The thunderstorm passed and I got a couple of hours precious sleep. From Italy I learnt that a lack of sleep makes my blood sugars really difficult to control, so sleep is now a priority. The sea was wild when I woke and not a person was to be seen. It felt as exotic and wild as anywhere, and it is really, just my preconception of Greece was skewed because it’s in Europe – this border makes me imagine a place is tamer.

By the time I got paddling the wind had sadly died, so I had no downwind. A chunky swell was coming over my right shoulder and flashes of lightning still flickered on horizon beneath a bank of cruel dark clouds. Rain arrived and didn’t leave for the next few hours as I paddled along the mountainous coast, shrouded in low cloud, past little fishing boat harbours built an arc of rocks piled in the sea. I wondered if Gerald Durrell had wandered these very beaches, collecting sea slugs and rose beetles.

Conscious that I didn’t want to get chilly and make my cold worse, I decided to come ashore at the small town of Paramonas. Coming in to the beach, a wave picked me up and a rock surfaced just in front of me. I jumped out, but it was too late, the nose hit the rock and I knew there would be damage. Damn it what a stupid mistake. Sure enough, the nose was chipped through to the hull.

I stood on the beach in the pouring rain wondering what to do next. Out of water, I walked up to a restaurant and knocked on the door. A lady filled up my bottle and shut the door in my face. I looked for shelter but couldn’t see any, so decided to paddle over to a the Church of Agios Nikolaos on the other side of the village.

By the time I got there, my boat was filled with water. A problem to deal with tomorrow – first get warm. The church was locked but had a large overhanging doorway where I sat in the dry and cooked some spaghetti.

Luckily the goddess aralditey was there to save me. The next day I washed the boat with freshwater, dried it in the sun, and repaired the hole with araldite.

As it set I read and wrote, the rest doing good for my hacking cough and runny nose. Needing water, I walked up a heavily eroded track through cool, peaceful olive groves to the road and found a tap outside someone’s house. Nets were laid out beneath the trees and I tried a fresh olive – yuck. A bunch of grapes had been left on a rock at the beach, almost raisins now, having dried in the sun. I shook the wasps off and plucked at them with my teeth, releasing the sunshine in my mouth – much nicer.

Sitting in the doorway of the church writing, large black ants ran around my feet. They’d found the strands of spaghetti I’d spilt eating dinner yesterday, and were carrying them back to their nest, 10 metres away. I watched an ant pick up a stick three times it’s size, and followed it hauling it back.

How do the ants find the spaghetti? What were they communicating to each other? What is ant reality like if there is no consciousness? I imagined what it was like to be that ant, and for just a second I was that ant, seeing through it’s eyes. Stunned, I immediately came back to my reality. The ant disappeared down its hole, followed by the pasta.

I found a chunk of the Bible embedded in the sand, and read the words, wishing they’d mean something to me. For surely we are no different to ants running around with the foot of some unknown being stepping in to our reality. But nihilism makes me doubt everything, commit to nothing, still wishing all the time I’d find meaning in a world I believe is meaningless.