Beneath this grumpy exterior communicating an aura that I really can’t be bothered talking to people is an interior radiating an aura that I can’t really be bothered talking to people. Never is this more true than at breakfast time when all I want to do is read the paper and eat my toast in complete silence. It is a character trait that potentially makes me ill-suited to travelling with a group of strangers or arguably travelling with anyone.  

Albania being a country of which I knew little and in which exploring it by yourself seems a daunting idea, I stumped up for a week long guided tour with thirteen other people. It was a tie between me and a recently divorced funeral director as to who was least posh. I probably edged it my being the only person to use the occasional swear word during the entire week. “That’s a blasted nuisance” was about the strongest language I heard. 

It was a pretty self-selecting group, the sort of people who were able to jog a museum director’s memory that it was Odysseus who gave the Cyclops wine and drop into conversation a reference to the Epic of Gilgamesh.  

If there is one thing I now know about posh English people is that they have strong views on jam and how it should be made. They can talk about it for fifteen minutes. The only thing that excites them more seems to be flowers and gardens. As someone who once put tulips in the fridge because I thought they were leeks or something, I will concede it’s not a subject in which I have any expertise. These people could talk about flowers, shrubs, the merits of oak leaf compost for hours on end. Several of them seemed to have memorised the contents of a gardening book by a woman whose name I don’t remember but who swore by oak leaf compost.  It seemed wise not to mention the tulip episode to them.  

Never having been much of a believer in talking to people at bus stops about socialism, I didn’t join in their political conversations. These took two types. There was a lot of Guardian style huffing and puffing about Trump that you couldn’t disagree with but seemed quite anaemic, though they do seem scared of him. 

The other sort was the divorced funeral director who muttered “they only want to move to Britain for the benefits” when Albanian migration was mentioned. I affected tactical deafness which wasn’t hard in a group where 50% of the people had hearing aids. Life’s too short to waste time trying to change the mind of aging Daily Heil readers is always my calculation.  

A more developed world view came from the man who worked in a senior position in Hackney in the mid 80s. He painted it as a Trotskyist dictatorship run by “the bloody Socialist Workers Party” that made Hoxha’s Albania seem like Nirvana. As I am not a fan of the SWP and he was on the wrong side of eighty at risk of dropping dead at any moment, I couldn’t be arsed putting up a defence of 80s left Labourism while drinking my beer.  

The counterweight to my standoffishness was a woman who works in the environmental sector and had been at Greenham Common. She was very solicitous towards the old man whereas on one walk I thought would kill him I was reconciled to finding him dead on the mountain path on the return journey. She was also much more polite to the racist funeral director than I ever managed to be. Why you would go out of your way to be civil to someone like that is a mystery to me.  

This was a glimpse into a world where people had worked in an art gallery owned by Jeffery Archer, spend thousands of pounds getting bookshelves made by a wonderful local carpenter and have strong views on planning permissions and the role of ombudsmen. In its way it’s as strange and alien as mid 60s Albania.