Eyes shut, I breathe in fresh air. In Athens—it must be just along the coast a way, unless we are on an island—the air tastes of hot stone and combustion, coffee and tobacco: the peculiar sensory seal of the capital. Here, you remember that the world doesn’t have to smell that way. The air is rich with salt and pine, olive groves and eucalyptus. I look out across the village and the sight matches the flavour that’s churning in my head: baking white sun and fecund blue water, soft marble blocks and terra-cotta tiles, wooden beams and doors. There’s fresh plaster render on some of the walls, space for frescoes and murals as yet unpainted. The little square is full of men with tanned, golden skin and dark hair—not fat but thick with Heraklean muscle, and gleaming with oil. The women have supple limbs and broad hands, dark eyes proud and sharp. When the wind gusts inland, it carries up to us the scents of roasting and bread, of fresh fish on coal and olive oil and artichokes. From the other direction, it brings peppers and tomatoes growing on the vine; the hum of bees, the sound of hearty laughter. This is time travel, to a Greece that never was: a vaccinated and aerobicised Olympian Pastoral Republic.