A summer of islands, books and history

Career breaks are rare opportunities to step back, rest, read, reflect, renew and prepare for a new adventure. They are treasured golden periods to step away from the rush of daily life.

Five years ago, I had one such cherished opportunity when Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), where I worked at the time, offered a three-month paid sabbatical to any employee who had been in the organisation for more than a decade. Having worked for CSW for – at the time – over 15 years, I became the first to take up the offer.

CSW imposed no conditions to the sabbatical bar one: that the person on sabbatical should not work. At all. That meant I had to hand in my work laptop and phone.

I divided my sabbatical into three parts.

First, I wanted to travel to a part of the world I had never been to before. It was obvious to me that the Holy Land – Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee – was my destination. I was fortunate that it was during a period of relative calm in the region, and so I had a very happy two weeks in Israel and Palestine.

Second, I wanted a spiritual component, and so I went on retreat, at St Beuno’s in north Wales.

And third, a period of learning. I was working on human rights in Asia, particularly Myanmar, North Korea, China and Indonesia. I had studied some Chinese earlier in life, but I knew that to advance to a level of proficiency in Mandarin, or to learn Burmese or Korea, would require years of study. Yet Bahasa Indonesia – the language of the world’s largest archipelago, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority state, the fourth largest population and the third largest democracy – is a comparatively easy language to learn in a short space of time. So I spent six weeks in a language school in Yogyakarta and Bali.

Five years on, I have had an opportunity for another mini sabbatical.

On 2 August I finished four years as Chief Executive of Hong Kong Watch, a charity I co-founded to advocate for freedom, human rights and the rule of law in Hong Kong, and on 2 September I will take up a new role, as Director of Research for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). At the end of a busy, stressful and at times heartbreaking few years trying to defend freedom in a city that has transformed from open society to police state, and ahead of a new challenge trying to help revive and strengthen our own freedoms and civilisation, it seemed right to take a break.

So what did I do?

First, I did what I love to do most and should do more often – I went on retreat. My first choice was St Beuno’s, because I love the Ignatian model, but it was fully booked, so I decided to join the Benedictine monks at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight.

Quarr Abbey.

I blended Ignatian and Benedictine spirituality, structuring my day around four periods of meditation, Ignatian style, using Austin Ivereigh’s First Belong to God: On Retreat With Pope Francis. I walked in the woods around Quarr Abbey, visited the pigs and sheep in surrounding fields, and prayed in the Pilgrim’s Chapel. I lit candles and said prayers for my friend Jimmy Lai, the courageous pro-democracy campaigner and entrepreneur currently in jail in Hong Kong, and for all political prisoners across China, as well as for Myanmar’s fallen democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, now in jail, and the country’s brave Cardinal Charles Bo, who inspired and received me into the Church 11 years ago. I prayed too for Taiwan, North Korea, Ukraine and for western civilisation and the free world. If you go to the Pilgrim’s Chapel at Quarr Abbey, you’ll find my words written in the book of prayers – and perhaps the candles I lit still flickering.

I also followed the Benedictine Divine Office and joined with the monks in Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. I confess I did not make it to the monastery’s first prayers of the day, “Vigils” at 5.30am, and I only made the 7am “Lauds” once, but I attended all the other liturgies and daily Mass.

I enjoyed joining the monastic community for meals, in silence but with readings delivered while we ate. I took plenty of reading material myself, including the poems of Christina Rossetti, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, Fr Timothy Radcliffe’s beautiful Listening Together and the late Pope Benedict XVI’s With God You are Never Alone.

On a walk one day I saw something heart-warming – an old telephone box, turned into a community library, with the motto: “Borrow. Take. Give. Lend.” For a bookworm like me, that was uplifting to see.

The final day of my retreat was the Feast of St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross who, as Edith Stein, a Jewish-born convert to Catholicism, died in Auschwitz on 9 August, 1942. Given my focus on the persecuted around the world, and given the riots across the United Kingdom at the time, it appeared an appropriate conclusion to my retreat, especially as in Magnificat the intercessions began: “Save your people, Lord!” and continued with prayers “for all who are persecuted,” “for all who are blinded by prejudice,” “for all who resort to violence” – with pleas to “send courageous witnesses to speak and intercede on their behalf”, “send men and women of truth to open their eyes to see as you see,” and “send people capable of countering hatred with loving prayer and patient faith.” It felt profoundly timely.

I marked what would have been my father’s 100^th birthday, during my retreat. My father, who taught and gave me so much, died in January 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic. During my retreat I maintained an Ignatian silence, but I broke it that day to share a call with my mother and sister, in honour of my beloved father.

From the silence of the Isle of Wight, I moved on to Greek islands, first Santorini.

In Santorini, I enjoyed sun, rest, and refreshment. I sat on the balcony and by the pool in Fira’s Atlantis Hotel – beside the Cathedral of St John the Baptist – watching beautiful sunsets. I finished Niall Ferguson’s The Square and The Tower, about the role of networks in changing the world, and then my friend John Sweeney’s biography of Alexei Navalny, Murder in the Gulag. Three months ago, John and I shared a platform at the Chipping Campden Literature Festival, together with Baroness Helena Kennedy, KC and Marina Litvinenko, and had then enjoyed lunch together at Michael’s Mediterranean, a day after he had finished writing his Navalny book, so I owed it to him to read it – and found it gripping.

From Navalny, I turned to Clare Hammond’s superb On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar, a book to which I could relate hugely having travelled extensively in Myanmar more than fifty times. It’s a bold, beautiful, fascinating book.

I went twice to the wonderful Naoussa restaurant, where I joined with gusto in the Greek tradition of smashing plates – a custom I found deeply cathartic. I also went on the cable car to the port and on to a boat ride, to hike up a volcano, swim in a hot spring and witness another beautiful sunset, this time accompanied by our guide with his guitar singing Greek love songs.

I walked from Fira to Imerovigli, along the caldera. As I walked, I noticed several amusing signs in shops and restaurants. One said “Save water, drink wine”. My philosophy precisely. Another, at the Catholic Church in Fira, read: “Stress free zone”. That ought to be a motto for our faith. And a third, on a restaurant hanging over a precipice, said: “Heaven is closer than you think”. I wondered: is that because the location is so high, the food so good, or the increased likelihood of falling to your death?

In preparation for my next destination, I read Lawrence Durrell’s wonderful introduction to Corfu – Prospero’s Cell – and then embarked on a true delight, Gerald Durrell’s laugh-out-loud Corfu Trilogy – My Family and Other Animals, Birds Beasts and Relatives, and The Garden of the Gods. I had read these as a teenager, but it was a joy to rediscover them.

When I arrived in Corfu, I was absorbed by the Durrells’ story, and so incorporated it into my own adventure. I enjoyed dinner at Christomalis in Corfu Town, where I admired the photographs of the owner with Gerald Durrell displayed on the wall. I had lunch at The White House in Kalami, a restaurant which was once Lawrence’s home, and swam in the sea where he would have swum. I read Michael Haag’s The Durrells of Corfu, and discovered that their first house was a few minutes’ walk from my hotel, so I concluded that the beautiful bay in which I swam each day was where the Durrells almost certainly swam too.

I walked past their sculptures in the main square in Corfu Town. Under Lawrence’s are the words “Greece is the country that offers you the discovery of yourself”, and under Gerald’s it reads “Corfu, the garden of the Gods.”

I ventured to the bridge to Kanoni, took a boat to Mouse Island, viewed the beautiful, tiny chapel there and then visited the Vlacherna Monastery, before walking up the hill to Mon Repos, the birthplace of the late husband of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

I read voraciously – including Anne Applebaum’s superb Autocracy Inc and Frank Gardner’s chilling but gripping and hugely important novel about Taiwan, Invasion. I recommend both.

But the highlight was a visit to Nissaki Beach and Agni Bay. Why? Nostalgia. And a reassuring reminder that in a turbulent and fast-changing world, some things remain almost unchanged.

In 1977, when I was three years old, my parents took me to Corfu. We stayed at the Nissaki Beach Hotel. I remember three things about that holiday – whether directly, or through photographs and family story-telling I don’t know.

The first is that when I ran one morning, with the energy of a three year-old, full-pelt into a pile of still-smouldering hot ash from a barbecue, and screamed my head off in agony, a waiter ran at full-speed and deployed a remedy none of us would have thought of: he slapped cold sliced tomatoes onto my burning feet. It did the trick and saved me from severe burns.

The second is the toothless, aged hotel maid called Maria, who would rush towards me, arms open wide, cackling. She was simply offering a friendly, grandmotherly embrace but to me she resembled a scary witch from whom I ran away fast and full of terror.

And the third is that each day, one of my parents would walk with me through the olive groves and along a cliff-top dusty path, lined with pines and cypresses, to the next bay, to have lunch at a Greek taverna, Taverna Nikolas, while the other parent swam in the sea to the same taverna. They would take it in turns.

Today, 47 years later, the hotel is still there on Nissaki Beach, and I managed – on an unplanned nostalgic whim – to book a night there.

When I checked in, I told the receptionist that the last time I had visited I was three years old. Astonished, she informed me that while some of the exterior had changed, the building was the same.

I enquired about Taverna Nikolas and was told it was still there. I asked about the cliff-top path and I was assured it was the same. They helped me try to book a table, but it was fully booked.

It would have been easy to give up. But instead, I decided to walk the coastal path I had walked with my parents in 1977, to Agni Bay. And there I found Taverna Nikolas.

Sitting at a table in a dark corner of the taverna was the current owner, grandson of the founder. I explained that I had last been there when I was three years old and had returned specially, and asked whether – despite being fully booked – he could find a table for me. He assured me he could.

Sunset in Santorini

When I told him that 47 years ago not only had we eaten there most days, but that the owner at the time had taken us in his boat to Corfu Town, Perikles Katsaros told us that was his father.

And so after a swim in the bay, I enjoyed a wonderful dinner of salad and sea bass. Perikles asked whether my own parents were still alive, and when I told him my mother is very much alive he  presented me with a picture of the taverna, a booklet about its history which he had written, and two bottles of Ouzo – “for Mummy,” as he said.

In a world of such perpetual change, the fact that Nissaki Beach and Agni Bay – and especially Taverna Nikolas – are so relatively unchanged is profoundly reassuring.

When I returned home to London, I immediately watched the 1987 BBC series of My Family and Other Animals with Brian Blessed and Hannah Gordon, and the 2005 version with Imelda Staunton. And I laughed all over again.

I ended my month between jobs with a few days with my mother in the Dorset countryside, where we were joined by a North Korean friend and his family and Chinese friends who are Falun Gong practitioners. And I began Simon Heffer’s High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain.

Among the Victorians Heffer describes are Thomas Arnold, the great educational reformer, who went to the same school as me, Warminster, from 1903-1807, and Thomas Holloway, the entrepreneur and philanthropist who gifted to the nation what is now Royal Holloway College, University of London, where I was an undergraduate. Such connections are beautiful reminders of the importance of history.

When we contemplate the future, we must remember and reflect on the past, learn from it, be inspired by literature, poetry and the memoirs of others – and treasure humour and humanity. And then be ready to move on to the next challenge, equipped with what we have learned, holding onto what is good and right from the past but ready to embrace what is true in the present and future. As Fr Timothy Radcliffe writes, “Without truth, beauty can be vacuous...Without goodness, beauty can deceive. Goodness without truth collapses into sentimentality. Truth without goodness leads to the Inquisition.” When we hold truth, beauty and goodness in tandem, we are equipped to help defend our civilisation – strengthened and renewed by a good holiday.

Benedict Rogers is the co-founder of Hong Kong Watch, and author of seven books including “The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny” and “From Burma to Rome: A Journey into the Catholic Church”.