The books arrived in the same post – the first from a writer with whom I share a name, the second from one with whom I share a birthday (August 14, if you want to send me a card).

Both are volumes of memoirs, of a sort. From the pen of Simon Gray – now, sadly, the late Simon Gray – came Coda (Faber and Faber and Granta, £14.95), the fourth and final volume of his highly acclaimed (and hugely enjoyed) series, The Smoking Diaries. From that of Frederic Raphael – still going strong at 77 – came Ticks and Crosses (Carcanet, £18.95), the fourth in his series Personal Terms containing edited extracts from notebooks kept earlier in his career (1976-78, in this case).

I devoured both books within a couple of days of their arrival, delighted to find, as always with these writers, so much wit and wisdom in their words. Coda, of course, is tinged with a terrible sadness since, in part, it chronicles Gray’s steady decline from the lung cancer which he acknowledges was brought on by the 60-a-day lifetime smoking habit that he would not/could not break. Freddie Raphael, by contrast, was writing at the height of his powers and living among movers and shakers at home and abroad, whom he studies with a jaundiced eye, following the huge success of his Glittering Prizes TV series.

A special interest for me in both books is that they are set, in part, on the same Greek island of Crete, indeed in and around the same small town of Agios Nikolaus. This is the resort known as Ag Nik to a generation of lager louts and their ladies who were transported there through the 1980s and 90s by Club 18-30 and its imitators. Gray and his wife Victoria are far away from any such unpleasantness, staying in a swanky unnamed hotel (where most of Coda was written) with a swimming pool attached to each room and private beaches. Raphael, for his part, is there some time before the resort acquired its dubious reputation – in 1976, which happens to be the year when I spent a three-week holiday there.

Details of this happy time remain firmly locked in my mind. Flying scheduled on Olympic Airways, we arrived in Athens too late for our ongoing flight. The airline arranged to put us up in a hotel until the next plane went out in the morning. While details were being fixed, the next plane from London arrived. I was delighted to find Yannis Daras, the conductor of the Oxford Pro Musica, among its passengers. “A drink?” he proposed. We never saw the hotel – or, at any rate our beds there.

We had no accommodation booked on Crete but managed to secure, for an absurdly small sum, a room with outdoor shower right on the beach at Agios Nikolaus. This was my last taste of what might be called student-style holidaying (well, certainly as it was then).

A source of some interest to Brits on the island at the time was that the Nottingham Forest manager, Brian Clough, who was staying nearby at the swanky Elounda Beach Hotel, was occasionally to be seen about the town. His presence caused a certain amount of surprise because Notts Forest was that week involved in a rather important game at home. “Peter will cope”, he confidently told one tourist – a reference to his long-time second-in-command Peter Taylor.

A final memory concerns the homeward flight. After three weeks wearing the same pair of plimsolls, I was horrified to discover as the plane took off, that they absolutely stank. For the next three hours I smoked vile Greek fags non-stop (those were the days!) hoping that the fumes would mask the pong.

For the benefit of the many people who will read Coda, I must correct one unfair slur it makes against a theatre reviewer from The Oxford Times.

Gray writes, concerning the reception of his plays Butley and Otherwise Engaged at their Oxford world premieres: “One theatre critic . . . wrote that he hoped to meet up with me so that he could punch me in the stomach.”

I find no reference to this in our clippings here at Newspaper House.What my acerbic predecessor as arts editor, Frank Dibb, did write was that the character of the English don Butley was “pre-eminently the sort of intellectual oaf who cries aloud to be kicked squarely, and frequently, in the pants”.

This, I am sure you will agree, is a rather different matter from lashing out at Gray himself.

Finally, let me offer, as example of the ready wit of Freddie Raphael (above), the following observations from Ticks and Crosses: “Who does not slightly like to hear something against his friends, lest the day come when he wants to dump them and lacks a licensing grudge?”

Or, concerning the formidable brainbox George Steiner: “He articulates his English in a way calculated to make a native speaker feel that it is quite an achievement to understand a sentence in his own language. This intellectual cuckoo may have contributed as much to the unpopularity of the Jew as lending money at interest.”