Yianna, the school secretary, and I got on from the word go.

Yianna had red hair and spoke with a cigarette voice while she put on some coffee or had a go at a student for some minor misdemeanour. She loved Greek Soap Opera, Baywatch, pulp quiz shows, and trashy thrillers. The opposite of me, in fact - well, I didn't watch Baywatch for the story. But we both liked Rembetika music, and she was always promising to take me to the local 'Rembetika joint' where some good musicians played those kind of songs. Her husband Nikos was obsessed with horses; the flat was a shrine to this much-loved beast: small wooden, enamel and procelain horses galloped across their windowshelves, bookshelves and mantelpieces; pictures of horses adorned their walls; mugs either had horses printed on them, or London, where Yianna had been.
Nikos had done National Service and was proud of the fact that he had been one of the worst shots in the corps; Yianna was an ace cook who could make even the bony fish of the lake taste good.
Today was the first day of teaching, and Yianna, like everybody else, had some advice. "Push them," she said. "Be strict! But quietly strict. Don't yell at them. The last teacher used to shout 'shut up, donkeys!' and you could hear his voice down by the lake. The teacher before allowed them to carve their names into the tables, though he was otherwise excellent. The teacher before the one before that was an alcoholic and turned up to class completely off her head. Oh, the dramas."
"So, what you mean is that as long as I can stand up in the classroom and keep control, I'll be all right?"
"That is all that is required."
Athina Kosatara, the School director, took me aside, and told me: "follow the teacher's book. Keep pairwork and groupwork down to a minimum unless it doesn't cause a discipline problem." I could feel all the wise words of my TEFL teacher trainers turning to dust in my ears. No wonder they had all warned me about going to Greece. "Don't teach there," they had said, 'we've heard some real horror stories." But I had assumed because I knew the Greeks, I would somehow be better equipped to deal with that sort of thing. I had some serious thinking to do. I had been taught to teach using TEFL methods, and from what I had been told, it seemed that I would have to teach Greek students using a Victorian approach.