On my way home from the cinema on Saturday, I made a diversion to the British Museum to see this small, but very charming exhibition about the charmed lives of Patrick Leigh Fermor and his friends. (My friend announced grandly that she'd already seen it in Athens.)

Hotel by the Sea, John Craxton, 1946

It did make me long to be staying here. 

The stone flags of the water's edge, where Joan and Xan Fielding and I sat down to dinner, flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off. On a sudden, silent decision we stepped down fully dressed into the sea carrying the iron table a few yards out and then our three chairs, on which, up to our waists in cool water, we sat round the neatly laid table-top, which now seemed by magic to be levitated three inches above the water. The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist-deep with a butler's gravity, and, saying nothing more than 'Dinner-time,' placed our meal before us - three beautifully grilled kephali, piping hot and with their golden brown scales sparkling ... Diverted by this spectacle, the diners on the quay sent us can upon can of retsina till the table was crowded. 

Don't you just wish you were there? And then, of course, there's the book jackets ...

At last I could stride about the olive groves for hours, putting sentences together and pulling them to bits again!

Beats the irritating TV Durrells - and the exhibition is free.