The temperatures have climbed and as the days hit forty degrees, the Mediterranean Soap Opera that is now my life, has swung into full force. Perissa is a small village, on a relatively small island and when not swapping stories at each other’s bars, over frappes gone warm, people discuss and dissect any rumours that float their way on the salty breeze. Tourists aren’t interesting, they come and go, throw up in bushes, pass out on the beach and fall off scooters with a soothing regularity. If you work on the island and are thus considered a pseudo local … it’s fair game. I have never been involved in so many illicit trysts in my entire life, under the moniker of ‘Fusion’s Waitress’. It’s how they while away their days – after all, we are in a country where it takes 3 hours to drink one frappe, conversation topics have to be interesting to warrant such a snail pace over a social beverage.

The hotbed of gossip is Nicos’ pool, at Soul Bar. Everyday the employees – Canadian, Australian, Serbian, Welsh, wherever  – converge to beat the heat and debrief on the evening before. This is where you find out who has been fired from where, and why, and who it was that streaked naked down the beach the night before.

It’s usually an Australian who streaked naked, or a very drunk English man.

Peak season is about to start, the boat and plane loads of tourists flood the island everyday, defiantly parading white flesh for the roasting. I think Australia is the only country going wild with the skin cancer scare campaign, everybody else seems happy to proffer puce backs to the harsh rays, and then totter around dazedly, in the throes of sunstroke. Of course peak season means loads of my favourite type of tourist, the Pom, and being privy to what is fast becoming my favourite past time – watching them dance. My favourite, favourite, favourite so far has been a Liverpudlian couple who rolled into Fusion at about 3am and stayed until 5am. The man, who told me in a confidential whisper that this was the first time drinking spirits for him, and then downed a shot of Raki without knowing what it was (vile, pure alcohol) was sensibly shod in a sturdy pair of Jesus sandals, and glowingly white. Announcing he is often called snake hips, he took to the dance floor (the only one at 4.30am) and set it alight with a series of convulsions I have never known the human body to be capable of. One hand went behind his back and twitched, whilst the other went around the front and twitched simultaneously. At the same time he bent his knees and writhed, often dropping low to the floor then flinging himself back up, head tossed. His shoulders were jauntily cocked and slumped in time to the music. At times he employed a zig zag foot movement that carried him across the dance floor with tremendous pace. We all watched aghast. His wife, who looked like a milk maid, so scrubbed and round was she, leant in and slurred in her gentle Liverpudlian accent, ‘he does this all the time. The terrible thing is, he think he’s shit hot.’

On the topic of watching such displays of grace and rhythm, I watched the sunset over Fira the other night, perched in a bar tacked precariously onto the cliff face, and then just two mornings ago, watched it rise over Perivolos (the next beach on from Perissa). Both times, it crept into and from the sky in a silent red ball, as if the only island it had to take care of was Santorini. That’s the thing about this island – if it weren’t for the jarring reminders in the form of tourists, it would be as if nowhere else in the world existed.