Your correspondent today has nothing new to say about Greek politics. The country’s debt management chief Spyros Papanicolaou was replaced by Petros Christodoulou as head of the Public Debt Management Agency. Wow, there’s a job you want — managing Greece’s debt obligations. Put your CV in now. By December the workie will be doing it, or the whole country in 12-hour shifts.

There have been no new bombs, not since google.gr/news was last refreshed anyway.

Instead your correspondent spent most of the day at a bar, drinking espressos and reading the world newspapers. In a leather jacket, with a scarf set louchely around his shoulders, saying “kharisto” each time the water glass was topped up. Gone real native.

There are probably greater pure pleasures in this world than reading the International Herald Tribune at a bar in a European capital, with a scarf thrown louchely around the neck, but your correspondent is yet to find it.

Though the IHT is now merely the international edition of the New York Times, having lost its Washington Post partner, the format remains the same: stories from across the world, op-ed pieces that sound like they were written by people in Nehru jackets in the glass foyer of the UN (“Michel Berubbisis Jnr was a commander in the Gangalese Liberation Front and is now Minister for Tourism”; “Laurent-M’Kwumzi Oo is a partner with Global Venture Capital of Beirut, writing in a personal capacity”). Ads for church services in Paris, escorts based in Zurich who’ll fly anywhere but Russia, marriage agencies offering a Hapsburg prince now in property and speaks six languages. And Fred Bassett.

The whole paper is like a goddam Le Carre novel. Actual news seems a mere pretext for people to arrange meetings and saying “the goose flies northwards …” Will the IHT be the last paper? Will it be like the last trams in cities a half-century ago; footage of people gathered around a kiosk , with a banner saying “la Derniere Journal aujourd’hui”? It’ll be neck and neck with The Guardian.

Athens is a great place to read the last newspaper, sitting at a bar. About 40% of Athenians seem to be doing the same thing. It is terribly unfair to judge a country by its cafe-dwelling sybarites. Were you to trip down Brunswick Street or Oxford Street of a morning, you might conclude that our country’s grievous terms of trade balance was due to Celtic tattooed wankers putting in Ozco dance grants over weak chai, but you’d be 80% wrong.

Likewise the whole of Greece is not lingering over an espresso on the Ermou, though it looks that way. There’s a ’70s air there, too. The men all look like Costas-Gavras extras — lean, bearded, pale, having stayed up all night arguing about Poulantzas — and the women look like they are each wearing the décor of an entire rumpus room; hip-length vinyl leather designer jackets that seem to go round twice, belts with buckles the size of a metal Frisbee, and those boots. Man, those boots. Twenty per cent of the country’s entire labour output goes into detailing these thigh-high, chiseled, tasseled, pointed monsters. If they kicked you to death, your last thought would be “man, I shouldn’t have answered that personal ad in the IHT”‘.

Come early afternoon, the streets around Syntagma Square were blocked by a protest of striking workers from the old Olympia Airways, the now-privatised state airline. To add to the protest, they positioned a long tourist coach bus across the whole street. Or maybe that’s just where they parked. It gets hard to tell. They assembled outside the offices of the finance ministry, whose staff have been on strike since Tuesday, a fact that may account for the recent marked improvement in the euro.

Behind me in the foyer of the Cypria hotel — all white marble, black couches and green plants, and an ancient telex in the corner — a touring party were struggling to get their wheelie cases into the old-skool three-person lifts. Amiable, goofing around, relaxed, about a dozen of them, clearly a Mossad hit squad. Should a global boycott eventually kill the halvah trade, the Israeli secret service could probably hang out its shingle.

Ten days, eight countries, three hits. I dictated a note to my sleek black Grundig dictamachine, now rendered an expensive paperweight by the iPhone: idea for a comedy. Mossad clones eight passports but due to a mix-up, the team leader is assigned the actual tourists who hold them, four whingeing Brits and a couple of lunatic American settlers, plus a Canadian Jew with food allergies. They must now take out the European command of the PFLP.

Can Ari weld these lovable goofballs into a gangster death-squad flouting international law with the connivance of the West? Remember to keep political satirical tone centremost. Act 2 crossover — PFLP is actually a dried fruit import company set up by clueless second generation US emigre Palestinians from Newark, who think they’re being punk’d for a reality TV show. Bana to reprise role? Pitch: Caddyshack meets Munich. The iPhone buzzes on the bar, chiming against the heavy glass ashtray. “Central Committee, Communist Party of Greece” the caller ID reads. All of them?

When I say the ’70s survive here I mean that as a compliment. There’s a freedom — in the streets; in the body — that has not yet been wiped out by the successive waves of anti-life that have been hitting the hyper-modern West for the past 20 years, a stew of high-technology, SSRI anti-depressants and public health warnings.

British New Labour began that whole wave perfecting a noxious stew of surveillance and nagging at home combined with the export of mass death to abroad, a perfect transformation of a progressive movement into a life-denying force. Rolled over to Australia via various burnt-out carpet-baggers, with the drinking age raised to 40, and signed note from Savanarola Conroy if you want to download an episode of The L Word.

Now it’s coming back to England via the Conservative Party. According to the IHT, David Cameron has announced he will stop ‘s-xing the children’. Sorry, that he will put the breaks on “the s-xualisation of childhood”. Cameron has said that he will give “children back their childhood”. The move is another chapter in Cameron’s remaking of the Conservative Party — astonishing, audacious and risky.

His model is Sweden’s Moderate Party, well to the Left on economic matters and with a heavy dose of social management. Most advertising to children has been banned in Sweden for years. It’s an obviously sensible move that recognises that ads hit children in a more literal fashion than they do adults.

The other part of the package is less attractive, and that’s Cameron’s obsession with “nudge” theory: the fashionable repositry of techniques to manage people into doing what you want. According to the IPA’s Tim Wilson, this is a devious left-wing plot. In fact all the parties of the Right are adopting this stuff now — none have the guts to stand up for the idea of a free citizenship because they know the political culture has been so therapeuticised by the centre-left that the inherent idea of government is now that it is purely the public’s doctor and psychiatrist.

Politics disappeared in the late ’70s — Thatcherism was ultimately a susbstitute for human advance, a late Edwardian fantasy — which is why Athens, with its bank bombs and marches and curls of cigarette smoke over the espresso, remains not merely a curio but a possibility. That the place where the modern and postmodern meet might not be the past but the future as well. The revolution will not be aped, but I remain hopeful of reading about it in the IHT, in a bar somewhere.