Tim Dowling: a literary festival in Greece doesn’t inspire much hope – and sadly, nor do I | Life and style

I’m at a literary festival in Greece, standing by some sort of colonnade, drink in hand, fulfilling my role as a non-luminary. Ahead of me, hands are being shaken and warm words exchanged. The sun has just set, and there is a faint glow coming off various luminaries.

“Why are you just standing there?” my wife says, coming up behind me.

“It’s what I do,” I say.

I’ve been to lots of literary festivals without my wife, where I spend a lot of time either in my hotel room or in a dark corner of the opening drinks thing. At some point I’m usually required to give a talk, and then I go home. I do not, at any point, give off any light.

But I’m not even doing a talk at this festival; I’m just here to play in the band. We did it last year and we’ve been asked back. But we aren’t playing until the penultimate evening, and in the meantime my schedule is full: swim, rehearse, attend talks outlining different forms of geopolitical doom, lunch, swim.

“There are people you know from last year,” my wife says. “You can’t stand behind a tree all night.”

“You’re underestimating my commitment to this strategy,” I say.

The next day I’m drinking a coffee between events, staring at the sea and thinking about geopolitical doom, when a woman comes up and introduces herself. She reminds me that I once gave a talk at a university where she was a journalism student. This would have been about 15 years ago. It was possibly the first time anyone had asked me to give a talk about anything, and I remember being both inept and a little graceless.

“No, you were fine,” she says.

“I don’t remember what I said,” I say.

“Me neither,” she says.

Anyway, she didn’t become a journalist as a result of my uninspiring words – she now manages cycling tours, one of which, it turns out, I’ve been on.

As lunchtime approaches, my wife comes back from swimming.

“How’s it going?” she says.

“Fine,” I say. “We’re all doomed, but in the meantime I think I’ve signed up for a second cycling holiday.”

That evening I go online and track down a contemporary student report of the university talk I gave 15 years ago. “He referred to himself as a ‘frightened little man’,” it reads. I’m struck by how long I’ve been committed to this version of myself.

I attend half a dozen more talks promising imminent extinction. The penultimate evening comes, and the band plays to a big crowd on a pier looking out to sea. The next morning people stop me in the street and at the talks to express their appreciation. For a moment I get a faint idea of what it must be like to give off a little light.

At the end of the final lunch a woman introduces herself and tells me I once gave her stepson a day’s work experience on a journalistic assignment exploring urban wildlife. This would have been 25 years ago.

“I remember him,” I say. “I remember the whole day.”

I had contacted various guides and arranged to meet them in different parts of London where secret and exotic wildlife could be found: rare birds, insects, plants and bats. I did research, made lists and planned a route.

The day before, I received a parcel containing a full safari outfit, which I was to wear in all the photographs. That, it turns out, was the assignment.

When the appointed morning arrived, it was raining and freakishly cold for July. I feared the safari outfit would mean the guides wouldn’t take me seriously, but it was worse than that: they thought I wasn’t taking them seriously. They were not happy. I was not happy. The photographer was not happy, and my work experience person was miserable.

“There wasn’t really much for him to do,” I tell the woman. “But I made him carry my pith helmet because I refused to wear it on the tube.”

On the wall of my office there is a framed photograph of me dressed in that stupid safari outfit, rain dripping off the pith helmet, pretending to look through binoculars. The caption reads: “Anyone Seen My Dignity?”

Every time I look at it I think of the poor work experience person, standing off to the side, shivering in the drizzle and holding my butterfly net.

“Anyway, after spending the day with you, he decided he didn’t want to be a journalist,” says the woman. “So I just wanted to thank you.”

At the end of that day I decided I didn’t want to be a journalist either, but it was too late.