#ingham

Pause, and reflect.

Tyto Wetlands, Ingham.

“It was all a bit spontaneous,” I say, when people ask me how we came to buy a house in Greece. And so it was. But it was also the result of a forty-year love affair with the country, which began with a cassette version of My Family and Other Animals.

When I was a kid, my dad loved driving holidays. The sort of holidays where we’d get in the car on Merseyside on a Friday night, and get out again three days later in Portugal. For my sister and me, the only entertainment was recordings of Top Of The Pops, (made by pushing our tape recorder up against the speaker of the telly), a crackly version of Jasper Carrott’s stand up routines, or the rich voice of actor, Gerald Harper, reading My Family and Other Animals. Over four cassettes we followed, breathlessly, the mad adventures of the Durrell Family, in the sun-washed, looking-glass world of Greece.

View from the balcony across Mirabello Bay towards Mochlos. © Claire Lees Ingham

My passion was cemented when, at twenty, I fell in love with a student from Thessaloniki. He was studying French and Film alongside me at a Scottish university. When we were sent together as scholarship students to California, he spent the year telling me stories about Greece, prompted by the Californian weather.

“Of course, it’s even better than here,” he’d say. “We have good coffee, and everyone smokes!”

To a girl from rainy Merseyside, it sounded sophisticated, exotic, and made of sunshine.

And then, observing me one day while we were at the beach, he said, “You should always live in a country where the sun shines…”

Wallaman Falls, via Ingham. QLD. Australia.

Brown Backed Honeyeaters building a nest, Tyto Wetlands, Ingham.