By Ian Parker

On the second day, I walked with Kristina and Michael down towards the village, past a tiny white church, to where the sea was thumping into air pockets in the rocks, making the sound of a door being closed on an expensive car. It had rained earlier, and the day felt autumnal, but it was still just warm enough to want to dive into the water from a concrete jetty.

‘I think Kristina’s approach to yoga reflects this place, and vice-versa,’ Michael said after we swam. ‘It’s very relaxed. You don’t have to starve yourself, or do without electricity. There are retreats where you’re in the middle of nowhere, you sleep in tents, you’re hardly eating anything. By the end of the week, you’re like this’-he pulled a frightening thin face. ‘People in cities live enough in their own heads; the last thing they need is to get more isolation. If people want to come here and go no a diet, or not have sex for two weeks, that’s fine. It’s a personal thing.’

Sitting in the afternoon sunshine, Kristina said she had learnt yoga as a young woman in Athens-‘My family looked at me like I’d come out of a UFO’-and through yoga met her British husband. ‘He was strong, very handsome, everybody in a room looked at him.’ They had a yoga life together: ‘I had the diet, I had the body,’ she said. Then he became ill, and two years ago he died of cancer, leaving her with two young sons. It was clear that 20 years of macrobiotic food and yoga could not make a person invincible, ‘and yoga became something that was in my life, not my whole lfe. I’m a mother, I love cinemas, I see people. I want to have a life. My yoga practice is a way that helps me enjoy other things in life.’

A Karitinos-Ireland retreat, then, meant two hours of yoga-intense enough to feel your body begin to change within a week-followed by coffee, moblie-phone calls and long discussions about the advantages of Hove over Rottingdean. We ate, and discussed eating, and, in mocking imitation of a friend with foolish New Age beliefs, Kristina waved her hand over her lunch then blew on her fingers, saying , ‘Yes, now it’s fat free.’

After a few days of this, we went to the nearest small town, Aeropoli, and were overwhelmed by the crowds: a man, a van, a donkey. We sat down in a restaurant with an unexpected print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks on the wall, and when a car drove past, we all jumped.