‘Sadly, my family (we had no Other Animals) went to Devon’

Despite his childhood obsession with Gerald Durrell’s Greek idyll, Paul Bloomfield never quite made it to the Ionian isle

At the age of 10 – as was the young Gerald Durrell in his autobiographical masterpiece – I fell in vicarious but earnest love with Corfu. Curled up in my suburban armchair, I devoured tales of strawberry-pink villas and tortoises and baby octopuses that blush brown and spit out clouds of ink. I wished that my parents and I – like that hilariously caricatured clan – had “…fled from the gloom of the English summer, like a flock of migrating swallows”.

Sadly, no. My family (we had no

Other Animals) went to Devon. Every summer. Without fail. Even today I remain enchanted by Exmoor, its craggy cliffs, red deer, starfish and seabirds. But the Bristol Channel is… well, not quite “butterfly blue”.

Danziger and Theroux displaced Durrell on my bookshelves, and somehow Corfu became diminished in my imagination. Seeking strange creatures and unfamiliar cultures alongside bath-warm waters and reefs, I ventured to Principe and the Perhentian Islands, Panama and Zanzibar. I’ve peered at Corfu across the strait from Albania, a mere mile or two yonder, but I’m still to set foot on an Ionian – or a Cyclade, Sporade or Dodecanese, for that matter.

Four decades on, long-haul on hold, Corfu’s allure is resurgent. The plotting has begun: I’ll go overland, traversing “France rain-washed and sorrowful, Switzerland like a Christmas cake, Italy exuberant”, as did the Durrells en route to that strawberry-pink villa. True, I am too late to meet the Rose-beetle Man, bugs fizzing around his hirsute head. But I might yet stumble upon a somnolent whitewashed hamlet, a festival of saints or a pellucid cove in which ink-spitting octopuses shelter still.