"...If you can hear the blood running...'

E-mail from Rebecca Morris on Wednesday:

Hi Simon, Hope all's well... Just thought I'd send you the first of our two interview transcripts…See you soon and hope Corfu was all to plan. Not checked to see how the roof's going…whether the knicker crisis is resolved...but I'm hoping for at least one of the two to be ironed out.

When we’d got beyond the process of giving blood, Rebecca had asked me ‘what is blood?’ I’d been given a sea shell to hold it to my ear:

I must have heard it when I was four or five, or something like that, and you could hear this ‘shh’ this wonderful surfy noise, and thinking that the sound of the sea has got into the shell from being near the sea. And then I read in one of these sort of – erm - great books of knowledge for children kind of things, you know, seldom known fact, sort of, what is the sound you hear in the thing? And it said ‘it’s the sound of the blood that you can hear

I have only once in a place so quiet I could hear my blood, on a hillside at Delphi - once known as the centre of the world. The panoramic hush was relieved by an old bus with crackling rebetica, played through speakers on its roof, working its way up the valley for half an hour. I put Rebecca’s transcript of our conversation through Word’s Autosummarize. From 7000 words it highlighted:

Because if you can hear the blood running then you can hear all sorts of other sounds about the life around you, erm, and nothing is more important at the moment, than people should hear what’s happening to the world. And you can’t hear this because people are blanking it out all the time and I think people are actively scared of hearing the blood running.

The funny thing is that when I tried it again no such selection occurred. By the way I'm mildly miffer Rebecca got in that quip about the knickers crisis being 'ironed out' before me. I'll just pinch it. Note: Googling the matter of hearing the sea in a shell I learn after half-a-century that it is not my blood I can hear but ambient and invented noise. How intriguing? It is amazing for how long one can believe with confidence that something is the case and then, almost in passing, learn differently. I'm a little disappointed but I'll recover. * * * E-mail from Thanassis and Kostas at Ano Korakiana today:

Dear Simon. Thank you very-very much for your interest... Now, some answers to your questions: 1.we haven't searched both Embassies, 2.We don't know if the language of the "paper" is either English or Greek, 3.we are sure that one of the names that signed the paper is Metallinos (Μεταλληνός). He was the "leader", 4. A similar paper has been signed by inhabitants of Kinopiastes (another village in Corfu) and one village in Zakynthos island. 5. It is passed by word of mouth as you have written. And today's information from my family's environment: a well known person that searched for another theme, found it in Leeds University (history section?) at the end of 1970s, a file about the Ionian aspect that contained this "paper". She read it, but they didn't let her have a copy. So, you can start with this information, but (we believe) not in "official way". Maybe they don't want (for their reasons) to give this paper.. Many many thanks to you and ...Courage!!! TS & KA