Mykonosian hay

Night clubs have always been one of life's more impenetrable mysteries. Like any habitable structure they're at one level just a means of regulating air temperature, humidity and composition and diverting whatever bits of it decide they want to be a liquid for a bit. They're also fitted out with interesting sound systems and interesting lighting systems. But reading up on reinforced concrete design or the DMX protocol has singularly failed to help.

On the face of it, night clubs rent access to a dance floor, play music, and, usually, sell drinks. They sell a service but then bend over backwards to stop people buying it. Dress codes, arbitrarily long queues, other random restrictions. So that's not what they're selling.

They're selling fun. Which is where comprehension fails. Clubbers are both the customer and the product. The attractive people, the alphas, the high status (in the narrowly defined mating market at least) males and females who who make others feel good just by being around them. They're the product. The remainder, the betas and gammas, we're at best customers, competing for a limited supply, at worst anti-product, contaminating and lowering the value of the stock. Hm perhaps incomprehension is preferable.

Cavo Paradiso is perhaps the epitome of this. There are two ticket offices in little Venice, beauties outside spruiking it to passers by. To other members of our temporary travelling tribe. But not to me. Which is precisely why I attended a night club at the age of 39. 'You don't want me? Well sod you, I'm bloody well going!'. Is reverse psychology now a marketing strategy? Did I spend more than I cost the club in lost revenue as word of it being invaded by 39 year old nerds spreads among and drove away their normal clientele?

Although it nominally opens at 11:30pm, we were told it doesn't really start until 1am. To my raised eyebrows, she said, 'Well it is a NIGHT club'. Good point that - I'd never thought about it so literally. Though that doesn't explain why it continues on till 8:30am, about two hours past sunrise.

It's worth describing the five members of the temporary travelling tribe, which had coalesced at breakfast in the Athenian Hostel a few days previously and the reason I'd come to Mykonos. There was the Artist, hiding his extraordinary range of gifts under the guise of a bogan Queensland surfer dude. There was the Activist, a steely and beautiful Iranian-Australian engineer from a country where activism has both meaning and consequences. There was the Entrepreneur, an Indian whose Mumbai business had after a brutal first year, finally taken off, and who was prone to truly Lacedaemonian laconicisms - 'the strategy is to get fucked' and the perfect distillation of Greek economic woes - 'if you spend more than you earn, you are fucked.' Last but not least, the Traveller, a Korean America who'd spent the previous year travelling and had perfected this into an astonishing easy going competence. (The sixth member, Billy the Kid, a young Asian-American whose stream of consciousness reporting on his internal dialog never left you wondering what he was thinking (although given his intellect, *understanding* it wasn't always so easy), had decided to take a Parisian vacation from his Greek vacation and couldn't make it.)

On a dare from the Artist, I shaved the hair off my head, what hadn't already left of its own accord that is, and most of my three month old beard. Successfully channelling Heisenberg, and donning my reindeer t-shirt (they are the coolest animal) I felt like Rein-man (more poor fool me).

The Traveller and the Entrepreneur turned in at 11pm, to get some shut eye, and I stared at the ceiling for two hours, until 1am rolled round, we could now be considered fashionably late, and I made sure I was loud enough rouse the others. Add another 20 minutes for two iterations of '10 more minutes' and we scooted off.

We actually almost made it. The scooters have fairly big fuel tanks but given they were handed to us empty, we were going to make damn sure they were handed back empty, and there's no surer way than by running out of gasoline on a remote hillside at 1:30am. With one scooter still spluttering on fumes, we ran relay to get all three of us the final few kilometres to the door by 2am, which in an unusual bout of luck is precisely when the Artist and the Activist arrived.

Cavo Paradiso looks vaguely as if Jabba the Hutt had spotlit his palace in purple. Quite impressive in its commanding location on a promontory overlooking Paradise Beach. The Artist was patted down but the rest of us breezed in with barely a glance. I'm still vaguely offended. There was MDMA available inside, dangling as it does at the end of its very long supply chain, but alas this was a black market inaccessible by someone so very (in the words of a maori mate) white.

It was a techno night with DJing by Marcel Dettmann and Nina Kraviz. If any music is my music, it would be techno, most closely approximating the limitations of the 80s sound chips I grew up with. I confess I was a little disappointed. The music seemed competent, but not much in the way of melody. There is supposed to be melody, right? (I must study this...)

And then from 2am to 6am I danced. I'd never actually danced before. The results were quite as horrifying as you'd expect. So much so they drove somebody the following evening to break the unwritten rule of never ever photographing a stranger on the dance floor (I hope he framed my middle finger nicely). But dancing at a night club was on the List and I was NOT going to lie on my death bed wondering. And I did actually dance. I had previously attempted to move my limbs in time to music, looking rather like Mr Bean, I'm told, but for the first time I could feel the tracks in space the music demanded, and did my best to follow them. I know they were nothing more tangible than weird transient synchronisations between the auditory and proprioception chunks of my brain, but the sensation was real. I do wonder whether the sheer appallingness of my dancing was due to these imaginary tracks being way out of kilter or due to my kinaesthetic incompetence at following them. Either way I continue to experience Arnold J Rimmer-esque knuckle gnawing embarrassment at the recollection, but given knuckle gnawing embarrassment was also on the List, that's two items down. Just one thing - NEVER EVER FUCKING AGAIN.

The spruiker was right that the density on the dance floor didn't plateau until 4am. Unfortunately the plateau was somewhat higher than the entirely passive ventilation could deal with and the temperature and quite possibly oxygen depletion started to become noticeable. The gender balance on the dance floor had also tilted heavily to the male with most girls having drifted away to cluster at the peripheral tables. Probably as a result, the dance floor became aligned in a radial pattern around the DJ. To be clear, there was nothing much to look at, just the DJ in their headphones, and in Nina's case an abstract pattern on the screen behind her, of the sort Hydra might use to encourage 'compliance', but perhaps it helped everybody imagine they weren't just dancing with a bunch of other dudes.

By 6am it was starting to hurt but the sky was lightening, and by mutual agreement we could leave with heads held high. Metaphorically (one was visibly wilting), and for the most part. One lucky head was by now otherwise engaged and nowhere to be seen.

Leaving behind a diminishing but still lively club, the Traveller was offered the solitary functioning scooter, and in lieu of more fuel, our heartfelt prayers. The Activist, Entrepreneur and myself piled into a taxi. 'That will be 50€.' We hand over 15€. 'No, 50€.'. 'Excuse me?' '20€ for this hotel. 30€ for that hotel.' Ah. Mykonos has a fairly short tourist season and one must make hay while the sun shines, must one not? Well this hay certainly felt well forked. We had no real choice, and the driver knew that and to his credit didn't even both justifying why we'd just paid him the equivalent of an international airfare.

But as far as sympathy for Greece in its time of crisis. Yeah, go fork yourselves.

Astonishingly, the Traveller also made it, though too early to buy fuel on his way. As the lightest and most fuel-efficient, I volunteered, figuring I didn't even mind the possibly 8 kilometre hike to the petrol station if the 'Scooter That Could' finally, *inevitably* ran dry. After a heated discussion over the suitability of PET water bottles for petrol storage, the Entrepreneur finally won the day over the EU regulators with a persuasive, 'What the fuck do you think we do in India?'. Well, the scooter did its bit, and I did my bit, and the other two did their bit. And then we had two scooters again.