2002-05-05 - 9:51 p.m.

Chuffing bollocks. I just wanna address my (now deleted) religious spazeroo the other day before normal service is resumed. I�ve since received some well-deserved e-mail and guestbook kickings, which is fair enough. I guess I kind of flipped out, and sometimes keyboards are not the best places for mindless headrushes. It�s just that I�d spent the morning reading so much news and so much killing and catholic priests raping children and teenagers lining up to become martyrs and the world going recklessly headlong into shit creek, and it was just a stupidly misworded lash-out against the horribleness of it all�government-sponsored terrorism, religious fanaticism and a worrying lack of condemnation on all sides (I�m terminally embarrassed that it looked like I was singling out Judaism, when it was meant to be a broader point about organised religion � my chronic inarticulacy to blame, not anti-Jewish feelings of any kind). Mea culpa Athy, Jess, et al, my motives were pure, I�m just prone, as you know, to moronic ranting�um�pretty much most of the time.

If I only had a brain.

In weirdly ironic news, then, witnessing Orthodox Greek Easter Celebrations over the weekend was one of the most enchantingly beautiful things I�ve seen in a church. Who would�ve thought chanting beardy clerics could move this old cynic? Less poignantly touching was the Greek tendency to mark the resurrection of the Living Christ via the means of illegal high explosives, from the colon-rendingly loud dynamite shaking the crumbling ruins from the hills, to the mini-gangstaz in the street walking around with their fire-crackers trying to (and succeeding in, for the most part) scare the tourists. I deftly positioned myself in amongst the padres, because there are more romantic ways to go than being incinerated alive by a posturing Hellenic runt.

But it was an idyllic few days, surviving on oily salads, ouzo and four hour�s sleep. In Turkey we bumbled around the market, people shouting to us in broken English that their stalls were �Cheaper than any Paki�s�, though this cheery brand of casual racism didn�t particularly entice me to peruse their gaudy fake Rolexes. We escaped into a Turkish bathhouse for an, erm, Turkish Bath. It�s an ancient art which seems to be based around giving corpulent moustachioed bruisers in steamy rooms the chance to, in the case of the boys, wrestle them aggressively into unnatural positions and, in the case of the girls, massage baby oil into their boobs. Yeah, everyone�s naked, and I can now say without fear of contradiction that leathery old Italian men have the most capacious scrota I�ve ever seen. Or would want to.

Still, if weird cracking noises are a good thing, then my spine�s in the best shape it�s ever been in.

Today I travelled for 14 hours � and this on top of all-night retsina-fest�a controversial tactic to make sure that we were up for the ferry at 5.30am. So you�ll forgive me if I doze now.

And what are these sex ads doing in my guestbook?