Harry Mount

Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year. I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years, in the wake of Odysseus, for a book – and I’m convinced The Odyssey is true. OK, the monsters, like man-eating Scylla and the one-eyed Cyclops, might not have existed. And you’d have to be a Zeus-fearing type to believe in the gods toying with Odysseus’s fate on Mount Olympus. But the catastrophic storms that tossed Odysseus back and forth across the Med are certainly true.

These are some of the things I worried about this morning. Should I brush my teeth while drawing the curtains, to save time? Should I get out of the bath at 7.40 a.m. or 7.45 a.m. to be fully clothed for the Tesco home delivery between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.? Should I instantly pick up the coat hanger that fell off the door handle as I left my bedroom or wait till I return this evening? These are mind-staggeringly boring things to think about. They’re even more boring to write down. That is the life of the worrier: a new worry dropping into the brain roughly every five seconds. Life is one huge to-do list for us worriers.

In Dad’s Army, Lance Corporal Jones, played by Clive Dunn, fought in six campaigns, from the Sudan in 1884 to the second world war. Well, my great-grandfather, Field Marshal Francis Grenfell, 1st Baron Grenfell, can beat that. He joined up at 18 in 1859 and stayed in the army for 65 years, until his death at 83, 100 years ago, on 27 January 1925. And then, in a tragic coda to his extraordinary life, he gave his name to Grenfell Tower, where 72 lives were lost in a fire in 2017. This week, Angela Rayner told bereaved families that the tower is to be demolished. Lord Grenfell was the ultimate Colonel Blimp – he even looked like him, handlebar moustache and all. The Zelig of the British Empire, he saw everything.

Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage beyond Gibraltar. The howling wind had ripped along the coast, whisking the beach away overnight I thought that, too, before I was bashed up by wild tempests in the two years I criss-crossed the Mediterranean in Odysseus’s wake. One morning, I turned up at a hotel on Mykonos. As I made my way to the breakfast table, the agitated maître d’ shimmered up and said, ‘I’m so sorry, sir, the beach has been washed away overnight.

What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly? No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly.  You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the builder who comes round the morning you ring him? These are the modern saints – the hyper-efficient deities who put to shame that other friend who only ever rings when they want something out of you; or the plumber you have to ring three times and only ever rings back to say he isn’t coming after all.

Europe is revolting against the tourist invasion. This summer, Venice has started charging a tourist tax to keep visitors at bay. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera have just set up inter-island protests under the slogan, ‘Let’s change course – let’s set limits to tourism’. Barcelona is planning to ban Airbnb. In the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, some of the coastline is now one-way, to restrict tourist traffic. On another bit of the Ligurian coast, plans are afoot to charge walkers. You can see why – the famous cities and resorts of Europe have become one vast Queueworld, where tourists gather in great numbers, intense heat – and, increasingly, intense misery.

Street robbery has become an epidemic. Horrible thugs are stealing luxury watches and jewellery in broad daylight. The number of luxury watches stolen almost doubled in England and Wales between 2015 and 2022 – with 25,802 stolen in 2022. The problem is particularly bad in London, where the Metropolitan Police have set up a special unit to tackle the problem. Even the greediest thief isn’t about to strip your suit off your back It's an unforgivable crime. Lock the muggers up and throw away the key. Of course people should be free to walk the streets, decked in gold and silver. Oh for the legendary days of medieval England when you could supposedly leave a bag of coins nailed to a tree for a year and no one would steal it.