It's ages since the holiday pictures were developed - not just the heap of prints from One-Hour Photo, but the handful of bright images left lying in a kind of easy-access inbox in the mind. My favourite is of a small white boat, a small white beach and water of such an intense turquoise that for once the travel brochure's talk of azure sea seems underplayed. You need to add a soundtrack: the tinkle of bells, for the only other creatures on this beach are a few long-haired goats, stepping down the cliff to doze in the shade of a single olive tree. Cephalonia, July.
Going there was an accident. A late substitute for over-booked Corsica when a palace revolution chez nous had quashed my scheme for another vineyards-and-cathedrals tour and established the rights of the majority to sea as well as sun. The largest of the seven Ionian islands dotted down Greece's western coast sounded tempting - rugged and unspoilt. Only when we'd paid the deposit did the ominous thought strike. Cephalonia is the setting for Louis De Bernieres's Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a book that has sold about a million copies. Would the whole place have become a themed pilgrimage site, with De Bernieres bus tours and a clatter of Corelli tavernas?
The journey from the airport was disconcerting. First, starting almost at the runway, a long ribbon of beach development looked as soulless as the Costa del Sol. North of the capital, Argostoli, the driver dutifully slowed so that we could see Farsa, the abandoned village that provided Louis de Bernieres with his novel's backdrop when he first came to Cephalonia on holiday in 1992 (dragged, it is reported, by a wife who had rebelled against yet another holiday in France). Next came landscape as bare and arid as the moon. Where were the dreamy little harbours, where you'd sit on a rickety chair, tucking into squid freshly roasted over charcoal? Where were the houses dripping with flowers?
Further on, is where. Tucked around the northernmost tip of the island, backed by slopes suddenly lush with slender cypresses, lies Fiskardo, achingly pretty - a survivor of the 1953 earthquake that destroyed so many townships further south. As Greek island villages go, it is a complete surprise - not a jumble of white cubes but, as a legacy of the Venetians who were here for 300 years, a long waterfront of houses with pitched, terracotta roofs and fronts painted the colours of Dodoni's 30 icecream flavours - raspberry, canteloupe melon, pistachio, lemon sorbet. For two weeks, this was our town. Our port, I suppose I should say. Because it was the boat - a brand new, sun-canopied, number with a nippy outboard motor - that made this holiday special. Christos, our boatman (think Rod Stewart gone swarthy) delivered a succinct tutorial, aimed at curbing the rally-driving instincts of the family males. Then we were off along the coast in search of perfect, empty beaches. Few of them could ever have been reached any other way.
It's a badge of civilisation, almost, to decry beach holidays. "I couldn't just lie on a beach for a fortnight," friends say, simultaneously implying tedium, mental torpor and the kind of people you'd travel a long way to avoid. I've said it myself (in the Tuscan-art-treasures phase, probably). But here, suddenly, lying on beaches took on a whole new appeal.
Part of the fun was in the preliminary survey - put-putting into narrow inlets to see which one we liked best. Sun, shade, number of sea urchins - these aspects would be weighed up, along with the human population, if any (usually holidaying Italians and, mamma mia!, rather vocal). One other boat was all right, two seemed like a crowd. The decision made, we'd moor offshore, then swim in - I the laughing stock, with The Age of Innocence or some other slim, untaxing volume wrapped in a towel and borne landwards on my head.
It was wonderful for snorkelling, that buoyant, unbelievably clear water, with tiers of unfamiliar fish skirting a deeply submerged limestone shelf. But I loved doing nothing. I could have sat for hours, admiring the pure white stones beneath me - sometimes round and smooth, sometimes painfully jagged, always the colour of sun-bleached bones. Or staring out to the misty outline of Ithaca, Homer's island, only five nautical miles away. They say Penelope came over to Cephalonia's secret coves to swim and cavort with her lovers when Odysseus was away.
Eventually, curiosity got us moving. One day we piled into a rented car and went off to inspect two famous beauty spots on the west coast. Seen from the road high above, Myrtos Beach is every tourist board's dream - a crescent of white sand with translucent jade green sea. But close up, the sand was coarse as Alpen; the water cloudy with a strong undertow - and cars were lined up all the way along, blistering in the midday sun.
On to Assos, a tiny village with a spectacular location, on an isthmus linking the mainland to a headland crowned with a Venetian fortress. So perfect had it looked in the brochure that we'd almost fallen for it. But . . . another but. It seemed stiflingly small and dispirited, somehow, compared to Fiskardo. Back we raced to our verandah up above the harbour, where you could sit in the afternoon breeze and watch the boats ply to and fro.
Another day, we had a jollier outing - from Cephalonia to the islands of Lefkas, Meganisi and Scorpios on what was billed the Onassis Dream Cruise. Barely 10 minutes out from the harbour mouth, our chirpy Liverpudlian tour guide launched into her Onassis spiel, which went on all morning: Christina's drug and obesity problems; Thierry Roussel's infidelities; Ari's dodgy taste on the yacht Christina, where the bar stools were apparently covered in the penis skin of the white whale.
It was hard to decide which was more hilarious, the deadpan delivery of this bizarre commentary or the outrage it provoked among uppercrust English passengers, who stomped around threatening to demand their money back. Scorpios, the Onassis-owned island, is well worth seeing, by the way, as an example of how to turn a wilderness into a vacation playground without messing up its looks. Nidri on Lefkas, on the other hand, is just plain tacky.
The yacht Christina, sold off to the Greek government in part settlement of death duties, is quietly decaying somewhere; but its spirit lives on flamboyantly in Ionian waters. Dining on the quayside at nightfall in Fiskardo, we found ourselves mesmerised by the Boat People slipping back to their luxury craft - mummies and small daughters with matching diamond earrings flashing in the moonlight.
What of the Captain Corelli people? Never a sign. No T-shirt reminders, not even the book itself for sale. We'd been in Fiskardo over a week before I noticed in Cafe Tselentis - a marvellous, high-ceilinged place in which gentle morning Bach would yield to full-throttle Clapton at night - a faded cutting from the London Times. I asked Minas, the cafe owner, if what it said was true, and he said yes: Louis de Bernieres came here a lot. Apart from that, nothing. It was as if Cephalonia still felt too pained by the event at the novel's core - the 1943 massacre by German troops of 28,000 Italians who had surrendered - to want to acknowledge it at all.
Would we go back? Probably not - but only because the sea might no longer be quite such a startlingly empty expanse of intense blue. Ours might not be the only boat bobbing in the bay. The menu at Lagoudera - homeliest restaurant of the lot - might be too polished up to make its proud boast of "special intestines". The film of Captain Corelli's Mandolin may change everything.