Flashback

Interior designer Ashley Hicks

IF I HAD MY WAY, I’d never go on holiday. I find them a little bit distressing if truth be told, and always rather wish I was back at home in Oxfordshire, making things and working.

I think it’s the idleness that bothers me, but I also just like home. It used to drive my ex-wife Allegra mad because you’re supposed to love going away, but I’m afraid I’m an old grump about the whole thing. I quite enjoy a bit of evening life and the occasional drunk lunch, but when it’s day after day with the same people it can get awfully tedious. My ideal holiday would be driving around somewhere, possibly alone, looking at beautiful houses and taking photographs.

Patmos, however, is one of the few places for which I can be successfully persuaded to leave the British Isles and be sociable. A small Greek island in the Aegean Sea, it is truly the most beautiful place. It’s a holy island which once belonged to the monastery on top of the hill.

I first went there as a child of about eight when we sailed around Greece on one of my father’s client’s boats. We stopped on the island and I remember being captivated by the idea that this was where St John the Evangelist wrote The Apocalypse, in a little cave. It’s all part of the magic of the place.

I finally went back years later with Allegra and our eldest daughter Angelica, pictured here grinning at her mother behind the camera, clutching what I was convinced was a half-eaten packet of popcorn before Angelica put me right. ‘No, you fool, it’s my armband.’ At 55 I’m too ancient to remember these things now. Though recently I’ve become a father again, so it’s all beginning to come back to me.

Angelica was almost three here and it must be one of very few family photos that feature me. I tend to take the pictures rather than be in them. We had rented a fairly basic fishing boat for the day. I’m clearly trying to read my book and thinking I look frightfully chic in my Persol sunglasses. They were the ones that folded up into nothing. I thought they were seriously cool.

These days, my daughters are a great reason to travel. Angelica, 25, lives in New York, and Ambrosia, who’s 21 and recently graduated from Oxford, is about to move to Milan to do an internship. I have friends in Milan, so I imagine I’ll visit fairly often. And at home, my wife Kata and I have little Caspian, our eight-month-old son.

We didn’t go back to Patmos as a family after that, although I’ve been back since. Allegra, being half Italian, never liked to be out of reach of an Italian doctor, and Patmos, not having been under Italian occupation since the 1940s, didn’t suit her.

I can’t say I blame her. I adore Patmos. But I much prefer normal life, and probably always will.

I quite enjoy the occasional drunk lunch, but when it’s day after day with the same people it can get awfully tedious

Ashley Hicks with his daughter Angelica on a 1990s family holiday to Greece