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In the late 1960s, when my father, a diplomat, was stationed in Washington, he received news that he was to be made an ambassador. Where would we be going next? We had already lived in Singapore, where I was born, Turkey and China as well as America. My father assumed a gloomy expression and announced that his next posting was to be Chad. If I had known more about Chad, even where it was, I might have appreciated the joke better.

In fact, we were going to Greece and my father was delighted. In April 1967, the junta, led by Colonel Papadopoulos, staged a military coup and seized power. We arrived in Athens a couple of months later. In December that year, the king attempted a counter-coup. When it failed, he went into exile where he remains to this day.

But I knew none of this. I was a teenager and Greece was perfect for teenagers. In the summer we had a house by the sea and there was a constant stream of handsome boys to take me to nightclubs and for moonlit drives in their sports cars. I had a wonderful time swimming, water-skiing, boating. We made trips to northern Greece to look for the source of the Styx and south to the Peloponnese to visit my father’s new best friend, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Being in Greece at that age guaranteed not only that I would love it, but also that I would continue to do so. Greece is forever associated in my mind with pleasure, with the sun and the sea, with long summer evenings looking up at black, star-studded skies and listening to Georges Moustaki. His big hit then was Le Métèque, a song so iconic that thirty years later the complete lyrics are posted on the Internet. On its release in the summer of 1969, every fashionable young Athenian played it over and over again. The first time a boy (he was a rather creepy Italian visiting the rich Greek shipping family next door) kissed me, it was in Greece, on a sailboat. The following year I had a boyfriend who was the son of our neighbours at the house by the sea and we spent our evenings making out in the hammock. There hasn’t been a lot of kissing since and, in Greece, mercifully, my heart has yet to be broken, which is probably one reason I love it so and why I feel it’s safe to come back.

I first came to Naxos in 1985 to visit a friend who was cat sitting for an Englishwoman who had lived here since the Sixties. That was eighteen years ago and I am still here. There have been odd years when I haven’t managed to come, but I haven’t been unfaithful. If I have come to Greece, I have come to Naxos.

Naxos is the largest and most beautiful of the Cyclades – or so say all the guidebooks. I haven’t visited all the islands so I am not really qualified to judge. The landscape is magnificent and its size means that you get it all: mountains, valleys, beaches, moonscapes, marble quarries like futuristic cities. The chora, the main town, is dominated by the Kastro, built largely by the Venetians who ruled Naxos for three hundred odd years from the early thirteenth century. The house in which I live is at the top of the Kastro next to the archaeological museum and it was built in 1550. It has neither central heating nor sophisticated plumbing, but the ceilings are double height and the rooms are vast. The other morning I was driving to Mili, a hamlet about five miles from Chora, where I have Greek lessons twice a week. As I turned down the track to my teacher’s house, a flight of doves rose over the olive grove in the valley and began wheeling and circling in the sky. I stopped the car to watch them and I thought, “This is why I am here.” But, along with beauty, there is a seductive combination of anarchy and indolence, which reminds me of the Caribbean. And not only a sense of history, but also a feeling that you are living in a world that has existed forever underscores it. When I look at the mountains of Naxos, at the terraced hillsides, they look so ancient and they have looked that way for so long. And I love way it smells - of a mixture of wild oregano, thyme, the sea, cat pee, grilling fish and meat, all intensified by the heat. The air, which is filled with the sound of crickets – that quintessentially Mediterranean sound - is so pure that you almost never get a hangover and, if you ever do, just go swimming.

Over the far side of the island, just beyond Mount Zas, the highest peak in the Clyclades, there is a tiny dead-end village called Danakos perched on the side of the mountain and with a view, on a clear day, of Donoussa. From Easter onwards, whenever possible, I like to go to lunch there, to a taverna called Florakas, run by a charming old man. One of the reasons that I particularly like it is that Kyrios Yiorgos is so fond of me. Every year he asks me why I am not married. One time, in exasperation, he said, “The men in England – do they not have eyes?” I love those remote villages. Another beautiful one is Keramoti, at the end of a winding road at the very bottom of a fertile valley. In the spring, it is as if green walls surround you. There are infrequent buses to these remote places and they tend to cater to the villagers needing to come into Chora for supplies rather than for tourists wishing to explore the island. As a result, they remain unspoilt and tranquil.

But, in town and in high season, I stay mainly up in my house. I like to get up early, work in the morning, drink wine and eat cheese and tomatoes around two, then sleep in the afternoon, waking around 6.30 to watch the long, slow sunset. I try not to go out in the evening in August and, when I do, I keep well away from the tourist spots. As the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (15th August) approaches, you can feel Naxos heating up. This is the biggest Holy Day of the summer and all the islands take on a frenetic, Fourth of July, carnival air. I find it exhausting, though visitors usually enjoy the spectacle along the parelia (seafront) where crowds parade up and down until the early hours of morning.

This (last?) summer I began to go stir-crazy so in late August I drove half an hour or so up the wild north coast to a beach called Abram where there is a pension and a good taverna, and stayed there for three days. All I could hear at night was the crash of the waves and the occasional quack from the family of ducks that lived down below. During the day I went swimming and then wrote and ate and slept. It reminded me of little hotels in far-off-the-beaten-track Caribbean villages and I loved being there all alone. Now, when I go there for lunch, I am greeted with open arms as if I am a dearly-beloved friend.

So what are the drawbacks? There’s a slight dearth of cultural life, though you wouldn’t think so from the number of openings that take place weekly. The problem is that the “artists” tend not to be that good. I have a theory that the hideousness of their work is a reaction against the beauty of the island. (There is one notable exception, a German sculptor called Ingbert Brunk, whose cool, pure sculptures in Naxos marble are quite lovely).

There seem to be no local writers, which is a blessing. The Cretan writer Nikos Katzantzakis (Zorba the Greek, etc.) was educated here for a time and one of the narrow streets of the Kastro is named after him. In the summer we have an open-air cinema, which shows the latest blockbusters. If you have missed them in London or Athens, you can catch up in Naxos. This summer I have already seen Matrix Reloaded; Two Weeks Notice; Catch Me If You Can (I took Maria, a sixteen-year-old who lives out in Melanes, a village near Mili, who had never before been to the cinema – she loved it); Frida (compared to which, Matrix Reloaded was a masterpiece) and 8 Mile. At the Naxos Cine Club, I just saw (for the tenth time) Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder.

And the municipality, seemingly blissfully ignorant that most tourists just want sun, sea and sand and that most local people are too busy slaving in tourist shops to get away, organises all manner of concerts (Greek popular singers, Theodorakis, and so on), theatre performances (last Saturday they staged Molière’s La Malade Imaginaire in Greek) and yet more exhibitions. As one friend put it, somewhat ironically, Naxos is “culture island.”

I do miss television a bit, but what I really miss is cable. I miss Buffy and Angel and CSI and ER, which I probably wouldn’t get here even if I had cable. Actually they do have ER on Greek TV, but the episodes are so old that George Clooney is still in it. I brought my cats with me so I don’t miss them and I have learnt to take a philosophical (or Greek) attitude towards the myriad strays.

You can manage perfectly well as a tourist if you don’t speak Greek, but, if you live here for any length of time, it’s polite, apart from anything else, to make an effort to learn it. Plumbers, electricians, builders and mechanics tend not to speak English. But Greek is difficult. An English friend visiting recently asked whether I missed intellectual stimulation. I said, “I get all the intellectual stimulation I need from Greek lessons.” And I get all the sensual pleasure I can bear every time I step out my front door.

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