Democracy Street

Getting a grip on Plot 14

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:35:00 +0000

We started preparing our plot on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments mid-summer 2010. Yesterday's potatoes from our allotment - planted at various times this year - are hard. This isn'to problem once they're cooked - boiled, baked, fried. The spuds are scabby, sometimes misshapen. It's no more than a cosmetic problem. It also tells a story. There was little rain in Birmingham this summer. We know there's something in the texture and history of the soil and the types of potato we planted. We'll learn as we go.

Pottering about the allotment, tidying, planting shrubs and trees near the park end, we've survived the early challenge of lay-out and digging over raw ground. We have a few paths. Some marked out areas. Weed growth is becoming familiar, easier to control. The ground turns easier under the fork now that the matted roots of couch grass, nettles and thick storked plants have been part removed. The shed's up with its veranda and slabbed curtilage. It cost almost nothing because we got it through freegle. I've the beginnings of a compost heap. People passing nod "Hmm! Coming along nicely". It's quite a while since days in late May when I didn't really want to visit Plot 14. I've planted a vine to mark Linda's 60th in August. It grows beside a south west corner of the shed. I'm putting up a piece of recovered trellis to give it protection and support.

Not perfect by any means but we're learning

**** ****
A few days ago I streamed a clip from one of my stepfather's programmes on Channel 4 in the early 1980s - River management:

A few days later I got this email from Mick Akrill:

Simon. Hi. Once again you have uploaded some treasures! The river management film is a favourite, have you seen this film by Hugh Miles who filmed A Passion for Angling and many other wildlife films. He lives round the corner from me, and is a fellow member of Wimborne Angling Club. It's nice to see that despite the abstraction, Jack's river is still in good health. Anyway I hope you are well. Regards, Mick

*** ***
I uploaded a clip about pole-fishing; fishing with the kind of rods used by Izaak Walton 350 years ago.

The next day I was cycling along the Soho Loop to the university and there were ten anglers using fishing poles that reached almost to the opposite bank. I asked if I could hold a segment of one pole - carbon fibre, hi-tech, very light.

<Μόνο αν κερδίσουμε την κοινωνία.>

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 01:44:00 +0000

The sovereignty of Europe stands opposed to the sovereignty of Greece and of every other European country sustained by European credit. Every expression of support for Papademos among Greeks is a vote for Europe. Today's poll by MRB (who are they? what's the sample?) - says 68% of the Greek population view a unity coalition as 'the government best suited to solving the country's huge problems with debt, budget deficits and economic competitiveness'. I suspect this 'support' is made up of resigned stoicism, apprehension and dismay at the absence of alternatives. Anti-austerity comes fragmented and incoherent via the competing rhetoric of a fragmented left. No-one speaks coherently about alternatives to austerity. Among those opposed to - rather than disliking - austerity policies, there is no narrative; no discernible manifesto or guidance on "what is to be done`'

[Angela Merkel's speech of 14 Nov in Leipzig is already written - "Europe is in one of its toughest, perhaps the toughest hour since World War Two." Lucas Papademos' first speech to the Hellenic Parliament - Οι προγραμματικές δηλώσεις της κυβέρνησης Παπαδήμου - on the same day is already prepared - "I assume the premiership in the toughest moment in the country’s recent history...Remaining in the euro is the only choice.”And we - the UK - outside the Eurozone are not disconnected as David Cameron emphasised in his speech at the Mansion House on 14 Nov "European countries account for 50% of our trade and much of our inward investment - "Leaving the EU is not in our national interest. Outside, we would end up like Norway, subject to every rule for the Single Market made in Brussels but unable to shape those rules."]

Pavlos Yeroulanos who continues as Greece's Minister of Tourism asks on Twitter
"More parties, more hope for the country? Only if we win the society" <Περισσότερα κόμματα, περισσότερη ελπίδα για τη χώρα; Μόνο αν κερδίσουμε την κοινωνία.>
The new PM says there will be a general election in the middle of February next year. Sworn-in today...

.., his new government must pass through Parliament a second EC-ECB-IMF bailout package for Greece, following the EU summit on Oct 26. This 'transitional' unity Government of Greece comprises PASOK members, keeping their former posts, but also a few representatives of the other two coalition partners - conservative New Democracy but not its leader, Antonis Samaras, and, far right, Popular Orthodox Rally (LA.O.S) but not its leader, Yiorgos Karatzaferis. Dora Bakoyannis' Democratic Alliance party promises to support the new government. Alexis Tsipras Parliamentary Group president oif Radical Left Coalition (SYRIZA) called the formation of Papademos' government "a crude distortion of popular sovereignty" - unelected Papademos heading a government "trying on to implement a policy that lacks democratic legitimacy." Secretary General of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), Aleka Papariga, called for the "immediate reaction" of the people, stressing that "not even a day must be lost...even before the government regroups, before it takes the first actions, it must find the people mobilised."

Prime Minister - Lucas Papademos, Non-party

First Deputy Prime Minister - Theodoros Pangalos, PASOK

Second Deputy Prime Minister - Evangelos Venizelos (also Finance Minister), PASOK

Administrative Reform and E-Governance Minister - Dimitris Reppas, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Dinos Rovlias, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Pantelis Tzortzakis, PASOK

Citizen Protection Minister - Christos Papoutsis, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Manolis Othonas, PASOK

Culture and Tourism Minister - Pavlos Yeroulanos, PASOK

Deputy Minister (Tourism) - Yiorgos Nikitiadis, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Petros Alivizatos, ND

Defence Minister - Dimitris Avramopoulos, ND

Alternate Minister - Yiannis Ragousis, PASOK

Alternate Minister - Georgios Georgiou, LA.O.S

Deputy Minister - Kostas Spiliopoulos, PASOK

Development, Competitiveness & Shipping Minister - Michalis Chrysochoidis, PASOK

Alternate Minister - Sokratis Xynidis, PASOK

Deputy Minister (Shipping) - Adonis Georgiadis, LA.O.S

Deputy Minister - Thanos Moraitis, PASOK

Education, Lifelong Learning and Religious Affairs Minister - Anna Diamantopoulou, PASOK

Alternate Minister - Konstantinos Arvanitopoulos, ND

Deputy Minister - Evi Christofilopoulou, PASOK

Environment, Energy & Climate Change Minister - Yiorgos Papakonstantinou, PASOK

Alternate Minister - Nikos Sifounakis, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Yiannis Maniatis, PASOK

Finance Minister - Evangelos Venizelos (also Deputy PM), PASOK

Alternate Minister - Filippos Sachinidis, PASOK

Alternate Minister - Pantelis Economou, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Yiannis Mourmouras, ND

Foreign Minister - Stavros Dimas, ND

Alternate Minister - Mariliza Xenoyiannakopoulou, PASOK

Deputy Minister Dimitris Dollis, PASOK

Interior Minister - Tassos Giannitsis Former, PASOK

Alternate Minister - Fofi Yennimata, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Paris Koukoulopoulos, PASOK

Health and Social Solidarity Minister - Andreas Loverdos, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Dimitris Vartzopoulos, ND

Deputy Minister - Markos Bolaris, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Michalis Timosidis, PASOK

Infrastructure, Transport and Networks Minister - Makis Voridis, LA.O.S

Deputy Minister - Yiannis Magriotis, PASOK

Justice, Transparency and Human Rights Minister - Miltiadis Papaioannou, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Yiorgos Petalotis, PASOK

Labour and Social Security Minister - Yiorgos Koutroumanis, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Yiannis Koutsoukos, PASOK

Rural Development and Food Minister - Kostas Skandalidis, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Yiannis Drivelegas, PASOK

Deputy Minister - Asteris Rontoulis, LA.O.S

State Minister - Yiorgos Stavropoulos, PASOK

**** ****

With Helen and Tony Scoville in Theotoki Street, Corfu (photo: Linda Baddeley)

Last Friday Tony Scoville sent me his keenly awaited account of his and Helen's visit this October to Αγαπητοί Ελλάδα, beloved Greece, including their stay with us in Corfu:

Strolling to Zissimos on the Liston

...Alas it is ages since we were all together at Ano Koriakiana and each day the age gets one day longer. By now we are home and you both are back in Birmingham. However, there is a consolation: with each day the time to our next meeting gets one day shorter. (In America if you and Lin come over to see Bay?)
What a wonderful week with you and Lin culminating in that salubrious garden party you along with Effie and Adoni gave us...

The Greeks

The Brits

It was such fun to meet them and all your friends that evening even though we often could only communicate with smiles and a raised glass. Please thank them for us for giving us such a welcome to Greece. Every one (outside of Athens) so friendly. Although I adore France, especially the southwest and Dordogne, one would never get such a reception in France. So great to meet Lin at last. Both Helen and I fell in love with her quiet smile - that peeks out while the rest of us are blustering on so full of ourselves. What a lovely house you have. The view of the straits across to Albania is even more dramatic than the photo on your website.

I see from a new blog picture that you have finished painting the shutters you must be glad to be done, shutters are such a fussy job to paint....

Of course it is ok to mention our visit and the book on your blog. The only thing is that I don't recognize myself because you paint such a flattering portrait. In any case glad you enjoyed the book and CD of my music compositions; I had fun writing the book and the Passage variations and waltz. Speaking of books have you ordered David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity yet? I have just about finished since we discussed it on Corfu. Am planning to order you one from Amazon-UK but didn't want to do so if you already have it. Deutsch has one of the best discussions of social choice and decision making that I have ever read. Also an excellent chapter on 'Optimism' by which he does not mean Pollyanna. Rather he refers to the belief that one can always ask questions to resolve whatever issues arise but the answer will often involve inventing a completely new paradigm.

'From the smallest scale in our individual lives to the scale of civilisation as a whole, the growth of knowledge is profoundly unpredictable. We cannot even predict most of the problems that we shall encounter, nor most of the opportunities to solve them, let alone the solutions and attempted solutions that will be thought of and how they will affect events. Nor can we predict the probabilities of any of those things. In the light of this inescapable limitation, what is the rational attitude towards the future? How can we plan for the unknown?' David Deutsch 20 March 2011

We arrived back exhausted exactly a week ago at 3am NY time after a 10 hour delay in part caused by a slowdown on the part of the Air Traffic Controllers. Have spent the week recuperating as well as participating in a memorial service for Helen's brother Whitney.

Both of us loved Greece - except for Athens which seems a sprawling blob expanding to the surrounding mountains like those plastic splatter balls pedaled everywhere by young Indian street children. And the omnipresent graffiti make the New York subway cars seem models of decorum and tidy neighborliness by comparison. The Parthenon and the wonderful new Acropolis museum with its simple archaic Korai and the famous Calf-Bearer make up for the rest of Athens. I could see what Scully was talking about in his diagonal approach to the Parthenon which drives the eye to Mt. Immetos. It was somewhat difficult to see this because the Parthenon is currently covered with scaffolding but H and I have plans already to come back when the repairs are completed.

But once away from Athens the country is glorious and fascinating. Extremely rugged and dramatic and changing constantly. We went everywhere up tiny little roads far into the backcountry that people in our hotels said we shouldn't attempt. At times I really had to navigate by the sun to check that we were going in the right general direction and then hope that the road we were on actually led somewhere! Which it always did thanks in part to Helen's intuitive sense of which turn to take. I swear she must have magnetic filings in her head like a migratory bird!

After we left you, we stayed at the Porphyrion B & B in Ano Pedhina in the Zagori. Lovely and a beautiful little town with buildings of the grey stone characteristic of the region - except for Porphyrion which is brick. Probably the most attractive place we stayed although the food good but not quite up to the lodgings. We gave them the giant cucumber. ... The Vikos Gorge is amazing.

We visited the tiny town of Vikos perched high above the gorge and completely quiet. A must to go see. Then descended about 1500 feet to the river which was crystal clear and shaded by oaks and what looked like beech trees to me. Then back up the other side to Mikro Papigo where we ran into an outpost of the World Wildlife Foundation. The obviously-glad-to-see-us young Director gave us a briefing on all the endangered wildlife in the Canyon including the rare chamois. (I sensed he had not had many visitors - especially ones who knew a bit about endangered species.)

A bit of an aside: When we were with you I don't think H & I mentioned our visit to the Monastery of Osios Loukas near Stirio about 30km east from Delphi. Built in the 10th century, this was one of the most beautiful Byzantine churches we saw. Radiant frescoes and the scale just right for the subjects about which Helen knew far more than I. Not all jammed together as at the Great Meteora.
Another aside: On the way to the Zagori via Ioannina (a dull strip city best by-passed) we stopped off at Dodona. A lovely theatre there along with scattered remains of temples (and of course the Jovian oak tree) set in long valley surrounded by high hills that gradually flared apart in the distance. One of the prettiest classical sites; it was not overwhelmed by tourists. It was easier to feel the landscape here and what made it spiritual than it was to do so at Olympia.
Next Kalambakia and the Meteora. Almost missed the Elena Guest house that you recommended (excellent by the way) as the street name signs in Kalambakia were terrible. I finally spotted a placard on the side of a building that said 'Guest house Elena 300 meters' and we knew we were home. But it was sheer luck...Incidentally, for lunch we had the best Tzatziki at the taverna of an old crone who reeled us in with her toothy smile as we stopped for a moment to get our bearings in Kastraki.

Kastraki, north west of Kalambaka, at Meteora

Very finely shredded cucumber, smooth rich yogurt (no low fat here!) and not too much garlic. Will try to duplicate soon.
Those sandstone pillars with the Monasteries perched atop are quite amazing. I climbed all the way to the top of the Great Meteora. A trek but the church was not as moving as the little monastery of Osios Loukas I mentioned earlier. The sandstone pillars very dramatic but I found the wild country of the Zagori more mysterious and awesome. There was something about that northern Greece terrain that grabbed Helen and me.
On Friday 9/30 a long drive (5.5 hrs) via Trikala, Larissa, and Corinth to Nafplion on the Peloponnese for 3 days. Made a mistake of leaving the autostrada at Thiva (Thebes) as a shortcut to Elfina just west of Athens. Thiva very dull; the road ugly and slow. As a general rule, unless going on the really back roads stay on the autostrada. The autostrada are beautiful roads and avoid the ugly sprawl of so many modern Greek cities including Athens. But back on track just west of Athens to Corinth where we stopped briefly to see the Temple of Apollo dominating the landscape. In good enough shape and not surrounded by modern clutter so that one can appreciate what a site it must have been to a pilgrim in the 5th cent BC.

A feather Lin, I & Amy found at the Pieirian Spring in the Temple of Apollo

Finally reached Nafplia about 17:00. Nearly couldn't find our hotel (the Leto which was high up with an excellent view of the harbor). Lots of walking up and down in Nafplia! Nafplia a lovely town sort of like Corfu town but filled with Athenian sophisticates and their stores. Great small streets strung with good outdoor tavernas and restaurants and a raucous central square that was fun to sit in. The harbor lovely. It too reminds me of Corfu but with more restaurants by the quai and a bigger bay. Saturday to Epidaurus with its amazing theatre in excellent condition and set in a dramatic bowl of hills opening onto the sea about 10 km away. The theatre has amazing reverb (rather like our living room) which must be the reason for its proverbial acoustics. The museum was not up to the theatre and site however its collection may not have been helped by having lost treasures to the Acropolis Museum in Athens (shades of the Elgin Marbles see later diatribe?) but it just didn't seem imaginatively organized. On Sunday up to Mycene which is a magnificent mountain surrounded citadel of cyclopean stonework at the head of a long valley.

How they hauled and maneuvered all that stone I don't know. The magnificent 'Lion Gate' whose single keystone with the engraved Lions weighs 20 tons. This in the mid 13th century BC when Atreus was king! The nearby so-called Tholos (Tomb) of Agamemnon really feels like the entrance would open on the pathway to death. Boring to one's sense of mortality but without the sense of the ability to question and create a human abode in the cosmos. (Yet it was created by humans and so contradicts its foreboding.) Stopped by Tiryns on the way back to Nafplia. Smaller and with cyclopean stonework as at Mycene but it didn't quite match my college classroom conception of its massiveness - in part this may be because it seems overwhelmed by the outlying suburbs of Argos and in part because the underground passages for which Tiryns is famous were closed owing to earthquake damage.
On Monday 10/3 down the coast where we stopped briefly at the small fascinating Mycenean ruin of Lerna (hard to find but well worth seeing) on our way (eventually!) to Mystras. At Leonidio we turned inland to we ascend up the wild incredibly precipitous Parnonas mountains. Back and forth around endless switchbacks on a very small road clawed into the mountainside over very deep gorges. We emerged after about an hour and a half on top in the cozy little town of Cosmas. Lovely small scale. Had lunch in the kitchen of the taverna in the square as it was too cold to sit out. We were definitely the only non-Greeks. Excellent sautéed meat balls along with a Greek salad that had the sweetest tomatoes I have ever tasted. (When I asked the proprietor where they came from he proudly said "Cosmas".) Also an excellent rose wine with more body than usual and a slight very unusual musty taste a little like an Alsatian Gewurtz but not as overbearing as a Gewurtz. We bought a bottle for our travels. After lunch we got off the 'main road' at Geraki and took the 'yellow' road via Agio Dimitrios to Molai where we joined the main highway to Monemvasia. Got totally lost several times and at one point ended up in a farmer's backyard. Several times I literally had to navigate by the sun to know whether we were going in the right direction. We went to Monemvasia on the spur of the moment because it was nearer than we thought and Helen's brother Whitney had recommended it. A bit touristy now but quite amazing extremely compact medieval town on spit of land - a Greek Mont St Michel. Well worth the detour but don't go in the summer!

After tea at a cafe overlooking the sea in Monemvasia we headed back north to Sparta and Mystras a quick trip on the main drag but we got lost in the Sparta suburbs when the road signs for Mystras petered out after a couple of turns. (Greek roads do that to you.) Eventually made it just at dusk. Thank heavens because I began to lose my solar 'bearings' when the sun set. Mystras, set under the enormous Taygetos mountains is quite fascinating. The only way I can describe it is as colony of cliff swallow nests constructed of thin bricks interlaced with mortar climbing up a precipice surmounted by an eagle's nest (the fort) perched on the top. It comes in two stages: the monasteries about halfway up and the fortress. Except for one short stretch we walked all the way to the top where the view is magnificent. I didn't venture too close to the edge because of my acrophobia! It was amazing to learn that at one point (late 12th and 13th centuries I believe) Mystras was the second largest Byzantine city after Constantinople. It has a view all the way to Monemvasia which served as its port city. The Vrontokion monastery with its church the Hodegetria very beautiful almost rivaled (to my mind) the Monastery of Hosia Loukas mentioned earlier. Wonderful repeating domes for a roof. Bought some lovely hand embroidered table napkins from an old nun (one of the very small colony still inhabiting the nunnery).

Sunday 11/6: After an hiatus of a week, at last time to return to this account. As you may have read, on Saturday 10/29 all of New England was hit with a freak snow storm that dumped 16" of heavy wet snow on Connecticut. Trees and heavy branches broken down everywhere from the weight of the snow. We were without power, telephone and internet for four days until Thursday. Here in CT there are still (Sunday) well over 100k families who are without power and, I learned today that some towns don't expect to get power until Thanksgiving two weeks from now. Inexcusable on the part of the power company farming out their risk to thousands of individuals and businesses. Luckily, I was able to connect our old generator to my tractor and provide power to the house for heat, some lights, and the fridge but no internet or phone. I wasn't sure the generator would work because I had never used it before but it worked without a hitch. Next time we will be better prepared as I have left the generator mounted on the tractor! Hence the delay in getting this off to you.
11/7: To continue.
On Tuesday 10/4 afternoon after our hike through Mystras, we headed down to Gytheio then down the east coast of the Mani via Katronas. Precipitous cliffs that plunged into the sea. At Lagia about halfway along the peninsula we headed inland across high rugged mountains laced with very small roads to a very romantic hotel (the Kirimai) situated on the little cove of Gerolimenas. Beautiful hotel with very good food (but not cheap unfortunately!). We dined on the terrace looking out on the cove. The half moon shone down on the cove, a nymph dancing on the water. About 10pm the hotel lit the opposite cliff shore with very dramatic lights. The reflection from waves in the water made the lights appear to move along the cliffs. (Germans staying there and throughout Greece like locusts. Obviously, Germany is riding high these days!)
Wed 10/4: We drove 30 km down the west coast of the Mani peninsula to the very end at Cape Tenaro. Rocks, rocks, rocks. Everywhere rocks! Amazing, beautiful, desolate countryside. How they survived I cannot imagine. Still Porto Kagia which we dropped in on managed to export 6,000 quails a month to Venice in the sixteenth century.

In fact, however, most Maniots didn't survive very well. The hills are practically paved with tiny terraces (miles of them) laboriously built with stone picked from the fields and still there are more than I have ever seen in New England. I can attest from farming in Vermont in the 1960's that New England has a rock problem. Each small plot I was told delimits the water/land rights of a family or clan.

And the Maniots fought each other over every drop of water. About halfway down our drive we stopped at the small towered town of Vatheia. It consists entirely of square stone towers about 3 stories high separated by small streets. No house has a window on the street floor because the Maniots were engaged in perpetual feuds over water rights and shot at their neighbors other across the street well into the 19th century. Some of this is described in PLF's book The Mani - a must read.

In fact the whole area is a must visit if you and Lin haven't done so. Wednesday evening we drove through a thunderstorm to a very simple but excellent taverna (the Katoi) on a tiny square in the center of Aeropoli about 30 km north of Gerolimenas. Almost impossible to find but serving delicious chicken. Totally Greek.

Speaking of Fermor there was an very good appreciation of him in the New York Review of Books in early July. An amazing character but the last of his type. I gather from the review that the final volume of his diary about his walk in the 1930's from Amsterdam to Istanbul will be published next year. It was nearly complete when he died. Amazingly for such a prolix writer he was constantly plagued by writer's block. If you can't find the article let me know and I will email it to you.
Thurs 10/5: Headed north to Olympia via Ancient Messene (known as Ithomi on some maps) which one approaches by way of the massive Arcadian gate. It is so big - almost Cyclopean - that one wonders how they built it beginning in the 6th century BC. A large site in very good condition and not plagued by tourists. Lots of restoration work going on but it is not disturbing as at other sites. After our usual lunch of Greek salad on a taverna terrace overlooking Messene (from this vantage point one could clearly see the lay of the land and surrounding mountains (unlike Olympia - see later) we resumed our journey taking back roads (in some places unpaved) by way of Malthi and Aetos. Near Aetos we came across a Mycenean Tholos tomb that had been beautifully excavated. Very like the famed Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae but to my mind more fascinating because it was quiet and one could imagine some small kingdom burying their king in this quiet far away valley. As we were traveling on this road we came around a corner and there in middle of the road was an old toothy goatherd with his flock of about 100 goats.

Helen and I will never forget the startled expression on his face when he saw us appear in our rented Mercedes mini-SUV. Then he uttered the expression "oh, oh!". He knew what the road ahead was like but we didn't. I am sure he expected us to reappear shortly on foot seeking help. About 1/2 km further on we came to a short stretch that was washed out. After canvassing the situation we picked out way across the shallow ditch and proceeded on to the main road to Kalo Nero and up the coast to Krestena and Olympia.

The Temple of Apollo at Bassae by Edward Lear

Fri 10/6: We decided to head over to Bassae and the Temple of Apollo Epikourios via Andritsena rather than explore Olympia because the weather was supposed to turn. A longish drive, because the road wound around a lot through rugged but beautiful country. The road get higher and higher after Andritsena as we passed (what looked like) several round stone sheep pens. Sounds of sheep and goat bells in the high pastures whenever one stopped. Suddenly one rounds a corner and there it is, the Temple now clothed in a large tent for repairs that reminds me of the Corbusier Philips Pavilion at the '58 Brussels World's Fair...

...While one wished that the temple were exposed, even the tent on that isolated mountain ridge surrounded by deep gorges is impressive. When one enters the tent and sees the nearly complete temple with its rows of Doric columns, one can understand why the Greeks built them as they did: they are truly moving-- the structure somehow suggesting an existence and order beyond man but still conceived and built by man. (I think I mentioned this in my book on 36 Taconic Road.) The paradoxical pagan intimacy between the human and the beyond moves me in a way that no church (save possibly Chartres) does. I hope I shall still be alive when they remove the tent. If so Helen and I have resolved to be over in an instant. The same applies to the Parthenon when they remove the present scabrous scaffolding.
Walking around the Bassae site we surveyed the breathtaking landscape with its deep gorges immediately giving to the next ridge of mountains - a theme repeated as far as the eye could see - one grasped how much more mysterious and awe inspiring it is to have just a single temple rather than other sites such Delphi where there is a jumble of temples like modern outdoor mall. Highly commercial the others seem - the business of religion dominates. As I saw many sites and their rendered modern reconstructions I became convinced that the visual and psychological view we have of Greek architecture - consisting of austere grey or white columns silently supporting the sky - is highly romantic. However, I like it that way! And it fits with the austere ethos of Greek tragedy.
We continued southward over rugged beautiful country - often getting lost - for a bit through one small village after another until we eventually joined the road to Kalo Nero and the coast that we had been on the day before. Upon returning to Olympia we walked around the archaeological site - very peaceful Helen thought - but for both of us not as moving as some others - especially Bassae which had just that morning spoiled us. Three problems proved a hindrance to me: first they had the major temples roped off so that one could not walk among (the few) remaining columns (particularly those of the Temple of Zeus) and feel their presence; second, I could not find a place to go and see the whole peaceful site in the context of the valley formed by the confluence of the Alphios and Kladeos rivers set among the low surrounding hills; third, the site is such a jumble of fallen broken columns that it is hard to visualize what the standing structures might have looked and felt like - too much the ravages of time prove a distraction!
Sat 10/6: Olympia having proved a bit of a disappointment, we decided to head to Athens a day early after going to the Archaeological Museum in the morning. The Museum rather than the site was the highlight of our time in Olympia: the Nike of Paionios...

...the Hermes of Praxiteles and especially the severe style battle of Lapiths and Centaurs originally on a pediment of the Temple of Zeus are wonderful. To me more moving than some of the more ornate figures from the Parthenon.
Sunday 10/7-Friday 10/14(3AM Eastern US time): There are five reasons to visit Athens which, as I remarked earlier, is a rather unattractive city lacking any charm:

Edward Lear: Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens 1850

A photo I took on my first visit to Greece in 1957

1: The Parthenon. Unparalleled even in its damaged state! And as one first sees it on emerging from the Propylaia one's eye immediately hits the northwest corner and travels along the procession of columns to Mount Hymmetos just as I learned so long ago in Scully's class. Compelling! And by far the most subtle of all the temples we saw: the entasis, the slight tilt of the columns toward the center of the building, and the barely noticeable arching curve rising slightly in the center of the front steps of the Parthenon. All this was hard to see through the gaggle of tourists and spider webbing of scaffolding but one could just make it out and most of all one felt it.
2. The Archaeological Museum with its treasures like the gold mask of 'Agamemnon'

3. The new Acropolis Museum - a superb state of the art attractively designed museum housing glorious works from all periods such as the marvellous Korai...

...and 'Calf Bearer' mentioned earlier. On the second floor the designers have set up an eye height replica of the metopes and pediments of the Parthenon showing the placement of the columns. Gaps pointedly left in the metopes and pediments where the 'missing' Elgin marbles would go if returned.
Here I cannot resist a comment. As part of the exhibit there is an excellent video of the history of the Parthenon showing its design and subsequent 'care' by succeeding generations of Athenians (including Christians, Turks, and modern Greeks since independence in 1832). Of course the video shows Lord Elgin removing the marbles. One has to ask whether the Greeks were exemplary custodians of this treasure. The answer is clearly "no". First, there was a fire in about 500 AD which no one took care to put out, Greek Christians defaced the sculptures because they were 'pagan' then they built a church inside the temple; the succeeding Mosque was no better and only very late did Elgin come along and take many of the marbles to another place where they would at least be cared for and not dissolved (like the Caryatids) by automobile pollution. Then, too, notice that many of the Acropolis museum's exhibits are purloined treasures from around Greece which the museum decided to take 'custody' of. Why is this any better than what Lord Elgin did? Why not leave them on location and provide care for them on site by locals? In short while one can understand the desire of the Greeks for the return of the marbles I am not convinced that the Greeks make a good case for their return. They neither cared for them while they had custody from the 5th century BC until the mid 19th century. Further, given the first opportunity, Athens has purloined antiquities from around Greece, Macedonia and Ionian Greece (now Turkey). As in so many cases, it just depends on who is wearing the shoe to see where they walk! So I don't blame the Brits for hanging on to the Marbles at least until Greece recognizes that they are world treasures and not just the property of Greece. Of course the latter conclusion should be applicable to all ancient artifacts held or claimed by whatever country.
4. The Central Market: This is a small scale version of Les Halles where, I gather, all the restaurant chefs as well as savvy individuals go. Endless trays of every conceivable kind of fish, shellfish, skinned lambs and pigs as well as vegetables and fruit are laid out looking very fresh. Plenty of big octopii here but none frozen so far as I could tell! H and I have always loved visiting open markets under their corrugated metal roofs but seldom have access to them. A riot of colors, textures and smells manned by very down-to-earth characters. I found myself wishing I had a kitchen to do some cooking while looking at it all but had to settle for a jar of Greek thyme honey that I love and which now resides in our conserves cabinet.
5. The Taverna Kuzina on the pedestrian Adriannou quai in the Psirri across the rail line from the Ancient Agora. In good weather it has roof top dining with a view over the Areopagus to the Acropolis. Sophisticated, imaginative contemporary Greek cooking with pleasant service and good wines all at a moderate price. We went there twice. I had wonderful grilled octopus; Helen had a superb fish mousse as a starter. We learned about this place from a young Greek shipping manager who had been to Tufts University and his gorgeous Bulgarian girl friend with whom we fell into conversation while having tea in a small tree-covered square just off the Ancient Agora.
We walked up to the Parthenon on our first afternoon in Athens and had planned to go back just before closing on our last afternoon (Wednesday). We had hoped to take some photos in the late afternoon when the Acropolis would be less crowded and the light better so one could see the effects described earlier. However, after the long walk up we arrived to find the gates closed. Apparently the Acropolis guards had decided to go on strike one day earlier than announced and simply closed the place! What a disappointment. Made one wonder whether the travails afflicting the Greek economy these days aren't largely self-inflicted - even though my economic prejudices are strongly Keynesian and firmly against blind austerity as resolution to the credit crisis facing Greece and so many other nations (including the US). ....Poor Greece (a para' from Tony's letter I quoted on 9 Nov)...Fond best wishes and love to you both, Tony

Simon and Tony in Ano Korakiana

PS. One lesson about traveling we learned from our trip: ditch your computer and cell-phone at the airport security check! For three blissful weeks we cut our umbilicals to the frenetic pumping heart of contemporary existence. Once every three or four days Helen and I would suddenly remark to each other how relaxed our trip was and how we hadn't thought about home at all during the interim. What a relief! Existence is all that our hyperconnected societies provide; not life together!

Ο αύριο ήταν σήμερα

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:30:00 +0000

Up early to treat myself to breakfast - fresh fried eggs, buttered toast and a mug of tea; then a last walk with dog Lulu along the silvery Farnack...

.... before Sharon drove me to the airport for my flight home to Birmingham

" We are beginning our descent to Birmingham"

With just hand baggage I was on the AirRail Link to International Station in minutes, waited eight minutes for a train into New Street, from where, almost as swiftly, I'm riding a 16 to Handsworth - bus and train free on my 60+ concession pass - scanning news from an abandoned copy of Metro - 'Mark Wright: I'll be fine without sex in the I'm A Celebrity jungle'.
*** ***

When I left Scotland, my plane two thirds empty, Greece's new PM was yet to be nominated.
George Papandreou's unpopularity has been the unpopularity of what he has tried to do, for all the mockery of his 'bad' Greek and scoffing at his American accent. It is so difficult to agree on a replacement to lead the unity government that he tried and failed while in office to bring about, because no-one stands out as having his talent at combining managerial and technical grasp of the issues - a legacy of his American education that began with exile from the Junta - with his political legitimacy as an elected leader and standing as a skilled parliamentary tactician, as well as - in a country that places much value on family - his membership of one of the Hellenic Republic's political dynasties. Even having stepped down he's still in the centre of things, as leading politicians struggle, under the anxious raptor gaze of the ECB, IMF, EU and the world, to find a replacement with the political nous, legitimacy and managerial sophistication of Papandreou.
***
So I learn this afternoon Lucas Papademos is to be interim PM, to be sworn in tomorrow afternoon. along with his new Cabinet. His not being an elected politician is circumvented by Article 38.2 of the Hellenic Constitution

2. Should the Prime Minister resign or be deceased, the President of the Republic shall appoint as Prime Minister the person proposed by the parliamentary group of the party to which the former belonged...

Λουκάς Παπαδήμος

...and note that the economist Mario Monti was appointed Senator for Life by the Italian President, clearing the way for him to succeed Silvio Berlusconi. [Toddler reactions]

*** ***
I looked down from the prop plane shortly after take-off and there below was the smoke from burning heather, the tracks and Farr Wind Farm by the Garbol Road whose tips were topping the horizon as two days ago I cycled along the strath...

...and in the evening I was in the front row of the circle at the Birmingham Hippodrome with Linda, our son-in-law Guy and Amy, her tummy now visibly swelling, revelling in Slava's Snow Show - children with paper snow flakes blowing in our faces, a theatre-wide skein of gossamer webbing spread over our heads; great coloured globes wandered from the stage to the gods to be tossed back and forth by the audience.

'... a truly continental economy'

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:20:00 +0000

We think we've allowed for the €3.50 for each square metre of the assessed floor space of our home in Democracy Street which we will be required to pay when we get our next electricity bill, but November 9th's Kathimerini reports problems across the country as the new property tax increment appears on this month's round of domestic bills:

Public Power Corporation (ΔΕΗ) on Tuesday announced that it has set up a special hotline to deal with hundreds of complaints from consumers around the country who have received larger-than-expected bills for an emergency property tax levied through their electricity bill. According to the majority of complaints received by PPC representatives across Greece, the square meterage of hundreds of properties -- which is one of the factors in the complex formula used to assess property tax, together with the location and age of the property, and the so-called objective value, a bracket set by the Finance Ministry to control real estate prices -- was inflated. It is the job of each individual municipality to submit to PPC the details of every declared property in its domain, with which it levies the municipal tax that is also charged through PPC bills. A spokesperson for PPC on Tuesday said that the discrepancies in the new emergency property tax are the responsibility of the municipal authorities rather than the electricity provider, though it added that consumers who have any questions regarding the tax they are being asked to pay can call the toll-free hotline on 214.214.1000 for advice. In the case of sensitive social groups, like pensioners and disabled people, the General Secretariat for Information Systems of the Finance Ministry - Γενική Γραμματεία Πληροφοριακών Συστημάτων - has set up an SMS (on tel 54160) and web (http://www.gsis.gr/faq/faq_eta.html) service to deal with claims of over-charging. Other consumers who believe that they are being asked to pay more than their proper dues are required to pay their property tax and PPC in full and to then apply for a refund via their next electricity bill. PPC has been ordered to cut the electricity supply of anyone who refuses to pay the property tax.

[Back to the future - 15 Nov': Kathimerini reports:

It is unlikely that the state coffers will see anywhere near as much money as expected by the George Papandreou government from the Special Property Tax, levied on citizens via electricity bills, as the first signs have been rather disappointing.]

*** ***
Channel 4 is showing a programme Go Greek for a Week . In the first episode three British citizens - a bus driver, hair dresser and a doctor, advised by a fake accountant - Mr U.Kostas (ha ha) - learn how much they would get by way of earnings and pensions in Greece, and how much they would need to pay by way of fakelaki - Φακελάκι - for an MOT and a planning application to build on greenbelt land. It's all done archly tongue in cheek. It's also depressing and one-sided implying Greek corruption - undeniable (see 'Tragic Flaw: Graft Feeds Greek Crisis' Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2010) caused the Eurozone crisis, leading to the collapse of capitalism. One responses from Radio Arvyla - Ράδιο Αρβύλα - is a parody show hosted by ANT1 from Thessaloniki.

**** ****
Negotiations continue for the formation of a possible government of unity in the Republic. Tony Scoville e-mailed me this afternoon with an account of his and Helen's tour of Greece, including their stay with us in Ano Korakiana, during October. I shall settle down to read it tomorrow. He ends his letter...

...Poor Greece. In the last three weeks since we left, things seem to have gone from bad to much, much worse. I read a heart-rending article today in the NYT portraying how the entire Greek economy seems to be grinding to halt - literally. Businesses and shops, even in the affluent districts are shuttering because they haven't had a buying customer in weeks and those who do come in are seeking to pawn family valuables rather than buy anything! Deposits are fleeing Greek banks and sent abroad before it loses its value from enforced conversion to a new drachma. Will be interesting to see whether the new coalition government can handle the situation. I have my doubts. All parliamentarians, according to the article, have to be accompanied by armed guards. Do you think the military will try to take over as in the 1970's if the situation becomes chaotic and the government simply cannot enforce the measures it passes? Though no one has mentioned the possibility yet, Greece may be close to this possibility. I have no sense as to how all these turns are affecting the countryside but the paralysis has got to hit the rural areas and smaller cities sooner or later if things continue along their present trajectory. How stupid and, as Paul Krugman points out in the NYT so much unnecessary suffering all because the ECB, France and Germany won't get together to form a truly continental economy with greater not less unity. Hell, we learned that lesson (during America's critical period) in the 1780's under the Articles of Confederation!

*** *** ***
Just another day and a half in my mother's house in the Highlands and then south to Birmingham. I'm ensconced as in a closed order here, warm, secure, remote - yet in touch through phone to laptop, with little need for TV or newspapers...

Brin Croft

...organising a lecture on campus on 11 November on 'managing in a political environment', planning an in-house event on performance scrutiny for Dumfries and Galloway later in the month, sending an outline of my interest to the new Director of Inlogov, Catherine Staite, in readiness for a meeting next week about further work:

Dear C...For 30 years or more, while teaching on campus and in-house at InlogovYes Minister crystallised that interest, both because it was so well received, so funny on an unpromising subject - the relationship between a senior administrator and senior politician - and because it was about the minutiae of what went on between two people, with their various foils, but primarily two named human beings - two players. In real life this relationship between a politician and an administrator is not meant to be a friendship, tho' often friendly and usually courteous. It's a public relationship of government - yet at the same time drawing on the energies, feelings, motives and passions of a private relationship. By and large this aspect of leadership in government is left to gossip, reminiscence, fiction and historical biography because methods for exploring personal relations at the core of democracy are so unattainable.
I’ve always had an interest in photography and then television (my step-father was on it and I spent some of my youth in studios as he broadcast). With a mix of help from Chris Game and John Stewart and people at the campus TV studios we started creating short films of political leaders in local government to use on courses - as spice. I became more and more fascinated by the idea of filming the working relationship between a lead manager and a lead politician in making government...there were subtleties here that merited the attention of the video camera, which while not guaranteeing authenticity, could show both verbal and non-verbal exchanges in conversations at a ‘political-management interface’.
I wrote about this in a number of papers that are on my CV - especially my thinking on ‘the construction of trust at the top of local government’ and ‘political-management leadership’. As time went by I detached myself from the increasingly expensive services of campus TV service and acquired my own filming and editing equipment; developing the skills need to use equipment that in time became more and more ‘user-friendly'.
There is a method and a craft to making these films of CEO’s (sometimes Chief Officers) and their significant opposite number in the political sphere. I don't just ask them to talk to me about their working relationship. I have found a way of getting them to have that relationship on camera while I say nothing though of course they know I’m filming.
In 2011 I have an archive comprising many hours of material collected over a lengthy period from which with very clearly agreed permission from participants I've extracted key episodes which I use for graduate teaching, one-off lectures, conference presentations and in-house teaching and consultancy aimed at enhancing the quality of a council's political-management working relationships. An important step forward was having participants trust me sufficiently to permit me to stream extracts of films I’d made of them on the web (clearing this also with campus legal services.).
Although these films are unique - both as a record and as teaching material about leadership in local government - they are by no means the only material I use. There’s the conceptual and cognitive material based on far wider writing on leadership in government and the tension between political, managerial and political processes concentrated at the point where unique figures meet in specific organisations - hence my strong preference for closely prepared in-house work based on local context. I use mini-case studies - critical incidents of which I have 100s on file - told to me, and then rendered anonymous, by the key actors. I use carefully prepared exercises in political mapping to help less experienced officers enhance their skills at ‘reading' a political environment, and similarly I have developed techniques that mirror these ‘reading' exercise to assist members read the bureaucracy they are expected to understand and lead.
With the great diffusion of agencies that has come with localisation such exercises are valued at all levels of local councils, but I continue to hold that the working relationship of a lead manager and politician is key to understanding the wider interaction of politics and management. I believe this entails a process of skilled negotiation. Teaching this subject in Australia with a colleague there we titled our seminars, run jointly across the continent, ‘Negotiating the Overlap’ (the attached programme flier may be of interest). I enjoy working with other trainers, indeed prefer it, whether colleagues from inlogov, other institutions or in-house managers.

With Professor John Martin in Tasmania

When I meet M I hope to win her interest (and the prospect of future work in this area) by running quickly through the contents of a one-day event for a specific local council and the planning that precedes such an event as well as what follows it by way of managerial and organisational development. Every encounter varies since every council’s unique. I’m a tourist in my own land. People speak of cloned town centres. One of the reasons I like walking and cycling is that when I visit a particular council I get to see a few of its byways and highways and of course, if it has one, its railway station. I see its houses, offices, public buildings and green spaces and the drivers of the local economy as I pedal about. As you know I’ve also been involved in community activism in Birmingham and have been able to learn from these experiences without compromising my capacity for an appropriate detachment when it comes to working with local members and officers across the UK....

*** ***
Yesterday under a clear sky I cycled first north to Wester Lairgs Farm, just sold to a new owner as yet unknown, then took the broad gravel forestry track that leads along the treeline on the eastern slopes of Strathnairn, turning downhill and back before Farr Loch, where the track ends...

...and joining a narrower one that runs beside the river beside fields and through tall plantations - about five miles, with Scotland to myself, but for the signs of seasonal heather burning and a few cars once I'd joined the road at Farr School half a mile from Inverarnie.
Later I drove with my mum to Tomatin Distillery to smell the oats and see a little of the process of making single malt...

'...curious treasures of their stock-in-trade'

... a small sight of another's craft. We got to see the copper distillation stills, a warehouse full of vaporous oak barrels...

... coopered on site and a sip of 12 year old Tomatin and learning that most Scots distilleries are owned by the Japanese - in this case Takara Shuzo - that the bottling's done far south in Dumbarton, the barrels emptied into a tanker; the oats made into mash-tun elsewhere and brought for distillation to Tomatin. Later I took Mum to the Snow Goose on the edge of town for supper - veg soup, local beer and sausages and mash, though Mum fiddled with an aubergine curry - and a chance to discuss a video we're planning to make tomorrow about memories of Bagnor - though I'm not sure mum has the plot on that wonderful 13 years of my childhood. There's so much happened, with so many separate intertwined strands, that I can't quite imagine how she'll weave a narrative, compared to other memories of her's that we've filmed.

Not out of the woods

*** *** ***
No white smoke yet. A compromise for Hellenic PM emerged today - Phillippos Petsalnikos - but he was blocked by fellow PASOK members, returning Lucas Papademos to preferred candidate, but with what mandate? Αύριο...

*** ***
My talented half-bro George Baddeley, Managing Director of Silver Comedy, just sent me a tweet about their recent work...

Single malt

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 02:50:00 +0000

Such a pleasure to bring, as a present to my mum, a 15 year old single malt, Dalwhinnie from Lochan na Doire-uaine.
"Whew!" she said after one sip "that goes right through my body. Beautiful."
"The angel's have had their share of that" I said, tasting the warming bitterness, the sun dazzling through the windows, creating long shadows, speckling surfaces, leaking into the house - searchlights showing glistening dust motes. I walked beyond my usual orbit diverting from one forest path and working my way, with Lulu, up an old fire-break strewn with long fallen spruce coming out above the tree line to gaze over the landscape from Ben Wyvis...

...to the north overlooking a patch of the Moray Firth to the greater part of Strath Nairn, Brin Rock, my marker.

Coming down my path dried up and I had to push my way downhill on my back and stomach through the needle bed below close standing spruce, which gradually thinned until I could stand and holding branches, head...

...where the trees were wider spaced, emerging onto a familiar forestry track to walk back to Brin Croft by the Farnack.
Yesterday I cycled a short circuit down to Inverarnie, over the Nairn at Balnafoich, along the road towards Flickerty, but turning east at Tordarrroch to Farr and home stopping often to gaze.

Tordarrroch; by his horns...a Highland Shorthorn cross?

*** ***
Lest it be thought I'm engaged in covert product-placement, I'm leaving clues for google-bots, Trojan horses and other malware to see how far despite, various measures to block such surveillance, I'm being automatically reviewed. Fascinating subject. [See also ICO, and Campus Legal Services]
** **
Thanks to Jim Potts for passing on via Corfu Blues latest news from beloved Greece and the possibility that Lukas Papademos (CV) might become the new PM of the Hellenic Republic:

Greece's political leadership will on Monday name an interim government and end a crisis of confidence that threatens to derail a €100bn bailout agreement crucial to the eurozone's survival. Socialist prime minister George Papandreou and conservative opposition leader Antonis Samaras met for almost 90 minutes under the auspices of the country's president. A communique issued after they broke off negotiations for the night said they would name the caretaker prime minister and cabinet the following day. The new government's agenda would be the ratification of a €100bn bailout for Greece which the eurozone approved last week, and the implementation of an austerity programme attached to that bailout. It would then take the country "immediately" to a new general election, the communique said. Papandreou has said that he will be stepping down as prime minister in order to facilitate the formation of such a government. His resignation has been the key demand by Samaras, who has reiterated it every day for the past three days. The prime minister's brother, Nick Papandreou, told The New Athenian that George Papandreou took the decision to resign on Friday....

George Papandreou, Karolos Papoulias and Antonis Samaras

*** ***
9 November'11 - back to the future - negotiations around the formation of a new government continue and Papademos seems out of the running having set conditions for accepting the position of PM which the others involved could not accept...I should just wait and see...er...Ioannis Koukiadis? Faites vos jeux?

Φίλιππος Πετσάλνικος

ATHENS, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) According to the latest unconfirmed reports in local media, amongst front-runners for the office was former Vice President of the European Central Bank Lucas Papademos and current European Court of Justice President Vassilis Skouris. According to local media, other candidacies included Speaker of the Parliament Filippos Petsalnikos, former Speaker of Parliament Apostolos Kaklamanis, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos.

[Back to the future: A player in these negotiations from which he made a display of walking out is Georgios Karatzaferis, Γεώργιος Καρατζαφέρης, leader of the rightist People's Orthodox Rally, Λαϊκός Ορθόδοξος Συναγερμός (ΛΑ.Ο.Σ), with 15 MPs and nearly 5% of the vote in the 2009 general election:

George Gilson, Athens News ~ 10 Nov: The George and Antonis show was upset by Karatzaferis, who stormed out of the presidential palace with the intensity of Maria Callas playing Medea, because Papandreou and Samaras were discussing the new government without him. He demanded that banker Lucas Papademos – who is widely viewed as the best choice to be interim premier due to his clout in EU power and finance circles – be appointed prime minister anyway. The Laos leader’s well-staged scene managed to force Papademos’ candidacy to return to the forefront, and talks were going on between the banker, Papandreou and Samaras as the Athens dailies were going to press. So the ultraright may become the kingmaker that brinks a banker to power.]

Ακόμα...

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:52:00 +0000

Christina Fernández, President of Argentina, at the G20 Summit*

Results of the Euro Summit agreed at the end of October...

1. An agreement that should secure the decline of the Greek debt to GDP ratio with an objective of reaching 120% by 2020. Euro area Member States will contribute to the PSI package up to €30 billion. The nominal discount will be 50% on notional Greek debt held by private investors. A new EU-IMF multiannual programme financing up to €100 billion will be put in place by the end of the year. It will be accompanied by a strengthening of the mechanisms for the monitoring of implementation of the reforms.
2. The significant optimisation of the resources of the EFSF, without extending the guarantees underpinning the facility. The options agreed will allow the EFSF resources to be leveraged. The leverage effect of both options will vary, depending on their specific features and market conditions, but could be up to 4 or 5, which is expected to yield around €1 trillion (around $1.4 trillion). We call on the Eurogroup to finalise the terms and conditions for the implementation of these modalities in November. In addition, further cooperation with the IMF will be sought to further enhance the EFSF resources.
3. A comprehensive set of measures to raise confidence in the banking sector by (i) facilitating access to term-funding through a coordinated approach at EU level and (ii) the increase in the capital position of banks to 9% of Core Tier 1 by the end of June 2012. National supervisors must ensure that banks' recapitalisation plans do not lead to excess deleveraging.
4. An unequivocal commitment to ensure fiscal discipline and accelerate structural reforms for growth and employment. Particular efforts are being deployed by Spain. New strong commitments on structural reforms have been made by Italy. Portugal and Ireland will continue their reform programmes with the support of our crisis mechanisms.
5. A significant strengthening of economic and fiscal coordination and surveillance. A set of very specific measures, going beyond and above the recently adopted package on economic governance, will be put in place.
6. Ten measures to improve the governance of the Euro area.
7. A mandate to the President of the European Council, in close collaboration with the President of the Commission and the President of the Eurogroup, to identify possible steps to strengthen the economic union, including exploring the possibility of limited Treaty changes. An interim report will be presented in December 2011. A report on how to implement the agreed measures will be finalised by March 2012.

*** ***
In the Palais des Festivals in Cannes the Group of 20 developing and industrialized nations is discussing 3 options for how the IMF can help euro-zone governments finance their debts...

Option 1: IMF creates Special Drawing Rights - IMF reserve assets - to be handed over to euro-zone governments. Those governments could then exchange them for euros at central banks around the world.

Option 2: Nations would put money in a trust fund administered by the IMF to ensure financial stability around the world.

Option 3: A call for governments to stop $280 billion of IMF resources - meant to be a temporary boost to deal with the crisis - being returned to government shareholders.

*the photo of the President of Argentina and Silvio Berlusconi at the G20 Summit is on today's front page of The Telegraph and is titled 'return of the leerer'

***

Waiting on the vote - ψήφο εμπιστοσύνης έλαβε η κυβέρνηση

...and I hear on the radio at 2300 GMT that Papandreou has won the confidence vote he sought from his colleagues and Parliament.
*** *** ***

Strathnairn, Inverness-shire

I've been strolling in Strathnairn with my mother's dog Lulu. I flew from Birmingham to Inverness yesterday morning, after a supper at Henry's, in the Jewellery Quarter, the evening before with my friends Kim and Tanya. The three of us have been treating ourselves to a shared supper for over ten years, catching up with our separate news, wondering about the world. We spoke of families, of my future grandson, the world, of bankers' salaries and bonuses - Tanya said "read Oliver James' Affluenza" - of the tent village in front of St.Pauls Cathedral and 'Occupy Wall Street'...

Image: Rachel Schragis (detail)

...of a neighbour sinking into dementia, of the news that close friends had been woken in the night by police to search their son's room with the news their boy was in custody facing a prison sentence awaiting trial accused of being culpably associated with someone who'd committed a knifing, of Jamie's Great Britain - a foodie celebration of British hybridity, of a dear friend's horse breaking a leg and having to be put down, of children's marriages and about becoming grandparents, of the cost of things, of the dwindling availability of credit and its complete disappearance in Greece, of Papandreou's referendum idea...

Martin Rowson ~ Guardian 4 Nov'11

...of Kim's decision to buy herself an e-book after coming across the latest Kindle, of looking forward to reading P.D.James' latest book Death Comes to Pemberley, of my reading - on paper - of Merchants of Doubt recommended by my American friend Tony Scoville (I spoke of the joy of taking up conversation with him again in Corfu after 45 years) of a friend who'd changed gender a few years ago - the full op - but said she was getting "tired of trying to be a woman" and has re-grown a beard "Such a relief to stop shaving"
"But is she still wearing skirts?"
"Oh yes"
"Do you call him-her 'he' or 'she'?"
"I don't know. But it's no problem. F's always been so interesting."
Lin was at home sorting through baby clothes, bought from storage, now and then holding up one of Amy's infant dresses; exclaiming
"Aah. Just look at that! Shame it's not going to be a girl."

**** ****
My email this morning to members of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments Association:

Hi. I’ve already run this idea past Peter (Hon Treasurer, VJA Assocxition) when he was walking in Handsworth Park a couple of days ago. We, Linda and I, and 5 others with voluntary work experience in the area have inherited unpaid responsibility for the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project (CHPCP). This is a handyman/woman project that uses a modern tipper truck carrying a variety of manual and power tools (chipper, chain saw, strummer, mower, drills, chainsaw, crowbars, posthole digger, etc) to carry out a wide range of tasks for vulnerable people in Handsworth. In August 2010 the project’s manager died unexpectedly leaving the care project without clear leadership and so without the means of seeking its regular funding - from grants and payments from larger social enterprises like Housing Associations - but needing to pay taxes, insurance etc. We were approached by a local councillor and others who had been involved in the project to see if we could help get the project back on its feet doing useful work in the area. Over the past 6 months the voluntary group which includes Linda and myself have managed to ensure the project is solvent and able - we hope - by the New Year to recommence the local services (mending locks, doors, windows, clearing gardens, laying slabs, putting up fences, helping people move in and out of their homes, doing basic work on allotments and gardens, delivering and collecting heavy objects and other loads) for which it was set up over 15 years ago. Our immediate need is to find secure storage for ‘our’ tools and parking for the tipper truck - currently at a city depot courtesy of its manager. Chatting to Peter the other day I explored the possibility of being able to park the tipper on the VJA site and store the tools in the community shed with a view, if my suggestion is approved, of working in partnership with the VJA (with approval from Birmingham Allotments Section) to make the tools and tipper available to the association as part of a quid pro quo for secure parking and storage. We are confident it will be feasible to enable members of the VJA to use the project's tools - with proper training in the case of power tools (for which there is already a precedent on site) - and even to commission jobs that require the use of the tipper (carriage of compost, manure, building materials). The project already has a tradition of working in the area and with local agencies including the council and local housing associations. We suggest that a partnership with the VJA could represent a win-win arrangement, enabling work to be done on the VJA site while continuing the handyman/woman activities of the project across the area for which the project was already well reputed. I very much hope this proposal can be given consideration, and that we might be able to enter into a trial arrangement lasting - say - up until the end of the year to see if the mutual benefits I’m suggesting can be realised. I speak for the Voluntary Advisory Group (VAG) currently managing the CHPCP. One or more of us would be more than happy to present the above proposal in person and answer questions from members of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments Association, especially from members of the committee in the first instance. I very much hope you will give this matter your sympathetic consideration. We in the VAG believe that such a partnership is very much in line with current initiatives focused on community development in hard times. Yours sincerely, Simon and Lin

I suspect our greatest difficulty will be the rule maintained by the Council that motor vehicles may not be parked overnight on its allotment sites. I shall seek to press the view that in the current situation some of the old rules are subject to change. If the prohibition that used to exist on bees and chickens on allotments has been, or is being, reconsidered, then perhaps the idea of a charitable partnership with the Care Project might not be beyond the pale.
** ** ** **
I took the opportunity in the early hours when cyberspace seems less busy - or is it my imagination in this 24/7 world of the web - to stream another of my stepfather's TV films; an episode - or part episode - of Jack Hargreaves' series called 'Old Country' made for Channel 4 in the early 1980s. The cameraman is Steve Wagstaff. The starting title shows my stepfather leading his grey pony 'Ghost'. As usual much gratitude to the viewer who recorded it off-air at the time of broadcast and sent it to me on a CD.
"This is the bird, or rather it's a not entirely successful plastic Italian representation of the bird, which has been known to put up the price of Brussels Sprouts in England in a week - the Wood Pigeon."

*** ***
Jim Potts 1 Nov' entry on his Corfu Blues blog summarises and links a number of announcements of next year's celebration of the centenary of the birth of Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), THE DURRELL SCHOOL OF CORFU will host a one-week seminar Wednesday 20 – Tuesday 27 June 2012, in the Durrell School premises at 11 Filellinon Street, in the historic centre of Corfu Town. The Moderator of this seminar will be Richard Pine, founder of the Durrell School (and now Director Emeritus), and author of Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape

*** ***
Thanassis on the Ano Korakiana website, while announcing a blood donation session at 10.00 in the Co-op on Sunday 6 Nov «Ελάτε να δώσετε ζωή με το αίμα σας», points how heavy rain has washed away the cemented terrace supporting a car-park area, a problem which, with lack of funds, is likely to affect similar constructions. He uses the problem to take a swipe at the 'culture of cement' «πολιτισμός του τσιμέντου», suggesting dry stone walls or stones bound with mortar will last longer and better than substituted cement...

Δεν άντεξε τελικά το βαρύ φορτίο του τσιμέντου που εδώ και χρόνια κουβαλάει και η παλιά πέτρινη λιθιά στη στροφή του Μπή (κατασκευής Γιάννη και Μιλτιάδη Ιωνά πριν από πολλές δεκαετίες) έπεσε, με συνέπεια την «κούφωση» του οδοστρώματος, σε ένα σημείο που σταθμεύουν αυτοκίνητα. Εάν δε, δεν υπάρξει σύντομη αποκατάσταση, η ζημιά θα μεγαλώσει με τις βροχές του χειμώνα… Έτσι, για μια ακόμη φορά, ο «πολιτισμός του τσιμέντου» υποχωρεί, παρασέρνοντας μαζί του την παλιά μαστορική της πέτρας, που όταν μένει ανενόχλητη επιδεικνύει μεγάλες αντοχές στο χρόνο…

People said "No"

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:43:00 +0000

«ΟΧΙ του 1940» στο χωριό

An annual ceremony to celebrate Ochi Day in Ano Korakiana went off as usual. But when the village's band got to town its members encountered protests over the austerity policies of the present government...

Ano Korakiana's Band rehearsing a NO 1940 parade, cancelled because of NO 2011

...Λίγες ώρες αργότερα, στην πόλη της Κέρκυρας, μια τελείως διαφορετική εικόνα, με εστίες έντασης μπροστά από την εξέδρα των επισήμων, που «κατελήφθη» από τους διαμαρτυρόμενους και που οδήγησαν στην ακύρωση της παρέλασης και στη διέλευση των Φιλαρμονικών και των λοιπών σωμάτων από τον παραπλήσιο κεντρικό δρόμο, μέσω του Λιστόν…Μια εικόνα παρόμοια με αυτές που έζησαν πολλές πόλεις της χώρας. ΣΗΜ.: Η Φιλαρμονική μας, ίσα που πρόλαβε (όπως και οι άλλες Φιλαρμονικές) να κάνει την πρόβα της λίγο πριν την έναρξη της παρέλασης (που τελικά δεν έγινε)…Στην «καταληφθείσα» εξέδρα των επισήμων δεν έλειψαν και κορακιανίτικες παρουσίες (τουλάχιστον τρεις)…

NO 2011 on Spiniada

A celebration over 60 years old that takes place every 28 October across Greece got mixed up with another set of protests across Greece. The celebration was of course of the anniversary of Ochi Day - Επέτειος του «'Οχι». The protest was one of many continuing demonstrations against the austerity policies of the government. One blogger asks why parade and protest couldn't co-exist to make a seamless mingling of the two expressions of Οχι.

Τον ρωτάμε: Από ποιους κινδύνευε η μαθητική παρέλαση; Από τους γονείς των παιδιών που διαδήλωναν ειρηνικά; Από τους δασκάλους των παιδιών που διαδήλωναν ειρηνικά υλοποιώντας απόφαση της Γενικής τους Συνέλευσης; Μήπως από τους αόρατους κουκουλοφόρους; Μήπως είναι ψέματα πως καμία επέμβαση της αστυνομίας δεν χρειάστηκε; Μήπως είναι ψέματα πως οι διαδηλωτές με την καθοδήγηση του μαέστρου της φιλαρμονικής αλλά και των αστυνομικών «έπιασαν» ορισμένους χώρους για να μη δημιουργηθούν εμπόδια στην παρέλαση; Θεωρούμε πως οι λόγοι που πολιτικοί παράγοντες δεν ήθελαν να γίνει η μαθητική παρέλαση ήταν: α. Η άρνηση νομιμοποίησης της πολιτικής διαμαρτυρίας με κεντρικό σύνθημα: « ΟΧΙ στο Ξεπούλημα του ελληνικού λαού». β. η δημιουργία εσωτερικής έντασης μεταξύ των Κερκυραίων συμπολιτών.

The Metaxas myth: dictatorship and propaganda in Greece (2006) Marina Petrakis

How did Οχι Day come about? 71 years ago, on 28 October 1940, Mussolini ordered his ambassador in Greece, Emanuele Grazzi, to seek permission from the Greek dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, to allow Italian troops to occupy parts of Greece. The Italian dictator tried to pretend, with the pervasive and widely diffused lying that was refined during the early decades of the 20th century, that his ultimatum was a request. Italian forces would not actually 'invade'. They would 'occupy' certain strategic places in Greece. Grazzi presented this demand to Metaxas early in the morning after a party at the German Embassy in Athens. Metaxas knowing this was invasion replied "Alors, c'est la guerre." At 0530 Italian troops stationed in Albania, then an Italian protectorate, crossed the border and Greece entered World War 2. In the morning Greeks took to the streets chanting the laconic 'Οχι'. Ioannis Metaxas comes over as a personal and political undesirable, little known outside Greece and, by and large, forgotten, except for 'Οχι' day. Metaxas was a professional soldier. He studied at the Preußische Kriegsakademie, the Prussian War Academy. King George II made him as minister of war in 1936. On the death of the then Prime Minister, Metaxas, claiming the need to prevent a communist takeover during a period of political instability and industrial unrest, proclaimed himself dictator on the 4 August - hence the historical name for his time in power Καθεστώς της 4ης Αυγούστου. Boys and girls were required to join a uniformed national youth organisation (EON - Εθνική Οργάνωσις Νεολαίας); a two headed axe on their caps.

EON badge

The communist party was outlawed; its leaders imprisoned, though unlike so many authoritarian regimes no mass killings were instituted; there's no evidence any were planned; there were no political murders. Metaxas did not introduce the death penalty, nor, for all his emphasis on the Hellenic race, did he promote anti-semitism. He advocated a Third Hellenic Civilization embracing the values and ideals of the ancient Greeks, and the Byzantine empire, presenting Metaxas as 'the First Peasant', 'the First Worker', 'the National Father of the Greeks'. He adopted the title of A'rkhigos, portraying himself as a 'Saviour of the Nation. He encouraged military uniforms, greetings, songs and rituals, including the Roman salute.

Metaxas died in January 1941, ten weeks before a German invasion ordered by Hitler to support his ally following Italy's overwhelming defeat Greek soldiers in the snow covered mountains of Albania - an event that delayed Hitler's invasion of Russia long enough to ensure his armies fell into the clutches of General Winter.

** ** **
It's been raining steadily. I'm pedalling through pools of water doing errands, feeling warm and dry, with a Gill jacket, Sprayway trousers and Stetson waxed cap - products of 15 years' experience cycling all year round. Lin picked these up second hand in England and Greece. They last. They work and they're expensive if you have to buy them new.

Wet day on the Birmingham Mainline Canal

I've turned up by invitation to have a flu jab at our local health centre.

I'm wearing an actigraph round my waist designed to measure my activities over a week as part of the Healthy Ageing Research in which I'm a subject.
I've just had Richard take photos so I can renew my passport - a fee of £77.50; a form filled in on line and no extra ID other than my old passport, sent recorded delivery to the Passport Office.

Lin's replaced her car, finding a newer model of her old Ford Estate on Gumtree - at only just over a £100 more than having the failed head gasket mended, once you added in the £182 she got for the old car's scrap value.
I've been making a veranda for the shed on our allotment. On Monday 31 October I finally claimed my State Pension having deferred receiving it for 5 years in order to build up a lump sum. This morning I loaded ten plastic sacks of grass cuttings and leaves from our garden, piled them in the back of Lin's car and had her drive me to our allotment so I could add their contents to our compost heap. Lin looked over the plot, commented on the lack of cultivation, including dried up corn, green potatoes, flowered broccoli, dried up onions that hadn't been fully harvested.
"It's a waste of time"
"Li-in!"
"Come on how can we work an allotment when we spend so much time away?"
"What a f***ing stupid thing to say!" I was momentarily enraged.
"Just go" I said "I'll walk home later with Oscar."
My anger is so ridiculous. It was because she might be right. It makes me even more determined to continue learning how to make our partially attended allotment work. I sawed flush the tops of the veranda uprights I'd dug in yesterday, fixed a piece of sycamore from my neighbour's plot between them, covered the whole with polythene; stapled the folded edges.
"It looks a bit Heath Robinson" said Lin seeing my photo.

...and how it was in July 2010 when a lot of us were just starting on our sheds, and the site had only been open a few weeks.

*** ***

Speeding through the Lake District

Over the weekend suited and tidied I rose early, cycled into New Street and took an early train north to Glasgow...

Changing at Lancaster on the way to Glasgow

...to enjoy the hospitality of my friend Miriam and see her at the Citizen's Theatre in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. I watched the show twice.

Lunch at Cail Bruich West

Then Sunday I had lunch with some of Miriam's Glasgow friends before cycling off to catch my train from Glasgow Central.

*** ***

...Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. (Dictionary: A UK billion = million million; A US billion = 1000 million, and a US trillion is a million million)...

A depressingly acute analysis of the Greek economic crisis by the financial journalist Michael Lewis came my way - an article published at the beginning of October in Vanity Fair.

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007...offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way. No response was as peculiar as the Greeks’, however: anyone who had spent even a few days talking to people in charge of the place could see that. But to see just how peculiar it was, you had to come to this monastery.

At the core of Lewis' article is an examination of the Vatopaidi Monastery - Βατοπαίδι μοναστήρι - scandal that broke in 2008.

Βατοπαίδι) μοναστήρι

Aleko just emailed us from Corfu, kindly sharing his latest Greek lesson:

Dear Simon and Lin. As you have no doubt heard Greece is in a no-return situation! What will happen|? Unfortunately our prime minister has lost his mind and is making desperate moves to recover. Something that is not at all possible. Even his own people have turned against him! Now he decides to have a referendum : do we want to be in the eurozone or not! Uproar from every member of parliament but he wants to go through with this. The 6th loan from the IMF is now in the air although it was confirmed to be given in mid November Elections. Yes, but what better can any other party achieve when the country is bankrupt? Young people are leaving Greece looking for jobs abroad, like in the 50's when they emigrated to Germany and Australia. Mind you, things are not much better in other countries but the are more stable than here...

3 November around 7.45pm hear via Twitter from Faisal Islam that the referendum is off; that it was a preamble to a threat of resignation by Papandreou, and a new attempt to get ND's Samaras to support a coalition government to press on with current austerity measures...

Papandreou Samaras will vote for new package...

E-mail to Aleko on 3 Nov:

The film has really speeded up. So now on Thursday evening I’m reading (sitting in my mother’s home in the Highlands) a New York Times story….'After a tumultuous day of political gamesmanship, Prime Minister George Papandreou called off his plan to hold a referendum on Greece’s new loan deal with the European Union, withdrew his previous offers to resign and opened talks on a unity government with his conservative opponents... there was no need for a referendum now that the opposition New Democracy party had said it would back the debt deal...The question was never about the referendum but about whether or not we are prepared to approve the decisions on Oct. 26… (about) our position in the E.U.’ Sometimes I return to my sense that your PM is quite an astute political operator; even that the public breach with Venizelos - Βενιζέλου - was not unstudied serving to herd PASOK MPs into the right lobbies and drag Samaras and ND on board the austerity ship - one which this time Samaras, at the head of a coalition might skipper. It's been a breathtaking example of the old saw that a week - indeed 24 hours - is a long time in politics. What times we inhabit.

** ** **
Tuesday night was a meeting of the Friends of Black Patch Park at the Soho Foundry Pub. It was good to meet up again, though emails have kept me in touch while we're in Greece. I agreed to kick off a Facebook page for the Black Patch. We discussed our situation amid the public money famine, what we could do to draw more attention to the Park - saved from being built on but without prospects of investment. We discuss Black Patch links - learned via the research of Ted Rudge - to Gypsies and Travellers, as the possible birthplace of Charlie Chaplin, the sighting of Queen Henty's ghost, the park's value to footballers, its connection to the old Soho Foundry, its proximity to the Birmingham Mainline Canal, its flora and fauna and the streams that join in its centre, its odd location on the Birmingham-Sandwell border, its lack of local users since it's more or less surrounded by derelict buildings and small factories.
"You're only hope is India!" proclaimed Harjinder gleefully "We're all going down. Only India can rescue us."
"Well yes and no, Harj"

The Friends of Black Patch Park

*** ***
Special delivery this afternoon, in a cardboard tube - a sketch of me scything on the allotments by Jan Bowman - quid pro quo for passing my friend Dhiaa's folding bicycle to her in August. I'm delighted and flattered by her talented portrait.

From a blog entry this June: I attended a workshop on using a scythe 5 years ago - a day in April I took a train to Yeovil on Friday and cycled seven miles through Somerset countryside to the Fleur de Lis Pub in Stoke-sub-Hamdon, close to Tinker’s Bubble where, the next day, Simon Fairlie led a workshop, for six of us, on how to use a scythe. I'd wanted to use it in the churchyard of St.Mary's, Handsworth, with an uneducated notion that we might circumvent the council's ground maintenance routines and turn the place into a meadow, by scything - instead of strimming - at times of our choice, clearing cuttings to avoid their over enrichment, nurturing a richer diversity of flowers. But I'd bitten off more than I could chew - the scale of the churchyard and the momentum of the city's grounds maintenance bureaucracy. Had I persisted I'm sure we'd have prevailed. I didn't. The next time I used the scythe was to help my daughter, Amy, and son-in-law, Guy, to recover the lawn of their new home on the east of the city. So I haven't been using it much. I had to fiddle with assembly; reminding myself of the proper way to sharpen the blade - something to be done nearly every five minutes when scything - let alone observe the method of thinning the soft iron cutting edge of the blade with a hammer so that its vital sharpness can be maintained - peening it with the jig I bought at the same time as I bought the scythe and two blades - Luxor for lawns, Rasierschnitt for rougher work with a protective tine at the tip. Bringing that kit back on the train Sunday evening, the blade well wrapped, I was joshed about being the grim reaper. I can't quite recall how I carried it back from New Street on my bicycle, but I suspect Terry Pratchett would have approved the image of a scyther on a Brompton folding bicycle. Now I carry just the handle across my handlebars, leaving the blade in my basket - well-wrapped.

In the city again

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:15:00 +0000

With Oscar on the Villa Road, Birmingham

I was on the phone to my mother in Scotland.
"The story has speeded up - you'll be seventy in March, Amy's expecting a baby in March, Richard's left home and is living with Emma in town..." and we seem constantly approaching an unprecedented climax of events in the world.
"Yes even for us there's a sense of crisis, Mum. I'll see you in a few days."
For the last few hours the fireworks of Diwali have been detonating across Handsworth increasing in frequency as midnight approaches. Our neighbours who've long looked after Oscar when we're away are both ailing, no longer able to look after him, so there's a small problem. Amy and Guy took over for the last two months, but they'll soon have a babe to look after - a boy whose possible name we were debating the other evening.

To my relief the allotment's not looking too bad despite our absence. I brought some potatoes back for supper after my first visit. I've paid the rent - just £15 - to which I've added my first annual sub to the Association - £5. Today I started making a veranda for the shed - two cheek pieces of ply now in place.

Tomorrow I'll support these with two uprights, add a plywood roof and cover it with roof-felt. The vine I gave Lin for her 60th birthday and planted in August can grow up the side and along the front.
** ** **
We've arranged the next meeting of the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project in three weeks - leaving us room to get various jobs done before then. We have various prospects for storing our vehicles and equipment. It looks as if we may not have to wind the project up and start anew as Lin's work on the accounts has so reduced our debts to HMRC and one other creditor.
*** ***
On Tuesday I was at the Wellcome Research Centre inside the old QE Hospital on my university campus as a participant in a project on physical activity and healthy ageing. I gave blood samples, had my bone density measured on a DEXA machine, did some dexterity exercises and - most exciting and fascinating - had an ultrasound scan of my heart.

Clare McNulty, about Amy's age I guess, explained how very high frequency sound waves create images of the structure of the heart and the way it's working - the same procedure used to look at Amy's baby.
"You can take a picture" she said.

Amy's son

On Thursday morning I go to the University's School of Sport and Exercise Sciences for another set of tests and a psychological assessment. It'll be a rainy cycle ride along the canal to Edgbaston.
*** ***
Nigel, striving for self-sufficiency in County Mayo, has begun building a page on his website - Grow Your Own - that uses some of my stepfather's films.
** ** **
Meantime Linda's without her car. The head gasket's shot. She tried one of those sealant products. I cycled up to Lozells Road to buy it for over £12. Useless.

John, our neighbour "You down wanna do it like that, Lin."

Back to England

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 07:39:00 +0000

So now our veranda should stay dry

Thursday morning, there was a sombre mood in 'the Bear' - our part of Ano Korakiana. Natasha as she said goodbye to us until early next year told me that it was the funeral of her friend and neighbour Maria that afternoon. "She was 62". Lefteris told me that Vasiliki goes again to Agrinio on Friday to comfort her sister, whose husband died only a month ago. We look forward to being home in Birmingham with many things waiting in our in-tray there, but I dislike departures - in proportion to my delight in arrivals. Over Wednesday Lin and I were tidying the house, working through a check-list to keep things in order in our absence, rolling up carpets, locking up and securing my bicycle, closing shutters, distributing the last of our cat food, and of course, putting finishing touches to our attempt to ensure the safety of our wooden balcony. Lin has painted Chromolac - a waterproofing product around the edge where we can expect the weather to work its worst over winter.

"We'll just have to see what happens".

Paul, Cinty's husband, said "Just be careful when you step out of those French windows next time"
The implication was that rot will set in under our covering of waterproof paint, roofing felt, polythene sheet and fibreglass building membrane.

The day before our departure I checked Summersong. She was as dry as a bone - no leaks above or below. Mark has been keeping an eye on her, while she sits unused on her mooring awaiting a new or reconditioned engine. How I hope one turns up.

Summersong's ageing 9hp Yanmar

Our cases were almost empty compared to the journey out, so room for cigarettes bought by Lin at the airport. Richard collected the car to take us down to Kapodistria. Lefteris and Fortis both warned us there were no flights because of the national strike across Greece.

As we waited for the car, bags at the top of the steps to Democracy Street, I phoned Yianni from whom we hire our car. "Airport's open" he said.

Waiting at the steps on Democracy Street

We'd left the kolokithia from our garden to neighbours and now, morose, we head to the airport. The weather's crisp, small white clouds, the coast of Epirus clear to the east. At Kapodistria checking in is straightforward. We wait in the sun before going through security. A thing I so like here is the way big old dogs hang about Departures, friendly and relaxed. Can you imagine them allowed at Gatwick or Heathrow or Eleftherios Venizelos in Athens?

Waiting for departure at Kapodistri

Our plane arrived soundlessly it seemed. In little time we were sat on board with room to spread, thinking more about our next arrival than our departure. Our Captain, Phil Shaw, cheered us with a happy chat, persuading us to pay attention to his crew's safety guidance, earning a clap from passengers.

** ** **
Last Tuesday I had a cycle ride to the west coast, turning off the main road at Skripero - three kilometres west of Ano Korakiana - and heading down a much narrower and quieter road through Doukades...

Δουκάδες - how ill at ease is that sole villa top right

...to where it joined the main road between Corfu Town and Paleokastritsa.

From there I cycled a kilometre to the junction with the Lefkimmi Road heading south east. I'd had a mind to visit the beach at the head of Liapades Bay but, having taken a right turn off the Lefkimmi Road, then followed a sign to Liapades beach where the constructions of commodified guesthood began to crowd the approaching shore - buildings and signs which over my life have marked the economic history of the southern Mediterranean. A greening pool appeared beside the road - premises that do for consumers what a combine harvester does for the land.

Thinking of old pictures of this place before the era of concrete came to Greece I turned my bicycle back up the hill and, on lowest gear, retraced my route until I could turn right...

The turn to the centre of Liapades

...and ascend upwards into the village of Liapades, where place yet resides in the jumble of houses fronting narrow passages, public and private space indistinct - the enduring architecture of neighbourhood. My route became steeper. I dismounted and walked on up between small houses. I know my thoughts on this contrast between old and new on Corfu are as impractical as a wooden boat in an age of glass reinforced plastic. Unlike GRP a wooden boat cannot be left to its own devices, it must be attended to, worked on, cared for - the saw about the relation of eggs and bacon - the chickens involved but the pig's committed. I emerged into the top of the village on a path that a car could only access with difficulty, and entered the countryside high above Cape Iliodorus, the October sun dazzling ranks of olives, where people were working, a dog appeared round a bend ahead of followed by three women, two on donkeys. "Greetings - herete"...

... they chatted round the bend as I headed on west parallel with the coast until I saw a vineyard beside a grassy margin, sprung since the last week's rain. I stopped for a picnic, sat on a low wall, just able to see the monastery at Paleokastritsa in the distance, the rest hidden by the woods between. Tap water and chunks of fresh bread from the bakery in Ano Korakiana, cheese and dried Corfu sausage and a chocolate biscuit.

I returned via the main road between the blighted coast and Corfu town, but a kilometre before the turn we're used to taking when coming northward to Ano Korakiana, I took a narrow winding road heading three kilometres north back to Skripero - a lovely route, little used - representing no short cut. Flat at first, through hedged meadows and allotments, it slopes gently up to Skripero through banks and trees...

...winding up through the village, from where I returned to the main Sidari road and thence to the small road I'd taken at the start of my ride back to Ano Korakiana.

England

**** ****

Guy gave us a lift home from Digbeth Coach Station. Amy was waiting for us at home having swept a thick coat of leaves from our drive. We chatted, sifted mail, learned that our grandchild expected in early April is a boy, tried out names, hugged dog Oscar and greeted cat Flea, and sent out for a Chinese takeaway and, once again drenched in multimedia news, easier to filter in Greece, we watched a programme in which Joanna Lumley visits Corfu, interspersed with shake pics of captured Gadaffi, blood speckled just before he was killed (Libya)

** ** **
This paragraph appears partly in brackets in the leaked EURO SUMMIT STATEMENT DRAFT issued on 19 Oct:

[pm strengthening of the monitoring of the Greek program] [We welcome the decision by the Eurogroup on the disbursement of the 6th tranche of the EU-IMF support programme subject to the adoption of the prior actions agreed with the Greek government. We look forward to the conclusion of a sustainable and credible new EU-IMF multiannual programme by the end of November]
[ pm: PSI to be prepared by the Eurogroup] We reaffirm clearly our unequivocal commitment that private sector involvement is and will continue to be an exceptional solution applying only to Greece, as its unique condition requires a unique solution.

Richard Pine's Op-ed in The Irish Times (19 Oct'11) begins:

The 19th-century American writer Henry David Thoreau observed that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. That is certainly not the case in Greece, where desperation is becoming increasingly unquiet as life, and the country itself, collapses under the burden of new austerity measures. The unrest is not only in the “mass of men” but within the system itself. Riot police recently dispelled a protest outside parliament by their off-duty colleagues; civil servants in the finance ministry have blocked access to the building for incoming EU inspectors...

and ends

...The glue that holds any society together is consensus, but what makes it vibrant is dissent. Greece is on the brink of collapse – some say civil war. As normal society grinds to a halt exemplified by the 48-hour national strike that starts this morning, the implosion will necessitate intervention to ensure distribution of essential goods and services. It is not unthinkable that the army might undertake those, and other more far-reaching, roles, at which point we should all be reading Thoreau’s short essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience . But does the army necessarily support this, or any other, government? A military – or quasi-military – regime in Greece would be far more damaging to the EU than a Greek default. It seems that in making everyone – except perhaps the super-rich – pay for Greece’s financial mistakes, the government is completely insensitive not only to public opinion but also to the hurt this will inflict on those who simply cannot afford it. For example, the removal of the subsidy on home heating oil will effectively double the price to the householder; in 2012 the price of electricity will increase by 30 per cent. Thoreau wrote: “When I meet a government which says to me ‘Your money or your life’, why should I be in haste to give it my money?” A referendum is to be held to test the waters on this issue: how the Greeks will answer Thoreau’s question will be crucial to the survival of the state.

France and Germany disagree about how to handle the Eurozone crisis, how to maintain fiscal union, how to handle the stability fund, the EFSM - especially as it effects Greece. My friend John Martin, in Australia, in a recent email, wrote:

...I watch with interest with what is happening with world financial markets and am annoyed that there is no apparent control, just blind faith is a system that on all accounts does not work. I am sure the UK Government will manage things at home but other countries I am not so sure...

The debate opposes 'fiscal raptors' who say we're in such deep debt we must scrape, save, cutback, reject further credit, reduce leverage and abhor its use solely for greater consumption, embrace austerity and advocates of Keynesian remedies who refer to their opponents as makers of an 'austerity death trap' preventing recovery by destroying the jobs, businesses and incomes that might redeem the debt. The latter say that only governments can now save the situation by injecting enough kickstart cash to revive growth and jobs. Where do environmental policies enter this debate? On the side of cash injection by government - but in ways that will move the world from an economic model driven by the exploitation of earth's resources to one that embraces sustainability based on conservation and renewable resources. Amid the crisis it is difficult to distinguish the hawks, from those who oppose them - since the changes required to create sustainability are quite as demanding as those that require austerity. No-one whatever solutions they advocate really expects anything nice to happen inside the next decade. The whole situation is made more frightening and depressing because the language used to talk about the crisis is on the edge of most people's comprehension. There are times when economic journalists, economists, financial experts, are carrying on an argument that passes over our heads, talking and arguing with each other rather than communicating and debating with non-economists - who worry about theirs, their friends' and their relatives' circumstances. I think I understand 'credit default', 'sub-prime mortgages' and 'frozen credit markets' but I'm struggling with 'collaterized debt obligations', 'repurchase agreements'. the different kinds of 'quantitative easing - QE1, QE2, QE3', the details of 'leverage', 'sovereign debt' and the workings of the 'bond market' from which derives so much of the problem. Yet when you do come across a layman's explanation, or something approaching, it can annoy. See the comments attached to this YouTube piece in which two vexingly smart American siblings, John and Hank Green, the Vlogbrothers, claim to explain the Greek Debt Crisis 'in four minutes'.

***
...and opinion of the former chairman of the Federal Reserve - Alan Greenspan - quoted in Kathimerini:

“Greece should never have been accepted as a member of the euro zone." The debt restructuring being faced by many European countries was the “only discernible solution" for them to emerge from the crisis. As for the euro zone crisis in general, Greenspan said the situation was “extremely critical,” noting that no one could predict what will happen in the future. As long as there are countries in Europe with a large public debt “Europe will have no future,” he said, adding that what is needed is a stronger political union which will curb the divergent behavior of other member states. He called for an “essential fiscal unification of Europe” stressing that the threat posed by an unstable Europe to the American economy was “extremely dangerous”; that those who overlook this are not being realistic.

... and Sarkozy says the same. Greece has only been in the Eurozone since 2001, The crisis began to emerge just three years ago - so could be said too have arisen in under 9 years. See this BBC story from January 2001:

Greece has become the twelfth country to join the European single currency, ditching its own currency, the drachma. The Greek Finance Minister, Ioannis Papandoniou, described it has an historic day that would place Greece firmly at the heart of Europe. "Our inclusion in EMU ensures for us greater stability and opens up new horizons" - Costas Simitis. But the president of the European Central Bank, Wim Duisenberg, warned that Greece still had a lot of work to do to improve its economy and bring inflation under control. In 1999, Greece was left out of the eurozone for failing to meet the EU's economic criteria. To qualify for euro membership, the Greek Government had to adopt a tough austerity programme, making deep cuts in public spending. Despite the budget cuts, euro membership is hugely popular in Greece, with polls suggesting that nearly two-thirds of the population are in favour of the move. In a televised New Year message, Prime Minister Costas Simitis said Greece "is already experiencing euro conditions. We all know that our inclusion in EMU (European Monetary Union) ensures for us greater stability and opens up new horizons," he said. The eurozone now consists of Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.

How the weather changes over Corfu

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 08:30:00 +0000

In the early hours I woke to the rumble of heavy rain, the house vibrating under the downpour, continuous lightning flickering through cracks in the shutters, thunder far and close from every direction. I jumped out of bed to close a window left open in the sitting room. Lin got up to to watch the storm. Back in bed, I relished listening, in the dark, to the noises around us – warm and safe. Now and then in the longer flashes I glimpsed Lin in her scarlet kimono gazing through the French windows, rain spattering the other side of the glass. One of my delights is to be safe in the midst of a storm. It may seem odd, but even at sea in rough weather, off-watch in one’s bunk, in a well-found vessel this is possible, the cradle rock of waves adding pleasure, and moments of apprehension caused by a breaking crest or harder gust calmed by confidence in crew and boat – thus do small seabirds ride out the tempest heads tucked beneath a wing. In the morning the sky was clear for a few hours; our veranda below the balcony almost entirely dry except for a patch where rain had driven in, fast drying under the sun.

But during the morning rain clouds, born on the south wind, spread from the Trompetta Ridge to fill the sky, relentlessly surrounding the diminishing blue. This is, at first, odd. I should know how it works but I forget. The warm grey wet thundery weather appears to come from the north, from over the mountains behind us, taking over the blue weather from the south. In fact, quite the reverse. The wind blows warm from the south evaporating water from the sea, carrying it north, forming clouds as it rises over Trompetta. On the highest ridge these thicken, back up and spread, encompassing the sky. A southward advance of grey darker edged phalanxes encircles the blue; in the van a great reverse crescent, one wing advancing along the mainland shores of the Sea of Kerkyra, the other along the mountain cliffs of the island’s western coast, until this wide pincer movement has advanced to the whole southern horizon, covering the sky mottled grey.

It is strange gazing on this defeat of the blue to gaze up from the village at the rear ranks of so overwhelming an attack and see the clouds overhead drifting swiftly north – almost as if a victorious army were returning in triumph. It's easy to sidestep the 'water-cycle' we learned in primary school, and imagine animate conflict. It's even more interesting.

* * * *
In anticipation of soon receiving an electricity bill containing, not just the existing tax on our property, quite small relative to the charge for power, but a much higher emergency property tax introduced by the government, we’ve just taken a tape measure to our house. The electric company estimates our home’s footprint as 77 square metres.

Our calculation this morning put this at 64.3 square metres, based on a length of 8.22m and a width of 7.55m, suggesting we’ll paying the new tax on 12.7 square metres we haven’t got. Stamatis at the shop says the charge in the village will be €3.50 a square metre – equalling an extra on our next electric bill of €270 on top of the cost of our electricity. I find it difficult to imagine such an increase being anything but impossible for some people to pay, even with concessions.

[Back to the future: 18 Oct: Advice - don't appeal against the electric company's estimate of house area. It's based on traditional measures that might have shifted to our disadvantage if we sought re-assessment, i.e. people used to live upstairs and keep their stock - chicken, sheep, donkey - downstairs.]

The ill-news is backed by constant stories in the newspapers of the world - typical of these 'Greece is slipping into the abyss' from a British resident in Athens...

But we are only at the start of this crisis. What will happen next year when unemployment doubles and people lose their homes? The Communist calls for revolution don’t look nearly as far-fetched as they did six months ago. While civil war doesn’t look likely, a return to the military days must be a possibility. If the Greek people reject their entire political system and the state falls apart, what will be left? The great danger is that the people are being pushed so far that the unthinkable becomes possible.

or from America, 'for Greeks the future is void'...

anger and helplessness dig deep in the Greek psyche. Joblessness is climbing and essential services such as health care and policing are losing resources. The crisis may pale beside the bloody conflict or poverty in Libya or Afghanistan, but the hardship is as much psychological as economic. It is the shock of undercut expectations, the loss of benefits and prospects once taken for granted as part of the European contract. The mood now resembles the plot of "Groundhog Day," a 1993 movie about a man who wakes up to the same day over and over again.

** ** **
Richard House sent details of the letter in the Daily Telegraph, 24th Sept '11, which I co-signed about the blighting of childhood in UK

SIR – Five years ago, your newspaper published a letter signed by more than 100 experts, arguing that children’s well-being and mental health were being adversely affected by modern technological and commercial culture. Since then, several high-profile reports on the state of childhood in Britain have agreed that our children are suffering from a relentless diet of "too much, too soon" – with UNICEF finding Britain to have the lowest levels of children’s well-being in the developed world, and Britain coming out near the top of international league tables on almost all indicators of teenage distress and disaffection.
Although parents are deeply concerned about this issue, the erosion of childhood in Britain has continued apace since 2006. Our children are subjected to increasing commercial pressures, they begin formal education earlier than the European norm, and they spend ever more time indoors with screen-based technology, rather than in outdoor activity.
The time has come to move from awareness to action. We call on all organisations and individuals concerned about the erosion of childhood to come together to achieve the following: public information campaigns about children’s developmental needs, what constitutes "quality childcare", and the dangers of a consumerist screen-based life-style; the establishment of a genuinely play-based curriculum in nurseries and primary schools up to the age of six, free from the downward pressure of formal learning, tests and targets; community-based initiatives to ensure that children’s outdoor play and connection to nature are encouraged, supported and resourced within every local neighbourhood, and the banning of all forms of marketing directed at children up to at least age seven.
It is everyone’s responsibility to challenge policy-making and cultural developments that entice children into growing up too quickly – and to protect their right to be healthy and joyful natural learners. Top-down, political approaches to change always have their limitations, no matter how well-intentioned. It is only by coming together as a unifying voice from the grass roots, therefore, that we can hope to interrupt the erosion of childhood, and find a more human way to nurture and empower all our children. Yours etc., Dr Richard House, Department of Psychology, University of Roehampton (the Open Letter’s organiser)...and many more.

When I was a child - fishing on the Kennet at Woolhampton (sketch: Fritz Wegner)

Our letter make lots of sense but when it comes to how such ‘erosion’ might be halted I come to a halt. Part of what made my childhood special and indeed what other people of the same age share with me, is the great amount of time we seem to have had to ourselves, unsupervised, able to roam, explore, invent and take risks. Much of what was good - allowing for flawed memory - was unknown, secret, not determined by any theory of child rearing supported by government or parents. Imagine the field day the risk assessment folk would have with allowing today's children such freedom (but see this sensible stuff from the HSE), not to mention the protests of many parents at any public figure seeming to advocate policies that might allow it. To make sure I’m not varnishing my childhood with nostalgia; for 18 months in the late 40s, my mother having become single and wanting a career - demonstrating the doggedness needed by a woman to achieve that in those post-war days - entrusted me and my sister to what she believed was an idyllic country boarding school. Charles Dickens would have enjoyed naming the head of this benighted institution near Brimpton in Berkshire, but he really was called Mr.Hart. Many years later, in middle age, I did a little research into this school, Lindfield, and even visited the building - Hyde End - now an attractive private house, in which we lived - a place about which my 94 year old mum still feels guilt. I got in touch by phone with a local lad who’d been a day-boy at the same school in which Bay and I were boarders.
“Oh yes” he said recalling the place "Hart only beat the boarders.”
I did not suffer that much, but watched others. Possibly my parent was considered just a little too potentially influential. Such a school with such a head would, in today’s world, have been dealt with by the child-protection authorities quicker than Hart could raise his busy cane. In those immediate post-war days such schools and their staff enjoyed the same freedoms and rights to privacy our letter against the erosion of childhood suggests be restored to contemporary children. Dilemma! By way of a happy ending, I was rescued from that awful prep school and went to another that was like day to night in comparison, and which indeed allowed us, within a wisely structured syllabus (we planned our own lessons each day but had to include so many sessions doing the subjects we found trickiest like maths, Latin, English grammar, French) rather than just art and history and English literature) a liberal amount of free time to roam a large wooded estate near Handcross in Sussex, to be children in charge of our own adventures. No doubt in today’s litigious world this amount of freedom to risk life and limb climbing tall trees, building houses in them, roaming through rhodedendron undergrowth chasing predatory monsters (I played a man-eating tiger lurking in the brush in one adventure I’ve recalled just this moment) with sticks and other missiles, would be near impossible. I hope not.

Jackdaws are still my favourite birds. Of all the crows they seem most to enjoy being close to humans and Jim was a great pet. Until he flew off to mate he was my mate. I found him as a fledgling fallen from his nest unable to fly and he stayed around with me for about 6 months in 1951. My mum took this picture on a visiting weekend at my boarding school in Sussex - Ashfold. Jackdaws enjoy playing with shiny objects and other small household items, which gives them a reputation as thieves. My impression is that they are actually always checking out whether this or that trifle might be suitable for a nest. The Jackdaw mentality in humans refers to a tendency to collect trivia in the fruitless hope that all may come together to solve the meaning of life.

*** ***
I mentioned this in May. Carol, a lovely woman, kind and enterprising, asked me to mention again that at The Lighthouse - ὁ Φάρος - in Kontokali at its border with Gouvia, there's a big table top sale every Saturday from 1000 until 1300, soon to be extended until 1400. Upstairs there's soft drinks, tea, coffee, snacks, WiFi and computer games and a children's library and supervised play area. Local phone - 6982458157

Grape pressing

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:16:00 +0000

A heady scent rises from Lefteris’ garden. The weather’s clear enough of rain for pressing grapes. The juice that’s begun fermenting in the large tub from last week’s crushing has been siphoned through a sieve into a tall barrel from where it’s been siphoned into glass flagons. The crushed grapes, left in the tub after most of the liquid’s been bottled, are now hand decanted into the barrel of the press, with a big saucepan.

The shallow threaded screw press turned with an iron bar ensures a steady stream of juice into a plastic bath from where it’s transferred in a wasp-waisted metal canister to a tall plastic barrel from which it’s siphoned into more flagons stored in Lefteris’ apothiki. The ratchet on the press is reversed – while working this I was minded of the Sherlock Holmes story about the engineer’s thumb – its hub turned back to the head of the screw, the wedges removed, and two halves of the press barrel held by sturdy iron twist bolts are removed from the cylinder of smooth pressed pomace, tsipoura, and left in the tub where they can’t collect dirt.

The pomace is eased apart and set aside as compost; not to make tsipouro. My small work on the press and earlier on the crusher attempts an exchange for all the bottles of wine Lefteris and Vasiliki hand us over the year.
Monday morning I collected Emma and my son Richard from the airport. Yianni makes it easy for them to share the car, so Richard drives us back to the village.
“Had a good flight?”
“Terrible. Turbulence from the time we took off and the plane was freezing. Then they said we could have blankets – for only £5.00”
Once home having not slept the night before they disappeared until evening.
By late afternoon I’ve finished helping Lin attach the rest of an old wooden blind, recovered from a flytip last year, over the scrawny wire fencing between us and the neighbours, so we can still see through and over to chat.
“I’m going for a ride on my large bicycle”
“OK. I’ll go on preparing the last set of shutters”
Guiltless I set about extracting the bicycle from where it hangs in the apothiki, blowing up the tyres, preparing a snack. I want to see if I can get up the 29 hairpin bend ascent to Sokraki, Σωκράκι - the village invisible above us on a ridge of the Trompetta Range, Τρουμπέτος Οροσειρά, that runs east-west across the north of the island. At 4.30, gingerly, I set off. In 15 minutes I’m resting at Ag. Isidorus on the ninth bend above Ano Korakiana.

If I can pedal up this road I reckon I can cycle any road on Corfu. I expect to walk some of the way, but this zig-zag route has persistently kindly gradients. At each bend I skirt round the left hand edge of the bend – unworried by being on the wrong side of the road. Motors can be easily heard. The higher I go, still pedalling, the quiet envelops me. Nothing but the breeze, increasing with height. Unfolding below, the island's limits become clearer. On the first stretch of the road above Venetia I see between the slopes above Doukades, about six kilometres west, a wedge of glittering sea, while on the east of the island I can see the widening Sea of Kerkyra, θάλασσα Κέρκυρα, blue as blue skirting the island’s blighted shores and the distant bare slopes of the Greek mainland towards ugly Igoumenitsa in the haze, and all below the deep green of the island’s interior, in which nestle and blend traditional buildings – new and old - while here and there the thoughtless proportions and angles of buildings constructed in uncouth isolation from time and place.

Staying in the lowest of my 21 gears I find pedalling up each stretch easy. I’m pleasantly surprised, having expected to dismount and walk at several points on the ascent. I lose count of the corners, stopping now and then to rest and gaze at the widening panorama. In under an hour I’m sipping cold ginger beer at Emily’s Taverna in Sokraki along with a toasted cheese and ham sandwich.

I am pleased with myself and the bicycle. The sign at the southern entry to the village reads Trompettas. This is a new road built only a few years ago, to a lower specification than the ascent road, and here, heading west on the north side of the Trompetta ridge approaching mount TsoukaI I come to the only hill on which I have to walk for a kilometre. Beyond either verges are abandoned or ill-worked allotments with makeshift gates and collapsed fences containing a couple of rows of vines and a cluster of olive trees, in some cases a few rows of vegetables.

Rounding a bend I see the higher mountains of Albania north of Saranda and, down the northern slopes below me, villages - Klimatia, Episkopi, the hamlets of Kiprianades, Valaneo, Ag Douli, and further away Nimfes, Mili, Xanthates, Platonas and Sfakera, between the high road and Roda on the windy northern coast. Then my road snakes down to the hamlet of Trompetta on the busy main road between Corfu Town and Sidari and I hardly turn a pedal for six kilometres to Skripero. A couple of kilometres more and I turn for Ano Korakiana, up gentle slopes to home – the whole circuit in two hours with breaks for rest and a snack. As I pedal the last half kilometre a couple of people wave and I boast, in halting Greek, of my climb to Sokraki and return to the village
“Mono theo oras!”
“Bravo, Simon”

*** *** ***
On Tuesday the weather is once again sunny, as predicted by our neighbour who, being born 69 years ago in the same house he lives in now, knows pretty well how Corfu weather works. October, like Easter, is a good time to be in Greece. The rich who invented the present concept of the ‘holiday’ – not religious feast or holy days but secular relaxation – later offered the idea, as a utility for the rest of the population. The gift is topsy-turvy in that the prosperous could afford when they chose to follow the weather, leaving cold England to winter in the Caribbean, or North Africa, enjoying spring and early Autumn along the Mediterranean littoral. Holidays for the majority, when they were introduced as a result of social reform in the late 19th century, were taken in July and August – the warmest weather in the north, thus trains and charabancs decamped in thousands to the occasionally warm beach resorts of England and Wales – Blackpool, Brighton, Hayling Island, Rhyl, Yarmouth, Ramsgate, Morecambe, Torquay, Bournemouth and Ilfracombe to name a few. Then when in the 1960s mass tourism was invented, flying large numbers at low cost to the Mediterranean and beyond, guess which months were chosen, were indeed the only ones available to most? The months of a British summer, which in southern Europe are the ones when even local people, used to the heat of June, July and August, swelter, staying indoors in the day, observing siesta. In hundreds, then thousands and then millions, people travelled for a week or a fortnight at a time to the Mediterranean at the least salubrious times, suffering in their package sojourns sunburn and sweat, welcoming air conditioning, freezing drinks, and swimming pools with plenty of the shade less available on burning beaches. Now that package tours encompass the Pacific and Caribbean, guess again when the unrich have their holidays – in the humid heat of the hurricane season. Meantime the rich who’d wintered under waving palms by the bathwater warm seas of the Leeward islands, are yachting in the Baltic archipelago, fishing in the remote lakes of Saskatchewan, surveying the fiords of Norway, and observing the summer wildlife of Alaska, cycling in the Highlands of Scotland, chasing seasons of choice in both hemispheres.
** ** **
We carted our some loose plaka back to the house. Lin laid it to cover the rather pointless 'flower bed' that guided damp into the wall below the lower bedroom window.

I found a large floor membrane left by the builder under debris in our apothiki.
“Let’s try this on the wooden balcony” I suggested “as an additional shield for the polythene sheet from sun wind and rain.”
Lin’s good with large ungainly pieces of fabric. In twenty minutes the membrane – part folded – was covering the balcony and with that protection for the polythene I laid out tables and chairs.
“There’s more needs doing” says Lin “Let’s put additional roofing felt patches, fixed with a silicone bead, on the outside edge of the balcony where we had to cut the felt and polythene to fit them round the nine banister pillars. The rain we had the other day found a way in there.”

Emma on the balcony, with its new covering

We peeled back the plastic and the felt from the damp edges to let the damp wood, felt and wet polythene dry under the sun. After a couple of hours we cut and laid the felt patches. Doing that properly took an hour. Then I nailed battens to the balcony plank edges all round after putting further silicone beads round every exposed joint at the base of each pillar.
“Rain’s due on Friday. Let’s see what happens.”
The last two evenings I’ve lit the stove.

**** ****
“You must have your work cut out at the moment”
I was talking to the evangelical pastor, Miltiades Pantelios, at the Lighthouse the other day - a place we go for the table top sales on Saturdays, the free WiFi and nice filter coffee.
“Yes indeed. The worst thing for people is the feeling that there’s no end in sight.”
“It brings out the worst but also the best in us, I guess” I added lamely, feeling an ache in my stomach, part of me wanting a kind of restoration of things as they were, but the larger part hoping this long storm of blighted hopes, this absurd and dangerous sequence of increasingly desperate attempts to kick-start a deeply unresponsive engine – with different kinds of stimuli, austerity, taxation, collateralisation, quantitative easing, selective devaluation, financial restructuring - will be as futile as I suspect, leading through many crises to wiser ways of living on the earth.

*** *** ***

Yesterday we went via Krini to Angelocastro; climbed the steps to the high fortress and had a family picnic under the oak tree there.

In the evening Richard showed us his three minute video of Handsworth Park. A pure delight. We all watched a few episodes of Little Mosque on the Prairie. I'm reading The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, having just finished Kingdom of Ashes by Robert Edric - a novelist I'm more than glad I've come across.

Richard on Angelokastro Αγγελόκαστρο

October

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:39:00 +0000

Of Greece, Tony and Helen will now have seen, before they came to stay with us in Ano Korakiana, Delphi and the scenery on their route via Metsovo to Igoumenitsa and the ferry to Corfu. Since they left us, they’ll have visited the Vikos Gorge in Zagori, the great rock pillars of Meteora, the ruins at Nauplion and Mystras and now they’re in the Mani. Tomorrow Olympia…I yearn to hear their impressions as they visit the sublime places of ancient Greece. For four days until the 12 October they will be in great Athens; there to see the Parthenon – “approaching it” said Tony, architecturally trained, “indirectly, as the builders intended, via the Propylaia” - Προπύλαια.
During Fall 1961 and Spring ’62 Tony at Yale took Vincent Scully’s courses on Greek Art and Architecture and Modern Architecture.
‘Thereafter I was never the same’ he writes at the start of his gift book to us about their Connecticut home, placed in a rolling landscape like a nest in the crotch of a tree - a building he and Helen conceived and built in collaboration with the architect Judy Swanson.
Vincent Scully 'opened my eyes' writes Tony 'to the mystery of architecture from the Parthenon to Corbusier’s Ronchamp’ - a building Lin dislikes, which I saw while a student at Cambridge on a theatre tour of France and Switzerland in 1962, gazing at it bemused.

Notre Dame du Haut, by Le Corbusier, at Ronchamp

Tony and Helen will visit the Acropolis I first saw when I was 16; Easter 1957, long before the floor of the Parthenon was closed to the public. My first sighting was the morning of my arrival in Athens by train from London, peering through the loo window of my step-yiayia's upstairs flat in Koloniki. Years later Amy, Lin and I visited - in 1996. What joy, that hot afternoon, to be in that place again - this time with close family.

Amy and Linda on the Acropolis, behind them Mt Lycabettus

I can too easily put aside these wonders with my thoughts so much on modern Greece, the troubles of present Greece, and our dear home on one island, and, for most of the time, one street in one village. Tony and Helen gave us a greeting card in which he'd written:

Dear Simon and Linda. Our friendship traverses time from the first house we worked on together, my “Corbu” – after Corbusier – in Vermont, to our reconnection here at your “Democracy Street” on Corfu. We thought you might enjoy this which documents in architecture much of the journey. Tony and Helen 9/21/11.

I first came to the Parthenon full of happy awe but, though I'd seen the Acropolis in books since I'd learned to read, lacking the education that could have made me sensible to the enveloping craft of Iktinus and Kallikrates. What matters is that I was given delight by genius to stir the heart of Everyman. My friendship with Tony has given me insight into how such things are achieved; how these seldom happen by talented chance. I become wiser in my appreciation of exceptional creation. In the book about their house - 36 Taconic Road - he says ‘architecture dramatises life'. It’s a stage, on which to tell a story, based on various principles – discovered, invented by humans long ago. One such is the diagonal eye, the indirect approach.

This concept is as old as the Parthenon. One ascends the steps to the Acropolis. On passing through the Propylaia, your eye strikes the corner of the Parthenon slightly to your right. The miniature Erectheum stands to your left. Before one extends open space. The Parthenon dominates. Your eye, split on the Parthenon’s nearest corner drives one’s vision along its apparent diagonal roof-line/pediment toward the geophysical object of veneration at the horizon: Mount Hymettos. The indirect off-center approach to the Parthenon makes the Acropolis come alive because one’s eye is driven beyond wherever one is – to try to determine why we are here at all…

So now instilled with such an understanding that began with Scully's lecture near 50 years ago, Tony with his stick will clamber up the sacred hill with Helen to see it together. What will they see and think? I saw it as a young man, untutored. Tony sees it as an old man, wise though with no less enthusiasm, perhaps more and with a beloved to share impressions.

We build in the face of incomprehensible random fate…incomprehensible even to the gods. Greek tragedy recognizes this. There are powers that even the gods cannot propitiate or direct to their ends. That is what makes Greek tragedy so profoundly moving and expressive of the human condition…In the face of this unseeable presence we build community among ourselves, and among the hills and stars…how unlike the dramatic eye-splitting Parthenon is the blunt, face-centered neo-classical New England bank! (Banker always miss the point!)

Don't they just!
** ** **
We were invited to supper by Mark and Sally the other night. How I enjoy even the anticipation of such an event. Showered and tidied we set off.
“Where are you going?” asks Natasha (not "pou pigate?", but "pou parte?") sat with family below the steps we share to Democracy Street
“To Mark and Sally. Their mum and dad are going back to England soon.”
After Natasha had helpfully corrected my “We are going” “Tha pas…” I made a passable go explaining in Greek our plan for the evening. Then,with our bag of ice and village wine, we stroll down the darkening street, past various place we would now know if blind, greeting the small gathering outside the opposing shops, until, on the hill past the band room, inhaling the jasmine climbing a corner two floors by one of the gently lit alleys that lead from the street, and, after the road narrows more, turning left down steps winding along a short path between walls until we arrive at a wooden gate opening into a low beamed foyer full of useful things - a wood pile, a reel of cable, boots, a washer, a dog bowl, a small table and chair, a chopping block - shaded in summer, cosy in winter, off which there’s a curtained door with a beaded hanger against insects.
Our arrival’s known. Black dog Teal comes out, growing old, still wagging his whole body, leading us into the familiar ground floor of pictures, shelves, books and fabrics, lit like an old painting, suffused with the tasting smell of slow cooked stiffado - hare and pheasant from England - and crisp crushed garlic roasting with small new potatoes.
“They’re upstairs” says Sally busy in the kitchen, a workroom inside the room we’ve entered, handing over wine and ice, putting my walking stick in the crowded stick stand, hanging my cap on its cloven hoof handle. The stairs are narrow, part triangular, open, built into one corner, marked by a string of white Christmas lights. As I ascend from the confines of the cosy sitting room, still rather too warm for a company to eat this time of year, I glimpse, through the curtains and part of the French window of an intervening room like a back-lit hint in the elaborate set of a drawing room play, silhouettes of people at a table spread with candles, set inside a balcony beneath a canopy of vines, whose two sinuous arm-width stems embrace, protect and frame a crow’s nest – the translation of Ano Korakiana, Άνω Κορακιάνα - overlooking the island’s central mountains 20 kilometres to the south, the bare outline of high peaked Epirus over the sea to the east, the twinkling lights of the mainland along a gently curving line that disappears behind the olive coated hills speckled with lights beside a straight stretch of the road to Kato, lower, Korakiana; while close by the small trees and climbers of neighbouring houses sharing our vantage, shadowed and lit by the last of the sunset, turning monochrome under a high gibbous moon. Towering behind us, three great crags meet the night sky showing the brighter stars and a planet. Wouldn’t an audience approve, even offer applause, for such a set, admiring the descent from narrow Democracy Street down an alley, into the confined arched space that leads via dim light and the enticing smells of cooking from an intimate interior to stairs that go up again to our small stage…
Later, to finish, there was a Pavlova, made by Cinty, and after the pudding, another of Mark's pâtés - "the best I've made"...

...along with cheeses, English and French and Italian - a delectable rough cylinder of white crumbly goat cheese.
** ** **
"Καλό μήνας" said Adoni a few mornings ago. I was puzzled. What was ‘minas’? Of course ‘month’, and this, being the start of October, Adonis my neighbour, was wishing me not just ‘good morning’ ‘καλημέρα!’ but welcoming October. So - ‘year’ is χρονιά (καλή), ‘month’ is μήνας (καλό), ‘week’ is εβδομάδα (one I keep forgetting), ‘day’ is μέρα, ‘hour’ is ώρα, ‘minute’ is λεπτό and, I think, but ‘second’ is also λέπτο, so I., confused. Αμέσως means ‘in a tick’ but, wait a moment, how about για περίμενε for ‘just a second’?

Η οικογένεια του Νίκου Νικολούζου

It’s a month for making wine - down alleyways, beside the road, biscuits of pomace left over from pressing. As we strolled by their house a few steps off Democracy Street, we saw Katerina and her husband pressing the grapes.
“Just a moment, Simon. I have a bottle of last year’s wine for you”. Katherine bought us out a two litre bottle of golden white. Their grapes both red and white had not become desiccated - wine from Ano Korakiana stock.

Lefteris and Fortis – yesterday afternoon – were still at the first stage, heaving 22 kilo plastic crates holding tight clusters of small black and larger white Zakinthos grapes, vine leaves, storks and twigs into a hopper, sat on a big chest-high plastic tub. Young Lefteris was having a go at the wheel.

“Simon” (their stress is always on the ό, rather than the ί in my name, which is properly spelled Σάïμον, which I like as much as the Greek respect in my more formal title ‘Mr Simon’).
“Simόn. Come.” I could see them by the tub from the balcony where Lin and I were working; an invitation to help turn the wheel that turned the cogged gear of spindled paddles above two shiny crushers at the bottom of the hopper. It was no less fun than as a child being asked to help with the mangle, squeezing out rinse water from jumbled clothes turned flat to have their creases shaken out; hung far from reach on the line. In one of the memory synapses so easily tapped I remembered, as I hurried downstairs to go next door, washing that hung in flat frozen slabs transfixed at a slight angle to the winter wind. Lin’s mum Dorothy still does her washing by hand. Here the handle of the crusher was sticky with grape juice which, clearing hair from my brow, stuck there too. 700 kilos - about 30 crates – to be crushed, and during a break a cup of Greek coffee, skirto, with biscuit-cakes sprinkled with sesame seed and grapes steeped in honey on a small plate with a teaspoon and a glass of water made by Vasiliki. The tub exactly filled, Fortis measured the specific gravity of the juice sample – “12.5% good, 13% not good” said Lefteris. Now I know numbers in Greek, I could carry on an almost coherent statistical conversation. Three days the mass of solid grapes and twigs and leaves and perhaps spiders, a wasp and bits of grass, will stand; fermenting in the covered tub, before the young wine is run off from the tap at the bottom of the tub and sieved into bottles to continue working. Sticky and sweaty, grape smelling, I retraced my steps back to our house next door. From our balcony I could look down on the tub I’d help fill. “So when did you no longer do this with your feet?” I’d asked “Ten years ago.” Why would anyone resort to the pestled bones of a slaughtered tiger when they can make village wine?

*** ***
Linda has completed the preparing and painting of our shutters so that now on at least the street side of the house they are restored.

Shutters restored and painted

“Soon we should paint the house” she said “I think I’d like to use asvesti, whitewash, but I’m not sure the best way to apply it especially if we want to mix in colouring.”
She’s also been putting down more plaka under the balcony. First she arranges the pieces of plaka as though doing a jigsaw, then fixes three pieces at just the level she wants – at either end and centre. I chipped out the edge of the existing plaka so the join would be uneven with the new, not just a straight line.

*** ***
Yesterday afternoon Yianni returned the hire car, and this morning I drove to Tzavros to pick up needed materials from the ironmonger, and get some ciggies for Katerina. Coming home the clouds opened and I gave a lift to a soaked neighbour walking up the hill from his field below the village.
"I thought the rain was coming tomorrow?"
"So did I. Thanks for your kindness."

More quantitative easing

In the village

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 11:30:00 +0000

So far, being without a car has been no problem. Fresh bread.occasional vegetables, can be bought from the shop yards away. We've plentiful milk and a fridge of food from our last big shop with Tony and Helen the Saturday before last. The village is our world. We read, do jobs, eat, gaze. chat to neighbours, check email and skype with family and friends at Mark and Sally's 100 metres up Democracy Street, watch films from across the world on the laptop, talk, recounting memories, dreams, the troubles of the times...we're at a tricky turn in our species' residence on Earth - at once immensely powerful, potent with recent knowledge of the infinite reaches of space and time - dimensions neither known nor believed until hardly a century ago - drowning in our numbers and our feckless chase for unsustainable wealth accelerated by the striving of the majority to imitate the feckless acquisitiveness of a prosperous minority - us among them. Lin and I amid our debates agree on the futility of nostalgia. Wherever we're going is not backwards. May it not entail some retracing of our present momentum to understand where we went wrong; learn from that compass error around two or even one generation ago - a short period that has progressed in its unfortunate direction with the accumulating pace of a runaway carthorse that neither it, its driver nor bystanders feels able to slow to a halt?

So perhaps I – or even God – can never think of asking the outrageous question. Perhaps man is just a blind horse with the bit between his teeth who can’t be stopped until he hits a hay-barn. It’s a funny thing that, only yesterday, the thrill we felt as we climbed into the market-cart every Wednesday arose from the fact that, just once in a week, we were going to meet some people other than ourselves.” Jack Hargreaves in 'The Old Country', Dovecote Press 1988

Round midnight we were watching a film on the computer. Lin said “What’s that light out there”. We went out on the wooden balcony and could see a - momentarily - a flame-red flicker behind distant clouds; high to the south beyond land, out in the fishless Ionian Sea west of Levkas, even as far south as Cephalonia. Irregular intermittent, soundless and in the same part of the sky which above us was starlit and clear.
“It has to be lightning. Maybe fifty miles away.”
I thought of other times and places where someone might have said “No not lightning. Guns, missiles.”
We stayed watching for a while wondering about closing windows, bringing in cushions and carpets outside, in case of rain in the night, stood on our wooden balcony which in places creaks when we step on a plank raised by the heat of the sun.
No-one sensible builds wooden balconies in Greece. The one on which we stood, not the narrower permenant one of concrete with metal railings from which we see comings and goings on Democracy Street, but across the side of the house facing south affording a view to die for...

...put together by John the jerry builder for the last owners, resting on brackets attached to the house at one end and a beam that sits on three cement rendered breeze block pillars at its front, built of untreated deal, which in the last few years has wilted under baking sun and the mighty rainfalls of winter – splitting and shrinking. We’ve treated it with creosote – our own mix of diesel and tar, but that’s no assurance of greater permanence. We’ve pondered solutions. Why not substitute a concrete platform for the present? Good question. Two answers. The breeze block pillars would have to be replacd with concrete ones to provide support for the greater weight and we’d likely run into planning and tax problems getting it made. Expensive and complicated. The advantage of a timber balcony is that its not legally designated a permanent structure – so needs no planning permission; incurs no extra property tax. So what can we do to stop its steady decline? Treat the wood of course and replace the shakiest planks and beams. But what then? Wood’s OK for windows and doors if maintained, though most new houses use metal for these including shutters, but not for the large flat surface of a balcony. We thought of covering the planks with roofing felt, sealing the seams.
“That’ll melt in summer, stick tar to your shoes and burn bare feet” said Paul our neighbour.
A recent proposal was to cover it in sheets of marine ply. Expensive but not too difficult.
“Trouble is it’s still wood and we still have to treat it every year and how can we seal the seams for certain?” said Linda "We’re not only wanting to protect the ailing wood, we want to be able to sit, work and hang laundry underneath the balcony when it’s raining!”

At the moment this balcony's a sieve; shady and cool in summer, but offering little shelter in winter. Anything left below in hard rain gets soaked. Our latest solution is a large temporary cover of polythene sealed at the wall of the house, and laid over strips of roofing felt cut round the balcony stanchions. ‘Temporary’ because of course it may need to be taken up to check the wood and this shouldn’t be made tricky and, because being polythene it’ll be brittle and cracked after two years and so need replacing. But for €20 a sheet or just a little more in two years that’s a reasonable running cost. We’ve plenty of felt left from replacing our roof two years ago. That’ll last under the polythene and won’t get too hot there, we think.

“It’ll look awful. How do you stand chairs and tables on the polythene? The legs will rip holes in it in no time.”
We’ve a wealth of old carpets and blankets to spread over our big plastic sheet. They’ll sit there in the good weather, swiftly drying out after a shower or even a few day’s summer rain. We store them in the apothiki when we’re away and in winter and if there’s a sunny spell it’s easier enough to spread them out again. We’ll see. The job’s part completed and I’m looking forward to seeing if, when next it rains, the space below the balcony becomes a proper veranda – cool when it’s sunny, dry when it rains.

*** *** ***
"We are fighting a war against fish, and we are winning" An American in Alpha Bank the other day asked me where he could find a fish restaurant in Corfu
“There'll be fish on menus in many restaurants” I said “but you may find it disappointing. Unless you are somewhere a fisherman has, by arrangement, delivered a lucky catch from the sea, or a restauranteur has bought local fish fresh from a market seller, they know the seafood you can get here will have come from some other part of the world and will have been frozen.”
Tony told us that at one restaurant they stopped on their way here it said on the menu as though to inform “before we asked” that ‘All seafood we serve has been frozen’. I mentioned a fish restaurant we knew at Tzavros; another we’d visited with Alex Kapodistrias, near Benitses, both of which despite specializing in seafood had served unexciting fish, and calamari which had almost certainly been frozen. I didn’t mention another we’d been to at Kontokali three years ago, and never visited again, after being charged outrageous prices for a plate of ill-served small fleshless bony bream.
“It’s very expensive” I said “and even that that’s fresh will come from EU funded aquaculture, fish farms – ιχθυοκαλλιέργεια - in inlets along the coast – Corfu and the mainland; fish with a bland and sometimes muddy taste”
He looked confused. I wasn’t being helpful. He was having to hear a speech.
“We’re all fished out across the Mediterranean. No fish restauranteur is going to tell you this. They keep it even from themselves. People still fish. There are still fishing caiques on the postcards, festooned with nets. Look off the harbour wall you’ll often see fish. Now and then a fisherman will have luck, but the Mediterranean’s near dead for fish - even deep down. The factory ships from Japan have hoovered up what’s left, here and across the world. It’s over. Until we come to our senses. Get less greedy; give stocks a few generations to recover. Learn some substitute for turbo-charged industrialised fish extraction. Enough odd prizes maintain the illusion that god provides. For our need not our greed I’m afraid.”
** ** **
Miriam skyped "Come and see me in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. Citizen's in Glasgow - late October, November?" I put a few days in the diary. In a way i don't like this. It marks a time when we are not in Ano Korakiana. This place is not for holidays, not even a second home. It's as much home as Handsworth. We inhabit two places, actually and, when away from one, in our imaginations. There's much to do in Birmingham - not least our allotment. I am glad to be in either place - it's the departures that can hurt and the arrivals that can be so exciting - but I wish in a silly way that all were in the same yet different places instantly and almost simultaneously reached by opening magic doors, and yet at the same time we're glad of the differences made by distance. Down at Mark's and Sally's a new puppy, one of black dog Teal's offspring, is getting used to the place.

Mark and - possibly - Drake

What I wanted them to see

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:02:00 +0000

Birmingham and the Black Country when they made widgets

These days it’s tricky, even in Birmingham, where for two centuries men and women sweated a living amid a vast stubble of chimneys belching smoke and steam over middens of soot and clinker beside turgid waterways through which horse drawn narrowboats edged night and day between workshops making widgets for the world, to find a part to solve a household problem, a gasket, a metal plate, catch, strapped hinge, a reverse pintle, bracket, fastening, matching handle, screws, nails and bolts of particular length and gauge and other needed devices lacking exact names. Things are made somewhere else, the sweat and dirt transferred to hungrier places.

This is nearly the same in Corfu though it does have small workshops dotted about. Here the difficulty of finding a widget is increased by the challenge of describing its specificity in Greek (Greece can surely accommodate its own version of that memorable ironmongery sketch by the Two Ronnies that starts with a request for “fork handles” or possibly “four candles”).
We’ve found a mix of gesture, sketching on a counter or scrap paper and pidgin Greek evokes a slow steady comprehension, interjected by checks in the direction of evolving agreement until we arrive at a pleasing glow of acknowledgment that our shakily communicated request has been understood. Relieved we wait for the shopkeeper to retreat into one of many multi-stacked aisles to bring what we want.
“Ah ha. Of course. I understand now what you need. No.”
His understanding smile plus hands and all his body transmutes, and we return to conjecture as to where in Corfu, across Greece or indeed the world, the desired item might be found. Like long waiting for a bus you can be glad to see one going in the opposite direction, for proof they even exist. A good ten days ago we needed small black plastic catches to secure the foot of one of the mosquito screens on one of our windows which kept shooting up on its rolled spring escaping originals wrongly footed. After fruitless diversions, questionings of regretfully unknowing friends, getting us nowhere, on the basis of a clue as opaque as a hint to Sam Spade, I was cycling and walking up and down streets on the south west edge of Corfu town, following a succession of contrary but accurate directions. I came at last to a shaded workshop on a narrow road that had crossed Margariti on the way to the airport where my gestures including the imitation of mosquitoes, the pulling down of a screen and two bent fingers as I crouched going “kik, kik”, quickly brought a box of black plastic mosquito net clips, a swift demonstration of how they worked, the handover of an opposing pair, and a complete refusal to accept payment, despite my obvious jubilation including the beginning of an un-English embrace – a touch on the other’s shoulder “I’ve been looking everywhere…ψάχνω παντού για... ευχαριστημένο!”

My stepfather enjoyed showing widgets used for pre-industrial farming, things either sent by viewers or which he'd encountered. Some were familiar, some unknown, so he'd show them on the tele' when broadcasting in the 1970s and 80s (this too).

** ** ** **
A few days ago we dispensed with our hire car. It's our largest outgoing when here - at around €20 a day in the season.
“Let’s see if we can do without it for a fortnight and save ourselves around €250” said Lin
"Great, we can walk, I can cycle and both of can take the bus."
Yesterday was a perfect example of the widget-seeking advantage of a bicycle over a car in the narrow traffic congested maze of Corfu; so easy to stop, park, drop into shops and ask directions. It was pleasurable too to cycle into town, down the steep narrow path from the house to the lower road, then, after a careful check of my tyres for thorns, two kilometers to the main Sidari road, two kilometres to its junction with the main road between town and Paleocastritsa, four more to the Tzavros junction then six kilometres along the dual carriageway to the Old Port turn at Potamos and another kilometer through Mantouki to the bottom of Nikiforou Theotoki Street where I can wend my way between walkers and a few more cyclists to Alpha Bank on Kapadistriou to pay our car hire fee into Yianni’s account, get a receipt and collect pink slips for other transactions made over the year. These slips are evidence our income is from UK; that we are not earning here. The tax office in Greece needs proof our income is external; enough to pay for the basics – electric and water with corresponding taxes – of running a house on the island. Tellers at the bank find it a chore to generate these. It always takes a wait of twenty minutes or so until they arrive. I relax and read and gaze around until I have my paperwork, then scoot off on other errands; searching for widgets, strolling my bike down Voulgareous Street amid the crowds enjoying a takeaway spinach pie, until I enter wider Georgios Theotoki and pedal amid cars and scooters to San Rocco Square, leaving it on this occasion via Polichroniou Konstanta which turns by the old hospital, now moved to the new one at Kontokali, into Ioulias Andreadi up Avrami Hill to where the narrow one-way airport road turns off to the south, where I started asking about window frame suppliers.
Later I returned to town emerging into San Rocco from Mitropoleous Methodiou, visited an internet café near St Spiridon’s cathedral, struggling I suspect, now there are so many places with free WiFi, looked up the news, awful as ever on the economy, found no service on the campus server so no email, threaded my way to the old port, along the front on Xenofondos Stratigou to catch the 4.15 bus, the last of the day, to Ano Korakiana, my bicycle folded and stowed in its luggage compartment – total fare €2. Just west of Agios Markos the steepest hill from Ipsos already climbed, with I its only passenger, the bus was stopped from preceding by a small fire. I unfolded and cycled past a police car, fire engine and a few watchers, two more kilometres on the narrow road through olive groves and was home by 5.30.
* * * *

What I wanted them to see

After five days as our most welcome guests, Tony and Helen Scoville have left for the mainland, heading for Zagori and the Vikos Gorge, then Meteora and the long drive south to Epidavros, then Athens - their first visit to Greece. We’d thought it impossible to do more than guide them to a few places on Corfu.
Monday the 26th, the day before they left, they drove me to the summit of Pantokrator then, on advice from Spiro in the shop, back to the Strinillas-Acharavi road, turning right to Petalia, Loustra, Eriva, Trimodi, Lafki, Kaniotiko, circling the western slopes of Mt. Krassato, on down to Riliatika where a thin road turned sharp right off a T-junction in Ag.Martinos, winding down and up a lonely sinuous route made by men, women, donkeys, sheep and goats from Krinias, Vassilika and Perouli, circling settlements within 30 minutes walk, toiling on foot and hoof for the Venetian empire over centuries, planting olives trees, unearthing rocks to build contoured dry-stone terraces to hold soil for saplings to root. Today, trees - centuries old - tall-coppiced every two years, have grown stout, gently twisted, full of natural cavities, venerably gnarled, now and then bearing plastic bottles in their branches to ward off insects, moss coated, cyclamen sprinkled in spring, harebells, myriad ungrazed wild flowers and grasses along sunlight verges. Now and then, though not this time of year, relieved of fiefdom, a waged family from far away, arrives by car, tending land they own, harvesting small black windfall olives gathered in spread nets. They’ll take these to one of the local modern olive presses to get a supply of their own oil, some offered for sale from roadside stalls in the tourist season. It’s not the best. Olives should be collected when they’re still on the tree; shaken down. Once these groves would have been dotted with labourers serving one of the northern estates, lean brown country people toiling for the signori – the lord of the manor. We’d see donkeys, sheep and goats and - around a makeshift apothiki - fowl grubbing from the undergrowth that today grows free in spring, drying in summer to make tinder for the arsonist or the feckless thrower of a smouldering cigarette. The landscape is confined, deep green, deep shaded, dappled with the bright sunlight that here and there shines through the olive leafed canopy, the ground brown with small outcrops of rock. There are few birds. In the quiet you hear insects and woodland sprites before a scooter or a car approaches, its engine varying as its driver negotiates the bends echoing unevenly so the listener is uncertain if it’s coming or going or, like us, has stopped to look and listen half-hoping for ghosts. At the hairpin turn in New Perithia we headed back up the Krassato’s burned eastern slopes via Margarika, Zervou, Loutses, Ipsila and Anapaftiria to lunch at Palia Perithia under the vine canopy of Foros where a sleepy dog adjusted its position on a margin between shade and the light of mid-afternoon sun. We enjoyed cold beers, local wine, horta, tsigarelli....

...grilled sausages, feta salad with green peppers sliced sweet onions and beef tomatoes, saganaki, fried vegetables and to finish a slice of sweet squashy cinnamon coated pie and Greek coffee attended by hovering wasps, interested cats. Distracting them with a wave becomes a reflex, punctuating conversation about the decades since Tony and I first met...
Before they were expected the previous Wednesday, Linda and I had done lots of tidying.

Downstairs bedroom

We waited their arrival late that afternoon.

My friend Antony sailing to Corfu

We would normally meet guests at the port or airport. Instead, being carless, I’d given elaborate directions so they, driving a hire car from Athens, after taking the ferry from Igoumenitsa, could find our house. Listening out, I could tell them coming up Democracy Street. A local would have driven faster, less tentatively. I’d written ‘we’re just past the church of the Archangel Michael’. They’d seen it and paused and I, waiting on our balcony for their arrival, saw them coming by and pausing again.
“Tony!” I called to the back of the car.
“Hullo!” said Helen.
“They’re here” I shouted to Lin indoors, as another car bringing Lefteris and Natasha, our neighbours home from a funeral in Agoria, pulled up behind. In a moment we were carting suitcases down the steps. Mark’s and Paul’s Dad Phil who was having a drink with us, guided Tony to drive on to a parking place and brought him back to us.
So having met and become friends as we set out on life’s journey – he 26, I two years younger – we met again – he 71, me 69. We shook hands in the street.
“So. We made it!” I said “…and as I was saying before we were interrupted …” Can we, I thought, get on with your thoughts on existence, infinity and indeterminacy – ideas we’d discussed with fervor all those years ago, Tony introducing me to Feynman, Gödel, Schrodinger and Heisenberg skirting, for me, ineffable mysteries of time and space. They brought presents, blue woven table mats, a set of white table napkins, a book about the wonderful house they’ve built in the wooded hills of Connecticut and a book by James Gleick The Information and a Schubert CD.
That evening I walked them around part of the village, up to Venetia, down the narrow path by Agios Jacobus, where the procession goes at Easter, and so back to our house via the lower road explaining the views as we came upon them – distant Albania, Epirus, the Old Fort that marks Corfu town to the south, and the story, as much as I knew it of our village.

From Angelokastro

On Thursday we picnicked below Angelokastro the fortress on a rock pinnacle commanding a view of the southern Adriatic and the high cliffs of western Corfu, descending to the tawdry shores of Paleokastritsa, on a tight bend of the descent we stopped at George’s souvenir shop, bought bottles of his village wine, and climbed again to the lovely monastery teeming with visitors.
On Friday Tony rose in the gloom, came upstairs and went out on our big balcony to see ‘rosy fingered dawn’ silhouetting the mainland mountains over the Kerkyra Sea.

We stayed home the rest of the day with plenty to do as they went exploring south towards lake Korission, saw the blighted eastern littoral, worked their way into the wooded hills along narrow roads where even with Stephen Jaskulowski’s excellent map, now a decade out of date, they missed an intended circuit that would take in both coasts where the island narrowed. I think they lunched in Ag Mattheos; swam from Ag Gordis before returning to Ano Korakiana for supper with us. Tony said they passed through one village in the south that looked desperately impoverished, and we've been sharing with them what we know of the crisis; how it strikes our neighbours here, Greece and the rest of the world.
On Saturday we went to town, strolled up N.Theotoki, up the Liston, around the Palace of St Michael and St George, through the Durrell Boschetto and into the Old Fort to gaze over the gentle blue to Vido, Pantocrator and the mainland, retraced to take a coffee, baklava and ouzo at Zissimos on the Liston...

Helen and Anthony at Zissimos, Corfu

...then a shopping amble down narrow Odos Ag. Spiridon, peering briefly into the cathedral, rejoining N.Theotoki and so home, to rest before supper at Strapunto, the taverna on the turn to Kato Korakiana.
On Sunday we sent our guests off to explore ‘Kensington’ – the cornice road from hideous Barbati circling the north east with its view over the Corfu Channel to Butrint and Saranda in Albania...

... taking a meal at a Toula's by the sea at Agni, thence the north coast as far as Roda from where they turned south through the Trompetta mountains to join the Sidari road west of Skripero bringing them home with a few hours before our party for them under the walnut tree in Effie’s and Adoni’s garden...from the Ano Korakiana website, by one of our guests, Thanassis Spingos:

Mark, Simon, Effie at our party for Tony and Helen

Η πρόσκληση σε ένα garden-party, που λάβαμε από τον φίλο Simon Baddeley, εξελίχτηκε τελικά σε μία ελληνο-αγγλική γαστρονομική συνάντηση, στον κήπο της Έφης και του Αντώνη, στην Πλάστιγγα. Κάτω από την τεράστια καρυδιά, το μακρύ τραπέζι που από νωρίς είχε στρωθεί, αποδείχτηκε τελικά μικρό για να χωρέσει τους πολλούς προσκεκλημένους του αγαπητού μας Simon και της συζύγου του Lyn. Το δείπνο ξεκίνησε με πρόποση και καλωσόρισμα του «οικοδεσπότη», που κατέληξαν με απαγγελία στοίχων του Καβάφη στα ελληνικά και το τραπέζι περιελάμβανε αρκετά νόστιμα πιάτα και σαλάτες, καθώς και ποτά για όλες τις προτιμήσεις. Οι ώρες κύλησαν ευχάριστα με συζητήσεις κατά παρέες, με τη συνοδεία μουσικής και χορού, αλλά και του εμφιαλωμένου κρασιού και των μελωμένων σύκων που προσφέρθηκαν για επιδόρπιο, παραγωγής της οικογένειας Λευτέρη Ιωνά. Ήταν μια θαυμάσια βραδιά συνάντησης και γνωριμίας…

Under the walnut tree with friends

** ** **
I'm again studying When Tomorrow Comes; struggling with it as I try to make sense of this report of an extended debate over recent months on the future of the public domain and the role of government, especially local government in England and Wales. It's not easy following the recorded conversations of people seeking new ways to understand public services, citizenship and community - always hazy concepts. A couple of times in the last month I've put the document down in a mixture of vexation and incomprehension, but I keep coming back to it, mining the text for things that make sense, underlining phrases, adding comments, getting a feel for the conversation behind this difficult text.

Two kinds of party on Corfu

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:29:00 +0000

Calypso and her dad, Paul on his 50th birthday

On Saturday where Paul’s and Cinty’s home perches at a bend on Democracy Street, its terrace entered from the street, with a vertiginous drop over a low wall to the lower part of the village, there was a gathering of their family and friends. Almost immediately below the terrace there are two narrow derelict private houses, their rooves, over frameless walls, almost entirely collapsed with bare fissured beams sagging under the few clumps of tiles that haven’t fallen into an interior lather of collapsed floor, forsaken furnishings, insinuated brambles and climbers. A hundred yards beyond, having avoided the heat of the day, someone was hammering inside one of the many houses in the village being renovated - signs of activity inside its smoothed interior. I sat on the wall nursing a chilled beer inhaling the smell of barbecuing meat and smoke serving to keep mosquitos at bay, listening with the agreeable passivity of a guest, to the sounds of food preparation inside the big kitchen of the village house that Paul and Cinty have been immaculately renovating over the last two years.
“See over there” said Phil, Paul’s dad - recently arrived from chilly England “that house with the small window in the gable end” he pointed over the rooftops below to another house I’d not seen. “They’ve been working on that all day right through the midday heat, putting up a cantilevered roof and balcony. The speed they work!”
It was a party for Paul’s 50th birthday, with family and friends invited to a spread that was gradually and effortlessly brought out in bowls and trays from kitchen and barbecue and, before that, biscuits to carry one of Paul's younger brother Mark's rich chickla, pigeon and chicken liver pâté topped with scarified butter and bay leaves from his and Sally's tree in the garden further down the village. Lin and I sat with Cinta’s mum, Natalie, and Mark and Paul’s mum, Sheila, at one end of a large teak table sipping iced drinks, served the readied food by young people bringing dishes and cutlery and “anything else you need”. I took in how the people at this Greek and British gathering full of cooking, drinking and eating, men and women, young and old, were neither too thin nor too stout, the daughters and sisters and nieces so singularly female shaped, lithe and tanned and dressed, not to kill, but to be simply beautiful, uncovetously happy, smiling, laughing so unself-consciously I felt my gaze almost voyeuristic. Our friend Paul McGovern had said there are two kinds of parties on Corfu – one is flash "showing off who you are and what you have" and "the other you enjoy". I was treated discretely, perhaps unconsciously, with Mediterranean respect for elders. We were looked after without patronage, service matched to my enjoyment of being attended to – and what food we had. Beside the rich greenery of salads came belly draft, chicken satay with sauce to hand, souvlaki, spare ribs with piquant dip, lamb chops perfectly scorched rich with tender meat, spicy Greek sausages striped from the BBQ grid, chicken wings and legs in abundance with a plate to hand to discard the small bared bones that could not be shared with the two Jack Russell terriers wandering between our feet after treats. As we sat, and drank and talked Mark came over to me with a small exquisite tasting piece of reddish meat, a perfectly cooked woodpigeon breast.
“How did you marinate that to make it so tender?”
“Nothing” he said “That’s how it is.”

I love how Homer describes the preparation and cooking of meat in the Odyssey. Read in unlikely places, his eternal words purvey the anticipation of feasting amid surrounding dark. The breeze was balmy curling the smells of food and smoke among us, dispersing it into the starred darkness through which now and then we glimpsed the lights of planes, soundless above our chatter, heading north and south. Some time in the evening I got a text message from Richard saying he and Emma would be coming out to stay with us in October. We debated experiences, spoke of families, of trying to imagine being grandparents, of films we’d seen and books we’d read, of fear and fate and the vexatious irritations of getting old, of the riots in England, the dignified words of Tariq Jahan that seemed to set a new tone and turn a tide, the parlous state of the economies of the world, of places visited, comparing the difference between people in the village who live in the same house in which they were born over 60 years ago, and others like me who have no such special link to place, hesitating to choose where, if allowed, they’d hope to die.
******
This long hot rainless weather, sometimes humid, reduces the variety of cloud formations and the shadow play of the sun on pillared cumulus above the mainland that so delights in cooler weather. The sky’s vaguer; so also the land. Then on Monday morning as forewarned everything changed.

The clouds darkened and there began an overture - remote rumbles of thunder and small jabs of lightning with pinprick showers - preceding the storm to come. But first bush fires started below us and beyond Agios Markos where smoke started climbing the side of the cliff that marks a northward turn of the mountains above the village. From the south came the fire engines lights flashing; then the prop planes slid slowly in dumping well aimed water. Within an hour it was raining chair legs blowing spray through any open window. We'd already got everything that needed to be dry indoors as water began to spout from the downpipes, streaming down parched Democracy Street in sinuous bubbled rivulets. The same day our neighbours, getting news of an in-law's death on the mainland, have taken a coach from Corfu Town, and will be away three days leaving us bereft of the summer sound of their laughter and chat at the table where they and friends gather just below Democracy Street.
*** ***
Tomorrow we expect our guests, Anthony and Helen, today visiting Delphi; tomorrow driving north along the north coast of the gulf of Corinth then turning north west via Metsovo to Igoumenitsa. The island's lost much of its three phase electricity, so we have lights but no domestic water amid the pouring rain. I've put big bowls under our drain pipes.

Invisible and incalculable

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 09:27:00 +0000

From England our daughter Amy emails us a picture

With exception of a few brief spatters, there has been no rain on Corfu since May. The weather has become slightly debilitating, making leaves and people droop. But the evenings are growing cooler, though still marked by the sounds of families in conversation from windows, balconies, front gardens. Cinta had phoned Lin to offer some paint that would otherwise be thrown out. We went round to her’s and Paul’s house after dusk.
“The knock on effect” said Paul as we sat on their terrace surveying a twinkling panorama from Trompetta above us past to coastal Sayada 15 kilometres away on the mainland back to the brighter cluster marking Corfu Town due south “is that there’s a dearth of insects and so far fewer migratory birds stopping by. Food is scarce. The Scops Owls aren’t here.”
Their mournful bell-like “don” is a night sound in Corfu. Cinta made me mug of tea, a coke for Lin and snacky things cheese and biscuits, crisps and a treat – smoked salmon on melba toast.
“And there’ve been some bad fires. We saw the effects of that three day fire blew over the northern slopes of Pantocrator above Palia Perithia” I said and after a pause, “What of the economy?"
“I was coming home the other day on the road into the village from Kato and I saw a woman and her child sat on a blanket on the edge of the road. Sign of the times”
We discussed the growing apprehension further north among the owners of detached villas.
“In England I guess we’d be seeing signs of Neighbourhood Watch”
“Trouble is it’s near impossible to attract the interest of the police. They are already so understaffed...” There’d been moves to start vigilanti groups
“…god help us. Can’t you see it with so many gun-owners. Get an alarm. Turn up mob handed. Shoot the maid.”
Recently a senior British politician on holiday had walked in on a break-in. They’d cleared off but the fall-out probably involving phone messages between London and Athens raised the threat of a gang targeting a foreign VIP’s family. It had brought the Greek equivalent of the SAS to the island. Work is getting scarcer and this divides Greek and foreign workers including Brits.
“We know a plumber. Did a good job on our house” I said “Bumped into Lin in Sally’s in Ipsos and said ‘there’s no work’. He’s thinking of going home after working here 27 years.”
“We find” said Paul “That where once an estimate would be approved on trust, clients check everything looking for savings.”
We hovered over the riots in England but there was little to add to what’s been said. Humans don’t fit the rules that can be inferred from sociology. They do odd things. Sometimes others copy them. The state of the economy’s a factor, but it could have happened without that. We try filling in dots with subjective analyses, but the narratives are as various as those for an individual. "Who wrote these knees?" said Spike Milligan. Who wrote these riots.
“I will preserve with many the memory of a bereaved father saying “Go home lads. Go home”. He did something Tolstoy would recognise - an act that changed the direction of things and which will mark the event in history above the social analyses.

A great gibbous moon came up over the shoulder of the dark mountains behind us, glittering on the sea. “We sort of found a beach to ourselves yesterday afternoon” I said “but it was tricky, working our way along a dirt road near Dassia through dry vegetation and high trees until we came upon a concrete structure, an unfinished derelict embedded in bamboos in the shape of a semi-circle, perhaps planned as beachside apartments with a mouldy white truck parked outside, various bits of rusting dusty equipment and on the equally bare second floor a smashed up car. How did it get up there? If we were in the Appalachian this is a cue for a fleeting glimpse of something lurking trailing its knuckles along the ground.

‘You stay here’ I told Lin ‘I’ll go and look around’.” We giggled. “Anyway Lin strolled on ahead with the picnic and I parked the car in one of the bays of the structure where it was a little cooler. A few minutes later having trailed her through a crushed bamboo path I found Lin sitting on an empty stretch of shore. OK it was crisscrossed with the tyretracks of beach buggies and there was the detritus that’s always – left or washed up – on tideless Mediterranean beaches, plastic bottles, cans, sweet wrappers, and off shore the regular sound of internal combustion engines – cars and motorbikes on water - but we enjoyed a swim in almost clear lukewarm water, then a picnic and a book to read while sipping chilled wine, then lying in the heat hearing the lap of the sea until after an hour a man appeared behind us and cried ‘No your car here’. We packed and headed home.” “I like the idea of imagining being all the horror films we’ve seen and not seen” said Cinta, but we agreed we’d come across a local farmer who’d savoured a big idea until the bank backed out. Down in the dark we heard a Scops owl. “They’ve not all gone away.” But even I could see that far beyond the vagaries of the weather which may or - as some believe so determinedly - may not be affected by our species’ way of extracting energy from the earth, that the sea in which I’d bathed wasn’t right. The devil’s in the detail. The overgrowth of slightly slimey underwater mould that coats the stones on the seabed, the imperfect clarity of water in which nothing inhuman swam, where I saw a few sea urchins small, stunted even. 15 years ago I was taken by someone rich to a more or less peopleless island where we and other’s in the family picnic’d under large parasols on a long clean beach unapproachable by road, but when I borrowed a snorkel and goggles it seemed to me the sea floor was without life even there – grey, brown and sparsely populated by a few small fish the floor even here littered with mould veneered remains of objects thrown from visiting yachts. My cousin shrugged despairingly “It’s men, The sea here is finished.” We’d swam and played with our children in his large pool in the woods in the remains of the coveted woods on the edge of Athens from where we could see in the distance not just heat haze but the summer fires set by mistake on purpose to gain property in the same places we were already enjoying. The better off see these things but being mostly civilized, aware of their access to more exclusive goods, will only speak in whispers - if at all about excessive numbers and the pollution and poverty that drives others to predation different, less effective but uncannily equivalent, to the mind of anyone with an education, to their own more effective narrative. So they retreat yet deeper into enclaves, building walls – literal and mental. The swimming pools of the rich, beside which one may lie in relaxed comfort reading and talking in the happy company of friends and family, are made nice by chemical stewardship, constant attention, cleaning, filtering the sun oil and other dregs of pleasure into a sea that looks exquisite from the indistinct perspective of a poolside lounger ‘colour it perfect blue that perfect sea that stretches over my peripheral vision to hazy blue perfect mountains under this perfect sky’; put it on a postcard or ‘an attached image’ home. Into it - invisible but to those who wade and swim on the shore – we allow the waste water of our lovely pool to drain. It passes down pipes, disappears even into seepage, but reappears as a smooth membraned efflorescence reminiscent of a failed embryo laced with small items of debris trailing the rocky shores of that perfect sea - the lymphy mess of something that might once have been alive. It sometimes astonishes me how much happiness I can feel even as I see daily evidence of my species’ dire impress on its surroundings. It’s a sort of intoxicated fascination that I live in times of ‘now or never’. Thousands of influential humans across the world know these problems. They speak and write and warn presenting analysis and evidence in eloquent multi-media broadcasts, but I can name no-one in significant power who dares allow anyone but their god to address the crucial problem of human numbers.
Most think of the current economic crisis. from Perithia in the north of the island, Richard Pine, who owns neither car nor swimming pool, writes his latest op-ed in the Irish Times for 16 September '11, ends:

.... In the village where I live, tempers are very frayed. The huge impact on public opinion of the “Indignant” protest in Athens from May to August showed how much more effective is a dignified gathering than union-led rioting. In one sense people are very angry at what is happening to their country, especially when all are being penalised for the faults of a few, and the way that sovereignty has been eroded – if not confiscated altogether – to the extent that Greece will effectively be owned by other EU states for the foreseeable future, thus mortgaging the hopes of an already dispirited, and largely unemployed, youth population. In another sense, anger is futile unless it is translated into action, which seems impossible, given the government’s own paralysis. Greece is fighting not only the future, but its own history. The anticipated default is due not merely to current mistakes but to 30 years of profligacy. Greeks cannot tell which is more prevalent: pessimistic despair or impotent rage. Society is on the brink of either implosion or explosion. But which? Even an apathetic citizen carries within him buried rage, and may be all the more dangerous for that. In view of the hopeless situation, citizens are prepared to withhold the new property tax which falls due in December, even though the government insists it is vital if the current budget shortfall is to be covered. Yet life goes on. Ordinary citizens, despite their despair, lead ordinary lives. The next lemon and orange crops are well on the way, and many villagers are self-sufficient in vegetables and eggs. The third week of September sees the grapes going to the local winery, and soon after, the long season of olive harvesting begins, thus guaranteeing two of life’s most vital fluids. These are visible signs of survival, but the consequences of what is seen as inevitable bankruptcy, and its impact on everyday life, are invisible and incalculable.
**** ****

I had a call from Bob Churn, Birmingham City Council planning - landscape practice group - the other afternoon regarding the children’s play area on the edge of the Parklands Estate, included in the S106A of 2004, yet, like the playing fields still not created. My reply to his suggestion that given objections to the play area by 'some' residents the money allocated to it might be spent in Handsworth Park:

Dear Bob. Thanks for taking the trouble to phone me regarding contingency plans for the long delayed children’s play area included in the Victoria Jubilee Allotments Section 106 Agreement that was determined in May 2004. We know a play area was included in the text of the approved application N/01514/03/FUL - i.e, 'An index linked sum of £27,000 towards the maintenance of a play area'. We are convinced that Marcellus Lindsay’s group’s two surveys of Parklands residents are convincing evidence that he and his neighbours have confirmed their approval for this element of the S106A. (Marcellus’s letter to me which you will perhaps have seen suggests a substantive majority in favour of the play area as currently proposed). We know that a reason for delay relates to the City Council’s need to confirm that Persimmon’s alternative specification for the play-area ensures it meets national standards for such facilities, but that the objection of a very few residents has also contributed, either directly or, as suggested by Marcellus Lindsay, as an excuse for delay. The resident who I understand to be the main objector has told me on several occasions (button-holing me on the allotments) that she is apprehensive about noise from the playground next to her home on the estate, an even more concerned that ‘undesirable elements’ will gather there and use it as an access to the estate and her property. She showed me the slightly larger green area that is currently fallow containing mature trees, between the edge of the VJA site and Hamstead Road, which would bound the east side of the play area. She insisted that a play-area next to this larger green space would become a point of entry for ‘bad people’. I am unsure who this fallow land belongs to. She initially insisted it was an area as large as the VJA and would not be convinced by my map showing it to be far smaller. If this resident could be assured that a secure fence existed between this piece of land and the proposed playground you might be able to put her mind at rest and lessen her objection which seems to be irrational, especially as this use of the land would have been known to her or her solicitor/surveyor at the time she took possession of her home on the Parklands Estate. Since your call yesterday I’ve sounded out a few others on the allotments and in the area who have been concerned about the delayed implementation of the S106A by Persimmon (by email and phone from Greece, saving money with the use of skype) and we are in wholehearted support of the position taken in favour of a children’s play area by the Parklands Residents Association - see letter below from Marcellus Lindsay dated 30 Aug’11, quoted also here: The Parklands Residents Association (PRA) FULLY SUPPORTS the playground. This has been the position for a number of years. There are, however, two residents that have objected and, as a result, delayed the construction.The position of the PRA results from taking two separate surveys/polls of residents. The first was only marginally in favour, the second had a more significant weight in favour of the playgrounds…..Additionally, my previous communication with Cllr Quinnen and Alan Orr has noted that the residents who had contacted them with the objections did not represent the views of the wider community. The PRA is the recognised and accepted representative body for the residents of the Parklands development. I note by the way Sam Collenette’s considered support for 'an area for community development’ and her preference for 'less play equipment’ and 'a safe space with a spongy floor for very mixed use.’ Parkland Estate’s fairly small gardens and the distance, from a toddler’s point of view, of Handsworth Park (the park in general and its play-areas near the leisure centre), make the Parklands play-area, as included in the S106A for the Victoria Jubilee site, a social good fitting between the green spaces now available for allotments, and the future playing playing fields for older children and adults. We would deplore diversion of funds from and official support for such a facility because of ill-judged assessments of risk by a small minority. I’m copying this letter to Sam Collenette, Marcellus Lindsay, Stuart Morgans and our ward councillors - who have earlier been approached by the objectors and so will have an interest in ensuring a democratically determined outcome on the matter of the play area for Parklands. Kindest regards, Simon (Baddeley) Handsworth Allotments Information Group (HAIG)

Gates of dawn

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:27:00 +0000

In the continuing heat, each room in the house gives off smells as though it were being slow cooked. In the dining room where we've drilled holes to start dealing with winter damp I can almost taste the stewing brick and stucco; in one of the lower kitchen cupboards an ancient mustiness mingles with the clinical smell of bleach where we've already washed and wiped. Shutters, under layers of old paint emanate baking wood, and the stones which in England only give off aromas when broken open, have identifying exhalations, tiles too - especially the trace whiff of cool marble caught and held on first entering a sheltered hallway from the hot street, remind me of my first visit to Athens fifty years ago, when heat like this was new. Despite the dryness Corfu remains deeply green; gardens are shaded by the large leaves of walnut, fig, orange and lemon, with exuberant vines cascading over balconies and alleyways, the aroma of jasmine caught in passing.
Working on the kitchen windows Lin and I had to climb on chairs to guide a large local Tiger Moth that had begun to flutter against the glass between it and the world a few inches away.

*** ***

An email from Minoti Chakravarty-Kaul still in lowland Scotland:

Dear Simon... I am rushing to write this as I am in the midst of a jam most of which is now melting under the heat of rush but have to make decisions so I wrote to Sharon today as I need to be thinking of getting back in time for the 2nd round of presentations in India. Roughly she says Theodora gets tired with visitors if they stay for a long period and so no more than 2 nights which means 3 days. I will then try to be there by the 27th of September ... Let me know how you are. Cheers Minoti

Dear Minoti. We - Linda and I - are now at our home in Corfu until late October by which time I imagine you will have returned to India....Sharon is right. Mum loves the concentrated exchanges she has with you, but - yes - she does get tired. When I’m talking to her I tend to work in 30 minute sessions and then rest, go for a walk, go to my room or just sit quietly. Mum may sleep or go to her room. But when she’s in conversation she’s alert as ever. all the best, love, Simon

Dear Simon...Yes I have to be in India long before the 21st as that is the date for my first presentation in the India Habitat Centre on the issue of land acquisition and New Delhi.this will be, if I can pull it off, a great opportunity to challenge the GOI of today on inflicting a tragedy of the village commons. I intend inducing INTACH which is for conservation of India's heritage to consider the issue from the point of view of historic villages of Delhi. I realised too late that I would have liked you to see a book I had here on Delhi's heritage villages. But hope you come to India soon. My next one will be in November and they may webcast it. I will have to work very very hard to get that off the ground so to say as the maps will be exhibited and all that has to be prepared. I am writing all this to you for I have to struggle about this all by myself. I feel re-assured just telling you. I thought over what you said about Theodora's getting tired - you may not have considered that a lot of conversations one cannot carry on with one's family simply because they are the 'knowns' whereas she may have so much to share with an outsider; also, she is alone for such a long time that there is a habit she may have developed to look inwards and looking back. Does she like music? I have a film which I would want her to see - would you know if she has seen it - 'Ladies in Lavender'- I can take it with me if she has not. besides I plan to cook a few things and I have already talked this over with Sharon - and she seems enthusiastic about it. What do you say? I am in awe about her attitude to life such that I think I will draw strength from her. Besides I will be taking some of the copies of Maine's letters and show them to her. Any other ideas? Minoti

Henry Maine at Cambridge

Dear Minoti. I think you may be right about the ‘knowns’ that can slow conversation between people in long connection with one other. I was inside my mother for 9 months and we've known one another for 69 years since. Even with Lin, we maintain long comfortable silences having been together since 1973, marrying in 1978, and having our two children in 1981 and 1985. We share an encyclopaedia of memories from which one of us may pick up a reference while the other - figuratively - peers over the other’s shoulder debating its accuracy, adding annotations that include additional details – debates and arguments. You and Theodora have - until last year - separate encyclopaedias which you are only starting to share. She and you can turn pages and pages that, were they being looked at within each other’s families, would be too well thumbed; not incidentally that I don’t like repeating happy memories, possibly gilding them with nostalgia. What may interest you about both Theodora and me is that neither of us really knows very much about Sir Henry and his significance. We’ve always been aware of his fame and enduring reputation, but even after we read Feaver’s biography I felt little wiser about our ancestor. It is only since you entered our lives that it has been possible for us, through your understanding and indeed reliance on his scholarship, that we have begun to gain insights into why this man is considered in a significant circle to be one of the great intellects of the last 150 years; only now as a result of your enthusiasm and generosity that I have begun to see links between Maine’s research into the governance of traditional Indian society, especially its villages, and his comparisons of these with village communities in the rest of Europe, and contemporary problems of governance and land usage; problems that I’ve so far viewed through different perspectives - environmentalism and sustainability. Much as I respected him in a general way, I hadn’t seen how Maine’s work might be so relevant to my enduring concerns about the urban environment, town and country relationships and new ways of organising the distribution of scare resources without resort to regulation by top-down government or exposure to the market. I know Theodora will be fascinated to see your copies of Maine’s letters. Neither of us have seen any of these, the only handwriting we’ve viewed being his signature. Indeed I feel very little sense of knowing this man as a human being, driven by the ambition of his intellect to excel among his peers at Cambridge, made a full professor at 25, well before the appearance of the books that made his name. He could have been arrogant, priggish and mean, but seems to have been none of these things, being regarded by those who new him as quite shy, generous, sweet mannered, always attentive. I still cannot imagine someone who writes with such originality and assurance and deals with such complex and difficult ideas in this light. I have not heard any more from Robin Peterson in distant Canada about the contents of those files she recovered from George Feaver’s estate. Except for the books Robin sent to Brin Croft in May, which I stacked on a lower shelf in my mum’s bedroom near her window, you now have all of the material my mother had on her great grandfather, - the obituary notices cut out by Jane in the late 1880s. I guess it’s just possible that new material will come to light but I suspect you are our unique link to Sir Henry, notwithstanding Karuna Mantena’s great talent as a scholar. She incidentally sent me a kind note a few months ago saying that she could not imagine a better person than you to help my mother and I to learn more about our ancestor. I read Village Communities - all 6 lectures - last time I was at Brin Croft in early August. I begin to see that what Maine was describing does not lend itself to any easy simplification; no idealistic paean for the simple and the traditional, no obvious opposition to the progress from status to contract. I see considerable concern about the effects on village elites and more educated Indians of the day of offering uncompromised access to legal procedures that enabled them to draw on English law to detach themselves from the older forms of governance that had had traditionally determined the settlement of disputes within and between village communities. I suspect that in raising this issue and supporting it with evidence he drew attention to unforeseen side effects of British rule that had had more obvious and dire effects in that earlier insurrection we were taught at school to call The Indian Mutiny. The insensitivity that required Hindu’s to be in touch with beef fat and Muslims with pork was a notorious lesson that has curbed the arrogance of many an imperial governor over-confident about imposing what he took for granted as being the universal and superior benefits of ‘our' way of doing things. What strikes me about Maine’s writing are the careful conditions and limitation he places around any too obvious or simple assumptions about the motives, mores and logic of other cultures. I see now why when I was at Cambridge reading Anthropology, at Trinity Hall with Sir Henry’s portrait - not very good - on the wall of the dining room at whose High Table he, as Master, once presided, I was told by one of our lecturers, that Henry Maine was 'a father of Anthropology'. It was not until I met you and, on your second visit to Brin Croft earlier this year, you gave us that fascinating tutorial on Maine’s research base, missing in George Feaver’s biography of him, that I’ve begun to digest the full import of that conclusion. I still haven’t read any of your written work though I’ve seen reviews, and you showed me your village maps. I very much hope that when I do I can strengthen my understanding of Maine’s work enough to make a clear connection between it and my committed interest in the commons and their governance, allotments and urban green space.I realise from your words how urgent it is for you to prepare a challenge to the Government of India that may be instrumental in averting the infliction of a tragedy of the village commons. Linda and I are enjoying the dry heat of September in Corfu, grateful for the breezes that start in the afternoon and blow cooler air through our house on Democracy Street.

We’ve enjoyed eating ripe grapes clustered on vines enveloping deserted houses in the village, picking dates sticky and sweet from overhanging trees that grow so abundantly some treat them as weeds. We've even found a few blackberries where the bramble roots have worked through the walls of old wells giving them the moisture needed to ripen rather than shrivel in the rainless weather. Cats and kittens roam everywhere scratching a living from throwaway scraps, occasional lizards and crickets.

I hope you will have a good journey to the Highlands (which I always miss) and enjoy again seeing Theodora and imbibing with her the spirit of Sir Henry Maine in whom we all share such interest and in the case of my mother and I, similar genes and DNA if not brain cells (:)).

I forgot to add an answer to a couple of your questions. Yes, Mum loves music. We have a radio programme you may know on the BBC called Desert Island Discs, in which a well known person is asked what they’d miss if they were marooned on a desert island. They are allowed to choose eight favourite recordings; extracts from these are played during the conversation. At the end they are asked what book “other than the Bible and works of Shakespeare” which are taken as givens, and what object, they would most like to have with them on their desert island. I think my mother’s book was The Wind in the Willows and she especially liked a small Rembrandt sketch of a child learning to walk…I did a home-made version of Desert Island Discs with Theodora about 18 months ago with these results:

Mum enjoys Jacqueline du Pré playing Elgar's Cello Concerto

She was entranced, listening avidly through earphones and watching the screen. She has a lot of interest in the potential of internet and was impressed at how easy it was to find not only the music or aria she wanted to hear, but versions by her favourite singers, musicans and conductors.I don’t know of she’s seen Ladies in Lavender but I suspect she would enjoy watching it with you and talking about it. Simon

In Venetia above Ano Korakiana

The best of all possible worlds...

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:35:00 +0000

Common swallow tail on our balcony

Attempts to preserve a Panglossian perspective are assailed by Richard’s choice of films for us to watch here. Monday night we watched Ajami; last night Animal Kingdom. Superbly filmed and acted they start off at low points – the casual street assassination of a young boy in Palestine, a youth watching an Australian version of Deal or No Deal finds his mother dead in the same room of an overdose - and descend from there in the proper form of tragedy, consequential and predictable – but unlike classical tragedy no relieving conclusion, though I suppose the young man finally shooting his murderous uncle and becoming the family's new strong man in the Animal Kingdom was a catharsis of sorts. In Mike Leigh’s Another Year the happy couple worked an allotment with their happy son, a cyclist, with his sweet sensible girlfriend, but misery revolved around them as unchanged as dead moons circling a living planet - the last image a long hold on Mary’s desolate face, silenced amid animated conversation about travelling the world.
“You don’t half download some films Richard” said his mum over the phone
“You mean too realistic?”

In a fortnight Anthony Scoville and his wife Helen will be our guests, their first visit to Greece; the first time he and I will have seen each other for forty six years. Tony was attached to me by Prof Russ Ackoff for a few months in the summer of 1966. I had a minor temporary post as research drone at The University of Pennsylvania. I had been supposed to join a Norwegian tanker as a fieldworker to observe the effects of a socio-technical design – which in line with the Norwegian Industrial Democracy Programme begun after WW2 – was intended to create a humane and efficient relationship between the work seamen did and the work done by machines. I still have the telegram.

In May I got a terse message via Russ from my future employer Prof Fred Emery, at the Tavistock, that my ship had ‘blown up’. I’d done anthropology at Cambridge; I’d spent 6 months sailing to America. It seemed like a perfect assignment. Instead I was directed to work at the Wharton School on a project funded by Anheuser-Busch helping analyse data from a survey of US drinking habits, relying, for the calculation of percentages and standard deviations on electric - not electronic – calculators, working through piled in-trays of completed force-choice questionnaires – work that a few years later would be mechanised, results transferred to IBM punch cards, for analysis by computer.
Our focus was to find an answer to a question put by the mightiest beer company in the world “Could Americans be persuaded to drink English bitter?” Guinness had a steady market among the miners of Pittsburgh but could there be a significant market for a brown stout brewed from hops – what some who’d visited Britain called “lukewarm English beer”. Many years later we know the situation was entirely reversed with lager becoming Britain’s default ale, especially among the young. Our theoretical perspective, to assess which I and others were processing data, was that people’s drinking habits evolved, starting as social drinking – where identifiable flavour and even alcohol content were of no great importance – graduating, as people grew older, experienced its up and downs in varying degrees, to one or the other of two main approaches to drink; reparative - drinking to face reality, and so not interested in getting intoxicated, and indulgent - drinking to escape, valuing a drink’s intoxicating qualities. There were plenteous intervening variables but a picture was emerging of the drinks preferred by each type. A spectrum, light in the centre, and dark at either end, with light and flavourless beers popular among the young, and stronger beers, at either end of the spectrum, preferred later. The most bitter at one end were chosen by reparatives, the sweeter at the other, were associated with indulgence.
At various points on this dividing scale people might switch from beer altogether because other drinks better fulfilled their needs - social, reparative,. indulgent and combinations of these. The marketing-production strategy prompted by this research entailed identifying one of these switching points and designing a new beer with a new brand that competed with the profile of the drink to which the consumer was planning to switch. A few years later it was this understanding of social drinking that led to Guinness introducing the first British lager – Harp. Young people, typically men, enjoy the company of their peers but socialising as been known in history, myth and later social research, is inhibited by peer rivalry. Young men are wont to claim they can rule the world, certainly the roost, but very privately they have doubts about this. The company they seek, as they escape the orbit of elders, to allay such hidden insecurity is one most likely to exacerbate it - other men their own age. Inject social drinking into this simmering testosterone soup and internal group rivalry and fear of intimacy is suppressed and companionship enjoyed. Thus was the new lager branded the lad’s sociable tribal drink, quite different from the individualised and classically reparative medicine of dark bitter Guinness preferred by men who ‘can take their drink’ rather than those who seek to become egregiously smashed in the company of peers. As for the indulgent I realised the import of the astute slogan “There’s a promise in a glass of Mackeson” – the brand, in its extreme, of the lonely toper sinking into sugary oblivion. I would have preferred to be at sea – a predisposition that Fred Emery, a brilliant man who switched twixt indulgent and reparative in his drinking, referred to as ‘oceanic’ and I’m not sure where that puts me as a drinker. I recall being in a dark temporary flat in Philadelphia wearing shorts and a T-shirt listening in stifling sweating humidity for the six-o-clock cloudburst to rattle on the corrugated iron stoop roof sipping an ice cold beer, feeling bereft and lonely in my aloneness - something I've never felt when on my own at sea.

Just a year ago, helped by the web, Tony Scoville got back in touch. I replied ‘you made those months in Philadelphia interesting’. He replied, to my surprise, he thought it was the other way around. I recall weekend journey’s with him and several friends by train, plane and automobile from our whitewashed shared basement flat in narrow east-west Pine Street, in whose sitting room he’d found me a bed and book space, to the house he’d designed, and with our help, was building on a ridge above a rolling wooded panorama deep in the Connecticut countryside; no settlement for miles and miles; American space and scale. Le Corbusier was Tony’s architectural exemplar. His house, its lower floors complete enough for living, was called Corbu. We roamed between finished rooms and the skeleton of the future building – minimal difference, stark modernist. There was at least one musician. I recall a lute played from a reclining modernist chair; poetry recited over an American breakfast dish – French toast - bread slices steeped in whipped egg, skillet fried, served with maple syrup to taste, before we set to work. One chillier weekend Tony shot a deer – clean and quick; gralloched it by the edge of a deep pinewood. I was sure this was Robert Frost territory. I felt my lack of talent in this company, hence my astonishment at Tony’s recent reply about our old friendship.

One thing I thought I had going for me amid the Wharton School’s scary reputation for smart practical research for corporate America was that I’d just sailed the Atlantic, but the switch from months of ocean swells sprouting flying fish, azure sea and white sands below trade blown palms to serried desks in air conditioned neon lit offices had created in me a depressed insensibility that matched the repetitive work to which I’d been assigned, while trying to make sense of socio-technical theory from papers sent from England, readying me for the ship-board fieldwork that would take me back to England on the Irish Spruce.
Tony shook me from my daze, making my first sojourn in America a memorable interlude of extended conversation about ideas and events in the world, rather than the start of a sentence. He lent me his Landrover to drive a thousand miles south to Miami and trail my boat back to Washington where I’d managed to sell it to two young lawyers.
Just now we’ve been exchanging emails – about seeing the remains of the ancient in modern Greece, about what he and Helen might make of the Acropolis and its new museum, what they might see in the Peloponnese; their route over the Gulf of Patras to visit coach crowded Delphi; catching the ferry to Corfu from Igoumenitsa, how to get to us in Ano Korakiana; recognise our house in Democracy Street; plan a visit to Albania and later Zagori.

Dear Tony. Yes the Greek code is +30 and Helen’s Greek SIM card will work, if it’s like ours, up to 50 miles outside Greece. Do you recall it was you who introduced me to Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus - and here I am two centuries later again reading Camus’ The Outsider. I realize I understand it better than when we read it at school because our French teacher left out key passages. I’ve only just realized this (we were reading L’Étranger in class in the late 50s in French). Our teacher left out just why Meursault might have helping out his friend Raymond in connection with the woman with whom he’d been having a failed affair. That omission – censored because about a sexual liaison - made the killing look as if committed entirely without motive and Meursault, a ground breaking example of that familiar inhabitant of modern fiction, the predatory psychotic as anti-hero. I’d always thought that was why the novel was notorious. It’s not like that at all, Foolish violence – yes; but the murdered man had, with friends, been trailing Meursault’s friend Raymond threatening revenge for the beating he’d given their sister. Raymond had asked for help. When Meursault came across one of the men on the beach, his victim had drawn a knife at which Meursault drew a revolver. I’ve been labouring decades under a misapprehension that Camus had described a motiveless murder. (:))

But then it is in long retrospect astonishing what in the 1950s we – in our teens - were not supposed to read or know. When Monserrat’s bestseller The Cruel Sea came out, we were reading – at prep school – the 'cadet’ edition. We’d compared passages in full edition one of us had smuggled into school. It revolved round a cuckolded sailor’s wife appearing at the top of the stairs just as he’d come home unexpectedly. She had ‘something on her nightie’. The amount and intensity of censorship seems astonishing now. I recall the courage it took me, at 16, to buy a ticket to The Windmill Theatre where, so long as they didn’t move, women could be on stage without clothes. Things changed with the failed prosecution for obscenity of Penguin, the publisher of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
“Is this a book you’d allow your servants to read?” asked the barrister for the prosecution. I’d been taught by my mother the confidence that sexual passion was neither dirty nor shameful. She mentioning things in passing, gave me John Donne's Elegies to read...

Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below...

...also Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress – 'And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity'. In a round about way I came to understand that most of the unhappiness between people who tried to live together stemmed from something wrong between them in bed – a cruel circumstance because that was something which in those days, and even now, people have no more idea how to discuss with each other than I had in early youth of how a woman could stand naked on stage in front of people. For a good while I was incapable of understanding how men and women who wore clothes got, at some crucial point, not just to take them off but to do it in front of each other – with the lights on, perhaps in the middle of the day, even out of doors.
On reading the headlined verdict, I went in a break to a bookshop in Victoria Street and bought a Penguin edition of Lawrence’s novel. I started reading it unhidden as I strolled back to school, utterly absorbed and moved, especially when Connie in pouring summer rain deep in the forest sees the keeper’s baby rabbits and stroking them begins to weep uncontrollably and Mellors begins to caress her. … Years later I remarked to my 10 year old son that we ought “to chat “ and he no doubt alerted to the possibility of such an approach said, in a wearied manner, “Let me show you my text book from school” In this he had written and drawn things under the tutelage of his human relations teacher which if not in style or emotion exceeded the details I’d explored in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Being the 1980s there was now information about how the AID’s virus could and could not be transmitted.
I mentioned my annoyance at being so long confused about the Outsider, and Linda, who’s also just read it again, exclaimed “Yes that’s the same version I was taught at school. There must have been an expurgated Outsider – the same we read all those years ago.”
“I’m quite vexed about that” I said.
*** ***
On Tuesday evening we were at a WiFi’d hotel to do our mail and swim, a place for Brits Abroad – cacophonous, bleach blond or bald and all ages plump - spraying Sky Sport with frenetic voices over a tape of pop relayed through speakers to the pool and its grassy surroundings, chat peppered with curses; wingeing toddlers. ‘what a fuckup‘ faces. “Why do we come here?” I asked Lin “I’m not sure” she said. “For respect and quiet we’d do better in the company of outlaws.”

** ** **
I was up early this morning in time to see the sun rise over Albania, coming round the corner of Pantocrator. A house away beside Leftheris garden a neighbour has chickens, the cock crowing as the village wakes, still setting too early to avoid the heat, though the days are growing cooler already.

*** ***
We were up late last night as Lin, as the Treasurer for the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project's rescue group, composing a letter appealing against a £300 penalty for being late submitting the project's tax return. It was nearly 1800 words overflowing with detail, summarising extenuation:

....Taking into account the detailed information supplied above, the Voluntary Advisory Group, on behalf of the CHPCP Committee, are appealing against the imposition of the penalty charge by HMRC on the basis of the following extenuating circumstances:

• On 19th May 2011, as a result of the death of Ms Foley and lack of management of the Project thereafter, there was no officially appointed agent with responsibility for submission of end-of-year figures.
• On 19th May 2011 CHPCP was entirely without the means to manage its affairs, with its financial circumstances unknown to the Committee and no responsible individual available or authorised to communicate with HMRC.
• No member of the Committee was aware of the workings of PAYE and the requirement to submit end-of-year figures.
• No member of the Voluntary Advisory Group was aware of the requirement to submit end-of-year figures until informed of this by BVSC in July 2011.
• No member of the Committee had access to or an understanding of the financial information required for the submission of end-of-year figures.
• End-of-year figures were not available until the Voluntary Advisory Group completed examination of CHPCP finances in July 2011.
• Although BVSC were supplied with accurate end-of-year figures on July 17th 2011, figures (which were inaccurate, as already explained) were not submitted by BVSC until August 11th.

Had it not been for the hard work over recent months of a small, unpaid group of dedicated volunteers, the March 2011 situation would have continued indefinitely.

** ** **
The sounds of the village are all about, reassuring, embracing. Lefteris prepares a little wine from his surviving grapes, Fortis takes the kindergarten books from the closed school - soon to be a special school for Corfu - to the bandroom in the centre of the village, Thanassis Spingos on the village website reports a 50th anniversary DVD celebrating the village band and recording its history.

Between times we've been at work on the house, sanding and painting another window frame, general cleaning including the minutiae of niches and corners, preparing the dining room walls for a damp resistant treatment that involves injecting a silicone solution at six inch intervals over the core area of dampness - a problem that has created an impressive landscape of shades on the stucco, leaving a musty smell in the room even in summer. Lin, after I'd drilled, blew the dust out of each hole with a straw, her face covered with a towel, in imitation of the Swallowtail with its proboscis dipped in our Bougainvillea. It's good to be here.

Cricket

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 12:03:00 +0000

Handsworth Park

Some humans feel diminished by discoveries which make reality more rather than less mysterious, as though magic and religion were never about mystery or faith or even consolation but only about propitiation and explanation. Last Sunday Amy, Guy, Richard and I strolled over with Oscar to watch the cricket, organised by Sted Wallen for the two day Sports and Cultural event in Handsworth Park. Sted, amid the bustle around the pavilion, invited us for food in the guest tent, and mentioned he'd had a word with our Lord Mayor, Councillor Anita Ward, about Persimmon Homes' extended delay providing playing fields, including changing rooms and children's playground next to the Victoria Jubilee Allotments under their S106A with Birmingham City Council. "We must hurry that up" she said. Fingers crossed. We bumped into Amy's Godmother, Sonia Hyman.

Lunch was curried goat, rice, salad. How pleasing that I could sit here in this park I care about so much among closest relatives, and, but for Sonia, be sat, hardly a fortnight earlier, with the same people, same dog, in the committee tent of the Highland Field Sports Fair at Moy.

Amy, Simon, Oscar, Sonia and Guy at Handsworth Sport and Culture Day

Tuesday morning, Lin and I coached to London, thence by train to Gatwick, for our flight to Corfu, arriving in humid warm darkness at 11pm, collecting the car from Yianni, getting into 208 Democracy Street after kisses and hugs with our neighbours sitting outside - Vasiliki, young Lefteri and his mother Natasha. We aired the house; began to unwind after the work of the last months.
When I woke before dawn, the sky clay, I could scarcely move. The muscles at the base of my spine had rebelled against digging our allotment - on Saturday spreading a big polythene sheet across one third of the plot weighed with slabs - tidying the flat - my contribution far less than Linda's - pre-departure chores with their hassle.
"You need to lie flat on a wooden floor" said Lin, disinclined to sympathy, but who had, after a chat with our neighbour Paul, obtained from him some locally available tablets called Arcoxia which, when taken after a meal, brought relief.
Even so I spent Wednesday indoors, philosophising about the impossibility of doing more housework, utterly engrossed in Zola's powerful demolition of the pastoral idyll - Earth - whose first English translation was banned in England and America.

A novel as heart gripping as The Bridge on The Drina. Later we swam, enjoying the blue, stirred into cobalt by katabatic wind down the hot slopes of Trompetta, as light blue velvet is napped cobalt with the heel of a fist.

Nick and Nancy's pool yesterday evening

The writer intended, when he put arguments in their mouths, that Job’s helpers demonstrate the limits of common sense. All Job’s sufferings – real enough in the world - are invented to explain acceptance and faith in goodness amid the worst of suffering – loss of children, the death of beloved companions, and the least of it, a banged shin, a stubbed toe, my aching back. Common sense invents a commentary that suits the actuarial calculation of insurers; the narratives of litigants before a jury. How profoundly, unlike the Book of Job, it fails to explain why bad things happen to good people.

Cutting back the Bougainvillea and Wisteria at 208

While Lin read, I dropped round to see Mark and Sally, unwilling to wait to see them. Mark knowing my interest in the scythe, showed me an article written nearly 30 years ago - he collects such things for himself and for me - about billhooks and how they differed across the land. Imagine the variants across Europe and beyond. I gave him a copy of Jack's 1981 stroll on Parsonage Down - a last broadcast on Southern Television.

Early Sunday morning a mosquito found us. I got up and addressed myself, lying headlong on a rubber mattress, to cleaning a large cerise stain spread across the bottom of one of the kitchen cupboards. I worked back to the white surface, reaching deep into the cupboard, twisting and turning in my efforts. After less than half-an-hour the space was pristine; my back no longer hurting, just the memory of its ache.
On Thursday we went to Foros, Ο Φόρος, at Palia Perithia for a long lunch of conversation with Richard Pine and his daughters, Emily and Vanessa, bringing back a bag of figs picked from one of his trees and the anticipation of a forthcoming book on Corfu created around his regular articles about Greece - and Ireland - for the Irish Times.

Richard Pine at Palia Perithia

Cleaning the flat

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Baddeley) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:08:00 +0000

Lin's final check

I've been helping Lin clean and tidy our flat in Cambridge Tower overlooking Centenary Square and the city centre. The tall crane over Birmingham's new library is being dismantled, the main part of the structure complete.

Rain spattered the windows of the flat 15 floors up a tower block. I don't like cleaning, especially when you have to go into nooks where detritus has collected and congealed unseen. I pulled out the cooker.

I'm not good at this. it's an effort to sweep out the odds and ends of food and other things that have been hiding there for months. I used a dustpan and brush to collect moveable things, then spraying on grease remover I set to with hot water and an abrasive sponge. After a while the results begin to show, the mess surrendered as in the advertisements to cleaning products - not sparkling bright with just a wipe, but passably clean with elbow grease.
While taking a break I got a text from Scotland.

Sharon had been out with my mum at Munlochie on the other shore of the Moray Firth. A storm in Strathnairn had taken out the power, lightning burning out the TV, phones and Wifi.

My sister in Manhattan is experiencing the remains of Hurricane Irene and a few days ago a small earthquake.

Portents? This evening Lin was driving back from the final tidying of the flat ready for our tenants to move in at the beginning of September. We'd dropped in on Amy and Guy who've agreed to look after Oscar while we're away, since his usual minders, John and Jo, are unwell. On the way home we saw a Moses basket under a street lamp at the corner of Heathfield and Brecon Roads. Lin braked.
"Just check there isn't a baby in it"
I had a peer, knowing that desperate people do now and then abandon babies. We'd never forgive ourselves if this was an example ignored. No. The crib was empty sat with litter on the pavement, but in excellent condition.