Now, knitting.

After the Archaeological Museum on Thursday, we went shopping. I had been struggling all week to get Google to tell me where to go for yarn. I found a rather unsatisfactory blog in which the writer complained of an Athenian shop which sold “a lot of acrylic and rough local wool”.

I had a sleeveless vest all mentally mapped out, in a heavy grey-and-white (=sheep-coloured) handspun of "rough, local wool". But where? The blogger didn't say. Eventually I found Knitmap – Google seemed uncharacteristically slow at getting me there. Recommended, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. And from Knitmap, I found four shops, close together, in central Athens.

We visited three of them. At the second, the poshest, we were told that there was no such thing as Greek wool. At the third, we found some, dark brown, handspun-looking, unplyed, perhaps fingering weight. I bought a couple of skeins, thinking a hat or two. No shaggy vest, alas.

At one of the shops, women were sitting around a table knitting in the familiar way. One of them had the yarn tensioned around the back of her neck and then wrapped around the little finger of her left hand. I was hard at work in the evenings, you will remember, on that Craftsy class in continental knitting. The whole problem comes down to the tensioning of the yarn – the hand movements are not all that difficult.

So that woman and I for a while discussed her interesting arrangement of the yarn – without much of anything in the way of a common spoken language.

Then C. wanted to shop for a leather bag. She and Greek Helen got to work on that, while I poked around in an olivewood shop next door. During our subsequent pleasant cafe lunch in a nearby square, I decided to go back and buy an olivewood bowl.

“What will you use it for?” Helen asked – her father's daughter, and it's a good question.

Inspiration came to me – I'll keep stitch markers and safety pins in it, on the table in front of me as I knit. Here it is. It has already given me a week of considerable pleasure.

I believe (I'm not going to look this up) that the gods competed for the right to give a name to the new city. Poseidon came up with a horse, indeed a useful animal. But Athene invented the olive tree and she won, because of its multiple uses. That is why it is so nice to see them growing on the battlefield of Marathon – symbol of Athens, symbol of peace. (Sparta was asked to contribute forces to fight the Persians, but couldn't, or wouldn't.)

So that's about it. You've already heard about Friday, Osios Loukos and Distomo. There, again, I wanted to take something home but I thought it would just wind up in a drawer. Mungo said to buy a fridge magnet – you can never have too many of those. So here is Osios Loukos himself, securing my husband's poll card for the forthcoming general election. Not the well-known Evangelist, but the holy monk who founded that splendid monastery.

On Saturday we went to the Byzantine Museum and saw a great many icons. On Sunday we flew home. The Greek girl at the end of our three-seat row on EasytJet had a classical profile such as I had never before seen in life, straight off an ancient vase. Not beautiful, by 21^st century standards. That strong nose, those big eyes. She was on her first visit to Edinburgh, and we gave her the window seat for landing.