If you don’t believe me, look it up in your January 1976 number of The Athenian. If you haven’t got it, you can probably buy it at enormous expense from The Athenian offices at 20 Alopekis Street.
Anyway, for November 1976 I had written: ‘The Traffic Police have at last succeeded in closing the northern suburbs completely with one-way roads so that cars will only be able to move round in ever-diminishing circles until they finally disappear in their own exhaust fumes.’ My original ending to this phrase had been ‘disappear up their own exhaust pipes’ but some hawk-eyed editor at The Athenian must have thought this too daring and toned it down. (I wonder if it will get by this time?)
Any of you who live in these suburbs or have visited them recently will know that my prediction is about to come true. Indeed, the situation is now so chaotic that the police has had to put up arrows all over the place. By following these arrows you still get back where you started from but it takes a little longer and gives you the opportunity of doing more sightseeing in the daytime and running over more cats in the dark.
A friend of mine, hearing that I had become completely immobilized in my home on Kamelion Street in Psyhiko by :no entry’ signs, decided to pay me a visit and bring some supplies. I had told him over the phone that my food stocks had run out and that I was eating nasturtium leaves from the garden.
A day later he rang up from a phone booth in the Second Platia to say he had been going around in circles for the past twenty-four hours, had run out of gas, had eaten the supplies he was bringing me and was about to throw a fit in the middle of the Platia so an ambulance could come and get him out of there.
The other day, as I was picking the last of the nasturium leaves in my garden and eyeing the chrysanthemums with a hungry glint in· my eye, a neighbour strolled round with a petition in his hand.
‘Ah,’ I thought to myself, ‘action at last. We shall make a collective appeal to the authorities and perhaps something will be done about the problem.’
‘Good morning,’ my neighbour said, Ί have this petition —’
‘Say no more,’ I cried, Ί shall sign willingly. Give me your pen.’
‘Well, I’m glad to hear that. Some of the householders on the street don’t seem to want a sewer line.’
I stopped in mid-signature. ‘What’s that you said about a sewer line?’
That’s what the petition is about,’ he explained. ‘They’ve laid lines down Amaryllidos and Antheon that will link up with the main sewage system but they haven’t done anything on Kamelion. We want to petition for an estimate of the cost of laying down a line along our street and see if we can each chip in to have it built.’
Ά sewer? A blinking sewer?’ I almost yelled at him. ‘Here we are hemmed in on all sides by “no entry” signs and confounded arrows and all you can think about is a sewer?’
He looked rather startled by my outburst and said:
‘Well, we’re all paying a fortune having our cesspools emptied every week and we thought —’
‘My cesspool is twenty metres deep,’ I interrupted, ‘and it never fills up and what’s more it’ll never fill up on this diet,’ I shouted holding out a handful of nasturtium leaves for him. to see.
‘Why are you eating those?’ he asked.
‘Because I ruddy well can’t get to the shops,’ I said. ‘We’re completely blocked in by “no entry” signs, or haven’t you noticed?’
‘Oh, those,’ he shrugged. ‘Who pays any attention to those.’
‘You mean you disregard them? You drive through “no entry” signs with panache and impunity?’
He nodded. ‘What else can I do? I have a car, not a helicopter.’
‘And you are never caught?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve been lucky so far,’ he said, ‘but I reckon that whatever I pay in fines for going up one-way streets the wrong way, I’ve still saved more than that on gas and on the wear and tear on my car.’
I stood transfixed in thought for a moment and then I slapped my forehead. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? The man was a genius. I thanked him profusely, hopped into my car and tore madly down all the one-way streets I could find, going the wrong way through all of them, till I came to the shopping centre at the Pharos.
There, I violated all the ‘no entry’ signs round the supermarket, parked my car right outside the entrance, stocked up on staples and a pile of goodies and drove back the way I had been used to in the days when the only signs in Psyhiko were the ones that set the speed limit at 20 kilometres per hour. Nobodyrever paid any attention to those either.
Being basically a law-abiding citizen I find my conscience bothers me at times. Also, I tend to wake up screaming in the night after a recurrent dream in which I have been cornered at a crossroads by five police cars.
But I am consoled by the fact that I am not the only one to flout traffic signs in my suburb and if, from this lowly beginning, we all develop into hardened criminals, the police will have nobody but itself to blame for the birth of a Greek-style Mafia in Psyhiko.
