I visited Kos from Bodrum, Turkiye, for just a day, a few months before the Covid damndemic, in 2019. I had a memory of a restaurant in a square and an elderly couple sitting under a tree chatting. And another memory of a nice bar and a tasty local beer. I wanted to go back to the ease and friendliness of Kos.

This time, I flew to Dalaman, in the south of Turkiye, spent a couple of nights in Marmaris on the coast then took a ferry to Rhodes. The chap beside me on the flight was British, ex-military, by his own telling, returning from laying his mother to rest back in old Blighty, and ran a health centre with his wife on a mountain top not far from Marmaris. We batted the bullshit with one another, passing the time until the plane came in over the shimmering stones of southern Turkiye. After a couple of pleasant nights in Marmaris, I crossed water again, to Greece.

Old Rhodes town was what I imagined it would be – castellated walls, medieval buildings and an ancient harbour. There were a lot of Scandinavians in the bars who didn’t hoosh you from the restaurants as soon as you had downed the last morsel of food. I liked that. Liked lingering, earwigging, chilling.

I also liked the view, from near the remains of the Rhodes acropolis, which was pure Aegean.

I took the ferry to Kos, a few days later, a two-and-a-half-hour journey. The ferry pulled into Symi harbour but not right up to the quay. It was Monday of last week, the third of June. I wasn’t to know, at that point, that a much liked and respected BBC doctor and health broadcaster, Michael Mosely, was on that beautiful island, living his last hours before expiring, tragically, in the crucifying heat of the Aegean afternoon. I had often watched him on tv and on youtube and loved his smiley, smart, engaging way of getting his message across. His sad story would fill the airwaves during my stay in Kos.

On Kos, I dragged myself up through the hot streets to my sweet little hotel with its even sweeter little swimming pool. The manageress was chatty and full of info. I revisited the remains of the ancient Agora, the Hellenic/Roman ruins and then the Casa Romana, a reconstructed Roman period house nearby. I told myself firmly: you are too old for walking around in the afternoon heat. (I was probably too old for the morning heat too, but at least there was shade).

The tone of Kos was as I had remembered it from before Covid: friendly, laid back, talkative, not over commercial. There was little hard selling in Kos. No need to waylay punters on every corner. More than once, traffic stopped to let me cross at a pedestrian crossing – and it wasn’t just my own antiquity that prompted that civic behaviour – I saw them do it to one another.  

I rediscovered certain things – that salad makes good sense in hot weather; that shade, water and a breeze can make all the difference. And that nobody really cares much, in that sort of heat, if your sandals are almost pre-Roman. I didn’t redicover the restaurant or the elderly couple or their bench under the tree. And I wasn’t bothered enough to track down the bar with the nice local beer slightly out of town. I just let the few days slide by. Then, on the Friday, I flew to Zürich, and wandered around by the banks of the Limmat and, on Saturday, flew back to Dublin.

For the first time in a long time, my flight into Dublin – in a small, powerful little Brazilian Embraer – didn’t feel like a trip through a wind tunnel. And the coast of North Dublin resembled, if only very briefly from a couple of thousand feet, some hitherto undiscovered Greek island, just west of Wales.