“There I was, in the local café in Metamorfosi on a bleak winter’s evening, wondering whether I should return swiftly to London. The proprietor said something to the other villagers and they looked at me half in wonder and, I suspect, half in pity. What then followed was the most bizarre game of charades I have ever played, acting out: “I am the foreign idiot who spent a small fortune on a derelict cottage and now cannot get into it because the key is no longer in its hiding place and the builder has not arrived and I have nowhere to sleep and will somebody PLEASE HELP ME!”

I try to picture now what I must have looked like then, standing in front of this audience and doing my best to mimic the action of a key being inserted into a lock, the vigorous shaking of my head to illustrate that the door would not open because the key did not, in reality, exist and then affecting a look of despair. Actually, I think I did the despair bit rather well – not that it made any great demands on my acting skills since it was entirely genuine.

My audience sat through this bizarre pantomime impassively, seemingly unmoved even when I got to the despairing scene. When it was clear that I had finished they discussed my performance at some length. I half expected them to hold up score cards, the way they do at ice skating contests, but instead one of them uttered a name – Babageorgos – and it was clear that salvation was at hand.

I knew the name. He was the old man who had been keeping an eye on the property for half a century or more. A search party was formed to find him and I tagged along. He was also very old – certainly in his eighties if not his nineties. He had clearly been dozing in front of his fire, but he insisted on leaving his house and coming with me down to the cottage. Maybe he didn’t trust me not to lose this key too, but I think he was just being friendly.

And so I spent my first night alone in Villa Artemis, a rather grand name for a decrepit cottage. Not quite alone, as it happened. My sleep was disturbed by a thriving colony of rats who clearly regarded it as their home, though they did have the good grace that night to confine themselves – albeit noisily – to the roof space above my bed. They became more sociable with the passing of time, as my son Christopher’s Greek auntie-in-law was to discover when she slept in the same room some months later and woke to find a pair of them sitting at the end of her bed regarding her with great curiosity. The auntie-in-law did not return. But I did.

Read the full article in our November 2009 issue.