How to live for ever

I found myself in disgrace a while ago when I contrived to fly my family to a Greek airport called Preveza, only to discover on arrival that they didn’t have a hire car big enough for our purposes. It was about 11 p.m. and I was standing pathetically thinking about buses and looking at a map of the area when I saw that Preveza was really called Preveza Aktio.

‘Hey!’ I said to my wife. ‘It’s fantastic!’

‘What is fantastic?’ she asked in the tones of someone still faintly hoping that her husband would produce a people carrier. ‘It’s Actium,’ I cried. ‘All my life I have wanted to see Actium!’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and I’m still waiting to see some action from you.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘It’s the great battle of 31 bc, the naval engagement that changed the history of the world. It was the one where Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra.