I Don’t Practice Santorini, I Ain’t Got No Piss-tal Ball: Urinating on a Woman, the Greek Pompeii and Over-Priced Drinks

‘Please,’ she said, wiggling her arse in apparent desperate need and pulling her red and black one piece to the side, ‘Please piss on me right now’. We were stood on a black sand beach, semi-secluded, on beautiful Santorini, a volcanic island in the south of the Cyclades Archipelago. This was new to me. Despite not wanting to give too personal an insight into my sex life*, I feel obliged to contextualise and admit that I had never urinated on my girlfriend before. But I’ll never be able to say that again. For I have lost my watersports virginity. And doing so felt every bit as exhilarating, awkward and confused as I had expected.

My girlfriend (who I feel I should give a pseudonym, let’s call her Andrew) and I arrived in Santorini at about noon, a tad nauseous from the ferry, a sharp, fast one that cut, shaking like a beaten dog, over the top of the waves. We dropped our bags at a hotel and hired a cheap, beaten up quad bike, roaring off into the sunshine at about 20mph, a speed I’m usually nervous driving a car at. With a helmet protecting me from the road accident instant death dream, the tiny yellow swimming shorts** I was wearing made me very fearful of leaving my kneecaps and leg skin as a bloody flayed streak across a loose Greek road. I didn’t. Instead, we arrived safe, if shaken, at the beachy spots in the south of the island.

Santorini is the largest of five (I think) islands that form a vague circle. One of these, the central one, is an active volcano, and the land masses that surround it, I surmised, are the surviving shells from when that volcano was much bigger.*** This history of volcanicity has resulted in black, granite, sand on most of the island’s beaches. Black, granite sand, sharp rocks and large pebbles were between the sea and where Andrew and I parked our quad bike, as far along a dirt track as we could go. The “All Terrain Vehicle” wasn’t powerful enough to continue along the sand.

We hurried into the water, yet were frustrated from swimming by a large, flat rock covered with barnacles and sea urchins a few metres out. It stretched for a long distance in every direction, and by the time Andrew and I had clambered over it our feet were cut up and our enthusiasm had waned. We splashed about in the deeper water, the lady mocking my inability to swim front crawl due to my lack of upper body strength. Eventually we decided to go back in.

After failing to bypass the big rock, we began the painful process of walking across it, being buffeted against its sharp edges by the angry surf. Andrew shouted in pain at one point, and she wouldn’t swim any further. (Just realised that my girlfriend might find being called by a man’s name more offensive than having her identity reduced to a semi-possessive referral based solely on her relationship with me. I’ll call her a capitalised She from now on. I think she’ll like that.) She called me over and demanded I check her right buttock for stings from a sea anemone. She said she felt irritation, a lot of it. I knelt on the sharp rock, my face at the same level as the breaking waves, and was unable to see any sign of damage bar a redness to the skin, though that looked more like a reaction to the salt water. I assured her there was nothing poisonous sticking out of her, and we continued, slowly and uncomfortably, to our bags above the waterline. In the five minutes this took, She had continued to complain about an injury I had seen no evidence of. I’m a heartless, uncaring person and was blocking it out, really, thinking of the fresh water and Kerouac novel in my bag far more than her. However, when she asked me to check her cheek a second time, I was greeted by something new. A huge welt, bigger than a bear’s paw and shaped like a fish with a fatally twisted spine, now ran from the top of her thigh to cover most of her buttock. Pale white, clearly irritated and dripping unhelpful saltwater, She self-diagnosed a jellyfish sting based on my description and her pain. To pee or not to pee, that was the question. She wanted my sweet, sweet urine. I was scared.

For a period of about six to nine months after being mugged a few years ago, I suffered from very extreme “stage fright”. This is a slang term meaning that, as much as I had scoffed at the idea of this as a teenager, as frustrating and confusing as it was at the time, for the majority of a year I found it physically impossible to urinate in front of other people. Literally impossible, no matter how much I tried to relax myself, how much I needed to piss, I couldn’t do it. Although it is no longer at that stage, I still prefer to use a cubicle and have to wait and relax before being able to wee when in front of others. The request to urinate on my girlfriend for medicinal reasons terrified me most because I was scared this tendency would rear its head and I would end up disappointing her with my penis in a whole new way.

We moved to the bushes behind us, her facing the sea, in visible and verbal pain. I stood behind her, waited for the nearest people to walk past and pulled out my wrinkled, withered, seawater penis. My foreskin was all I could grab, the majority of my trousershame withdrawn into my loins. I pulled quickly, squeezing enough meat into the old chap to be able to aim, tried to be calm, float, focus, and wham, bam, a yellow tuber of liquid sloshed forth onto her welt, skidding down her legs and running down the back of her knee. I kept going. ‘How’s that?’ I asked, ‘Good, relieves it’, she said, ‘Keep going.’ But when supplies were exhausted so was the soothing effect. She lay on the beach on the towel and I jetted off into the island to find a pharmacy.

The specialist cream and a handful of ibuprofen sorted her out much better than my wee, and she hasn’t asked me to repeat the performance since.

The rest of our time on Santorini we spent being annoyed by the double whammy of expensive and weak cocktails until we found a locals’ rocker bar that sold unwatered-down spirit-and-mixers at standard continental prices and ratios. Excellent. We also went to the ruins of a town dating back to the Neolithic period that had been buried, a la Pompeii, by volcanic eruptions. A great museum of a very old, very developed settlement: three storey buildings! Whilst there She became aware of the existence of the National Archeological Museum and became incredibly angry that I had suggested the New Acropolis Museum rather than that to visit when in Athens.

Santorini was beautiful. Drinks were over-priced and watered down. Two days was a nice length of visit. Next up: Paros.

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*Not because I’m a prude, but there’s a time and a place.

**I was repeatedly caught “hanging out”, especially whenever I had to raise my leg to clamber off the ATV.

***I didn’t check this and nor do I intend to.