What is remembered: Athens.

From my six months in Athens as a young adult, two people and incidents strike me as memorable now. One was a tiny crooked lady who appeared at the Piraeus underground station one day. She was the colour of dust all over - hair, skin, clothes - wrinkled and extremely small. She walked right to the centre of the station, chucked down the dust-coloured sack she had been carrying, threw back her head, and shouted in a voice as broken as it was loud: "Sika freska sika! Sika freska sika!" - a fig seller.

I had never seen fresh figs; I had to go and get a closer look. Her sack was full of figs, deep purple in colour, dusty, onion-shaped. I bought a small paper bagful of them, out of curiosity, although I didn't know how to eat them. I don't remember how much she asked for the figs she had dragged on her back from God knows where. I believe it was ridiculously little, even when measured against my vanishingly small Athenian wages. Somehow I managed to peel the fig - with my fingers? With the Swiss Army knife which got lost in Athens but which I might still have had in my pocket then? In any case, the taste was delicious, the whole fruit out of this world, alien, from another planet.