it could get this bad.” Everyone knew. So Greece swung into action to protect its elders and its fragile healthcare system, stripped bare by a decade of austerity. 

By putting an expert in his field at the head of its response, the Greek authorities based what they did firmly on the evolving science of the coronavirus, rather than good old common sense, stiff upper lips or wishful thinking. 

Society stepped into line with surprisingly little complaining because Greeks were not willing to see their elders as a disposable layer of their society, which the government was very aware of. This is not a country in which the Prime Minister could even dream of taking to the airwaves and giving up on the country’s elders without a fight, as Boris Johnson did when he warned that many people would lose loved ones. 

Imagine the agony of those listening to that speech in the UK, those with grandparents and parents they loved and wanted to protect, who saw that the people elected to do that very job had given up at the starting line, who were bombarded with confused and inconsistent messages before being told to work it out for themselves. 

The next 100 days?

At the start of the pandemic, Greece’s R number stood at 2.38. It is currently 0.31. One hundred days later, people are only just starting to get back to normal life. Children are returning to school after the scientists leading the response ran the numbers and said it was safe. Offices and businesses are re-opening. 

Back on the beaches we are finally allowed to visit again, we look to the sea and hope for the best. Tsunamis don’t come in single waves. We know that. These one hundred days have felt like a year, but they have proved Greece right. Greece built a compassionate and robust response to the virus by using science, facts and a sprinkling of that magic secret ingredient – love. It has not been a perfect response, but it has been vastly better than many places. Here’s hoping the next 100 days will be as successful. 

On 24 May 2021, I was invited to be part of a very important conversation organized by Greek Studies Now: A Cultural Analysis Network and hosted by TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities.

Along with Rutgers University’s Sadia Abbas, Brown University’s Johanna Hanink and Generation 2.0’s founder Nikos-Deji Odubitan, I was invited to share my thoughts on the issue of ethnicity and race in Greece. The talk pivoted around a phrase we often hear in Greece: “We have never been racist”: a phrase that figured in the roundtable’s title as a provocation and thus a starting point for the discussion.  

To begin to address a problem, we first have to acknowledge that it’s there, and so the first step for me is to grab this phrase and take it apart, to debunk this idea that Greeks are not racist. 

Greeks have a very long history of interacting with races and cultures around the world but the fact is that it is simply not true in the lived experience of ethnic minorities in this country to say that there is no racism in Greece, or that ethnicity is not a visible aspect of life here. That’s not to say that Greece’s issue with race is among the most problematic in Europe, in my opinion it’s not. But the subject of our talk was Greece, and so it was my experience in Greece that I focused on.

Greece is an extremely uniform country in terms of race and religion. Where this becomes an issue is with the mainstream dialogue that surrounds the issue of race and ethnicity. 

As ethnic minorities here can attest, if you grow up in Greece as a visible ethnic minority, even if you are born here, you still have to prove that you are more Greek than the Greeks. It’s also not uncommon for ethnic minorities who celebrate their approval of Greek citizenship with social media posts to receive abuse along the lines of trolls saying that they cannot be Greek because ‘you are born Greek, you do not become Greek.’

This hostility has historically not only been experienced by visible foreigners. It is also ethnic Greeks that have experienced this in the past as we’ve seen during refugee flows from Asia Minor, Pontus and elsewhere – even these populations, although identified as Greek by the Greek state, were categorised by their otherness and initially rejected by Greek society. 

I do believe that Greeks like to think that they are not racist. This belief stems in part from a quite commonly held belief that to be racist, you have to physically attack someone.  I have sat through a baffling conversation during which I brought up racism in Greece where I was challenged to list the times I had been attacked in Greece, which is zero. “Then how can you say that Greece is racist?” the other person, a Greek, asked me, resting his case that my perception of racism was all in my mind.

I’ve come across this mindset again and again, but as people who have experienced racism know it’s very often that we experience small aggressions building up over time rather than one violent episode. You don’t have to spit on someone or beat them up to be racist.

I would like to add to the conversation around race in Greece by reflecting on my own experience of how there was a shift in discourse during the years that I lived here. 

I moved to Greece in 2006, before which I lived in the UK. At that time, I don’t remember feeling uncomfortable or unsafe. There were one or two instances during which I wore traditional dress while I was moving around the city for formal events or just because it is more comfortable in the Athenian summer, and I would get very intense and intrusive stares, but they did not feel hostile. I compare this to something like this: if I saw a lady on the London tube wearing a kimono, that’s unusual so I would be curious and I would look. It was harmless curiosity.

However, there was a sharp change in the atmosphere in the build-up to Golden Dawn’s rise to power in 2012. When as an ethnic minority you start to hear racist discourse become normalised in the conversations around you, even among the people you know, it’s very unsettling, but still I had the hope that it was only the venting of frustrations due to the severe economic crisis Greece was facing. We’ve seen in many countries that economic pressure makes the population look for a scapegoat, and it’s usually outsiders. Greece is not at all unique to have experienced this phenomenon of an economic crisis driving the far right to power. 

But when Golden Dawn actually began to win seats, this opened a floodgate. Suddenly it was okay to express extremely racist views, it was as if people got permission to bring the worst of their feelings to the surface, even people I knew who I considered friends or family. And this is when things began to feel dangerous. This was when I, like many others in my position, began to self-censor. I felt afraid for my safety. I stopped wearing traditional clothes outside the house and I tried to keep conversations with people I didn’t know to a minimum in case I made a mistake with my Greek or my accent gave me away. 

All the while, I was told that I was paranoid, but this wasn’t the case. Around us, the attacks on ethnic minorities began to escalate and very little was done. It was only when a Greek was murdered by Golden Dawn that the authorities realised that things had gone too far and tried to pull in this monster that they had allowed to grow out of control. 

I recall that part of my lived experience of Greece’s history as one of the darkest for me. It is very unsettling to see the danger coming your way and to have everyone around you tell you that you’re imagining it, and to feel that if you got into trouble, the authorities you turn to for help might not help you because Golden Dawn allegedly has infiltrated the Hellenic Police. 

It’s a great comfort to be here today looking at that period in time in the rear-view mirror, but still it’s an important lesson for how things like that can get out of hand in a country which famously regards itself as not racist. 

For those of us who have lived in Greece long enough, becoming a Greek citizen is one of our biggest goals. Here too we face hurdles and misinformation. I have been through the process and I can tell you that it’s complex and time consuming. It is stringent in its requirements of language and knowledge of history and current affairs. Until recently it was a verbal exam, which was very open to abuse and the examiner’s own biases around race and ethnicity interfering in the applicant’s exam prospects. 

Amid this, I constantly heard about how this or that government was handing out citizenship like candy to Pakistanis or whoever the unwanted ethnic minority of choice was at the time. Having been through the process from start to finish, and being the proud holder of Greek citizenship as of just over a month, I can tell you that nothing was handed to me on a plate. Meanwhile, the criteria to meet in order to apply for Greek citizenship have now gotten even more narrow in a process which was already known for being extremely selective and convoluted. 

So how did we get to this point? One of the biggest problems in Greece today is who controls the narrative, and I say this as a journalist. The media in Greece is highly concentrated in a few hands, and standards, especially for broadcast journalism, are questionable. Greek news often carries segments on crimes – robberies, attacks and the rare homicide – and they make a big effort to point out the ethnicity or nationality of the accused. So you’ll hear ‘two Albanians broke into such and such place’ or ‘a Pakistani man’ or ‘a person with a foreign accent.’ It led to me avoiding saying where I was from when asked. The conversation simply carried too much negative weight when I said I was from Pakistan. 

So for a while, I started saying that I was from Guyana. It’s obscure enough not to have too many questions asked, and it was liberating to not have a litany of follow-up questions about why there were so many criminals from my country of origin. 

This distinction of a criminal’s origins is never made when the perpetrator is Greek. What does this do? Over time, this drip feeds a narrative of foreigners, especially dark-skinned foreigners, as dangerous criminals who contribute nothing to society. What this does for the vast majority of us ethnic minorities who call Greece home is that it places an impossible burden on us. To counter this very small but very amplified group of deviants, we have to play the role of the exceptional immigrant. But let’s face it, we can’t all be Yiannis Antetokounmpo, most of us are very unremarkable, ordinary citizens living ordinary lives, working, paying our taxes, and raising our families. 

How do we address this issue? We first need to acknowledge that it’s there. There are a lot of surveys and pieces of research which illustrate that Greeks are not as accepting of outsiders as they would like to think they are. 

In 2019, the Pew Research Centre found that Greeks were least likely of all countries surveyed to say that immigration should increase or stay the same, with 82 percent feeling that fewer or no immigrants should be allowed into the country.

Second only to Hungary, Greeks also felt that immigrants burdened their country rather than made it stronger. Fifty nine percent of Greeks also felt that immigrants are more to blame for crime in their country than other groups, the highest of all surveyed countries.

Greece is also facing a very serious demographic issue. In 2019, data from ELSTAT showed that there were 83,763 live births versus 124,965 deaths. This meant that there were 41,202 more deaths than births, the highest gap recorded so far.

Apart from boosting the birth rate of the native population, which will be slow to yield results, Greece needs immigrants to survive, keep the economy running, and pay the pensions of a rapidly aging population. If this situation isn’t remedied, projections show that Greece’s population could more than halve by 2100.

But turning to the solution of immigration to fix Greece’s dismal demographics should not mean only white immigrants. Greece’s future depends on being able to accept a non-white population into its ranks as equals who are welcome here, rather than constantly placing barriers in our way and asking us to repeatedly pledge our allegiance in a way that native white Greeks are not asked to do. This would also counter the right-wing narrative of the slow erasure of the white population in Greece by immigrants – the aim of an immigrant is not to erase but to add to growth, both in economic and societal terms.

There is a duality here at the same time, because even though Greekness is seen as whiteness and Europeanness, survey after survey shows that Greeks don’t like being told what to do by the European Union. The EU carries its own undertones of colonialism and the narrative of the white master resented by his subjects, while at the same time Greeks see themselves as white in certain contexts. Is this an overreaction to the paranoia of being one of Europe’s easternmost outposts? Is it an attempt to shake off all the years of Ottoman occupation, during which and immediately after which European visitors described Greeks as more Eastern than European, e.g. sitting cross-legged on the floor rather than on chairs? It’s an interesting paradox that needs further examining because the whiteness by which Greeks perceive themselves is pronounced when compared to migrants, but dulled when contrasted to northern European or Anglo-Saxon populations – Greeks would bristle against the idea of belonging to the same ethnicity there, and would rather identify as Mediterranean or simply ‘Greek’.  

It may seem that there is a lot to be pessimistic about, but I don’t feel that way. I’m starting to see more difficult conversations around me, including initiatives such as this one, and these conversations can only lead to positive change. 

It is always hard to accept that a problem exists. The natural reaction is to reject that there is something wrong with the country that you are proud of, or to be told that it’s worse elsewhere and that if I have such a problem with racism in Greece, I can leave. Greece is home for me. It’s the country I have had three children in and which I plan to live out my days in. When you love a country, it’s your duty to work to make it better and better, rather than brush its blemishes under the carpet, even if that conversation is a difficult one to have. 

But if Greece can acknowledge that there is a problem, it will be the first and very important step to fixing it and creating an atmosphere where everyone in Greece can not only survive, but can also be welcomed and thrive. 

This article first appeared on the Media Diversity Institute‘s site on June 29, 2021

A Greek conference on fertility was cancelled after it sparked outrage on social media marks a significant victory for the country’s growing social media users who are using such platforms as an alternative to the country’s highly concentrated news landscape.

The conference, which was due to take place from 2 to 4 July, was spearheaded by figures from the Greek church and the far-right. It was promoted as a state-sponsored scientific conference to delve into the murky waters of Greece’s demographic problem.

The event was endorsed by President Katerina Sakellaropoulou and had speakers from the far-right fringe of the serving New Democracy government, along with a sprinkling of IVF clinics. When the event began to adveritse itself, the negative reaction on social media was immediate.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Short article on the 'fertility' conference. Article &amp; conference webpage in but automatic translation OK. Any similarities with <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/HandmaidsTale?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#HandmaidsTale</a&gt; a complete coincidence. <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/%CF%83%CF%85%CE%BD%CE%B5%CE%B4%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%BF?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#συνεδριο</a&gt; <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/%CE%B3%CE%BF%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BC%CE%BF%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%84%CE%B1?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#γονιμοτητα</a&gt; – add your voices in protest.<a href=”https://t.co/iqqrt2tov6″>https://t.co/iqqrt2tov6</a><a href=”https://t.co/lP4fmt50Q3″>https://t.co/lP4fmt50Q3</a&gt; <a href=”https://t.co/p4ChX3t96m”>https://t.co/p4ChX3t96m</a></p>&mdash; Lena K. (@lk2015r) <a href=”https://twitter.com/lk2015r/status/1403786812217233415?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>June 12, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&#8221; charset=”utf-8″></script>

Users pointed out that only six women out of a total of 40 guests had been invited to an event that targeted women. They also took the conference to task for tackling the demographic crisis from a purely biological point of view rather than examining the myriad economic factors which have worsened the problem in the last decade, and for placing the burden of the problem squarely on the shoulders of women.

The promotional video attracted particular fury. It showed a woman lamenting entering her 40s without having a child, having spent her reproductive prime on a career and education. “What did I do wrong?” she wonders out loud, while a voice off-screen reassures her she didn’t do anything wrong “You just didn’t know.” Viewers were then cheerfully directed to the event’s site, which translates to ‘My Fertility’ to find out more.

Fertility has been dropping in Greece since the 1980s. Deaths began to outpace births for the first time around the year 2000, but this trend seemed to be reversing by the time the financial crisis hit.

However, once that happened, births have steadily lagged behind deaths, and the trend is getting worse and worse. Data from ELSTAT, the Greek Statistical Authority, showed that in 2019, the gap between births and deaths widened even further. In that year, 124,965 deaths were recorded against 83,763 births, leading to a deficit of 41,202.

Combined with young Greeks leaving the country as the crisis deepened, the consequences have been disastrous. Between 2011 and 2016, Greece lost around 3 percent of its population through lower fertility and emigration according to the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. Forecasts for 2050 see the population declining by a further 18 percent from the current 10.9 million to 8.9 million.

A paper by the Lancet titled “Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study” showed that at this rate, Greece’s population is set to fall as low as 4.7 million people by 2100, less than half of the recorded population in 2017.

But it is not women being physically unable to have children that is the problem, as many on social media pointed out. It is the economic circumstances faced by the country’s young couples that often scuppers their dreams of a family, where low salaries and unpaid overtime are the norm in the private sector, twinned with the high cost of living. It was the fact that the conference overlooked these issues, combined with its heavy focus on women only that led to Greeks taking to social media en masse to slam the conference’s promotional video, prompting supporters pulling out and the conference eventually being cancelled.

A visit to the My Fertility site now shows a message in Greek, explaining the reasons the organisers decided to shelve the event.

“The organizing committee of the “1st  Panhellenic Conference on Fertility and Reproductive Autonomy: Limits and Choices” unanimously decided to cancel the conference due to the negative reaction on social media to a TV promotion, the message of which was misinterpreted,” the website states.

The message ends with: “Since it was not possible to hold this important conference, we ask the State to take responsibility and take care to inform the population, safeguard freedoms and the achievements of women, so that they can choose and pursue childbearing whenever they see fit.”

The cancellation of the conference on the weight of social media outrage represents the start of a growing trend in how Greeks make their voices heard. This is especially true for younger Greeks who may feel left out of discourse in a country where the mean age is over 44 years. This year alone has seen a number of important initiatives take hold via social media with hashtags to promote Greece’s own #MeToo movement, police brutality and #BoycottGreekNews in response to Greece’s highly monopolised media outlets.

The latest Reuters Institute Digital News report for 2021 showed that 89 percent of Greeks get their news online, with 69 percent of Greeks online getting their news from social media.

Smartphones continue to grow in popularity, and about 70 percent of Greeks use them for online news compared to 55 percent for computers or laptops.

Thirty seven percent of Greeks said that they share news via social media platforms. Facebook remains the most popular platform, followed by Youtube and Messenger.

Adding fuel to the fire of the social media debate, the Reuters report mentions a notable incident in which the Prime Minister of the country condemned social media and drew the ire of its users in the process.

During a parliamentary debate in March 2021 which addressed police brutality, PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis said that social media was ‘a threat to democracy’.

“The way social media works today and the algorithms […] create barriers […] And that is bad for our democracy, it is bad for the level of our dialogue. Because in this way young people are trapped in their views without developing their critical thinking, without questioning what they see, what anyone can present them.”

In recent days and weeks before the PM’s comments, social media users had posted scores of videos detailing incidents of alleged police brutality. His speech in parliament drew an immediate reaction on social media, with users accusing the government of trying to silence a media form which they could not control.

If you asked me in 2019 how much TV I watched, I would have smugly told you ‘Not that much’. Greek news is impossible to watch, emanating a heady miasma of terror, fear, racism and political jiggery-pokery disguised as topical current affairs. 

One of the most profound side effects of the pandemic has been how much television we have all been watching lately, especially in the deepest depths of last year’s multiple lockdowns. 

I’m not going to pretend that I’m a stranger to Greek reality TV. As a reality TV fan, I know the format well. I’m also no stranger to trash TV, having spent my formative years watching Jerry Springer and Eurotrash. In later years, one of the best TV shows for me to get a better grasp on Greek turned out to be a show called ‘I Look Ahead’ (Κοιτάω Μπροστά), a Greek daytime phone-in show where the callers were so unhinged and the problems so outlandish that I used to make visiting friends and family sit with me while I translated live for them. 

If trash TV were a pebble-littered landscape, this show was an unpolished gem. The trashiest of trash, I actively pushed myself to understand more Greek so that I could stare in slack-jawed wonder at the specimens rolling onto the show. 

Reality TV is one genre, and trash TV is another. What Greece channels have achieved is the crossover genre of reality trash TV, which I will henceforth refer to as RTT. Lockdown brought with it a glut of these RTT shows. It’s easy to understand why. RTT is cheap to make. People are bored and everyone wants their shot at fame. At one point I was so desperate to just spend time eating, drinking and talking with other people that I told my husband that I was going to apply as a participant in any one of the RTTs running last winter, pregnancy or no pregnancy. 

There was just so much of it: Survivor, Masterchef, Farm, Greece’s Next Top Model, Big Brother and my personal favourite last year, The Bachelor. And none of them were safe from getting the trash treatment. You want to see how to make perfect risotto? You can, after we’ve made these three contestants fight with each other, with sharp knives within easy reach.

I’ll state outright that I watched very little of Survivor, none of the Farm or Big Brother, and went off GNTM in a big way (we’ll get into that in another post). 

What I did become hooked on last year was the Greek version of the Bachelor, a show so terrible, so offensive, with contestants who were so determined to undo decades of feminist progress, that I could not tear my eyes away. Many was the lockdown evening when I yelled at my kids “Go to bed it’s 9 o’clock, my show’s about to start!”

Last year was the maiden airing of the format in Greece, and it was RTT that was so bad it was good. The Bachelor was one Panagiotis Vasilakos, whose occupation seems to be football player/model/reality TV regular. 

Admit it, girls and guys. You would.

Until he starts talking. This genetically blessed individual managed at an impressive speed to demonstrate that you can be technically gorgeous but have such a crap personality that your hotness immediately cancels out. 

In true patriarchal piggery, the Bachelor Greece pitted 20 absolutely horrible, banshee-like women against each other to win the affections of our prince Panagiotis, screamed at each other but spoke to the bachelor like they were 5 year olds. And guys, it was as awful as you’re imagining. 

These women stopped at nothing to take each other down, bully, backstab and pick each other apart for a prize that seemed pretty hollow in the end. All the episodes concentrated on the girls indulging in things Panagiotis liked, to prove their compatability, because who the hell cares what the women are interested in when it comes to relationships, ammaright, friends?? 

Our wonderful Panagiotis also stated repeatedly and emphatically in the year of our Lord 2020 that he wanted a woman who could cook, non-negotiable, because he could not cook. It boggles the mind that there are still men who reach adulthood unable to cook, because they expect their mothers, girlfriends and wives to do it for them. Who are you? Why aren’t you at least TRYING to learn? Do you have a physical disability preventing you from doing so, such as having no arms? Do you live in a Hong Kong coffin apartment with no access to cooking supplies? No? Then what business do you have not knowing how to cook?

It also cycled through all kinds of toxic relationship tropes which no young person should even be entertaining. That to win someone’s affection you have to play games like pretending to be in a mood, playing hard to get, being aloof, but also being fiery tempered. Panagiotis let girls go who he considered too cool-headed, he wanted the slammed doors, kicked over dustbins, fights with him, the works! 

He also unashamedly kissed his way through all of them, which okay, I’m no prude. But at least wipe the lipstick off from Contestant number 1 before Contestant number 2 dives in. Also, there’s a pandemic going on. Life was hard for Panagiotis because he repeatedly had to stare off into the distance, frowning, for filler shots where he declared that he had developed feelings for one of the girls, two, five or eight of them, that lamp over there, the ramen noodles in my cupboard, the lighting crew, a cloud that reminded him of his aunt, this burger, the last book he read and Tom Cruise. 

Packaged in such a brash and jarring way, The Bachelor Greece 1 was a total train wreck, so bad it was good. 

This year’s edition is so bad it’s bad. There was nothing redeeming about last year’s run, and redeeming features in this year’s show run into minus numbers. For a start, the bachelors aren’t even real. They’re just recycled faces from other shows. This year’s bachelor is Alexis Pappas, washed ashore from his appearance on The Survivor. 

And guys, it’s not going well. Panagiotis at least gave half an attempt at pretending he was in love with himself the girls during his totally non rehearsed and non scripted spontaneous deliveries to camera. Alexis delivers his lines like he’s reading a menu. I tried, for the sake of journalistic research, but three episodes in I couldn’t even pretend any more and gave up. And the women. My God. They make me feel like Emily Davison got trampled to death by a horse for nothing. Jokes aside, it’s truly depressing to see grown women treat each other this way and act so infantile for a man, all for what? Their fifteen minutes of fame, a free stay at a villa with bottomless champagne from Lidl (no offence, Lidl, I love you) and a male mannequin who constantly looks terrified that his life choices have led him to this point in his existence.

Seemingly egged on by last year’s numbers and forgetting that we all watched all that TV because we LITERALLY HAD NOWHERE TO GO, Greek channels have gone into overdrive this year, pouring RTT shows into the schedule like a thick, burning layer of completely unentertaining and cookie-cutter lava that destroys your hope in humanity, leaving a smouldering trail of rage in its path that you tricked yourself into wasting hours from your one ride on this rock we call home watching this rubbish. 

So what have we so far this year? Here’s a sample:

The Bachelor 2

GNTM (separate blog post coming on that one, I have much to complain about)

Game of Chefs

Top Chef

Masterchef 

Big Brother

The Voice

There’s more that I probably forgot. The bottom line is this – Greece has a habit of taking reality TV formats from other countries and butchering them into Jocelyn Wildenstein levels of irrecognisability. You want your brief flash of fame? Tweet about a finance minister, or go on a reality TV show where all you’ll get out of it is to be endlessly bounced around one show to the next, while you wail “I used to be somebody” the way I do when I make my kids watch the clip of that time I was interviewed by the BBC.

I have recently heard on good authority that a Greek channel has bought the rights to RuPaul’s Drag Race. There is a buzz in the LGBTQ+ community, but also worries that if this comes to fruition, the Greek version will be an insensitive and dehumanising showcase dressing up this entertainment form as freakshowery for the straight-laced to clutch at their pearls over. I could not believe my myopic little eyes when I saw that Pose was running on a Greek TV channel, until I saw that, of course, it was buried in the schedule at 1 a.m..

But hey, I guess if the total dismantling of all other reality formats is good enough for everyone else, it’s good enough for Drag Race. Just come at it with very low expectations and you’ll be fine.

Hello beleaguered readers. It looks like I’ve ended up accidentally famous for a short while, so if you’re here after reading my story on CNN, please take a second to check out the fundraiser I have going to fund a wheelchair van for my son, Hermes, so that we can keep having adventures and escapades. You’re the best!

https://gofund.me/2bf38d08