HOME COMFORTS

Whenever we visit Kalymnos we take various items for ex-pat friends who can't survive in a foreign land without such necessaries as Cheddar cheese, Bovril and Galaxy chocolate.

I suppose it's different when you live overseas (as opposed to just visiting) and I often speculate on how I would get by on a long-term sojourn in one of the countries where I've repeatedly stayed for short periods - America, New Zealand, Italy or Greece.

For example, I admit to missing marmalade and when, one week into our stay (and just as I was suffering marmalade-withdrawal symptoms), our friend Elaine from Edinburgh came to stay in Emporios, she brought me an emergency supply of St Dalfour's exceedingly yummy Orange and Ginger marmalade! Though there is, of course, something frightfully eccentric (and utterly British) about a French-made English preserve being purchased in Scotland and exported to Greece!

Curiously (not knowing that marmalade rescue was on its way), I'd just managed to pick of a jar of St Dalfour's Raspberry and Pomegranate jam - exclusively made in France for Greeks, for whom the Pomegranate is pretty much a national fruit!

For me, one of the joys of foreign travel is being able to enjoy those things that you can't get at home: the Greek version of Walls, for example, offer a wide range of ice creams that we never get to taste and I discovered that Kellogg's All-Bran in Greece is - as you can see below - quite different from the dessicated hardboard that we get in the UK...

And it's not just interestingly shaped...

It is also tantalizingly flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg!

In a kind of reversal of the ex-pat's desire to still enjoy abroad their much-missed pleasures from the Old Country, I actually contemplated bringing home a box or two of All-Bran Golden Bakes.

But then I realised that it would be like that bottle of ouzo that one returns with but which never tastes quite the same in Surbiton or Slough as it did when sitting in the sun in a Greek taverna by the sea...