Rob's Life: Whatever Rhodes your boat

Things you only know when you're living somewhere that's not an actual home: you can cut a tomato with the edge of a metal fish slice. You can even, by applying some serious pressure and a bit of additional work with the by-now-too-long fingernails, use the fish slice to cut a lemon. But you cannot, however wide you open your mouth, use that fish slice as a fork. The human mouth just won't accommodate it.

Yes, I'm in a studio apartment in the very centre of beautiful Rhodes Old Town and the apartment has got a kitchenette, but not a jot of cutlery. After dinner in a restaurant on my own yesterday, I vowed to make my own food in the flat from now on. There would be no more Souvlaki-for-one experiences on this holiday: no mixed mezze platter is so good that it tastes like anything other than bitter ashes when you're eating on your own, and the aged bouzouki player keeps looking over at you pityingly as he plays another heartbreak solo.

But there truly is some global-level strolling to be done here in Rhodes. The old town's absurdly atmospheric, with the widest street being a Brighton back-alley's width and the side lanes coming off it being rarely more than mazey little entanglements with lean stray cats and the occasional bakery or coffee house.

The tourism, though, that clogs these pretty little arteries has got that proper off-the-cruise-ship vibe about it, with hoards of vacant-looking Nordics, Russians and Brits being extravagantly beckoned into shops selling tiny plastic Greek warrior helmets and I heart Rhodes bum bags. It's very much the sort of scene that makes me desperately want to stride confidently through it with a bag full of groceries and a look that says "I'm just here to get some daily life done, man. Leave me be." Unfortunately this is pretty hard to pull off when the limp folded map in your hand is the only thing between you and total disorientation.

I'm drawn to the least lovely corners of this admittedly lovely place, in search of something which feels Greek. Today I had some excellently workaday tasks to complete because I needed to buy nail clippers and a phone charger. These are not things which takes you to the M&S or the Zara on any of the main shopping streets and I instead walked the cigarette butt-strewn backstreets. I had an outstanding iced coffee and bowl of crisps in the kind of bar where the staff throw an ashtray down in front of each person who arrives and where your change gets artfully sifted out of a bumbag full of coins.

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The journey to get to Rhodes was largely uneventful and definitely had that quality of floating silently through a noisy family-filled human world. I tend to get very detached in these moments, and I walk around airport terminal and bus station alike with a feeling of watching it all unfold on a screen, not unlike the weird "jog along a forest path" simulation you get on a modern gym's more expensive-looking treadmills.

But despite my being insanely early for the flight, there was no sign of a let-up of whatever force-field ensures that I must always, at some point during every journey, run towards a closing check-in desk or ticket barrier. I'd got to the gate at just the right time to eat my Pret and gaze about me, and Speedily Boarded™ the EasyJet bus to get me and the other non-extra-fee-paying pleb passengers to the actual plane, when I realised that my glasses, which had been hastily thrust into the side-netting of my rucksack, were no longer with me.

I excuse-me'd my way off the bus, and ran back up the steps to the airline passport control, went back through the gate and back into the main body of the terminal. Miracle of miracles, I found my glasses right where I'd earlier been merrily biding my time. I ran back to the gate with visions of a night in a hotel airport flashing through my mind, to find that the non-Speedy Boarders were still at it and the bus I'd been on 15 minutes ago was still on the tarmac. All was well with the world.

p.s. back in the old-town kitchenette, it basically goes without saying that as I was tidying up my fried egg/bread/salad meal which I'd eaten with my hands and chopped up with a fish slice, I discovered that the little table has got a drawer in it. There lies a whole array of cutlery. It's quite possible I'll never slice a lemon with a fish slice again. And there's something not unequivocally happy about that.