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It’s Easter Sunday. At last. We seem to have been waiting forever.

Easter is late in Greece this year; Orthodox Easter falls, as it does every four years, over a month after the rest of the Christian world has celebrated Christ’s resurrection. Usually there is a gap of just a week between the two. But this year, while Britain was shopping for Easter eggs in March, Greece didn’t begin its Easter rituals until late April.

I am going to the country for lunch, to near Potamia, with Kathy and her husband Vassili. Kathy, an Australian woman, has lived in Naxos for nearly thirty years. She and Vassili have a couple of “tourist” shops in town; Vassili also works at the archaeological museum. We are going to see Vassili’s best friend, Yiorgos, and his family. Yiorgos, who is in his early fifties, is recently married for the first time to Rena, a young Bulgarian woman. They have a baby, Vangelitsa, and Rena also has a six-year-old daughter, Sophia, by a man from Crete.

For days I had been worrying about what to take as a present. Not Easter things, Kathy said, they’ll have more than enough of those. Finally I bought some handmade chocolates in the shape of a pair of lips from the bakery where I buy my bread every day. The woman let me try one – they were delicious. Kathy and Vassili are taking half a goat, already butchered into chops and other cuts for the barbecue. There aren’t going to be enough of us to justify roasting a whole lamb on the spit.

Yiorgos (along with his five brothers and sisters) was brought up in the house to which we are going, though he now lives in town where he has a stationery shop. The country house is at the end of a dirt track off the road, a small one-storey structure set in lemon groves and fields full of wild flowers. As we turn onto the track, we pass a big, liver-spotted hunting dog. It looks like a pointer. Barking, it lunges forward to the extent of the chain that restrains it. We park out of reach of the dog and walk towards the house. Clouds of smoke are billowing from the little charcoal grill as we approach.

On the little terrace, Yiorgos’s ancient, toothless mother is rocking Vangelitsa in her arms. The baby, serenely good-humoured, is sucking half a lemon. A boom box belts out “Good Golly Miss Molly” in Greek. Sophia darts shyly in and out of the semi-derelict parts of the building, following me as I explore. There is an old iron bedstead rusting where once sheep must have lived. An antique dealer would snap it up, so would Michaelis, the lecherous old goat in town who runs a junk shop, stuffed with things he has wheedled out of the villagers. Yiorgos has put in a new bathroom – it is the finest room in the house. Sophia presents me with a posy of flowers – after that, we are friends.

Finally, around four, when we have drunk glass after glass of cloudy homemade wine and snacked on homemade tzatziki (yoghurt with cucumber and garlic), the goat is ready. We are all starving. The last time I ate was the previous night, around two, after church, when I had a bowl of mayeritsa at Kathy’s house. Mayeritsa is the traditional fast-breaking Easter soup, made of the entrails of a very young spring lamb, flavoured with dill and onion. Anthony Burgess claimed that the test of a true Orientalist was a liking for durian. I guess the test of a true Grecophile is an enthusiasm for mayeritsa. I fail both tests, but the goat tastes great.

The dog thinks so too.

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