Grania Willis/Athens Letter: A Greek god has come into my life. Well unfortunately not quite into my life, but certainly into my boudoir.
Just out of bed in the near-nocturnal existence that is an Olympic media village, I heard someone using a key to try and open the front door of my chalet. Wrapping a towel around myself, I opened the door and there was Adonis, in all his glorious beauty.
And bearing gifts to boot. I very nearly bared all myself as the birthday-suit protection came close to slipping from my grasp in the heat of the moment. Our eyes locked and it was lust at first sight. Well certainly on my part it was.
Tragically, the gifts he so reverentially held out to me with outstretched arms turned out to be clean sheets, so I had to ask the gorgeous Spiros Erntikatzides to come back later. Even more tragically, I haven't seen him since and am now in the throes of creating an Ode to a Grecian Ern in the hope that I can lure him back with promises of ambrosia.
But would iambic pentameter work or would I have to go for something more dashing?
A colleague from the Independent has also met Ern, but in even more bizarre circumstances. Watching Olympic coverage on the telly while drying off after her shower the other morning, she turned round to find Ern - once again bearing sheets - standing transfixed in the doorway. A muttered apology, but still Ern stood gazing at the Irish Aphrodite - minus her nightie - before him, until finally he melted away, back into the fantasy world from which he'd emerged.
Greek historian Herodotus wrote of such meetings many years before Olympian media villages were even thought of, but I have now donned the mantle of a modern-day Herodotus to tell of the happenings in Agios Andreas, the place I currently call home.
Originally built as a seaside holiday camp for Greek army families, Agios Andreas is - to use a Greek word obviously coined for just this occasion - spartan in the extreme. The policy of transparency encouraged by the IOC has been extended to the press corps, who are daily left totally transparent in their curtain-free showers.
Dirty laundry - or at least members of the Fifth Estate - is being washed in public. So public in fact that one of the journalists was forced to change address when his female chalet-mate kept sending a tidal wave of water large enough to wipe out a Cornish village flooding into his bedroom every time she took a shower.
Others have had to adopt a nomadic lifestyle within Agios Adreas for different reasons. Another member of the Irish hack brigade arrived back to his lodgings at 4 a.m. a few nights ago, only to discover that his fellow lodger had locked the front door - from the inside. Unable to get either himself or his key in, he returned to the 24-hour reception desk and was rehoused for the night. His new accommodation contained a Y-front-sporting Slovenian, obviously the worse for wear, who was sitting, swaying gently, on the edge of his bed.
Our hero retired to his room, stripped down to his boxers and was just about to hit the sack when the Slovenian ricocheted in, demanding to know who he was. A bottle of Ouzo later, the two were best buddies.
I don't think it was a Slovenian, but there was an uninvited guest in my room when I returned home the other night and unfortunately it wasn't Ern. A gargantuan creature, bristling with hundreds of legs, was clinging to the ceiling directly above my bed. Arachnophobia is a big word, but not big enough to describe this thing. Fishermen are renowned for their ability to exaggerate the size of their catch, but there was no need for hyperbole with this mammoth multipede.
Jaded from a long day at the coal-face, the last thing I wanted was a wrestling match with a monster, but my house-mate wasn't too keen on tackling it either. Where was Ern when we needed him? Girding my loins, I clambered up onto the bed, towel in one hand and wastepaper basket in the other, but The Creature refused to relinquish his hold on the ceiling. A prod with a hanger merely provoked The Creature and it scurried - thankfully away from me - across the vertiginous wasteland of the ceiling.
A frantic stab at it with the hanger and it disappeared from view. As I fled to the sanctuary of the great outdoors with the creature-catching receptacle at arms length, I prayed that TC was temporarily dwelling in the bowels of the bin and was quite prepared to leave it there - once we'd established it was there - overnight.
But my animal-loving house-mate wouldn't hear of such a thing. No, it had to be released into the wild so it could breed freely and take over the world. Deftly flicking the bin over, she did indeed release The Creature but, far from making a break for freedom, it bolted back towards the door, its million legs working overtime to ferry it back to safety. Reacting with the speed of light I did my own bit of flicking, catching TC amidships with the tip of the towel as it was just about to hurtle across the threshold. It sailed into the night, narrowly missing house-mate as it flew through the air, and was gone.
But the handle on the front door is obviously in league with TC. Falling off into the house-mate's hand the other morning, it now refuses to stay on the door at all, spending most of its time lounging on the front step, beckoning in the world's centipedes, multipedes and ants whose dimensions bear a remarkable resemblance to the door handle itself. Ern the Exterminator, rescue me please.
