The Sink in Skiathos

Before I ever went to Skiathos, I knew about a bathroom.

My mum had been to the island years before me and came home full of stories about it. She loved it. Properly loved it. The sort of place you talk about as if you’ve discovered something everyone else needs to know. She kept saying to me and my brother, you have to come to Skiathos. I need to take you. You’ll love it.

Among all the stories she told us was one about a bathroom. There was a place called the Bourtzi, she said, where you could stand at the sinks washing your hands and look straight out across the sea. It was such an odd little detail to bring home from a Greek island. Not the beaches. Not the tavernas. Not the sunsets.

The bathroom.

But I remembered it.

Eventually, I went to Skiathos myself. And eventually, of course, I went to find the bathroom.

It was exactly as she’d described.

You wash your hands beneath a covered wooden roof and, instead of looking into a mirror or at a tiled wall, you look straight out across the Aegean. Water in the sink. Water stretching away in front of you. Little islands sitting on the horizon.

There was something incredibly calming about it. And something slightly ridiculous, because it’s still just a bathroom. You take a photograph, post it on Facebook, and anyone who hasn’t been there thinks you’ve wandered into the strangest public toilet in Greece.

But people who know Skiathos know immediately.

The Bourtzi.

Over the years, that bathroom quietly became one of those strange little landmarks of Skiathos for us. Friends of mine have gone to Skiathos and sent me their own photographs from the sinks. Trish has one. Tracy has one.

Perhaps that’s what happens with places we love. Eventually we stop only photographing the spectacular things and start photographing the tiny pieces that prove we were there.

Somewhere along the way, Skiathos stopped being somewhere my mum had visited and became somewhere woven into my own life.

We went back.

And back.

And back again — so many times now that I’ve genuinely lost count.

We’ve celebrated my dad’s retirement there. My fortieth birthday. My dad’s sixtieth.

And, nine years ago, my wedding.

At the Bourtzi.

The place with the bathroom.

Which means that on my wedding day, amongst all the enormous things happening — getting dressed, seeing everyone, marrying the person I love, photographs, speeches, music, champagne — at some point I went into that bathroom, seven months pregnant, bladder under siege, and washed my hands at the same sinks my mum had once come home and told me about.

I said I do.

Then, not long after, I did what any seven-months-pregnant bride would do and made a beeline for the loo.

There’s nothing terribly romantic about that part of the story, but it’s true, and I think it belongs in it anyway.

I doubt I thought anything of it at the time.

That’s the strange thing about meaningful places. We usually imagine we’ll know when we’re standing inside one. We think important places announce themselves somehow. The church where you got married. The house where your children grew up. The hospital room where somebody was born.

But sometimes a place becomes important almost accidentally.

You simply keep passing through it.

The first time, it’s just a sink with a beautiful view. Then you visit again. And again. Years begin gathering around it.

Eventually the place itself hasn’t changed very much, but you have.

There was the version of me who had never been to Skiathos and only knew this bathroom through my mum’s story. The version of me who saw it for the first time. The version who kept returning to the island. The version who washed her hands there on her wedding day, heavily pregnant and half-listening for the next thing on the schedule.

And now this version of me, looking at a photograph of two sinks overlooking the sea and realising just how much life has happened around them.

These days it isn’t just me washing my hands there.

My daughters do too, every single time we visit, without me ever having to ask them to. It’s become their favourite place on the planet, in the way children decide these things absolutely and without negotiation.

I don’t know if they’ll remember, years from now, that this was ever anything other than completely ordinary — a sink, a view, something you do without thinking on the way past.

Which is, I suppose, exactly how it started for me as well.

I’ve heard Skiathos described as a boomerang island, because people have a habit of coming back.

That has certainly been true for us.

Next year will be our tenth wedding anniversary. We’ll be going back to Skiathos.

And at some point, without ceremony or fanfare, I’ll walk into the bathroom at the Bourtzi, turn on the tap, look out across the sea, and wash my hands in the same sink.