A friend messaged on New Year’s. He was skiing in Davos. He is the type to compete with the big dogs. Good luck to him and the rest of the 1%. I hope his stakeholders hold his hand on his deathbed while whistling softly the tune they first danced to.
You couldn’t pay me to swap places with any of them.
During the day on New Year’s Eve, my city, Thessaloniki, turns into a massive street party. Live music reaches every corner. Bars and restaurants spread on the pavements. Dancing and singing crowds spil into the street and stop a traffic that is always bad but on New Year’s Eve truly tests the most prized Greek cultural value of nothing on time.
I had good holiday breaks before, but this year, I went through a second puberty. I went out every single night for two weeks.
During my actual puberty and early 20s, I was anxious and couldn’t switch off. I would go out, but it often looked like I was not enjoying myself. I was hostage to my moods and lived in my head. I am hard of hearing and felt easily isolated in a crowd.
My home town was the crime scene of my unfuckable hate nerd days. In more ways than one, I always left my heart in London. Greek men were invisible to me because I used to be invisible to them. The only touch I knew from boys in my school would, at best, be to push me out of their way.
Now I go back and find Greek people more beautiful than I left them. Age expands our repertoire. The ugly ones are always funny, and the boring ones are always hot. Greece’s God is a magnanimous one.
One aspect I struggled with when going out was the music. I used to find electronic music challenging. From 1-10, I give it a generous 4 during daytime. Men usually can convince me to go to a rave, but I need to find them irresistible to make the ear rape worth it. It is entirely understandable that most people need to snort horse tranquiliser to enjoy it.
I am generally not a big music fan. I like music, but I passionately love so many other things in my life that I would not give music a spot on the Pantheon of my favourite arts. My desert island disc would be a book. The last thing I want to listen to before I die is Hilary Benn in the UK Parliament in 2016 saying, ‘What we know about fascism is that it needs to be defeated’.
My favourite music to dance to is Greek and trashy and, failing that, Pop American (see Britney Spears and the other noughties Queens). This is the fast food of music. It asks nothing of you. The tunes are familiar, and you can mouth the lyrics if you feel awkward on the dance floor and don’t know what to do with your hands.
But you grow up, you ditch the chicken tenders and force yourself to nibble the Roquefort because that’s what adults do. And then you surprise yourself. It smells odd but tangy, creamy, and complicated and misunderstood, like the teenager that first turned her nose at it.
Something similar happened to me with electronic music this year.
I usually meet this wretched noise pollution with resistance. But this time, I found how to let it in. It bore me for the first hour. I chatted around with my ~fellow kids~ until I caught a wave, and it clicked. You shouldn’t listen to electronic music ambiently. You need to focus on it; this is why drugs help its enjoyers so much, particularly stimulants. They allow you to hyperfocus on one strain of sound and let it weave you into the next one, and then the next one, like surfing the ocean. You have to let yourself get picked up and thrown around by it. It is good. It finally feels like art. I love humans for coming up with shit like that.
I also love the youthfulness and casualness of my city’s social culture. Nobody ever rushes you, the waiter, or your friend. Coffees turn into beer, and beer turns into cocktails, which turn into shots, which turn into filo pastry filled with cream patisserie and dustings of cinnamon and powdered sugar.
You start your night with a friend, and by the morning, you have hopped around three different groups of people who haven’t talked to you since high school or who just met you, but it is never weird that you are following them to the next bar.
At the New Year’s party I went to, the age groups were 21-31 apart from one lady in her 70s with white hair but for a flair of red at the back. She lived on the top floor of my friends’ building and joined the party because why not. That’s Thessaloniki for you.
Is this scenario impossible in London? Yes, 100%. Apart from the fact that many pubs in central London close at 11:00 p.m., there is a dearth of social spaces that accommodate both chill chit-chat and dancing. You either go to a pub to chat or a club to get audio assaulted.
I adore a neighbourhood called Valaoritou, where old, abandoned buildings have been transformed into spots where millennials and Zoomers congregate. It has bars with every type of music in between places to get a bite that stay open through the night.
In London, you must arrange to catch up with friends weeks in advance. A coffee means a coffee, not ‘let’s meet and see where it takes us’. When the hour is done, so is your friend, off to their next appointment. People rarely buy each other shots because they cost a kidney (not that I drink them, but it’s nice to see flowers being watered even when you identify as a cactus).
A city with a nightlife like ours needs institutions. Institutions are not just buildings and organisations with written constitutions and ceremonies. They are people, like the old guy on the seafront who, rain or sunshine, takes his speaker and sings Greek folk songs on a wavelength that resurrects the dead and instils fear of God in the living.
I have a friend from school whose parents are Chinese immigrants. They opened a Chinese restaurant in the city centre and it became a bit of a landmark. He studied in the US and now works for Apple in San Francisco.
Eventually, he wants to return, maybe opening a noodle shop that stays open all night and caters to the hungry, drunk youth he was and always will be. He doesn’t care if it makes a profit; he just wants to add one more brushstroke to the work of art that is our city. At the eye level of the casual tourist looking at Thessaloniki, that stroke will be insignificant. What’s one more shade on a canvas that is already full? But to the apprentice ready to pair blue cheese and bop to techno? Now that’s dope I’d pay a fortune just to try.
