I'm not really here. That is, I'm not really here in Britain, because I'm on holiday at the moment. In Crete, to be precise, where everything's considerably warmer and sunnier and more congenial than jolly old London which, from my current perspective, consists almost entirely of looming grey building-shaped objects constructed from bin lids and misery.

Still, don't be jealous. It's not like I'm lolling around in the sun doing nothing. I'm sitting indoors typing this. Then I'm going to loll around in the sun doing nothing. Before you hurl your newspaper across your dingy tube carriage in disgust, remember I'm allowed to do nothing because I'm on holiday - under doctor's orders to relax, no less - but still, it makes me uncomfortable.

I guess I'm supposed to lie back and let go, but in the absence of anything to fret about I quickly start to lose all sense of my own identity, like a lumberjack waking up to discover all the trees in the world built a space rocket and left for another galaxy during the night. Worries hold me together. Worries form my exoskeleton. But the sky's blue, the sea's clear and the sun's beating down: worries are hard to find and even harder to hold on to.

I tried worrying about tanning, for starters. I don't tan. Different bits of my body react to the sun in different ways, none of them conventionally sexy. My forehead gets vaguely darker, but my arms merely freckle a bit before giving up, and my stomach sizzles itself pink within three minutes. Consequently, I have to apply a dizzyingly high-factor sunscreen, slopping it on like Persil-white emulsion until I out-gleam the sun itself. As you might imagine, I look and feel out of place on a beach, but then again I look and feel out of place almost everywhere. I've been badly Photoshopped into this world. So there's no point in worrying about tans. Damn.

I could worry about stepping on a sea urchin. I was flipping through the guide book on the plane, and apparently sea urchins are a) everywhere and b) painful. Tread on one and you'll need a doctor to tease out the spikes. Never mind that I'm less likely to step on a sea urchin and get a spike in my foot in Crete than trip over a dead neigbour and get a syringe in my eye in London: it's an exotic new threat, and I'm alert to it. Or rather I was. For the first few days I watched my step, dipping my toe into the surf as though the sea itself might bite me. Now I've forgotten all about it.

Driving. Now I can definitely worry about that. I don't drive, but throughout my stay I've been accompanied by friends who can, so I've seen my fair share of Cretan driving at close quarters. And it's fair to say faith plays an important role in everyday life here. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched people overtaking one another on blind cliff-side corners. It's like a Bond movie. Either Cretan drivers have a far better appreciation of the realities of risk than I have, or they're crazy. Thing is, it actually gets quite funny after a while, chuckling over each near miss. So even that doesn't feel like a real concern.

Last night I barbecued some freshly caught fish beneath the night sky. Textbook poncey Guardian holiday stuff which ought to be outrageously relaxing, not to mention delicious. Fortunately, I managed to imbue the entire experience with needless anxiety. It was a gas-operated barbecue for one thing, so I kicked off by worrying about the canister suddenly exploding and blasting the entire front of my body off, so I'd spend the rest of my life looking like a surprised, cauterised medical diagram. Then there was the fish itself: an unidentified pointy, sharky sort of creature with accusing eyes and tiny rows of sharpened doll's teeth. It was so long it wouldn't fit properly over the coals, which was absolutely brilliant since it meant I got to worry about whether it was properly cooked or not. Maybe I'd end up poisoned, clutching at my throat and trying to explain to a Greek doctor who didn't speak a word of English that I'd fallen victim to some underdone poisonous barracuda. Sadly, that didn't happen. Didn't even choke on any bones. Instead I ate the fish, and the fish was nice. This will never do.

My first bit of holiday reading was a book called Risk by the journalist Dan Gardner, about all the scary things in the world and what degree of hazard they actually pose. I was secretly hoping it'd frighten the shit out of me. It did the opposite. It patiently explains that there's never been a better time to be alive. It even makes potentially horrifying future threats such as nuclear terrorism seem less inevitably ominous and more soothingly unlikely. It cheered me up immensely. I almost hurled it in the pool in disgust.

In summary, try as I might, for the time being I've managed to successfully get away from it all. And that's just not me. It makes me feel like an optical illusion in my own mind's eye. Which is why, as I said at the start, I'm not really here.

Still, think of all those delicious worries I can tuck into on my return. Ahh, the promise of miserable unbliss to come! It's the only thing keeping me going through this current ordeal.

• This week Charlie decided, after hearing several goats at close range, that the disturbing thing about goats is how human they sound: "Almost exactly like people moaning about being trapped in a goat's body without using actual words, in fact."