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#MilitantFactionsQuotes 61: 9.9.88 (Friday) Patras, Greece
9.9.88 (Friday) Patras, Greece
People say Patras isn’t Greece, but for me it is more real than the sun-bleached villas of the postcards. Dirty, smelly, run-down, poor, dirty, friendly; being forced to spend a few days there is no bad thing. Having seen nowhere else, this will always be the real Greece to me.
“How did I get here?” I asked myself last night, pulling a rucksack through blocks of flats and hungry children playing ball. “How did I get here?” I asked myself, tired, broke and lonely, as the youths on scooters buzzed past and stared. “How did I get here?” I asked myself as I lay on a pebbled beach in the dark, watching rats scavenge and humans fish, scared that the police might come, or the fishermen. Then a rat jumped on my back, and sleeping on the beach didn’t seem such a good idea after all, not even for the early morning dip. I dressed, packed and was off down the road before you could say “Obstreperous”. Cursing the rats, and tired.
-From "Beware the Undertoad", first published @ 3:AM Magazine (2010), and one of the stories in Mark Piggott's fiction/non-fiction collection "Militant Factions" available in paperback or Kindle from Amazon.