Talk to strangers

Happy Friday!

They've left!

For the first time in exactly a month, I'm alone. More or less. Actually, I'm in Athens, so I'm anything but.

Within minutes of saying a heart-skipping farewell to the rest of the core team, I was scooped up into the bosom of another generous family. But that's Athens for you.

The sky is dark and the wind has been whipping up the scent of rain. I'm about to go out for dinner with people I've never met. Athens is that kind of place.

It's the kind of place where squats are being evicted and refugees herded into buses and driven out of the city, while their possessions are driven the opposite direction to the municipal dump. Where you can pick almost anything out of the bins next door.

It's the kind of place where a man of the old school will take apart my bike and put it back together in the right order for the first time since Trieste.

It's the kind of place where hangovers don't count. Calories neither. The kind of place that fills your respiratory tract with hard, black gobbets of pollution and shrugs its shoulders.

It's the kind of place where drivers will share a joke before cutting you up. Where one-way signs are nothing more than a warning that there may be oncoming traffic.

It's the kind of place where people throw parties and raffle their car to help pay the legal fees for an asylum seeker. The kind of place where everyone you know has won something, even if it's just a jar of Georgis's honey.

It's the kind of place where you can speak at cross purposes and still understand each other. Where everyone knows that what you really want is cold water and bread on the table. Where honey comes with coffee.

The kind of place I like.

Thighs of Steel has more or less taken every ounce of energy from my writing bones this month. I'm looking forward to a week of unpacking exactly what might have happened. I feel like I could sleep for three days and still be dreaming.

Why would I leave Athens? I can think of three reasons. You might be one of them.

If you like this sort of thing, then you'll probably also like my back catalogue of over 500 posts, all found at davidcharles.info.

Two episodes of Foiled are already online. Get your Foiled fix here.

Top tip if you're in a foreign country with a UK mobile phone: you can listen using your roaming data, rather than connecting to wifi and being blocked out.

The Derek Jacobi episode is out on Monday. THRILLING.

I have some good news: I like you more than you think I do. Quite possibly we all like each other more than we feel we deserve. The loveliest piece of research I've read in a while.

Much love,

:DC:

CREDITS

David Charles wrote this newsletter. David is co-writer of BBC Radio sitcom Foiled, and also writes for The Bike Project, Forests News, Elevate and Thighs of Steel. Reply to this email, or read more at davidcharles.info.