And so, with my student years in the past, having spent a month in Bath alternately chilling and packing, and with another graduation ceremony under the belt (two down, one to go), I stuffed all the books, CDs, DVDs, and clothes in 14 cartons, shipped them off to Greece, left a moderately auto-biographical magnetic poem on a fridge door and, armed with parting advice from Nigel (Alain De Botton’s The Art of Travel) and Raphael (Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness) and a PowerBook full of movies I boarded an EasyJet flight back “home”.

Athens, that is.

Meticulous readers might have observed that I have lived in Bath for the past nine years. Yeah, well I’m done with that. Moved. Took everything. Back in my parents’ house I am now trying to update my time-capsule of a bedroom and to retroactively apply a policy of streamlining with respect to the collection of stuff. In the meantime, I am already experiencing severe culture shock. Suffice it to say that Greece still seems like a third-world country of resistant-to-change xenophobes, exceedingly proud of their country but unaware of and unwilling to learn about anything happening outside it. But friends convinced me it’s getting better, and there are always little details that make me believe that (like the excellent Athens Voice).

Anyway, in a few hours I’m off to Ithaca (oh, the irony) with a crew of sympathetic repatriated academic immigrants.