Now it can be told. While everybody else was writing off the Greek football team in the European Championships, Sam Snort was tipping them to go all the way.

Oh yes, you may scoff, but if you’d been around Snort Towers before the opening game of the tournament between Portugal and Greece, you’d have happened upon the following scene: Sam and a group of friends sitting cross-legged on the floor, before a sumptuous repast of moussaka, dolmades and retsina, strumming bouzikis and wailing: “All we are saying, is give Greece a chance.”
And it’s not just because Sam is enough of an expert in soccer ball to know that Greece were always going to major big-time in defensive plays which would neutralise the opposition’s offensive stars whilst, at the same time, maximising the chances of a Greek place-kicker making a decisive score, perhaps even with a headball – anyone who knows anything about the sport dubbed ‘the vaguely interesting game’ could have told you that.
No, Sam’s prescience is rooted in something much deeper: a life-long attachment to Greece, ancient Greek civilisation, Greek philosophy the Greek way of life, and, most especially, vast quantities of ouzo. So, in no way capitalising on the fact that the country is suddenly flavour of the month, we are proud to present today, a work that has been literally millennia in gestation: Sam Snort’s Rougher Than Fuck Guide to Greece.

Posterior Analytics
We begin, as everything in the civilised world does, with Aristotle. The great man pretty much wrote the book on physics, poetics and politics but is best known in the Snort household for a tome entitled Posterior Analytics. Not that we’ve read the bloody thing of course, and nor have we the remotest intention of ever doing so, but a wacky title like that deserves some kind of prize. Consequently, I’ve encouraged my old charges, Foghat, to name their next album Posterior Analytics, in the hope that it will help bring the work of old Ari to a wider audience.
To be honest, not much happened to bring Greece to the attention of the world for quite a long time after Aristotle - until, indeed, another bloke called Artistotle came along and married Jackie Kennedy.
This was considered by some to be a bit of scandal, on account of the fact that Jackie had been married to JFK and, as far as most Irish Catholics were concerned, she should have worn black and lived in a hole in the ground for the rest of her life, rather than taking up with a wrinkly shipping magnate – and bloody foreigner! – who wore funny-looking shades and smoked cigars.
As a child, Sam didn’t give a fuck about any of this and was just delighted that there was a man in the news about whom you could make a good joke i.e. ‘Why will Jackie’s new husband never be short of a donkey? Because he has his Onassis.’ Terrific.
After Aristotle and Aristotle Onassis, Greece is probably most famous for its extensive selection of Irish bars. The hedonistic Aegean island of Ios was once so popular with our Celtic soul brothers and sisters that it was dubbed Ireland Over Seas but, these days, there’s scarcely a rocky outcrop in the sea south of Athens that doesn’t have a place called ‘The Shamrock Bar’ or ‘Bar Shamrock’ or similar.
What else is Greece famous for? Well, there’s the island of Lesbos, of course, sometimes called Lesvos in a bid to prevent it being used in old school comedy routines and lads’ magazines, but to no avail – Greece will always remain the first nation to give the world hot girl-on-girl action. No wonder they call it classical, eh?
Talk of hot girl action, reminds me of Nana Mouskouri, not that the Dana of Hellas would ever have had anything to do with that class of carry-on. Instead, she confined herself to wearing outlandishly large glasses and warbling prettily about “the white rose of Athens” which would never “bloom again” presumably on account of the heavy blanket of smog which chokes the city for much of the year. The Greek capital is also famous for some old ruins and for sharing its name with the home of popular beat combo REM.

Projectile Vomiting
Of course, in this Olympic Year we can’t overlook the fact that Greece has also given us ouzo – the closest thing to a performance-enhancing drug you can purchase across the counter in your local taverna. At least, that’s if performance-enhancing is taken to refer to such rarified skills as projectile-vomiting, falling through a hotel window or sleeping naked on a beach under a corrosive noonday sun.
Finally, not even a rougher than fuck guide to Greece would be complete without reference to such cultural giants as Plato, Homer, Socrates and Demis Roussos.
So consider them referenced. Yassoo!

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq