The Christmas I realised a world was out there for me to discover

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/22/christmas-world-discover-italy-france

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To understand the impact of Christmas 1978 on a seven-year-old boy from a small island in Greece, you have to clear your mind of a lot of developments.

Back then, Greece was four years out of a dictatorship and not yet a member of the European Community, travel abroad was expensive and uncommon, information was sought in the pages of bulky home encyclopaedias and important moments were captured with a Kodak Pocket Instamatic. Back then, a holiday road trip through Italy and France in a red Simca that broke down every time Dad drove too fast over a puddle was an impossible folly.

The giant ferry that would take us from the western port of Patras to Bari in Italy was wonder enough. A cabin with bunk beds and perfectly round windows; half a dozen lounges as vast as schoolyards; cafeteria glass displays full of strange and exotic puddings with names like “tiramisu”; fruit machines bleeping their siren song at my father’s gambling addiction.

There is no line in the sea to mark a border. It is a fiction invented by possessive politicians and complicit cartographers. Yet a fictional line was crossed and, as we disembarked, everything was exactly the same and entirely different. I opened my eyes and ears and took it all in. So, this was ... Italy. People spoke a melodious language I did not understand. Transactions took place in a currency called “lira” and involved millions. The signs were in a different alphabet. And everyone kept wishing us “Auguri! Auguri!” Which baffled me quite a bit, since in Greek it means “Cucumber! Cucumber!”

The same trick was repeated a week later when we drove through the Mont Blanc tunnel – “the longest and deepest you can drive through in the world”, Dad informed the three of us in the back. It was then; it isn’t now. We entered the tunnel in the valley of Aosta and exited in Chamonix. And just like that, we were in France! Yet another language, a different cuisine, a strange new currency – French franc notes, so thin you could see through them and so large you had to fold them twice to fit in a wallet.

For Dad, the cinephile, the trip was a beguiling tour of favourite film sets: over there, Anita Ekberg danced in the fountain; on those steps, Gregory Peck pretended to run into Audrey Hepburn; behind that palazzo, Donald Sutherland caught a glimpse of his daughter’s ghost; and right here is where Cary Grant kissed Grace Kelly. “You’ve a very strong grip. The kind a burglar needs.”

For Mum, I suspect, it was an endless reprise of telling us not to bicker in the car, trying to read foreign signs and give directions and getting lost. There was the logistical nightmare of ensuring a plentiful supply of food and drink any time a hungry mouth opened. Most of all, the constant military campaign of making certain that three very curious children didn’t get lost. A journey filled with heart-stopping moments in which, for a breathless instant, one of us couldn’t be spotted. Then she would see us and blood would flow to her face again. “Hold my hand. Hold your father’s hand. Hold your sister’s hand.” We held hands a lot back then.

For my sisters and me it was the densest concentration of new information, stimuli and wonders we had ever experienced. For the family as a whole, it was the closest we have ever been as a unit. Something about an alien environment makes you huddle a little closer, hold the corner of your father’s coat a little tighter, ask questions with more intensity. Love your family that little bit more. We had each other exclusively and an entire continent to ourselves.

Memories, of course, are notoriously tricky things. I have no idea whether all of what I remember actually happened or whether I have amalgamated different journeys and different Christmases in my brain. What I do remember is the love.

Rome and Venice and Monte Carlo will continue to be brilliant, but not in the same way, because I will never be seven again. My family will never be together again. Different versions of it are, but not that one. Were the rebellious cells which would eventually mutate and attack my father’s pancreas present in him that Christmas? Was the genetic material that would eventually manifest as Alzheimer’s already working on my mother’s razor-sharp brain? It doesn’t matter. We may have wasted other fortnights, but not that one.

Two weeks of autostrade and motels, restaurants and museums, maps and arguments, zoos and dessert trolleys. An overnight stay in Avellino in a “pensione” with impossibly tall and soft beds, with a view of Mount Etna, ice-cream outside the Colosseum in Rome on an unseasonably warm day, seeing a great white shark for the first time in Monaco’s Musée Océanographique on Christmas Day, hearing thousands of bottles smash on the stroke of midnight in Venice, thrown off the “ponti”, as we welcomed 1979 from a balcony of the Hotel Rialto.

Something changed inside me during those holidays; something profound. Once a child has begun to explore a world beyond their nation, the exploration never stops – it can’t. Once you have crossed one border, you begin to look at the whole world differently – as food to be tasted and language to be explored; customs to be understood and train schedules to be bent to your will; maps to be deciphered, summits to be conquered and marble monuments to be caressed.

I think that was the Christmas I felt, for the first time, that I belonged to a larger collective, separated by semantics. The first time I felt more than just me. Who knows whether without that journey I would have decided to study abroad and live and work in another country? Whether I would be spending so much of my time arguing with insular nationalists, scared of “the other”? Without “the other”, home does not exist. It lacks the fictional lines around it, which define it. Or if it exists, it is an airless place, vacuum-packed with mothballs.

To all seven-year-olds out there – of whatever actual age – I wish you the courage to embrace both the familial and the other. I wish you all the very best for this memory-making festive season. Or as the Italians say: Cucumber! Cucumber!