How the beaches, culture and people of Corfu hit me for six

How the beaches, culture and people of Corfu hit me for six A cricket match kindled my love affair with the Greek island, inspiring both a literary festival and my new novel T his is not where you would expect an article about one of the Mediterranean’s most beautiful islands to start. It’s the tail end of winter, 2021. Kensal Green Cemetery in west London: the imperial mausolea canted and crumbling, low clouds dissolving into rain. We are still in that strange phase of the pandemic when we are masked, newly aware of our bodies and the space around them. We are here to bury Nikos, a man who for me, for many, was the incarnation of Corfu. I had spent my 20s trying to find the perfect Greek island, hopping from the well-trodden (Mykonos, Santorini, Cephalonia) to the more obscure (Kythira, Symi, Meganisi). None quite matched the vision I had dreamed into being as a child, when I segued from Robert Graves to Mary Renault, then to Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles. Greece was an idea before it was a place: freedom and deep thought, a constellation of sand, salt and thyme. Then, on a whim, I accepted an invitation to play cricket in Corfu. I knew little about the island at the time – not about its strategic history, nor how that position had shaped a culture that is at once Greek, Venetian and British. I hadn’t yet walked the Liston, the elegant colonnaded arcade that might be Venice or Trieste, Bologna or Perugia were it not for the cricket pitch laid out in front of it. The pitch is surrounded by a car park; its groundsmen battle heat, salt spray, digging children and fouling dogs. Yet it remains the only cricket pitch in the world I know that’s set within a Unesco world heritage site . Taking guard there, you look up to the Old Fortress for solidity, and to the Palace of St Michael and St George for elegance and flair. I went out with the Lord’s Taverners, a UK sports charity team. We were a motley bunch: a couple of former internationals – Andy Caddick and Chris Cowdr...