Taking a gap year at 40 did not initially seem like a very sensible idea. I had a good business, a nice flat and everything was relatively rosy — so it still beats me why I chose to jeopardise it all. I suppose I should blame my cousin’s girlfriend, for it was she who largely put me up it. Two years ago, over lunch on Mykonos, I blurted out that someone should write a book about travelling around the Greek islands. Don’t know why I came up with the idea, I just did. But of course it seemed a ridiculous notion really, totally impractical, so I thought nothing more about it and returned to London.
Then, one October evening, I scribbled an itinerary, from Venice to Istanbul — more a romantic ‘what if’ than anything else — and the more I doodled, the more the idea grew on me: 2,000 islands, the Aegean and all that history! It would be a modern odyssey.
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