My father, the headmaster of a local school, said, before he died of heart failure, that he’d always regretted not becoming a postman. A gentle job, he believed, wandering the streets with nothing but dogs to worry about, would have extended his life. Idiotic, I considered this: worrying was an excitement I needed. But now I had some idea what he meant.

Not that he’d have survived on a postman’s salary. I had begun to realize that I, too, wasn’t used to today’s financial world. I’d always bought my own milk, but had no idea of the price. I’d seriously underestimated what I’d need as a New-body. The price of condoms! Apart from the cash I’d put aside for my return trip, I’d spent most of my money and couldn’t use my bank accounts or credit cards. Until my return I needed a cheap place to stay and money for my keep.

It was in Greece, on a boat one morning, that I met a middle-aged woman with a rucksack who was going to study photography at a “spiritual center” on the island I was visiting. She had hitchhiked from London to visit the Center, which was known to be particularly rejuvenative for those suffering from urban breakdown. When I told her my sad story, she offered to take me along with her.

While I waited in a café in a nearby square, drinking wine and reading Cavafy, she went to the Center and inquired whether there was any work I could do in exchange for food, a place to sleep, and a little payment. Otherwise, I would find a job in a bar or disco and crash on the beach. The woman returned and told me the Center had been looking for an “oddjob” to clean the rooms and work in the kitchen. Providing the leader didn’t dislike me, I would eat for free, earn a little money, and sleep on the roof.

We walked down to a handful of flower-dotted, whitewashed buildings on the edge of an incline, with a view of the sea. She opened the door in a long, high wall.

“Look,” she said. I did: the devil peeping into paradise. “They must be between classes.”

It was a shaded garden where the women—naturally, it was mostly women—sat on benches. They talked, wrote earnestly in notebooks, and read. In one corner, a woman was singing; another was doing yoga, another combing her hair; on a massage table, a body was being kneaded.

Here, these middle-aged, middle-class, and, of course, divorced women from London took “spiritual” nourishment, meditation, aromatherapy, massage, yoga, dream therapy. What baby with its mother ever had it better than in this modern equivalent of the old-style spa or sanatorium? The three men I saw were middle-aged, with hollow chests and varicose veins.

She asked, “Will you be all right here?”

“I think I’ll manage,” I replied.