Inspecting the roof at 208

Inspecting the roof at 208 Originally uploaded by Sibad.

Dave and Miguel inspect the roof at 208 Democracy Street before yesterday's downpour proves that their diagnosis of its problem was correct. Lessons: Check builders' credentials even more carefully than we did; use lead flashing despite contrary advice; keep buckets handy and don't demolish outside stairs or balconies without a good deal of forethought. All of these problems were a result of misguided alterations of the previous British 'builder'. This will all be sorted and we're relieved the welcome rain revealed the problems that need sorting. Oh and make sure external doors have lintels!

Picnic off the Trompetta Road

On Tuesday this was crisp and parched. We ate in silence gazing down on the terraces of fruitless trees towards the north coast of Corfu. Today it will be soaked and full of sprouting green. I thought later how Lin's photo looked rather like one of Edward Lear's wonderful landscapes made sometime between 1856-64 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was looking north from south of Corfu Town - from Ascension, which I don't know.

Rain at last!

5.00pm. After this mornings gentle showers, the rain increases, which, so long as it doesn’t cause flooding or landslides is good for Corfu. It’s good for all of Greece’s parched terrain, if it’s falling equally on the mainland. But D’s predictions about the failings of our inadequate roof improvements are proving correct as we go back and forth with buckets and clothes stemming leaks. Leaks, diagnoses, solutions – the leaking side door caused by splashes from streams of water coming through unsealed guttering will be solved by mending the guttering, a tactical application of additional silicone sealant round the marble at the foot of the door and a lintel. How even more aware we are of how that ill-judged removal the old external stairs and balcony took away rain shelter from that side of the house, especially the side door. Leaks in our bedroom upstairs, on the wall back of our bed and the wall opposite, are because the silver tarred flashing between Leftheris’ house and our back roof and between it and the front section of our house is useless. It will be replaced by lead flashing chased into the walls at either end. We didn’t order this originally because we believed people who said ‘the Greeks all use tarred silver paper’. Further leaks along the east wall of the small upstairs bedroom are caused by water driven along the roof beams that stick out a foot through the wall that overlooks Leftheris’ and then drip down on the inside of the wall at intervals, in line with those unnecessary extensions. The leaks on the west wall of the front top room are a result of not running the roof’s new waterproof membrane into the edge of the guttering, so that instead of pouring into the gutter, rain drips off the last tiles ands runs between gutter and wall into the house. The reason there’s no leak on the west wall of our bedroom is probably because rain is leaking out of the gutter before it gets there. Small mercy. Lin is displeased. ‘Ah well such is life’ she sighs seeing the drips striping her paintwork. I phoned M who’d done our roof and said ‘I am not happy’ explaining what was happening. He said ‘Oh shit, how could that have happened?’ I phoned D, praised the accuracy of his diagnoses the other day and we agreed it was lucky we’d been in to see the problems first hand. ‘I’ll be round on Friday’ he said. Kitchen, utility room, downstairs bedroom (now we’ve put temporary protection outside the door) dining room and sitting room and, indeed for the moment, most of the house is still dry. But we expect another’s day’s blessed rain and should not complain about the bad condition of our roof. I took the remaining sacks of rubble down to Tzavros along puddled roads. Now we have a few well washed blocks left for various jobs. I drove home via Ipsos and checked Summer Song to see her self draining cockpit was working. Shifting rainbows arched across the bay, several giving the illusion of plunging into the sea or shore in a specific location marked by an aura of golden light. Once back we manoeuvred one of the wardrobes downstairs where it fitted neatly into the space in the downstairs bedroom where the stove used to go, before the previous builder made it unusable there by adding a floor. It’s a cheapo chipboard piece left by the last owners. L’s painting it white. * * * 2.00pm. Greyer and greyer skies as we give a climbing grip to a vine to grow below the veranda and bicker over, string-knotting, holding steps steady and passing scissors, as we tether errant branches of bougainvillea. Next door the Lefteris squabble aimiably as they begin extracting juice from their garden harvest. ‘700 kilos of grapes!’ Leftheris looks up and traces on one hand with a finger. Then rain comes again, this time gentle but steady with occasional downpours – proper rain from the sea, part of a weather system and not a local phenomenon. So welcome. Lefteris’ vines have prospered on regular hose water but is there yet hope for the olive harvest or was that made impossible by the lack of rain last winter? Thunder wanders around and we repair to the cosy house and cuppas. The Lefteris cover their kit with plastic sheet and also shelter. A spindle of water from an unsealed roof gutter splashes up from the concrete to the middle of the side door, runs down and seeps through a corner. Under an umbrella I position a slab of plaka as a temporary solution to deflect the stream, then stand at a window to enjoy seeing the wet, reminded irrelevantly of another rain gazer in Jack’s tale of class hatred. An old peer habitually stands gazing from a high window of his club in St.James as rain pours on scurrying crowds in the broad street below his window and runs down the gutters from Piccadilly towards Duke of York steps and the Mall. Asked why he stands so intent he grunts “I hate the poor, ‘n I like to see it rainin’ on ‘em’.” * * * At 9.30am it feels cool. Weather from the south east has brought a light overcast, and a few minutes of light rain wetting the balcony and settling dust. Athens News gives a very readable overview of the challenges facing ND under their successful leader Karamanlis. It’s noted that just before the election deputy finance minister Petros Doukas signed an agreement with the Mayor of Zaharo Pantazis Hronopoulos in Ileia Prefecture the right to lease land protected under the EU’s Natura 2000 programme for conserving natural habitat – made part of Greek law in 1998 - for ‘high quality tourism’ hotel development to the Hellenic Public Real Estate Corporation- a private corporation within the finance ministry that manages the development of ministry owned land - paving the way for 16k of coastline in one of the worst burned areas to be leased by private companies in order to develop the area’s tourism industry. Lin and I pondered this piece of news. Athens News reports the mayor saying ‘the olive tree – our one source of income - is finished here. We lost 1.1 million trees. It will take 10 years for the industry to re-establish itself.’ Against reproaches that this decision sends out the wrong message in view of the long running connection of fire and development Hronopoulos says all hotels will be limited to one or two floors and all development would be ‘in keeping with the local environment’. He is criticised by Kritonas Arsensis, regional planner of the Elliniki Etairia (Society for the Preservation of Environmental and Cultural Heritage) who sees this agreement as leverage for property profiteering. He cites the positive example of post 1986 earthquake Kalamata. ‘They didn’t take the quick money route. They restored the traditional architecture. Anyone who passes through is likely to visit the old town. They never did that before. Zaharo has many beautiful villages. They should concentrate on preserving the unique characteristics that attract true quality tourists and encouraging local industries and businesses.’ But George Mitropoulos for HPREC says this overlooks immediate needs of local people. I guess a lot depends on the personalities and interests of the Mayor, the HPREC and key figures in ND and their responses to the diverse political pressures of the situation. (Athens News 21-27/09/07 p.10 reporter Thrasy Petropoulos. Letters to the Editor an-community@dolnet.gr and by post 3 Christou Lada St Athens 102 37) [further article by Maria Magaronis about Ileia in Autumn on 9 November 2007] A wise letter in the AN from an English resident points out the increased combustibility of the Greek countryside as farming has decreased and ground cover is no longer cleared by people, and sheep and goats. Clear scrub round your property and remove low tree branches. Create a buffer zone cleared of flammable materials. I realise now that I should have seen danger present in the small area of trees, bamboo and thick brambly undergrowth at the back of our house which went up in flames on 1 September putting ours and other houses as a risk but for swift action by villagers. No doubt a domestic goat or two would have cleared this area in the past. * * * Tuesday 25 Sept. This morning I woke before dawn, wrapped myself in a quilt and sat on the balcony to watch the earth roll towards sunlight. There are two especially bright planets east and west, and above in the high south the three star belt of Orion in front of the innumerable lights of the great circling disc that is our own galaxy. The cock crowing spreads, then the dogs take up their cries with their barking and soon come the scooters and now and then, like tumbling boulders, the rumble of aircraft rising from Kapodistria Airport. The sky lightens enough to show the grey smudge of a ferry heading slowly towards Corfu port and then another on a course for Igoumenitsa. Pink light grows and flares behind the mainland mountains, the stars disappear. I make myself a cup of tea and return to my seat. Venus and Mars remain longer, then fade into the growing blue. Sunlight tops the mountains and in hardly twenty seconds a noose of light has caught and warmed me on the balcony. I hear conversation across the houses. Lin wakes to hear me working on the door latch and lock of the bathroom door which hasn’t ever closed properly. By the time that task was done, we were making lists. I pruned the bougainvillea, helped Lin put up curtains and we discussed the next set of things to do. In the afternoon, we picnic’d in an olive grove at the end of a path off the road high on Trompetta. It was quiet enough to hear the blood running in my ears. Lin had made up smoked salmon, cream cheese, fresh bread, a can of cold beer and a fresh tomato. The ground was crisp with dried olive leaves, but with all the parching there was moss and spinach green undergrowth among the rocks above the terraces that went downwards in gentle steps strewn with the rolled dark plastic nets that will be used to catch the fallen olives in November - though a poor harvest is expected after so little rain. Even as strolled in pleasant solitude the phone rang. Richard said a man from Severn Trent wanted to come in our house and ‘check our stopcock for a suspected water leak’. ‘Tosh!’ said L ‘On no account let him in. We’ve been through this routine before.’ We’d already shopped for needed things, including bags to fill with rubble which I started ferrying to a site at Davros that wanted ‘baza’. Katherina helped fill the sacks. A third were removed before dark. I’ll try to get rid of the rest tomorrow. At 10.00 pm Lin continues, lying on her side, cleaning the marble skirting of the guest bedroom, having gloss painted door and window frames. * * * Monday 24 Sept. A lazy day. I got up later than usual, reading an account of trying to make the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq work by Rory Stewart, realising the prescience of the Mad Max films; but in this case the scale of the collapse of order in a place that was the cradle of civilisation, the fertile crescent, the place where calligraphy began, where people converged from across the known world to trade and gaze in awe at its architecture and culture. It has become thrice Ozymadian - a ghastly blighted wasteland of corruption, dusty hot ugliness, pollution and murderous feuding between innumerable factions riven by contradictory hopes and intentions stirred into unreliable and treacherous alliances against its rueful, frustrated, puzzled, impatient, covetous, misguided and despairing invaders who, by and large, want to escape at almost any cost but can’t loose their grip on the country’s oil or the bizarre idea that democracy might be nurtured in Iraq. One of the lessons Stewart imparts is that history doesn’t point a way forward in Iraq. It is all very well to repeat the maxim that ignorance of history causes its repetition, but today’s circumstances are so different from the past that to rely on knowledge of previous fiascos is to drive by the view in the rear mirror. Dreadful Rumsfeld was probably right to speak of the problem of handling not known unknowns, but unknown unknowns. There’s enough ignorance of the past among the invaders to justify that explanation of the calamity, but Stewart suggests that even with far greater knowledge the task of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq would have been impossible. I was struck by words in Stewart’s Foreword

‘…I have not catalogued the national failures in planning, policy and administration. This is because I believe it was not grand policy but rather the meetings between individual Iraqis and foreigners which ultimately determined the result of the occupation.’

Starting each chapter is a quote of apposite relevance from Machiavelli – embarrassing because we still try to fool ourselves he was describing the unique politics of renaissance Italy instead of immutable human behaviour. * * * D and Mg have been on the roof at 208 Democracy Street. As we expected a large part of the roof will have to come off again and be properly tiled with chicken wire between the tiles and damp-proofing. D told us the tiles were uneven because the older ones were made by women bending them over their thighs – some slenderer than others. You need to grade them when roofing and organise the up and down facing ones in far neater ways than M. had managed. We sat in the top room and discussed the roof, the repair of the cypress wood floor, plastering around the new archway, and making a flue hole for the stove, which they carried upstairs for us so we could decide against which wall to set it. D will give us an estimate in a couple of days. Lin says ‘let’s go for a sail to the mainland on Wednesday.’ * * * Dropped into CJs. J has got a €1000 in the café for his ‘Greek Fire Appeal’ and is driving over to donate it for one selected village. Several present were quietly rejoicing at the departure in a few days of the last of the Thompsons and Cooks geese. Some report that the Thompson birds will not return next year. I note the Durrell School of Corfu and the Institute Dikeoma are co-sponsoring a symposium between 24-28 September on ‘Cleaning up the Mediterranean’ (durrells@otenet.gr) Note: On being ourselves tourists, a quote from the last chapter of David Roessel's In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination 2003, Oxford UP

Bad building on Corfu

Sunday 23 Sept. This morning while Lin, who doesn’t do morning food, slept I made myself toast and very lightly scrambled fresh eggs, a mug of tea and orange juice and enjoyed breakfast under the veranda, having placed a pot of basil beside me to keep flies away. Later we went into town to bargain for flowers to put beside Kiria Leftheris’ who’s promised to water them with hers, thus hiding the stump of the external steps amputated by the previous builder. Bad things are being done to houses here – bad rebuild, bad new build. Roof joists of grossly impractical form with unnecessarily heavy purloins and ill judged joints; hollow higgledy-piggledy brick work; walls without insulation likely to leak in winter; incompetent work hidden by render, plaster, filler and paint; ungraceful imitations of Venetian arches – things that would never pass building regulations or planning rules in UK, blighting the island’s architectural traditions – most of it driven by the migratory fantasies of plump northern geese. Long ago Jack* said to me ‘if you move, go somewhere already ruined’. This advice has suited us fine in past years. This house, as we knew when we bought it, comprised two properties joined together with surpassing incompetence by a local British builder who took its vendors for what they had, which is probably why we were able to buy it. We are removing the shoddy and enabling what remains of the good to emerge. As we do this it grows on us that incompetence can, unintentionally, reveal ingenuity. There is a wood stove in what was once a single storey house. The builder ran a flue through the wooden beams of his upper floor which almost broke through his new roof tiles. He thus created, simultaneously, a fire hazard and a leak. He nailed sub-standard floor boards without tongue and groove to the new floors. They lean and creak under foot. None of his doors close. His unfixed skirting board bowed from the scuffed walls and will be good for kindling. His roofs had no insulation nor waterproof membrane. His breeze block bunkers encroaching on the side lane were his inept means of disposing of rubble from an unnecessarily demolished external staircase and balcony. These filled with rain from his ill fixed gutters forcing damp into the walls, while the removal of side stairs left the side door unsheltered. Rain drove under and round it. In the upper floor of the older two storey house he cemented up a window that looks towards the sunrise. Sometimes we imagine the misery of the previous owners as these faults came to light during the Corfu winter. It was perhaps for warmth they put lino on the fine tile floors, but why did they cut down the vine and the lemon and orange trees to put up a dish aerial? Possibly seeing England via BBC and ITV helped keep their minds off the disappointing mismatch between their hopes for Greece and the cold, wet winter, the dark strange foreign village, the wasps and flies of summer, but I don’t really know and I’m not sure they did either. If Greece wounded George Seferis, how must it have hurt our predecessors.

In the Manner of G.S. (1936) No matter where I travel, Greece wounds me still. On Mt. Pelion amid the chestnut trees the shirt of the Centaur slid among leaves to wind about my body as I mounted the slope and the sea followed me mounting also like mercury in a thermometer until we came on mountain waters. In Santorini as I touched the sinking islands and heard a flute play somewhere on the pumice stone an arrow suddenly flung from the confines of a vanished youth nailed my hand to the gunwale. At Mycenae I lifted the huge stones and the treasures of the Atridae and slept beside them at the inn of The Beautiful Helen of Menelaus they vanished only at dawn when Cassandra crowed with a-cock hanging down her black throat.

[Back to the future: June Samaras of Kalamos Books circulated a story in the Miami Herald, 24/12/07 with the comment 'Use the URL to see the awful photograph (12/07/08 this image has now been removed) this guy is using to state his case ... If he thinks THAT is a true scale model of the Parthenon, it is no wonder the British Museum does not choose to take things seriously... A plea for 'Marbles' in Parthenon (see 'missing commentary' above in this blog]

* * *
We are beginning to grow accustomed to the sounds and smells and shapes of this home – the warmth stored in its walls in the evening and its cool in the day, the bougainvillea, the green rushes and the lemon and orange trees and the immense panorama of Albania and Greece at sunrise and the violet evenings and the wind ruffled sea in the afternoon, Vido island and the olive covered mountains as far as the eye can see and the crags behind us. I could move around it with eyes closed. It is so quiet in the mornings even with cocks crowing, charter flights rumbling, dogs barking, scooters buzzing along the side roads, the conversational chorus between our neighbours at the start of school, the chat outside in the evening and occasional yells of fury at children and the miaoing of Bubble hoping for affection and milk.
* * *
 Saturday 22 September. Most flies and wasps that get in the house want to get out and their freedom can be arranged. But certain small flies sunbathe on my keyboard, hover over my tea and do not accept the offer of an opened window or door, so must be stalked and swatted. My impulse is to protect insects, especially the innocuous spiders that commute discretely along ledges and other interior surfaces. Lin found several 12cm centipedes upstairs and drowned them claiming ‘they bite and were really nasty’. Is this so? We argued. ‘I don’t want them breeding in my house’. She wouldn’t mind them outside. I think there’s a treatise to be written on what living things are accepted by different peoples in their homes, in their gardens and in the world and how acceptance and even welcome varies between people, between individuals, between Lin and me. The cat Bubble has rediscovered us. She’s in a poor state with a cough and will not now cross our threshold. Since we left in April she’s learned – no doubt at the end of several brooms – that she’s a village cat not a household one. * * * I doubt we’ll get that cruise this stay. There’s too much unfinished here that’s not been done since we arrived. ‘Welcome to Corfu’ said V at CJs with sympathetic resignation. L and I have done much and the house is liveable and we eat and sleep here happily enough and receive guests, but winter will come and other jobs we need to do that we can’t, until the electrics are fixed and after which there’s plastering to do and joinery. Last night over several chilled lagers D said ‘don’t worry. I’m a stickler for things. You relax. While you are away me, and B and Mgl will see the whole lot done. You won’t be disappointed.’ D has looked after Summer Song and been something of a guardian to us over the year from the moment he raised our spirits from the depression we were in on first arriving in Ipsos and seeing the musty condition of the boat we’d bought. ‘There’s a list we’ll make and get her up to scratch.’ This happened then and could now.
* * *
The half moon last night shone among strange cloud formations like the striations of agate – not visibly moving. Through the night at this time of year comes the regular drone of the northern geese arriving and departing.
* * *
Last night I lost my SIM card for phoning home. What sense would that have made ten years ago. Why are we searching the house for a 25mm x15mm plastic strip on which has a 12mm x13mm golden chip next to a 19 digit numbers on one side and a corporate logo on the other next to the words ‘if found call 0800317720’. It could be smaller but for the need for human fingers to pick it up and insert it inside their phone. It has this vital function. It ties me to the company who provide the service that enables me, for a payment made automatically by my bank, to phone England. We also have a similar card from a different company that we can use in Greece but which is made useable, after it has been inserted in the same phone, by being ‘topped up’. This done by buying a card locally which if scratched reveals a unique number which when keyed into my phone tops up its credit by about €20. If I used this to make international calls it would swiftly run out of credit, but it is useful for receiving such calls. Were I to use the other card for receiving such calls they would be ‘roaming’ calls for which I, and not the caller, must pay. Furthermore if I call locally using this card the person I call also ends up paying for my call as though it were from abroad – even though the person I call is a kilometre away. These circumstances mean we are frequently shifting chips in the phone. Wiser people might keep two phones for local and long distance, setting up a bar on roaming calls to the international chip. It must have been during one of these substitutions that I mislaid a chip. This morning I came downstairs and found that before she’d come to bed, after I’d fallen asleep, Lin had found it – in a corner of the kitchen floor. I describe this because accounts of daily events leave out matters so mundane, yet I find a detail of how you might reserve a seat on a stage coach and how pay for a ticket on one intriguing. No Victorian fiction I’ve read mentions how such a transaction occurred. We are simply told ‘they took a coach to Dover’. Yet the matter of currency, credit and the flow of information on paper or electronically and its loss and recovery are vital to us. Without credit one becomes a stranger – hence the term ‘credit’ from the latin term ‘credo’ - a statement of principles or beliefs, especially one that is professed formally, faith, dogma, doctrine. We are even when dreaming of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence, only made rendered free by secure location in a matrix of trust validated by international credit-reference agencies and state bureaucracies. A lost digit on a short circuited computer can see freedom evaporate - we become unbelievable. Another human can see us with their eyes, but the classification system that guarantees what that other human being must know to allow us freedom to pass or purchase cannot. We have disappeared. Our connection with Corfu is a matter of the heart, but it is also about our tax number, and the electricity and water accounts on 208 Democracy Street - meters on the wall and at the bottom of our property. We learned, last night, that my Mum, bound for a long anticipated holiday in France, has to return from her point of international departure, Birmingham, to Inverness, because somewhere between those two airports she mislaid her passport – a thin burgundy docket 125mm x 88mm constituting her permission to travel outside the UK – her ID, her permit, her authorization - her credit. Until I lost the chip yesterday, I was reproaching her for her absent mindedness. Thank goodness Amy and Richard were able to drive over to the airport hotel where she was ensconced in limbo to succour her as loving grandchildren. *Jack Hargreaves who brought me up - my stepfather

Βρεκεκεκέξ κοάξ κοάξ

Frog chorus from Aristophanes: Ah, no! ah, no! Loud and louder our chant must flow. Sing if ever ye sang of yore, When in sunny and glorious days Through the rushes and marsh-flags springing On we swept, in the joy of singing Myriad-diving roundelays. Or when fleeing the storm, we went Down to the depths, and our choral song Wildly raised to a loud and long Bubble-bursting accompaniment. Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax

Tell me some lies. I am working on a modern plot for a revived version of Aristophanes’ comedy ‘The Frogs’. It is September in Greece. There has been one hour of rain since April. On the beautiful Ionian island of Corfu the authorities have been so anxious about water they have considered turning away the summer geese rather than face the health hazards of such gigantic flocks lacking water for their pleasures. The gods have surrounded this paradise with a multitude of small coves facing crystalline sea, gifting men with winter rain in abundance to replenish reservoirs of water deep in the island’s rocks, but the geese in their eccentric yearnings have found sea-girt shores inadequate and so, for their delectation, men have dug thousands of concrete swimming pools across the island which they fill and refill with hard water from the island’s aquifers, laced, for cleanliness, with chlorine. A progressive architect is seeking, in these times of apprehension about this waste of precious water, the coarseness of concrete swimming pools which lie empty for the winter months collecting leaves and moss, and the hazards of chlorine - revealed by EU risk analysis - to promote pools that imitate nature; pools that do not need annual emptying, regular scrubbing and refilling from mains water. He has, as an experiment, constructed, beneath the eves of his house, which views the sea through the tops of olive trees, a shallow edged irregular rain fed pond which, in draught, he can top up economically from the mains. It is arboured by climbers, edged by flowers, with lilies, papyrus and purifying reeds lining its shallows. Above it swallows swoop. Colourful fish, small and large, swim happily in its deep but limpid centre, surfacing excitedly when anyone approaches. This pond, sun-stippled through the overhanging vine, adorns the house, providing its occupiers and their guests with the pleasure of bathing or paddling in clean, often soft, water or dipping their feet to enjoy the cool toe-kissing of golden carp. At night frogs visit. In spring it is their trysting place. The wide adoption of such ponds could solve the island’s looming water crisis since they keep themselves clean all year round, need no chlorine and no refilling, making full use of winter rain, stored in adjoining sternas or reservoirs for dryer months, harbour fish that eat mosquito larvae and frogs and, being shallow edged, are safer where children are about. The architect’s once friendly neighbour, has, under the goading of his envious soul and a covetous wife preoccupied by disparities in stremas between the two properties, been transformed into a Lopachkin type of orchard-chopping self-made bread-hater. The Gods, who have schemed to have the island destroyed by an over proliferation of summer geese as a lesson to men, now use him as a gadfly to punish our hero and frustrate his plans to solve the island’s water crisis. Achilles, overtaken by fits of uncontrollable rage begins to hurl of imprecations over his neighbour’s wall, then rocks, and - as the play opens one warm winded moonlit midnight – he climbs the wall, naked, hair awry, and makes a mad violent midnight physical attack on the architect and his lover, while his wife, her hair streaming, urges him on from the top of the wall, screaming through the night that she is a sorceress who mates with frogs. The police - comedic figures - have been unhasty in reaction to the gradual break down of civility, but, following report of this dramatic incident, they take note of the architect’s plea for their protection. They phone Achilles from their station in the nearby town, hoping to effect a reconciliation of neighbours. However, Achilles, in his rage, uses such porcupine language to the police, the chief beedle is provoked. He rises from his night desk, summons aid, and in the gendarmerie 4x4, drives out along the dark olive lined roads to arrest Achilles and bring criminal charges against him. In the second act, Achilles’ lawyer, Photis Serendipitos, an opportunist rare in his profession, has drawn up a simultaneous civil charge sheet, under article 989 AK, against his client’s victim. It claims that Achilles was provoked ‘beyond reason’ by ‘sleep deprivation’ caused by the ‘noise pollution of croaking from his neighbour’s frog farm’ which has led, collaterally, to an ‘invasion of mosquitoes and toxic smells threatening his client’s well being’, making life’ so intolerable for him and his family’ that he seeks to have his neighbour sent to prison or fined thousands of euros on each of several counts, and asks the court’s permission to take such ‘drastic measures’ as may be necessary to end this menace (to be continued). * * *

We do work we can do. Lin’s painted our walls inside - gallons of starkest white rollered on top of properly spread astari that helps the paint to grip on plaster, holding walls and ceilings together. She's conscientiously chased out edges with a brush. The revealed tiles and marble are showing cleaner as Lin scrubs and scrapes skirtings blemished by old paint, lino glue and mortar. I’ve chiselled out the side door frame and inserted the marble strip to exclude driven rain. It’s held in place by its fit and the white acrylic sealant carefully inserted by Lin and smoothed by finger. I hid a 50c coin between marble and door and I’ve added a bolt to hold its foot to the marble. We think Kiria Katherina approves but she went on telling us to get rid of the hideous concrete 'bunkers'.

After borrowing a hefty electric stone breaker from D., who needs hard core for the foundations of the home he’s building a mile below us, I’ve demolished the remaining breeze block cisterns our vendors’ builder had put up along our side wall. Now there’s rubble there ready to go and spare plaka, but the house and path look better already. I’ve been wire brushing the wood burner ready for black stove paint. This must go upstairs to sit on an east wall where I’ve already taken up the marble surround.

On Tuesday Nl & Gbr drove over from near Gastouri where we must go on 2 October to collect the bed Nl sold us, and enjoyed conversation that included Greece, England and Switzerland, the long-forgotten plot of Heidi, the disappointing way fish and chips get cooked, the prospect that women are more useful than men, the Swiss habit of doing three kisses to the Greek two and confusions that follow. We sat around our table and on the balcony as it grew dark. Only after they’d left did Lin and I ponder the fact that B’s expected visit hadn’t happened and we are back to where we were on 3 Sept so far as any further work on the house, except for the work we’ve* done ourselves. How I wish I was an electrician and joiner and plasterer to be free of this time-expensive dependency.

On a table at 208 Democracy Street

Planning at 208 Democracy Street Originally uploaded by Sibad.

Chart of the north Ionian, a pilot book, Athens News, poems of Seferis, Cavafy, The Axion Esti by Elytis, Durrell on Corfu, Kazantzakis' The Fratricides, a New Democracy candidate's flier, a souvenir icon, my whistle and compass, an edition of 'What Works?" and a morning cup of tea.

Marble

I woke early and worked on my Oct 5 session on ‘weighing evidence’ for scrutiny; useful quote from my policeman’s Phd on crime stats:

‘Comparing the public information system with the information systems used by the professionals is like comparing a kaleidoscope, or a camera obscura, to a microscope. The public system confuses with smoke and mirrors, the professional system’s clear, focussed, capacity to isolate and identify problems. The challenge of providing accountability via performance measurement remains to be realised…'

Monday was another busy day. I rehired the car from Kostas who charged me for a scratch and broken antenna – caused by putting the table on the roof. At Arco I got office work done over iced coffee, then arranged to re-insure the boat, buy electrical stuff, buy ciggies for Lin, ginger beer for me…and…and… I bet Lawrence Durrell didn’t have to do this so much menial stuff, but I don’t grudge him. Poetry requires sweat. I like the way our house stays cool in the heat. I found Lin scrubbing tiles. ‘We need access to the roof’ she said. She marked up the ceiling over the stairs standing on a ladder I held, and cut through lathe and plaster between beams, via a small hole made with a screwdriver, using a keyhole saw. Dust coated us. At 7.00pm we needed to collect marble. At ΜΠΑΡΜΠΑΡΗΣ Ε.Π.Ε on the Paleokastritsa Road Eleni took us into their workshop to collect rectangles of 3cm and 5cm grey striped Kavallah marble. An ageless man from 2000 years ago, in a long apron, met us. ‘He's from India’ said Eleni. The factory is sensuous, full of marble and other stone mined from land masses across the world, cut with geometric perfection, some polished, some rough. We wanted to stare, touch and stroke. Eleni had our doorstep off-cut shaped with a water splashed diamond cutter, so I could put it - cool, clean and wet - with the other marble in the back of the car. The Indian mason carried the slabs as though holding cardboard. We went back via Ipsos so I could check ‘Summer Song’ and put a cover on the main. A drink at CJs, a chat with Vky and Tr. Lin looked at the News of the World for all of 30 seconds – an aircrash on a drenched runway in Phuket involving ‘Brits’ among the dead, then pages of sport statistics. I viewed a pop video of Britney Spears. A dispiriting sync-edit of passionless undulation against a background of polished male clones preening to camera, and music, which to appreciate, you’d need the memory of a circling goldfish. This stuff is sprayed on an industry standard backcloth by accountants, and I'm spoiled by the ball of fire that rises over Epirus each morning pouring light into our house. Lin paused at 208 so I could unload and gingerly heave our marble down the steps to our side door, ready to go upstairs behind and below a wood stove. A cup of tea and coffee, and we were back to cutting the hole in the ceiling. I took a turn with a bigger saw and completed the job pulling away and bagging lathes and chunks of plaster. It was after 11.00pm before the dust and debris was swept and bagged and we could shower.

Sun up at 208 Democracy Street Αχιον Εστι

Martin, me and his son Adam enjoy a hard sail to windward in the rough seas of Corfu. Lin and Sandra are sitting below sick with anxiety. Thank god the men are in charge. Luckily there's enough light to see the land but I have checked we are near Greece with the GPS while Adam is on watch with the monocular. We made landfall at Agni where we were thankful to be taken ashore and fed food and wine by our rescuers.

* * *
The sun squeezes in through every aperture. This is seconds after it has risen above the mountains of Epirus across the straits of Corfu and blessed our house in Ano Korakiana under Pantokrator. The sea is too bright for me to gaze that way for more than an instant. Axion Esti.

[Back to the future: 12 December 2007 - I posted this picture on Flickr and this comment was made:

it is so primeval, so greek...
like a Giannis Moralis painting echo...
i do like your photo...
and all those you write...
and how you end your text...

Εκεί ρόδια, κυδώνια
θεοί μελαχρινοί, θείοι κι εξάδελφοι
το λάδι αδειάζοντας μες στα πελώρια κιούπια·
και πνοές από τη ρεματιά ευωδιάζοντας
λυγαριά και σχίνο
σπάρτο και πιπερόριζα
με τα πρώτα πιπίσματα των σπίνων,
ψαλμωδίες γλυκές με τα πρώτα-πρώτα Δόξα σοι.

I will try translating this as part of my learning. I know there are quinces and pomegranates and exultation but I am getting stuck after that]

* * *
Finding the cypress to complete the floor here was hard work - by G, who scoured the island to find a woodyard with a good supply. Now the room has to be plastered and the ceiling lighting rewired but first we must get access to the roof space lest an infestation misses attention. All the same the views from this room are panoramic and then there's the balcony.

Monday morning after ...

Monday at the Arco. So Karamanlis of ND has the needed 152 seats and will form a government I was told by Kostas this morning as we booked the car until Friday - when we may finally finish enough errands at the house to sail away for a few days. Aristotelis at CPA has arranged via his wife at Ethniki to renew the boat insurance and Lizzie says she knows nothing about politics which is wise and healthy in a mature democracy! Sunday 16 September. The expected crowding round the polling station hasn’t happened. The kafenion at 11.00pm is crowded. There’s a buzz in the village as the sacred task of casting votes proceeds in orderly fashion. In town this evening bells marked the end of voting. Our table was lowered from a third storey, opposite the town hall polling station, and tied to our little car. I whizzed on uncrowded roads to Democracy Street where Lin was waiting with Mrt and S and A who, with Kiria Katerina, helped unload and carry four sturdy chairs and the table to the house with minimum congestion. Earlier a stubborn old driver had sat in his car immoveable making no more than a disdainful hand gesture and forcing eight cars to back down so he – and they – could eventually proceed. Our neighbours, standing and sitting outdoors this warm evening, watched the altercation with amusement. A four legged English table and chairs grace our dining room. We think they’re elm but they might be some kind of pine. We sat round the table, ate cheese, drank wine, lager and ginger beer, and then embraced and said farewell to our good friends flying home tomorrow. Later Lin changed the curtains left in the dining room for lighter ones. With the table, the uncovered tiles, two oil paintings and a mirror the room is beginning to take shape. Saturday 15 September. A small promise of some order in the work on 208. I caught Ben dashing up the jetty in his Harley to help create a mooring space for a neighbouring yacht coming in with a strong wind blowing onto the inside of the mole. A stranger yacht had taken his space. All very efficient. I threw the bow warp, and helped hand her into the gap while Ben inserted fenders his side. “Who took our space? Oh yes, the ruddy Dutch’. They been anchored outside waiting for a spare berth since the evening before. Anyway once all was shipshape Ben said I’ll be up on Tuesday. All work hinges on him doing the electrics and then starting on the joinery – floor and balustrade. Meantime we’ve ordered the marble for the new upstairs hearth for the wood burner. We hope Ben will install the flue for that, mindful of the 135˚ angle needed to ensure a good draw. Eleni at the marble supplier on the Paleokastritsa road will also cut the doorstep we need from the discarded marble Lin found on the beach at Ipsos, so we can stop rainwater blowing in under the side door. Meantime we went to a house sale in the centre of Corfu and bought a fine dining table and four sturdy chairs from Drn., who’s selling a house beautifully restored with a rooftop view over most of the city. He’ll help us move these hefty items tomorrow if polling traffic isn’t too great after 6.00pm. Polls close at 7.00pm. Just before dusk two travellers – soft-sell, hard-sell - presented us with a nice crochet bedcover from Cyprus which started at €50. At €25 we gave in. As he left hard-sell asked for €2 for a taxi. I surrendered. As we worked under the veranda mending a cast iron marble top coffee table we’d salvaged from a small tip in Corfu town main car park, Mr.Leftheris greeted us from amid the greenery of the adjoining garden. He has a fig tree from which we could reach up to pick fresh fruit. “Yes yes, you have”. His copious vine is drooping with white wine grapes with which he’ll start making rosé and white wine in October. Ten heavy marrows hang from plants growing amid the vine. He said our veranda and garden were equally festooned but that the previous owners had cleared them. We have two little vines starting up - from the old roots I guess. These will do fine said Leftheris “in another year”. Meantime our remaining lemon and orange trees promise to be heavy with fruit. I’ve left the car on the lower road anticipating that Sunday General Election polling at the school a few metres up the road will see Democracy Street in a jam. Athens News – in English – gives a helpful overview of the Greek political landscape. ‘With a new electoral law in place, the post-election permutations appear endless’ says the front page, wondering if the ‘two-party system will falter’ as a result of a 2004 electoral law passed by PASOK, who’s import I don’t understand – a known unknown. AN think New Democracy under Karamanlis will get a majority – the issue is whether it will be big enough to form a government and if not with whom K will make alliances – hence much jostling among smaller parties. Friday 14 September. 10.30am. Veranda at 208 Democracy Street. I hosed the plaka to aid the coolness. Dark and shade are so clearly different I can sit outside and see the computer screen to write. I went down to the shop to get some bread. The church, a few yards down Democracy Street, of St.Michael the Archangel is overflowing. I was told in the shop ‘It’s a name day’ he paused for thought ‘Stavros’. Two days ago I saw women – all the Stavros mums, wives, sisters – tidying the church and asked to take a look and was beckoned in. I could take in only a carved triptych wooden reredos (is that the name?) at the eastern end with a painting of the saint in the centre and rows of pews.

‘This small world the great…study the insignificant in depth’

Wed 12 Sept: The words are from Elytis’ Genesis hymns at the start of The Axion Esti. Phone last night. Amy’s home. Richard’s well. Lin’s parents fine. Oscar good. George, I spoke to briefly, in Saffron Walden. He sent love from far away. M and family are here. It’s good to see them.

G. lent me a fine winch handle and said kindly to Lin. “Shit happens’. She looked rueful. I met Dave, at last, strolling from his van, my mentor and steward of our boat. ‘Ti kanis?’ ‘Cala!’ We gripped hands in the road. I need him to say ‘it doesn’t matter’ to Mrt. who is striving – oxymoronically – to relax from the incompetency he’s encountered in making his business so successful. Shoddiness and sloth are for Mrt. the source of evil. ‘So the market doesn’t always heal itself?’ I said unkindly.

Conversing on the balcony, or was it at AnnaLise Apartments where Mrt, Sdra and Adam were staying, Mrt described a client who’d insisted on a completely blank flat bare wall in a building – a feature indelibly inserted in the specification. Mrt. inspected the work. A contracted electrician had put a socket in its centre. S., wife and colleague in the business, looked at Mrt. solicitously as he began to simmer at this even in the telling of it over a meal in a pleasant restaurant at Ipsos.

He relayed another. ‘We were on site at a hospital with a dementia ward. To protect the old people we put up a sound proofing palisade around our work, but it meant relatives had to circuit a long route to visit. Our foreman constructed a safe covered bridge so they could go more directly. The hospital manager said ‘that crosses over my space, take it down now!’

Combine shoddiness with self-important stupidity and you see evil in its unspectacular banality, speaking ‘the language of porcupines’, the leadenfaced. Both of us seethed and S. worried about Mrt’s blood pressure. I told him about my last dream of insulting a bread-fearer, which was probably unhelpful. Young Adam distracted us with a conundrum about the impossibility of standing behind a tree ‘because being all round, it has no front, or back to stand behind’. This moved us on to the contrast between Archimedean, Newtonian and Einsteinian topology – the last being placeless, is in line with Adam’s proposition. “Yeah, well, if we were being shot at we’d be glad to get behind a tree damn fast!’ I said in Johnsonian refutation of what had seemed a feasible conceit. ‘Yeah but if the tree, you and the bullet were all traveling relative to each other at the speed of light…’
Lin drove us yesterday to near Gastouri south of the city to bargain for a bed, We were late and tetchy. All roads south pass through the traffic fracas of Corfu and signs are ambiguous. Negotiating the one way system to the west of the town centre the driver and passenger see a sign which says go straight on for Lefkimmi, Achillea and the airport. Getting closer there’s another sign showing a right turn to Pelikas. ‘Don’t we tell ourselves take that one. We then see two downward pointing and divergent arrows indicating a fork. ‘Ah ha’ we think, ‘the right hand one must be to Pelikas. Do not go right, take the left for the airport and beyond.’ As we turn left we glimpse nearly all the other traffic veering slightly to the right and scurrying down a previously invisible road which is the one we should have taken instead of the one to the left which heads into the city centre and which contains, of course, a long almost stationary queue all the way to San Rocco Square from which, because its one-way, is inescapable. After wasting time cursing the road designer, we found various weapons hidden about the car and started killing each other for not looking at the signs. Escaping several more minutes of silent antipathy and the devilish one-way system we made a rendezvous with the bedseller and after lying on it together became owners for €80 of a sturdy wooden ended king-size bed and mattress to collect later in the month.

* * *
On Monday evening, as wanted and as urged by Katerina, we pulled up the parquet patterned lino in the dining room and hall to see the unglazed tile floor below – geometric pattern of yellow, green and white involving lozenges, bands of yellow and green squares, pleasing to the eye. The same colours are revealed in the hall without the lozenges and in the washroom, showing, in the same colours, a larger green parallelogram surrounded by four yellow and white scalene triangles giving it a 3D effect like something from M.C.Esher. Noting that new grizzly grey tiles in the bathroom are a tile thickness higher than the hall ones, we conjecture a similar pattern beneath those, but having no immediate replacement will leave them for the moment. I scraped off the lino fixer and Lin mopped. Dampness trapped beneath the lino was gone by morning.

* * *

I took a cup of tea out on our balcony at 7.30 to watch the sunup. Cocks crowed. Cumulo-nimbus rose gigantically over the mainland, mist obscured the shoreline across the strait. Grey cloud covered Pantokrator behind the village, with skimpy outriders overhead. The sun was having nothing of this as I guessed from the forecast. Slower than my eye could detect but in the time it took to turn away to sip tea and read a paragraph the mist dissolved revealing the mainland, the cloud on the mountain was swept away, and, most amazing, the Everest pile of cotton wool over Epirus evaporated before the chatter of parents coaxing children to school at 8. By half-past, after some desultory conversations among houses and ringing of pails, Ano Korakiana was quiet with sounds from further away muted indoors. Already there’s heat haze off the land to the south.

At 11.00 I phoned M. ‘I’ll be up definitely tomorrow or Friday to do the guttering. B will be over as soon as possible to do your electrics and finish the floor.’ Lin did the washing and we shifted some lampshades. There are now some little oil paintings on the walls – a girl sewing, an elm tree in an English hedgerow under a grey sky (both familiar, from Mum’s home in Scotland), a scene of ruins in moonlight, a snowy lake with a castle in middle Europe.

At 208 Democracy Street - elections on 16 Sept!

Monday 10 Sept. A hot day with a local morning breeze. My aches are moderating from all the messing about yesterday. My phone is still drying but we shifted my SIM to Lin’s so I got a call at noon as we tidied, that B. would be coming up to do our electrics and M. tomorrow to plaster. Lin in her nightie is spooning out rubble from around the electric wiring beneath the floorboards. The power’s off. I court martialled myself to her about the silly mistakes on the boat on Sunday. Our friends will be here from England in the afternoon.

The cat, Bubble, has found us again but not its companion Squeak. Bubble is older and has a cough and seems altogether in poor form. She pleads. Lin gives her food. One, a chop from supper yesterday is too hard for the cat. Lin chews it smaller and places the macerated meat on a plastic plate where they are welcomed.

How one becomes acquainted with dust when sweeping it up! How one notices the ground. Kostas spoke of the need to dig the earth and grow vegetables. We'd recalled the giant whom Heracles defeated by lifting him from the ground - the source of his strength. What was his name - Antaeus? Yes.

The use of association. Take these just now lathe-nail-crucifixion, dust-death – these are easy. Suitable for cryptic crosswords. They call on memory only. To dig deeper you have to jump on other things – which could be an assonance, a nonsence sound, an idea, an object, even a sound or smell. You don’t know whether what you’ve got is a wriggling thing or junk. The wriggling things have seen me first and I don’t know it. You have to fall asleep and then wake in a dream and think - stealthily.

Lin called while I was in the garden. ‘Come and look at this creature’. It was in her bucket wading on the surface tension of the water. A delicate slender striped multi-legged creature about an inch long with antennae fanned out ahead like something from the sea. She edged it gently into our garden. We are dusty but the house, though very incomplete, is looking much cleaner.

Sunday 9 Sept. A brief round of bells this morning. We wake just before 9.00am having not slept until 3.00. Eight miles away a northerly breeze dissects the sun’s reflection on the sea apportioning light to Epirus and Kerkyra. ‘Can we have some music?’ says Lin. I turn on music on the laptop, the Leipziger choir is singing Theodorakis’ folksong. ‘A solitary swallow’ - Ena to helidoni - from the Axion Esti.

One male singer:
Nur diese eine Schwalbe A solitary swallow
Der Früling macht sich rar and a costly spring
damit die Sonne heimkehrt for the sun to turn
Bringen wir Opfer dar’ it takes a job of work’

The choir echoes:
Nur diese eine Schwalbe…

Starting with parts, we’re getting, as we work, to know the Axion Este, set to the music of Theodorakis and parts of Elytis’ epic poem, which I have in English. I got to like the rebetica pieces, other parts grow as we get a sense of the whole – Genesis, Passion – in which the poet writes of a merciless struggle against the others – ‘it cannot be they without you nor can it be you without them… and you must face them without fail…those who wear the black shirt’ and others who ‘speak the language of porcupines’, raw-eaters, water-brutes, bread-fearers, the leadenfaced and the neocondors. The lead singer’s lines are repeated by him and the choir, the tune ratcheted up a key in a familiar heart churn even a musical idiot like me can grasp:


Tausende Tote braucht es it takes a thousand dead
wenn das Lichtrad ruht sweating at the wheels
lebende Leiber braucht es it takes the living also
wärmend verströmst ihr Blut giving up their blood

The same echoed, and then the chorus, back to the earlier key:

Als mein Gott die Erde schuf God my master builder
Baute er Berge um mich her you built me into the mountains

Als mein Gott die Erde schuf God my master builder
Schoß er mich ein im dunken Meer You enclosed me in the sea

A morning service for secularists enjoying peace. Here's A solitary swallow sung in 2001 by Mario Frangoulis and the same sung by Grigoris Bithikotsis with Theodorakis conducting in 1977. Keeley’s notes say the ‘master builder’ is not God but an architect from a folktale who built a bridge at Arta over the river Aracthos in Epirus - where Gianni Moralis was born incidentally. As is well known bridges, because they cross water, must have a sacrifice. He buries his wife alive inside its structure. Nowadays, in our disenchanted world, EU law would forbid this, but in some accident a beloved companion will slip on the wet marble of their new pool and be drinking through a straw for life – like the bold young motorcyclists in Corfu’s mental hospitals who did one wheelie too many or swerved into an olive trunk wearing no helmet.

* * *
Now mid-morning we wash before driving to the Sunday sale at Kontokali. Yesterday afternoon as we swept the path beside the house Kiria Leftheris brought a plate of sweetmeats made by her mother, telling us the name to make it right and I can’t remember – sweet crispy baked and tasty with honey.

* * *

The sale at Kontokali was not on so we drove west to Agios Ioannis. L and M sat with us over coffee for a couple of hours and added to the Sunday conversation in the square. While Lin looked at the stalls three of us with a combined age of 201 discussed the young – which is where I heard about the brain damaged in asylums, as we discussed the pros and cons of the rule of law at a table in the Platea at Agios Ioannis. We got on to Corfiot opinion about the UK and their indignation at our help for the Muslims in Yugoslavia, who they associated with the collaborationist Chetniks who had hounded Serbs for the Nazis. Durrell, years ago, wrote the British occupiers up to 1864 [Sir Frederick Adam, Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands between 1824-32], when Corfu became part of independent mother Greece, regarded the locals as about 'as interesting as their stock' and the Corfiots regarded us - and other invaders - with contemptuous indifference. I doubt that all true. For the first commissioner, Maitland, yes - but a lot less for his successors. We brought good roads, ginger beer and cricket, and also there is a education and growth in trade. The Venetians brought the olives - a strategic incentive.

Olives, Corfu 1912, oil on canvas. John Singer Sargent

‘Oh yes and we contributed to the military band element of the island’s music’ said L ‘ except they regard it as slightly beneath them to tune their instruments’. ‘Wait’ I said, ‘maybe if you’re poised between East and West “out of tune” hasn’t the same meaning as it does for us?’ L. thought about that.

‘In the meantime, tell me some Corfiot jokes’ I said. These were mined from conversation with denizens who circulate Greek versions of English self-deprecation – both a product of confidence in one’s good fortune to be born under one or other flag. ‘How do you tell the difference between Corfiot electrician and a Corfiot joiner?’ ‘It’s written on the side of their van’. Two Corfiots meet in a bar. ‘Have you heard any gossip?’ ‘No’ ‘Have you heard any rumours?’ ‘No’ ‘Then tell me some lies.’ God offered to grant an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Corfiot, who had lived good lives, their dearest wish. The Englishman asked for a small castle and a few acres; the Frenchman asked for a vineyard that produced good wine; the Corfiot said ‘the man next door has a cow that produces 25 litres of milk every day’ – pause - ‘Yes?’ said God. ‘Can you stop it?’ asked the Corfiot. That last one is especially sweet. It makes Corfu sound like the Forest of Dean. I found M was a fan of Grand Prix - for me tedium in agate - but his joy in the success of the young Black – he called him ‘coloured’ - racing driver who’s brought Britain back into Formula 1, was infectious. I find this is always the case with enthusiasm – when modestly inserted into chat. We all get our turn.

* * *

We went back via Ipsos where I started putting on Summer Song’s sails and ran into a series of mishaps of my own making. The main went on fine, except that as I was folding it down a batten dropped out and disappeared. I started bending on the self-reefing foresail, but the afternoon wind had risen. The sail fought back, sticking in its groove. The foot clipped my face and my glasses fell into a fathom of hazy water. I leapt in after them. Futile of course. I called to B., on the boat nearby, and he dived for them, at first fruitlessly until I pointed out, through a myopic haze, something glinting. Phew! Then I remembered my mobile was in my pocket. I dunked it in fresh water and it’s still drying along with a few euro notes. The chip is OK in Lin’s phone. She wandered along the mole and gasped in admiring disdain as I relayed my foolishness. She tried to help me get the jib on but again it jammed. I persisted when I should have abandoned my efforts, and put the halliard on the mast winch. Another gust around Trompetta and I dropped the winch handle in the drink. ‘That’s it’ she said ‘how am I going to trust you in this boat?’ I wondered too. Such stupidities can, at sea, become swift disasters. I dived unsuccessfully for the handle in the warm salty harbour, and found the batten. ‘Wait until the morning clears the water’ said my neighbour on his taxi boat. I tidied up. Put the jib below and dug out dry clothes.

Lin drove us home ‘I was so angry with you’ she said. I don’t blame her. Another mistake. I hadn’t brought the combined tools gadget that should be on my belt, and was using a wholly inadequate spanner on shackles. ‘We could have been back tidying the house’ said Lin as we drove home. Meantime she’d found two shelves in kavalla marble lying on the beach.

What have I learned apart from ‘there’s no fool like an old fool’? Think what I’m doing. I should have left the sails until the morning or got help. It would have been unfair to ask Lin. Last time we sailed together in 1976 I was in the boat I’d sailed single handed in many weathers with sails far easier to bend. I’d done the sail work leaving her occasionally steering and cooking. She and I are a lot less lithe and I’ve not taken Summer Song more than a few miles up the coast so far. (note – have spare winch handle and attach a little white float, tether my specs, don’t bend on sails in a wind gusting 4 from astern, think!)_

The view east from Democracy Street

Lin took this view from the balcony last night. She has paint in her hair and I'm exhausted watching her at work. Ferries, one bound for Corfu Port - the ship on the right - and and another for Igoumenitsa, on the mainland a few miles further to the south, are travelling slowly through the Corfu Channel, to avoid causing damage in small harbours on either shore with their wash.

Far off like floating seeds the ships Diverge on urgent voluntary errands; And the full view Indeed may enter And move in memory as now these clouds do, That pass the harbour mirror And all the summer through the water saunter.

W.H.Auden 1937 Seascape

Long before having an thoughts of spending time at sea I loved this poem - probably because I had a bad experience with it. When I was 15 there was a competition in College Hall at Westminster (where in term time we ate breakfast and supper off wooden tables and sat at benches made up, so I was told, with 370 year old deck planks salvaged from wrecked galleons of the Invincible Armada, almost certainly not true but I believed it at the time). I recited Seascape, thinking I'd done well - articulate, emotive and in every way an exemplary rendering. Awaiting an encomium I was instead slated by our excellent and subversive English teacher, for being inaudible, 'which was probably fortunate'. A Spanish ghost had stymied my best effort, absorbing my oration into the once salty creaking grain of thick polished beams witness to centuries of raucous schoolboy babble over a million school meals, spilt tea, burned toast and porridge. I can be callously amused - with many other viewers - these days when seeing on the X-factor a candidate suffering the consequence of a similar chasm between their self-opinion and the judges'.

At Democracy Street

Some pictures’ titles are obvious. ‘The arrival of The Emperor Cattobaz with his retinue at Telepontus’ and there’s a grand set piece oil painting, part souvenir, part measure of the artist’s talent, part landscape, part suitable decoration for a national museum. Then there’s a surrealist pictures with the same title and the subject will be consciously disconnected from an reference to any word in the title and the painting will comprise some striking collection of incomprehensibly juxtaposed objects mined from the terra incognita of the subconscious – yours and the artist’s. There will be perspective and colour to entice the curious and bewildered eye, hinting at the possibility of meaning and teasing the libido. Most perfect of these is ‘The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors’. Or there’s a title for the curator that you suspect the artist would rather omit, but since you insist, it’s called ‘Sequence 1’. If the painting depicts something I recognise then I can guess there will be a series and I can guess at a figurative sequence. If it’s abstract I have to lie back and think of colour, shade and shape. People think this sort of painting is easy, until they try painting a canvas that covers a church sized wall in shades of variegated cerise. Perhaps the artist or their patron will call it ‘chapel’ or ‘frieze’. It helps me even as I suspect I’m not supposed to need a hint. The picture is offered for me and others to make of it what we will. Some are made indignant by the freedom feeling taunted by a ballot box without papers offered on a day without election. Some see a box with a slot in the top into which one my slip an anonymous vote as a mark of respect for what ought to go on between humans. Dictators, unless tempted by the market value raised in the democracies they distrust, do not like paintings whose title’s are not agreeably and unarguably linked to their subject matter. Say nay pas oon peep. Are you taking the piss? Are you looking at me? Recruit a crowd by burning it in public. Throw their ballot papers on the same pyre. Ensure our court photographer is there. ‘The burning of decadent art in the interests of the people on (date) at (venue).’

* * *
No builders came on Friday. At dawn it rained for a good hour. The morning skies were grey, the land steaming. All day we worked on the house. Lin painted but also started on the rockery in the garden. I carried stones for her. We cleared weeds from the garden. Moved more odds and ends into the roof of the Apothiki. Lin did washing and hung it out. I brought it in at dusk. Lin painted on. I barrowed a pile of tiles left by our builders and piled them against the Apothiki wall, and manhandled 22 sacks of debris closer to the road so we could dispose of them properly next day. Earlier I bought some tools and more paint at Dassia and dropped in to Ipsos to check ‘Summer Song’. I put up the spray hood, ran the engine for a bit and raised flags to let D. who’s been keeping an eye on our boat, that we were around. We are more resigned to the slow pace of work on the house.

Friday 7 Sept: Long before light on Friday I dreamt I was very rude to a rather important imaginary superior and woke in dark silence, Lin stirring in deep sleep. I had just arrived at a new organisation, saw a staff circular inviting comment on some aspect of policy and so signed up to have a word with the boss whose signature was on it. A small dapper man entered the staff area and circulated, eventually to me. He’d noted my signature on his circular. ‘So, how can I help?’ he said. ‘It seemed like a good way of meeting you’ I said with a pleasant smile. ‘Well now you have’ he said and headed for the door. I chased after him and sprayed the remains of my tea on him saying in venomous sotto voce ‘You fucking little prat!’ and worse - every consonant precisely emphasised. He looked at me astounded and then walked off. I wondered why I had effectively abandoned my new job. I pondered swearing I’d never said such a thing, wanting insanely to justify my behaviour and grew cravenly apprehensive at how everyone else would view such choler. I woke with relief astonished – my first dream in this house. Speaking to the ghost of Norbert Elias, of whom it would be impossible to imagine such incivility let alone mine I’d interpret this dream as a recognition of barbarism within, a live volcano of which this was a mere tremor, but even waking I am certain that my opinion of my imaginary superior was correct. The problems of the world come down to bad manners.

* * *

At 7.30 on Thursday morning came a shower for ten minutes. The dawn landscape steamed and freshened. A church bell pealed in welcome. Swallows swooped overhead. A scooter puttered invisibly through the tree cover. I was glad the blackened area behind our house was being damped. Yesterday Katherina, the Leftheris and Lulu’s grandmother were tidying there, collecting wood. Kiria Leftheris said the land belongs to a man from Corfu city. Lulu’s grandmother indicated, a sleeping gesture, that the fire had broken out about 2.00 in the morning last week.

She thought the old twisted tree on the land would live, though badly scorched, its upper leaves and branches shrivelled. At its roots greenery is coming through the soil. I collected a plastic bag of plastic bottles and other litter and found four sealed bottles of wine half embedded in the ground. G said later ‘that one is vinegar, but try opening that one and let it stand. If it doesn’t fizz it should be drinkeable.’ I heard a man had put out flames on the mainland with wine. Maybe I should send these bottles to him.

Later while Lin painted I went with G to the wood yard he’d found at Kalafationi on the Viros road, an hour’s journey south involving threading Corfu town’s heavy traffic to a yard piled high with the cypress wanted for the floor. G’s Greek helped with the order but I was stuck by a demand for my tax number, not having it to hand. I phoned the property agent who said our file was now with the notary, we not being on their books any more. A. at the office would try and get it. A conversation on my phone between the wood yard manager and the agent and we were allowed on our way, the invoice incomplete. The authorities are rightly trying to track the movement of wood. I should have had the number to hand.

Later I continued with Lin tidying. We tidied some of the lathes and debris in the apothiki so that the doors opened and I could take stones to help make a rockery at the end of the garden. I cut back shoots from the lemon tree to help a few main ones grow better. Lin thought I’d cut away too many. We argued. From the upper floor the sea is darkened to the bluest of blues by the afternoon wind and in lucent air we can see the cumulus piles over the mainland on a view of the coast that stretches from the Albanian Cape Stilit, about 9 miles away across hardly 5 miles of water directly east until beyond Cape Gourouni south of Igoumenitsa it disappears towards Preveza behind the nearby higher ground at Anilipsi inland from Ipsos. From the balcony we can see Vidho Island between a gap in the local hills.

On Wednesday evening, over supper, we looked at Imray’s North Ionian Chart designed by Rod Heikell and linked to his Greek Waters Pilot, planning a short voyage in the Corfu Sea during our last fortnight here, sailing across from Ipsos to the hardly inhabited inlet of Ftelias in Greece but just under the Albanian border (p.56 in the Pilot Book), or perhaps Pagania with its promising shelter (p.56/57), then on to inhabited Sayiadha (p.57/58), where the strip of Greece that ribbons up the coast widens and the harbour can be entered if not too crowded. From there we could sail on about 15 miles towards Igoumenitsa but turn into Ormos Valtou, Igoumenitsa Creek, where the pilot shows a sheltered cove before the fish farm at the head of the creek (p.58). There is always a straightforward route back to Corfu but we could go on down to the harbour at Platarias (p.59) – popular with yachts but perhaps quiet enough for a berth in late September. From there we could go on, either to Mourtos among the Sivota Islands, to the harbour at Mourtos (p.60) (possibly incomplete) and the anchorage off Mourtos in Middle Bay (p.61), an adjacent cove. Then or earlier we could cross back to Corfu, possibly to the harbour at Levkimmi (p.50/51) (also called Kavos), or round Cape Levkimmis to Petriti (p.50), crowded but possible to anchor. Seven miles further north, past Boukari (we are now going against the prevailing wind) is the new marina at Benitses (p.49), after which comes Corfu Town (p.47/49) where we could try Mandraki under the old fort (p.48) if there’s room and we can pay, or we could try the old harbour, but be careful which end and will it be too crowded (I need to check this when in town). After that it’s home to Ipsos, though there’s an option of anchoring off Vido Island (what about Gouvinon island?). One question I have is whether it would be more interesting to make this round voyage in reverse, working south on Corfu and north on the mainland, crossing to Ipsos from Ftelias or nearby? I guess we can go south any route if the northerly wind prevails and, if going to windward I guess we’d prefer the calmer offshore version that we should get on the Corfu side. Clockwise makes sense but what about bolt-holes.
Thursday 5 Sept. 208 Democracy Street: While Lin painted and M. worked on the upstairs room I went to Corfu to pay for the car. Kostas beckoned me to a rare parking space outside his business by the old port and sent his son out for skirtos. A shared smoke and banter over these delectable little pots of bitterness softened the pain of parting with money. I embarrassed him first by conveying my regrets for the fire disaster, then we spoke of war, crime and human stupidity and the crazy badness of the world. ‘Things’ I assured him ‘ will only get worse!’ He delightedly agreed. ‘Yes indeed, everything will get worse’. ‘But’ I said ‘if you read your great historian Thucydides, things were always getting worse.’ I expanded my arms to demonstrate everlasting worseness. ‘Yes, Mr Simon, you say such good things! When you come next time you will come to meet my family. Is your wife with you? Here.’ He gave me a plastic bag of prickly pears, expertly flaying one and handing me a juicy core to sample.

In Greece

Wednesday at 208 Democracy Street: I wake before 6.00 which is just before 8 here. This morning is grey and even damp from a short rain (predicted even last Saturday) while we slept, brought, as usual, by a rare southerly breeze.

Most bad things in Greece come from the north (totalitarians and the m*lt*mi with its moaning delivery of suicide and household mayhem) but the issue in Greek foreign policy since WW2 has been an island to the south east. The British relinquished their governing role in 1959, satisfied to an agreement that gave them a military base in Cyprus and bars for our lads. Tension between Cypriots, locked in their children’s history books, and stands by Greek and Turkish governments in defence of their own, as this is understood, on the island and on the two mainlands, has stymied reliable peace. Memory of the feud – great acts of chopping and shooting between villages – has made old men and women weary of the fervent young, so ready, if licensed by their elders, to set upon each other, in uniform for their state or as bandits for their friends. Internal politics in Turkey and Greece are swayed by great men’s views on ‘the problem of Cyprus’. Some young mainland Greeks scorn the trouble bringers – ‘Cypriots, ttch!’ The Aegean pot is stirred by the great powers protecting our ultimate driver. A river intractable runs through it from the Middle East. Until our economies eschew carbon and we live instead on the bounty of sun and the wind we live under the satrapy of oil.

* * *

And now comes more sweet rain. When we go to the cottage people say “you’ve brought the rain” with reproach, but in Korakiana it’s only a blessing and we must hope for more.

* * *
Tuesday 4 September at 208 Democracy Street
The train journey to Gatwick and the flight passed most of Monday. We arrived at Corfu in the night. Kostas’ son met us with the hire car. We drove to Ipsos and dropped in on the café there for an indoor smoke and a drink. V was just tidying up to go home. Dg sat at the counter as he had when we left and J pointed to the collection box for the victims of fire mentioning ‘one boy they bought in with firelighters – 65 years!’. We wandered across the road and drove up the jetty to see ‘Summer Song’ lying quietly at her mooring. Amplified sound came from the strip but most places seemed lightly patronised, except where a coach party milled in one long bar.

At Ano Korakiana, at one in the morning, Lin dropped me off with the luggage and parked further up the village. I found the keys in their place. The house held the day’s heat. I surrendered to the air conditioner. There was building dust and detritus everywhere and much incomplete, but the upstairs room with its divider out is a great improvement. The replaced window stood wide open to the cooler night and a moonlit view of the sea and hills and a landscape dotted with too many lights. I made us tea and coffee. Lin wiped surfaces. I was glad we’d anticipated there’d be ‘a few things to be done’.

I woke just before 8. Wandering to the balcony I shade my eyes, gazing only momentarily to the east, where the sun has already turned the view to dazzling monotones, assailing the house through windows left unshuttered by the previous builder, leaking through the ones that are protected. The clock ticks in the kitchen. Lin sleeps. I make myself a cup of tea bracing for the heat, wondering what to wear. M. texted he was coming round with G. They sat over coffee and tea, new bread and honey, I’d got from the shop.
Lin paid part of what we owed for work to date. M. will come tomorrow to try and finish more of the top room. Gossip about the island. Police heavies from the mainland have visited to enforce laws on things like bad driving and parking habits and not wearing helmets on motorbikes. Local police not wanting to stir things with fellow islanders treated many infractions as customary, and tolerance on such things has long been part of tourism, but the state is putting its foot down to avoid paying more fines to the EU, whose Regional Structure Fund has benefited Greece since she joined. Brussels is now saying ‘what’ve you been doing with all the cash you’ve had from our shared pot? Didn’t you know when you dipped into it that there were conditions? Where’s the structure? Rule of law? Regulatory frameworks? Your borders have had the protection you get from full membership of the union. The Euro emphasises that, making a mockery of neuroses, once justified, about the ‘Macedonian Question’. Do you seriously think the place under the conditional name FYROM is going to invade, invest Thessalonika and march on Athens? Grow up. Stop the corruption. End the pervasive clientelism that blights your democracy. Stop the seedy relaxed attitude to the rule of law!’ Of course I wouldn’t countenance such views’ being too used to what pots tell kettles.

* * *

Evening of Tuesday 4 Sept: The house, although we’ve not wanted at first to admit it to ourselves, is more of a mess than we’d expected. The Apothiki is a fish skeleton of nailed lengths of wood, lathes and debris from the upstairs building work. ‘Who would have known the old wall to have so much rubble in it?’ There ‘s a pile of broken tiles and odds and ends on the balcony. Furniture wears a fine dust from the sanded floor, which is incomplete, as are the walls with wires loose and rough surfaces. Builders’ odds and ends have been plonked down all over. The garden looks more of a mess than when it was rubble. To top this there’s been a fire in the land below our house that was once overgrown. From the balcony you can see a couple of dead trees, others badly scorched. Mrs Leftheris greeted us and shook her head at the devastation.

To add to our chagrin I was stung by a wasp and trod on a nail. Blood dripped on the path until Lin found a pad for my heel. The wasp must have been weary so I didn’t go into antiepileptic shock as I did once. We tidied and tidied. Now there’s a pleasant waft of salad in preparation, plus fresh bread, and wine. Supper of tzadziki, ham, salad of tomatoes, onions, peppers and feta, with a chilled retsina. Lin wondered if there was some music and I dug out on my laptop some of the lute music from Iraq that Dhiaa has sent me when I asked him about his favourites, interspersed with songs from Miki Theodoraki’s setting for Axion Esti – near East mingling with Middle East. It’s strangely moving to hear these sung in German given their context.

* * *

J said ‘business has been shite’ this summer. G. said middle Europeans – Croats and others from Yugoslavia come to Corfu with their food and drink in their baggage. ‘They stand outside bars chatting and dancing and drinking. enjoying the lights and music but not spending any money. They even bring their own water!’