How I Find Creativity in Everyday Athens.

I work from home.

For a long time this meant that my world got quite small. Desk, screen, coffee, repeat. The city was right outside my window and I was in here, staring at a brief or a blank page, wondering why nothing particularly interesting was happening in my head.

Then I got a dog.

And my dog, it turns out, is the best creative director I've ever had.

The mandatory walk

Here's the thing about having a dog in Athens: you have no choice but to go outside. Several times a day. In all weathers, at all hours, regardless of how deep into a project you are or how many emails are waiting.

At first I resented this slightly. Now I think it might be the best thing that has ever happened to my work.

Because the neighbourhood I walk through every day — the streets around Filopappou Hill, the paths up through the park, the coffee shops and bakeries and little corners I pass on every loop — is endlessly, quietly full of things that feed into what I do.

The dog doesn't care about any of that. She just wants to sniff things and occasionally eat whatever she finds on the pavement. But while she's doing that, I'm looking around. And Athens, even on an ordinary Tuesday morning, gives you a lot to look at.

Filopappou Hill

This is where we go every morning and often in the afternoon too.

Filopappou Hill sits right in the middle of the city, just to the southwest of the Acropolis, and walking up through it feels like stepping out of Athens and into something older and quieter. Pine trees. Stone paths. Cats who have decided the hill belongs to them and are not wrong. Views that appear suddenly between the trees — the Acropolis over there, the city spreading out in every direction, the sea on a clear day.

We've walked up there in early morning when the mist is still sitting in the valleys between the hills. We've walked up in the golden late afternoon when everything goes amber and warm. We've walked up when I was stuck on something and needed to think, and come back down with the problem solved in a way I can't entirely explain.

There's something about walking — the rhythm of it, the physical movement, the fact that your brain is occupied just enough to stop overthinking — that unlocks things. I've had more good ideas on Filopappou Hill than at my desk. Considerably more.

The dog gets the credit for this.

The coffee shop rotation

I work from home, but I don't always think from home.

There are three or four coffee shops within walking distance that I use as thinking spaces. Not to work — I'm not the person with the laptop open at the café table, though no judgement to those who are — but to sit for half an hour with a coffee and a notebook and let my mind do something less structured than staring at a screen.

Athens takes its coffee seriously. This is well documented and completely true. But what I love about the neighbourhood coffee shops specifically is that they're places where the same people come every day and everyone knows each other and the conversation is constant and the whole thing feels less like a commercial transaction and more like a small daily gathering.

What the dog actually teaches me

She is not, I should be clear, a smart animal, in fact she is an idiot!

She is motivated almost entirely by food, cats, and the desire to be wherever I am at all times, including the bathroom. She has no opinions about design. She has never read anything I've written.

But she gets me out of the door. Every single day, multiple times a day, she insists on the world outside. And the world outside the flat, in Athens, is always worth going out into.

I think about this sometimes in relation to creativity generally — the way we can convince ourselves that the work happens at the desk, in front of the screen, in the focused hours. And sometimes it does. But a lot of the best work, for me, happens in the gaps. The walks. The coffees. The hour on the hill when I'm not trying to think about anything at all.

Living in Athens makes those gaps extraordinarily good. The city is beautiful and layered and full of things that catch your eye and reset your brain. All you have to do is go outside.

It took a dog to make me do it properly.

If you're visiting and you want to feel this

Walk up Filopappou Hill. Go in the morning if you can, or late afternoon.

Take the path that winds up from the Dionysiou Areopagitou pedestrian street — the long walkway that runs below the Acropolis. The hill entrance is at the end of it. Go slowly. Look around. Let Athens be quiet for a bit.

It's one of the most beautiful walks in the city and almost nobody talks about it.

You don't need a dog. Though it does help.