The St Lucian poet Derek Walcott made a similar complaint about European attitudes towards the Caribbean. In his 2000 poem Omeros he mapped the Caribbean onto the Aegean, and satirised the English who sought “somewhere, with its sunlit islands/ where what they called history could not happen”. Yet St Lucia’s 20th-century history has been far more pacific than that of Greece. The one post-war work which has brought this turbulence into the British consciousness is Louis de Bernière’s 1994 novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which describes events in the Ionian island of Cephalonia before, during and after the Italian and German occupations. Much criticised in Greece for its pro-British and anti-Resistance politics, this novel has nonetheless served the purpose of yoking the idea of Greece to some of the most terrible aspects of its recent history in the British imagination. Somewhat less-known, the 1969 Franco-Algerian film Z — nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards — successfully evoked the sinister Greek pseudo-democracy that preceded the 1967 coup.

When I first started visiting Greece in the early 2000s, it was a far stabler, happier place than that depicted in either of these works of fiction. Since then, it has declined again. The economy has staggered. Tens of thousands of refugees have arrived as a result of unrelated wars. Degrading acts of austerity have been imposed by the EU, including the privatisation of coastlines, and the much-resented enforced opening of shops on Sundays. Greeks have proved powerless to effect any improvement in their situation through the ballot box.

The resultant tension is manifest in behaviour that was unknown before. My husband was recently mugged by a taxi driver. I witnessed a spectacular example of road rage in Athens two months ago. Thus the anger that is glimpsed periodically in British news footage of demonstrations on Syntagma Square is between-whiles dissipated in tiny, life-degrading acts of fury. In the meantime, Mykonos has probably grown fractionally more tolerant of the barbaras behaviour of tourists who will keep its economy afloat.

And yet, despite all their grounds for complaint at the EU, there is no significant appetite to leave it — only the euro. They look upon the British decision to leave with bewilderment, perceiving the British to have had the fat end of the EU while they have received its sharpest. The most conservative and wealthiest Greeks are uniformly opposed to leaving even the euro, and thus are even more bewildered by the British referendum result. And a post-Brexit Britain that defines itself as anti-immigrant might no longer be the obvious place of refuge for Greek kings in exile.

In the light of Brexit, a Greek passport has suddenly become more attractive to me. Perhaps the frailest European barque into which I might jump, the Greek one is nonetheless the one available to me. Or so I thought. It emerges that Greeks do not dispense their citizenship lightly. The website detailing the required residency requirements, language test, and history and culture examination, is significantly written in Greek alone. The days when the son of one of Greece’s more famous families could procure citizenship for his Anglo-German wife are, it seems, over.

Thus modernised — thus EUropeanised — is Greece today, for all its current desperation. And so I am holding fire on my learning of Greek grammar. I will wait and see, and find out where our two countries stand in five years’ time. But I also fervently hope that the Greece to which we plan one day to retire is one in which I will feel no compulsion to disengage from the historical present in order to bathe (properly clothed) in an uninformed Arcadia.