IT AMAZES me that the ancient Greeks and Romans managed to get any civilising or conquering done at all given their corner of the world is suffused with a soporific heat for much of the year.

“They must have had long siestas,” I said to the Man-in-Charge last week as we pottered slowly among the ruins of the Paphos Archaeological Site, our limbs coated in Factor 20 and slick with sweat like marathon runners. “And timed their battles for the winter month.”

January, it appears, is winter in this part of the Mediterranean. This must also have been when they did building projects.

However, we’d booked the first two weeks in September to take Secondborn on a trip to Cyprus, erroneously believing that it would be a good time to explore the island’s archaeology. Better than July or August, anyway.

“Oh no,” said one of the tour company reps in our hotel when we enquired, British-style, about the weather. “It doesn’t start to cool down until late September.”

Which was bad news indeed for The Girl, who has an interest in ancient Roman and Greek archaeology but a natural affinity for the cool, damp climate of England.

Our holiday had been planned to celebrate the fact that from next month our daughter will be studying archaeology at university. (Her friends have started calling her Indiana Jones, although she favours a trilby rather than the wider-brimmed leather fedora worn by the screen tomb raider).

And there was no way we were going to allow a bit of blistering sunlight to get in the way, especially as both myself and The Man have long harboured ambitions of an archaeological kind.

So we set off each day, after anointing ourselves with unpronounceable Piz Buin (does anyone know how to say this?) and stocking up with water bottles, to explore ancient sites.

It soon became clear that the vast majority of our fellow holidaymakers were more interested in turning themselves a deep shade of mahogany than seeing Roman mosaics or Greek temples, so we had many sites and museums almost to ourselves.

The Man-in-Charge quickly established himself as an amateur archaeologist, collecting shards of broken pottery wherever we went (this is not hard to do as pieces of old pot lie absolutely everywhere) and poking at the ground with what he called his ‘archaeology stick’.

Secondborn was not impressed at all. “Just stop it. You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, later adding “or talking about” as The Man regaled us with personal theories on life in ancient times.

I also felt an urge to offer my own ill-informed opinions as well as spouting platitudes about the wonder and beauty of it all. I think I may have had a touch of Stendhal Syndrome, or it may just have been the sun. (The syndrome is named after a 19th Century Frenchman, who felt overwhelmed by the beauty of the art he saw in Florence, and is also a theme in the latest Alexander McCall Smith Scotland Street book, one of my holiday reads).

I kept saying: “Isn’t it amazing how they had all these fancy villas, baths and underfloor heating when we didn’t even have indoor toilets until the 20th Century!” I’d also been reading Bill Bryson’s book At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which has a whole chapter on toilets. I base much of my historical knowledge on Mr Bryson’s scribblings.

“You can stop mentioning that now,” The Girl said eventually.

But it is difficult not to exclaim and gush when exposed to 2,000-year-old mosaics of hunting scenes and collections of Roman glass.

The Cypriots, of course, take it all in their stride. They’ve been digging up artefacts in their gardens for generations. Some even have their own little museums packed with coins (the holy grail of Stelfox amateur archaeology) and pots. A guard at the PalaiPaphos museum explained to us that during the British occupation of Cyprus (until 1959) it was considered fair game for Cypriots to hang onto anything they unearthed in order to keep it out of the British Museum. And who can blame them?

Of course, it is the very fact that the British were a presence on the island for eight decades that makes it such a Brit-friendly place to visit today. Almost everyone speaks fluent English, they drive on the left as we do and all signage in shops and on the roads is in English and Greek.

Only the weather has remained unaffected by Britishness.

We left the island with the thermometer pushing 34°F and the sky typically cloudless and blue. We arrived back to gale force winds and signs that the garden had been well watered while we were away. The Girl uttered a sigh of relief.

“I think you need to major in Viking archaeology,” I said. And she didn’t disagree.