Working and thinking

So here I am with my trusty folding bicycle about to enjoy a cheese and pickle roll on an almost empty London to Brighton train after the rush hour passengers unpacked themselves and headed into the capital. I was up at 5.30, set the alarm for Lin at 8.30. My main bicycle had a puncture, so I changed lights to the other, and cycled into Birmingham New Street in the growing light to catch a busy express to London. From Euston on a bright morning amid the bustle I pedalled to Victoria via Trafalgar Square, Whitehall and Victoria Street. What a delightful way this is to get about. With 20 minutes before my train I sent off some e-mails via the WiFi that covers most of central Westminster. Among other things I sent one to Lin asking if she could find me a reasonably priced copy of the natural history book F & D had recommended when we visited them two Tuesdays ago, while it was still light, threading our way down to their home over a bridge off a narrow alley at the foot of Ano Korakiana – a walk of minutes that would have been a mile by the road. Cold, sinking that evening to -6°C, had shrivelled greenery in our garden. The air was too dry for rime or ice to hazard the steep path between the houses. F & D brought us in to their sitting room, with blazing fire, carpets, a warm puppy, tea, coffee, glayva – a whisky liqueur - and conversation. We discussed Corfu wildlife and I was given a reference to and shown their copy of Thanasis Petsis’ and Penelope Gourgourini’s Greek Nature: The authentic field guide 2004, Lynx Edition, Athens ISBN 960-87746-1-6 e-mail: lynx@hol.gr “Borrow it! Borrow it” said F but knowing my unreliability on the matter of returning books I really want, especially a reference book that looked as interesting and practical as this – you can slip it in a pocket when walking – I refused. (Another guide to Corfu Wildlife can be downloaded as a PDF file)
* * *
An exchange with one of my favourite bloggers - My Greek Odyssey (MGO) - Stavros had been pondering his reasons for writing on the net:

Anyone stumbling across MGO and reading its contents might think I am a hopeless romantic, out of touch and disconnected with Greece and Greeks as they exist today. Perhaps so. Not so long ago a blogger named Thomas lamented my naivete: 'A lot of Greeks here in Greece would disagree with you. They would say your view is quaint and old-fashioned. Some would say the Greece you talk about is dying fast, and others would say it's been dead for a long time.' From its inception MGO has been one man's view of Greekness. It is a celebration of the Greek spirit and the things that have shaped and molded that spirit. If my version of Greekness and its cultural legacy is idealized it is because I prefer to highlight what I see as worth keeping and passing on to my children. If my view is nostalgic, it is for an ethos that was preserved by those that came before me. If I sound naive about the ever shrinking piece of Greece that exists in our collective memory, it is because I am trying to keep it from shrinking even further.

I commented:

I wonder if we are all experiencing what Edward Said described:
http://www.reconstruction.gr/en/actions_dtls.php/25
I don't like the word 'Glocalisation' but I think its rather baleful effects are being widely experienced, which makes your blog and other odyssey's especially treasured. On the feeling of disappointment no-one knows better than you that if you arrive at the real Ithaka you will have done all your discovering - so voyage slowly. Simon Posted by: Simon Baddeley | 25 February 2008

Stavros replied to me and another of the many comments on his blog:

S. Fascinating link. I've read it twice and must admit that it seems to me that its theme is played out regularly on this blog. As for your sage advice, I will try to tarry awhile enroute and smell the roses on the way. BTW, your new home is coming along beautifully.

Kosta, Where have been? You've been missed. Blogs, whether you are looking in or out, are addictive. An offshoot of this 'globalization' Simon refers to. I sit at my desk in Maine and get to talk to really interesting people thousands of miles away. People who I find are looking for that elusive Ithaka just like me. Why shouldn't we learn from each other on the way? Posted by: Stavros | 25 February 2008

The link I mentioned in my comment leads to a piece on Glocalization - Homelessness: a new geographical boundary by Katerina Nasioka who sounds like a most interesting mind among a number on a site called 'reconstruction community' concerned with artististic and architectural projects for the remaking of cities. It seems based in Greece but its relevance extends. I shall make a link, I think there are also cross-references with Artemis Leontis' Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland - based at my old university in Ann Arbor. On the same website my eye was caught by a piece called tunnel 14: the art of courage by Mélinna Kaminari which quotes Theodore Zeldin - a pioneer of 'new methods to improve personal, work and intercultural relationships in ways that satisfy both private and public values.':

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, and to attempt to increase, even by a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world. But it is careless to do so without remembering how previous efforts have failed, and how it has never been possible to predict for certain how a human being will behave. History, with its endless procession of passers-by, most of whose encounters have been missed opportunities, has so far been largely a chronicle of ability gone to waste. But next time two people meet, the result could be different.

Monday morning in Birmingham

Up early to get through my mail. The citron scent of several kilos of lemons from the garden at Democracy Street fills our kitchen in Handsworth. "Are you allowed to carry things like lemons?" asked Richard. "No problem, but for the efficiency of Greek airline security we'd have lost your aftershave!" Having cleverly discovered a 125ml bottle and a small silverplate knife, fork and spoon set, which Lin had unthinkingly packed in her hand baggage as gifts, they transferred them, with swiftly completed paperwork, to our hold baggage, to be collected from the carousel in Birmingham. I get news in Corfu via the internet when I do my e-mail - while sitting in a bar, but here - as in Greece it must for Greeks - the television, the newspapers and the radio spread the news in a modern version of the penetrating style of a village crier. Police searching a former Jersey care home, where a child's remains were found the other day, are searching six more sites. In the north a child has been missing for over 5 days. The Speaker of the House of Commons is being accused of improper use of his expenses. On TV last night there was a fascinating and ghastly documentary about a French mass murderer which we didn't have to watch, but we did, as we went through the mail collected while we'd been away. This morning on BBC Radio 4, an agronomist speaks about the extinction of crop variety and the building, on a remote island near the North Pole, of the Svalbard International Seed Vault to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change. I suppose this is good news. The big lenders are jumpy. Op-ed pieces focus on 'chain-gang economics', 'disaster capitalism' and 'Keynesian military expenditure' as ways of delaying capitalism's apocalypse. To cheer myself I use the internet to find stories like one about the TV serial Yabanci Damat (Foreign Groom) that was a popular hit of the 2005 Greek summer television season. It told the story of the trans-Aegean love affair of Nazli and Nikos, the family diplomacy involved in bringing them to the altar and the charged political context of their marriage.- 26 June 07 Greek News:

On Saturday, Panteios professor Martha Mihailidou and Bilgi professor Asli Tunc presented survey results collected from roughly 500 Panteios and Bilgi college students’ regarding their views about Turks and Turkish society and Greeks and Greek society, respectively, along with their television viewing habits vis-a-vis the series. Additionally, the respondents were queried, via 40 or so questions, about the personal attitudes towards a possible romance with a member of the opposite sex who happened to be from the other country. The specific television series, entitled “Yabanc Damat” (Foreign Groom) in Turkish and “Ta Sinora tis Agapis” (Borders of Love) in Greek, was produced for and aired by Turkey’s Kanal-D network beginning in November 2004. It was later broadcast throughout Greece by the private Mega channel, generating phenomenal TV ratings in a 'football-less' summer season in the country. According to the survey paper, the series deals with the relationship between a young Greek man and a young Turkish woman and the problems -- and especially the prejudices -- encountered in an inter-cultural relationship (and later marriage). Its comedic tone and play on historic Greco-Turkish antagonism made it a huge hit in both Turkey and Greece, as well as making stars out of the leading actors.

It's not so difficult to find good news if you search for it. I know something like this is being re-enacted for real much closer to home. Waging peace. This is Romeo and Juliet as a comedy with a happy ending... (see this from Modern Greek, University of Michigan)

and Lin has saved me a fee to my accountant by filling in my form herself and actually saving me some tax as well. In Corfu we met a really good and pleasant accountant who's submitted our Corfu tax forms - for which daunting looking 6 pages she needed our 'pink slips' attesting the transfer of cash from UK for house purchase, our local tax numbers from our house contract and our passports - all done for a most reasonable fee, as we chatted in her office near the Ionian University. The sun is sparkling off the little windmills in our garden. Our dog Oscar was all over us, and the cat Flea allowed herself to be stroked several times and I've got two interesting assignments coming up this week and more next, and Amy got 'Recognition of Good Work' from West Midlands Police for helping with the arrest of youths spraying grafitti in the city centre and I've already had photographs from our friend M in Ano Korakiana about a project to build the same kind of wild fowling punt that my stepfather built with Colin Willock in 1957. I've passed M's sequence of photos on to Jack's biographer, Paul Peacock.

The coincidence of finding we have as close neighbours in Ano Korakiana, someone who rides, owns a stable, cooks brilliantly, sharing her life with a boatbuilder - versed in the use of marine ply and GRP construction - who's followed my stepfather's TV programmes and enjoyed his books (I saw some on a shelf, beside Paul's biography of him, when we strolled over to their house for supper the other evening) is, to a struggling rationalist, more than astonishing, especially when I think of the happenstance of having a home in Democracy Street in the first place. M diffidently remarked that he was less sceptical than me about such eventualities being fortuitous.

The earth turns towards the sun

... mist poured, as over the down-turned rim of a basin.

About 1951, by lying his way out of insistence he be accompanied up Olympus, young Kevin Andrews, had the mountain’s many peaked summits - the Mítikas, Lesser Mítikas, the Skala, the Skoliό, the Stephàni and Prophet-Ilías – to himself – a last ‘act of irresponsibility’ before the ending of his youth. A detailed route was given him by a retired Greek general who'd often climbed to the summit, whose first ascent was claimed by the Swiss Alpine Club in 1913. Yorgi, an old soldier detailed to guide Andrews on the lower slopes, suggested ‘first’ be parenthesised. Shepherds had long herded on Olympus.
“We used to go up there when we were boys, chasing the goats up on the topmost pinnacle of the Mítikas itself, but I haven’t been there since I was sixty…when our goats get lost on the summit we have to bring them down again.”

Mount Olympus

This morning’s minion was a pink reflection on the flat sea this side of the Corfu strait beyond the shadow of the mainland heights. Around 7.20, with no breeze to flatten it, a wave of mist poured, as over the down-turned rim of a basin, into the valleys between the hills above Ipsos, Analipsi and Dassia, floating below our village in the direction of Skripero. We still speak, and think, of the sun ‘rising’, yet there were surely villagers in Ano Korakiana seeing what I’ve just seen, and shepherds on Olympus, gazing on the same process amplified, who knew the world tipped towards the sun long before Galileo struggled with the Inquisition to prove the fact among men who would one day see, from space, the round earth turning. Andrews' book, bought second hand, is lightly marked in black ink by a previous reader who seems to have been asking questions that interest me. I noticed later, inside the cover, the name ‘Michael Moralis August 1985’. He notes some different passages from the ones that catch my eye, but I feel a companionship with my preceding reader – with his curiosity and his name. Kevin Andrews, p.185: On his way towards Kalamata on a route up to the Langádha Pass, Andrews sees a village with burned-out houses. No-one locally will tell him who is responsible. A little later, a man on his road, a merchant refugee from Smyrna with a ‘thin cultivated voice’, offers his donkey to carry Andrews’ pack. They talk as they walk. Andrew feels it safer to ask ‘the question to which I had long been seeking the answer:

“Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?” “I can only tell you the side that happens to have most power in one district or another also has the most opportunity to commit them.” ’

Mark Mazower noted this careful answer. I know I’ve seen it quoted in one of his books. There are other conversations in this tenth chapter - most powerful when Andrews ponders the murderous actions of his friend Kostandi. He does not judge but he allows himself his angriest passage (margin marked by Moralis):

‘Perhaps the blood on his hands was less, in the scale of things, than the desecration of one man’s private and essential value (that was all he had to begin with, and end with); less than his uncritical, unquestioning adherence to the revolting shame of lesser people’s stupidity, cynicism and cheapness – and everything else that oils the all-pervading and hospitable machinery of unchecked power. But I came to no conclusions on the subject, either then or later’

Yet Andrews leaves a message in the remark of a Kalamata fishmonger with whom he chats while waiting for a bus to Methoni (inside whose crumbling fortress I strolled with Lin and Amy with such pleasure 12 years ago). He puzzles with the fishmonger about Kostandi:

“...the most likeable person I may ever have met. As I know him, he’s good through and through. Apart from terrific courage, he’s the best husband and the kindest father: a person who hates to cause embarrassment or unhappiness or disappointment to anyone he’s fond of. Yet he has slaughtered so many people that he’s lost count of the number…and he’s not even anxious.” “How do you know?” “Because he’s proud of it” … The fishmonger says (another mark in the margin) “He won’t always be proud of it…Because you can’t always stay with the outer form of things – things like honour, power, revenge. Some day he’ll come to a crossroad, a moment of crisis, of judgement. Everyone meets it sooner or later. And then he won’t be able to escape himself. That’s when his life may begin. But it won’t be your business.”

Nicholas Gage knew this - certainly intuited it - when he’d the guts to stay himself from killing the man who’d murdered his mother Eleni of Lia in Epirus.
* * *
It seems such a long time ago - in experience rather than time. The advertisement on the internet, on eBay, spied by our daughter, said:

Snapdragon Sailing Yacht 28 Foot, Lying in corfu on a permanent free mooring. We have lived aboard her for the last 14 years. YSE Yanmar 12hp diesel engine 300 hrs since re/con, Bilge keel nearly new sails, wired for 220volts, Inch hot water system, Full 6 foot standing room throughout, In very good condition. Its my dads yacht you can phone him in Corfu for any technical info on 0030 26610 *****. We can arrange to view at Corfu, at your cost if you wish! Email for info, thanks for looking

Lin and I were trying to recollect the key things remembered about our different stays in Corfu since that moment when I clicked ‘buy now’ on that eBay ad for ‘Summer Song’, while sitting at our kitchen table in Handsworth on 23rd July 2006 at 13:11:33 BS, before they fuse into each other. When recalling these most recent winter weeks in the village, what we will especially recall, is the company of the friends we've made and our gratitude to Alan for taking us under his wing so that after initial hiccups electrics, stove, floor and roof are either complete or ready for our return before Easter. Today has involved tidying and packing. "I don't want to leave" said Lin.

The wood stove is working!

Just before sunrise on Monday morning I checked and found the fire had stayed in overnight. The logs are seasoned, from a truckload I’d bought and carted down our steps and stacked in February last year. G and M had carried them from beside the house where they’d have got soaked and stacked them in the apothike from where I carted six logs upstairs last night. I placed an olive log on glowing embers but saw I needed smaller logs. I made a cup of tea, fetched a dustpan and brush, and a handsaw and put on socks and pants and brought the laptop upstairs. The embers needed coaxing but until fire flamed, smoke came from the door and lid when opened. I didn’t want to spoil a growing ash bed with the riddle and was wandering whether to open a window to increase the draw when I spied a flame. I opened the front. The fire spread, muttering and clicking. I drank my tea, basking in the enveloping warmth. The bedroom door was open to spread the warm for when Lin dressed. Bright sunlight leaks through all the eastward windows. Shadows of invisible smoke rise twirling beside the shadow of the stove on the white wall. I assume it’s very thin smoke off the paint of the stove that will stop in time, or does a sun so bright make shadows of the heated air? More vexing right now is a foot long crack in the marble slab behind the stove. Was this made by too much heat behind the stove; by a flaw in the kavalla? Will it extend across the rest of the slab? We need to get to know the stove; the effect of its placing in the room, how its heat spreads, our choice of fuel, the weather, the design of the flue – inside and out. In the room is a thirteen foot stainless steel tubular radiator too hot to touch and already turning iridescent, adding to our warming. Yesterday morning condensation in the flue dripped brownily on the floor from the horizontal joint closest to the wall. Heat from embers prevented that this morning. Olive creates a lot of tar and we help create a market for olive wood – the tree whose abundance is part of the island’s character. I was assured this load came from the trimming of local trees every two years, but we’d prefer to collect the generous amounts of discarded wood we see by the road and along the shore. One day, not so far in the future, people will mock us for not knowing how to use the sun that shining so dazzling on us in the depth of winter to warm our homes. The kafenion here has two solar heating panels facing south west beside its terrace – as an example to all who pass.
* * *
There are so many small birds frolicking around the gardens and the robins are numerous and allow you to get within a few feet. We wondered if the shooting sends them into the gardens and empty buildings of the village like some modern agriculture in England drives country creatures into the city using the canals as routes and parks, allotments and untended gardens as habitats. D told us the other day of a worried man who’d wandered up to the place they’re making a house below Ano Korakiana and asked, in English, if they’d seen an animal he was seeking. “It has a dark voice and…” – making a swift gesture as though combing back a quiff and “a chi!” – pronounced hard. Could this have been a badger, or the particular character of a missing dog?

* * *
Sunday morning, reckoning the mortar dry round the flue hole in the wall, I light our stove. It warms the main upstairs room. We drop in on a table top sail at Drifter’s Bar in Dassia and buy cutlery, china, pictures, a mirror and a four foot long hand-made hand-painted papier maché parrot on a stand. The breeze from the north chilled us even in direct sun creating the clearest of views across the channel as we passed through Ipsos. Once home we finished work on the guest bedroom door and hung it with glass replaced, between the kitchen and the downstairs bedroom. In the evening with the temperature falling below freezing the stove warmed the whole house. We sat and gaze at the flames listening to the logs, which I’d brought up from the apothiki, crackling, inhaling the slight waft of wood smoke. It’s only a week now before we return to England for five weeks.

* * *
Sunday morning: The sun rose into a watery sky. There was a shower in the early morning. Lambros and one mate arrived at 9.00am. This confirmed my learning that you need to be on the spot with any building. Not because of dishonesty or incompetence but because work on houses, like surgery, requires regular revision of original plans because of the inconstancy of materials and settings. A flue tube as just too large to fit the second bend poking out of the wall. Our spare tube is needed and another cut with the grinder. Another fitting is too loose.
How to make it stable? Our longest ladder is almost impossible to position safely in Leftheris’ garden. One more rung of extension might have made it possible but there’s a safety fitting that makes extension that far impossible. Rightly so. We find one acceptable position, which is OK to insert the pipe and chimney top and mortar the outside part of the hole made for it, but not to drill for a bracket to hold it. Lambros asks for wire. He finds the right stuff off the neighbouring waste ground and fixes the flue to the same bracket as the gutter’s. I hold the foot of the ladder like a limpet while Adoni hands Lambros mortar through an upstairs window. Meanwhile Lin’s putting a coat of varnish on the conscientiously stripped and sanded and filled door for the guest bedroom which now has a worn surface of ancient eau de nil lacquer with wood showing through that interior decorators enjoy crafting and lovers of the new regard as scruffy. Then upstairs Lambros and Adoni are straightening out our drunken archway – with render. I’m on the phone to Paul. “Is there a difference here between mortar and plaster?” “Not really. It all depends. We tend to go for a slightly knobbly finish.” “OK. Thanks.” Later when Aln trying to restore the upstairs downstairs two-way switch he finds a two-way switch but no wiring leading upstairs. “Where did it go?”

Under Mount Korakiana

Another chilly blue dry day - perfect for our odd jobs. Aln came up in the late afternoon and fitted our flue. We sat enjoying the fire and the slight scent of the wood smoke drifting back through the rough hole that Lambros is coming up to finish tomorrow along with putting final touches to the roof, putting in a botched window properly, plastering and generally tidying the mess made of our upstairs last year. The weather promises to stay fine over the weekend and beyond.
* * *
E-mail makes arranging future work pleasantly easy - over a soup and bread in the Beer Bucket in Kontokali. I got a circular from the university yesterday on an agreed ‘sustainable cooling policy’. It aims to limit the use of ‘active cooling’ - air-conditioning:

With the expected increase in temperatures due to global warming the need to adapt buildings to prevent overheating and ensure acceptable working conditions will become increasingly important…The University will adopt a cooling strategy based on the ‘switch off, absorb, blow away and cool principles’ with active cooling being a last resort. (i) Switch off: Reduce internal and external heat gains by minimising gains from lighting, IT and heat producing equipment. This includes minimising the need for heat producing equipment, locating such equipment in dedicated areas, and the use of passive techniques such as solar shading. (ii) Absorb: Where practical use the thermal mass of the building to absorb heat and/or by the introduction of phase change materials (SB note: technology for collecting night cooling for use in the day) (iii) Blow away: Ensure an intelligent ventilation strategy. For example the use of night time air to cool buildings, limiting ventilation when external temperatures are greater than internal. (iv) Cool: Where cooling is unavoidable, ensure that the system used is well controlled and is designed to minimise energy use and the production of CO2

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I finished Kevin Andrews' The Flight of Ikaros. I’m grateful for the web friend from Ikaria and the English north country, who is making a study of Andrews, who told me of him. Andrews' writing makes his book universal, but it could be read alongside Nicholas Gage’s Eleni – the latter first, partly for the summarised history inserted to give context to the story of his mother’s murder in the village of Lia in Epirus – by any non-Greek wanting to understand the Greek Civil War. Andrew's only meets communists very briefly, on their way to prison, but spends much time in the company of those who fought against the andartes.

The understanding that is emerging – very slowly as my stolid intelligence reaches for it - is the role, only recently teased out in a number of doctoral theses focusing on small areas of Greece in the period to which Professor Mark Mazower and fellow contributors refer in his sombre and scholarly collection After the war was over, is the way the civil war, so often viewed as the first surrogate hot war spawned by the Cold War, in which ignorant armies clashed under the aegis of greater powers, was also an occasion for escalating the violence of traditional feuding between villages, families and brothers. In Kevin Andrews’ encounters across Greece during that dire period people talked less of differences over the future government of Greece – the preoccupation of the Americans and the British and, to some extent the Russians, though Stalin had graciously agreed with Churchill to cede Greece to the West at Yalta – than about the settlement of scores, revenge and retribution. This is the story of all civil wars including ours - now entertainly re-enacted as a fancy dress picnic on Bank Holidays. Imagine that here. Thucycdides wrote of it with the start of the revolt in Corfu. Its ingredients include envy, jealousy, rage, the availability of weapons and the opportune moment. These fine grain interpretations are bound to be less welcome, even 50 years later, not just because they become so tortuously detailed, but because their currency is made up of villages, streets, families, the names of individuals and the messy subjectivity of personal accounts among people whose scores, even now, remain unsettled. No wonder some say ‘leave it be’.

Andrews, who’s sense of severance at leaving for New York at the end of his fellowship in the early 1950s perhaps surpasses Lawrence Durrell’s (‘The loss of Greece has been an amputation. All Epictetus could not console one against it’ Ch 8 Prospero’s Cell), recalled from the caique nosing past Cape Matapan towards Crete in April 1941, returned (unlike Durrell) to become a citizen of Greece, living there with his family until his end. Nicholas Gage, on the other hand, was born a Greek but, through his mother’s courage, escaped, as a child, to America to return as a man to research and tell her story.

‘History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember: that is our function’ Lawrence Durrell op cit 1945

* * *
I had a good dream last night about ordering wet work on the person who set me up over the credit card theft – only joking. Katerina came up from the bus stop yesterday afternoon with more horta for us with names like famous battles – moskalahánu, prikalíthá, zaxhouliá and zágouna. It’s chilly but sunny enough to dry washing and feel warm in the day. Katherina sighed and exclaimed ‘Krio!’ I made gesture of flexed arms ‘Stin Anglia einai zesto!’ She laughed. I might have made some doltish sense despite every tense wrong. God how I wish I could speak this lovely clever language – and a hundred others but that can wait.

An Athens News horoscope tells me ‘its getting creepy but getting moving as the week goes on’ and that I should ‘get good luck from low-class little men up the backstairs and avoid the great and the good…’

Last night I took my new stick for a walk up the village. Lin held my gloved hand in the chill. “Left or right?” she asked at the top of our steps. “Let’s go up the village”. We strolled against the wind funnelled between the houses until we came to the wider slope that leads to the car park and bandstand and the lights of Corfu and the mainland coast twinkled between the dark shapes of swaying cypresses harking the winter breeze. ‘How could you prove to a child those lights, which look just the same, are closer than those stars?’ We strolled over the performance area by the bandstand and traced out the words on the low iron-fenced memorial to those who’d died for their country. Lights shone behind the windows of a substantial overlooking house from which hung the national flag. We walked on to where the road narrowed between small houses, some occupied some clearly not for some time. A heavy dog chained on a terrace barked suddenly and loudly as we passed and went on being noisy out of boredom. We came to the derelict music school. An earth tremor had made a crack that ran from the lintel above its third floor to the street. We started back from the second of the hairpin bends as the road starts to climb to Sokraki and the street lights end. ‘It’s got the same magic as Lydbrook’ - the village where we’ve had a home for over twenty years. On the fringe of the forest between high steep slopes sprinkled at night with lights along its steep unlit footpaths and a night sky almost free of city glow, we’ve walked on similar windy evenings and enjoyed the long village to ourselves as people sit snug indoors. Coming home we passed quietly by the new music school where a piano was being practised and the kafenion where elders were playing cards and backgammon.

Nightmares of the contented

People in Corfu gather edible plants - horta - such as asparagus, dandelion, wild mustard, chicory, and borage, from favourite places. Katherina, with typical generosity, gave us horta - 'wildweed' - from a sack of plants she'd picked. I've had it in restaurants. This was delicious cooked like spinach - almost my favourite vegetable - but I'm half wondering if it makes me dream. Yesterday morning I was in a machine shop in an old building in Derbyshire. My companion, who I didn’t know very well, needed to buy a particular tool. It was the second place we’d visited on a journey to get something done further north. There was a shout. Everyone stopped working. I wondered what was going on. A foreman arrived in worn overalls. "There’s been a credit card stolen. Would all of you mind emptying out your pockets." I immediately pulled out my cards in their plastic container but with them was this red and white card and a piece of paper in a similar design that I didn’t recognise. Immediately someone pointed to it even as I was grasping what had happened, and I was left with a security guard The room emptied. I could think of no way out. Anyone can be a thief. Why not me? The security guard remained impassive, not unwilling to listen to futile protestations of innocence. This is the second dream I’ve had since arriving here, where I’ve woken just before being arrested. The previous one, obviously brought on by the juice of our blood oranges, had involved me cycling on the pavement on a lonely dark road in Birmingham near my university. A patrol car came by and parked at the next junction and, via a speaker in its roof, asked me to approach. I dismounted and tried to hurl my bike over the hedge with the intention of following it and escaping, but the bike fell back messily, compounding my offence and shame. I know these waking nightmares have nothing to do with their subject matter and are only prescient about the possibilities of my character. They are worse than one’s about physical disaster like plane crashes or shipwrecks. They refer to offenses treated as minor in our society – especially the cycling misdeed - but they are only slightly less dreadful than ones where two police, one a woman, come to the door with news. They are about the unreliability of shared opinion – in this morning’s case, of my honesty, which I foolishly take for granted as existing outside me and abruptly doesn’t. Conrad wrote in Almayer’s Folly, his first novel, ‘few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings’ and ‘the reliability of their police’ (or similar words) adding that their ‘interior is still phantom and heartless.’ (see Internal Polity) My dream was about the bickering that went on between Lin and me as she drove us into town the other day about the whereabouts of our electric bill. "At the electric place where we must pay they won’t know who we are without it. I’m sure I left it with you!" "For god’s sake don’t be such an old woman"says L. "Don’t be sexist" I said grumpily. As it was our tax number, their computer system and a friendly employee at the company found our account in a minute. I don’t think it's about age. I've had such dreams since childhood. I think they occur when one is happy and enjoying peace - unlike so much of the world. To recover my cheer I played Ένα Το Χελιδόνι and Της Δικαιοσύνης Ήλιε Νοητέ from Axion Esti. Lin came down. I had a cup of tea. A few days ago our English neighbours, of long residence in Corfu, visited to see our house and to show us the house they are having remade a few doors up Democracy Street. M presented me with gifts – an olive walking stick he’d fashioned and to which there’s a history that made this gift special and two eggs for us from their geese – one of which I’ve enjoyed as an omelette. My step-father would have been so pleased to know that a stick he’d made on television of hazel from an English hedgerow, had been crafted for me from out of olive in Corfu. ‘Where did you get the roe deer’s hoof?’ ‘Off eBay’. This matter of balancing old and new is one that recurs – a way of inventing our future. Wednesday was blue again but with a chill breeze during all but the middle of the day. We’ve been doing more jobs so we can relax in April. Lin has begun preparing the rest of the garden for a layer of plaka between beds. I’ve barrowed concrete blocks stored under the veranda to her. Most of the apothike tiles are now on our roof, so we cleared the corrugated roof of mortar left by Lambros. We gently pruned the lemon trees. Lin put more plants in the garden and watered it. We’ve done more carpentry on a kitchen shelf and the guest bedroom door which Lin’s still stripping while I de-rusted and oiled the latch, before we reglazed the four panes using silicone instead of putty. From time to time neighbours strolled by, greeting us. We realised we were supposed to have renewed the car hire contract yesterday. When I rang him, Kostas said "Don’t worry. Come in when you can." Tuesday evening, over spaghetti, we watched Theo Angelopoulos’ Landscapes in the mist. A teenage girl, Voula, and her little brother, Alexandros, set out from somewhere in Greece on a journey by rail to find their father somewhere in Germany - a ‘somewhere’ that could be anywhere, as the idea that he’s in Germany is a tale of their mother’s, who we never see, to avoid telling them their father’s unknown – something we hear after a policeman takes them to their uncle in a vast power station after they’ve been put off the express to Germany. This was a Greece of grey skies, snow, wind and rain with people in winter clothes standing around a lot in towns of scruffy empty buildings or monstrous machinery at work in taupe landscapes crossed by trucks on featureless motorways. The children are brave, sadly innocent - distressingly so in the case of the girl - but increasingly ingenious at surviving. Memorable scenes include, policemen and women in the street gazing up at falling snow; a gigantic hand floating up from a muddy sea with a stump of an index finger pointing out of the screen and being carried by a helicopter past the apartments on the Thessaloniki corniche to disappear over the Turkish citadel; a line of clothes shaking macabrely in a stiff breeze like limp bodies – andarte and battalion uniforms and traditional klepht costumes strung up for sale by a penurious theatre troupe no longer able to draw an audience for their touring re-enactment of events between 1900 and 1949.
* * *
The Corfiot is an English language monthly magazine (subscriptions - most of the paper is not on the net) edited by Hilary Whitton-Paipeti. Its contributors are Greek and English and the editorial policy is diplomatically, but entertainingly, opinionated. We enjoy it for its small ads about forthcoming events and for articles on old Corfu, on current challenges facing the island economy - most especially how to develop policies for sustainable tourism. The latest issue – February’s - has heated responses to a letter from someone who’s recently come to live in Corfu, in Temploni, effectively complaining about Greek Corfiots and calling on readers to write to the local authorities and complain about their behaviour. C.M. Woodhouse in The Philhellenes wrote scathingly about a certain kind of Englishman who came to Greece and complained about Greeks – in the 19th century this included grumbling that the natives didn’t pronounce Greek as taught in English public schools. The hapless RS in this January’s letter pages of the Corfiot asks why all Greek civil servants aren't required to speak and write English and why road signs aren't in Greek and English. He complains about the lack of direct flights to Corfu out of season; about shooting small birds on the island, about some Corfiots poisoning stray cats and dogs; about the way these animals are allowed to run free on the island. His solution is regulation, dog licences, neutering, ‘keeping on leads’, criminalisation, and the ‘mobilisation’ of armed forces and the police to collect refuse during the recent strikes and a lot of letters to the local authority. What vexed me and Lin about this letter was amplified in responses to it in the February issue. Dr Lionel Mann, a good old man with a distinguished career, who we’ve had the honour of meeting in Ay.Ioannis, wrote, with uncharacteristic anger that the January letter 'was horrifying in its display of the monumental arrogance and abysmal ignorance that have made English-speaking nations so widely despised and hated.’

‘We do not want foreign “improvements” imposed here, as seen today in its ugliest forms in Afghanistan and Iraq.’ ‘Man has always been a hunter and always will be. I do not particularly like the shooting of little birds either, but these guns are not being used to slaughter indiscriminately innocent Iraqi and Afghan men, women and children, are they?’

There’s rebuttal of each complaint in the January letter. He finishes

‘Consider that for more than two thousand years until the British left in 1864 the Corfiots had always been ruled by occupying powers who made little if any effort to educate the residents. Corfiots have had only a relatively short time in which to learn to govern themselves and are not doing at all badly. Insensitive, ignorant criticism is at best unhelpful, at the worst flagrantly insolent and tarnishes even further the already suspect reputation of British immigrants. Anyway, life here is vastly superior to that in the over-regulated yet greed-driven, crime-stricken, violence-worshipping, drug-sodden, booze-swilling, pollution-plagued, barbaric UK. Accept beautiful tranquil Corfu for what it is – faults and all. I love Corfu.’

There are two more letters in the same vein reproaching Mr S with equal vehemence. I disagree on only one element of Lionel’s letter. My love for Greece is not deepened by any animosity towards England. Perhaps it’s my luck; possibly the result having two families – English and Greek – that allows me to love both lands – a feeling that is not for one moment compromised by awareness of their separate and shared problems. * * * There are about four bus stops along the lower road through Ano Korakiana. One is at the end of the short path that goes down from our house. Lin, who unlike me has been less keen on breaking up with her car, asked me about bus times. She's influenced by the daily cost of car hire - our largest regular expense at €22 a day (the best going rate fr a small saloon we know). On weekdays, a bus leaves that stop four times a day for Corfu Town at 0715, 0900, 1245 and 1630. The same bus leaves Corfu main bus station for the village at 0645, 0830, 1215 and 1600. Last year a single fare was €1.40. Using my bicycle - folded and stored on board - I can also use the Corfu to Sokraki bus that leaves Corfu on weekdays at 0500 and 1400 (then have an exciting cycle back down the zig zag hill to AK). I can also use the Corfu to Sidari bus, which will drop me off at the AK turn off the Sidari road, about 2 miles to the centre of AK. This leaves Corfu 0515, 0900, 1100, 1200, 1400, 1600 and 2000 during the week and on Saturdays at 0515, 0900, 1100, 1400 and 1830 and on Sunday at 0930. I don't know what time it takes for the bus to get from Sidari to the AK turn where I could wait for it, but it departs from Sidari on weekdays at 0700, 1100, 1200, 1345, 1600, 1700 and 2100 and on Saturdays at 0700,1100, 1200, 1600 and 1930 and on Sunday at 1615.

"And...?"

In cities, where more and more of us live, plots are elusive. Moments that might, in a village, have started a story, get washed away in the urban flux. “We ran to an incident yesterday” said Amy on the phone from Birmingham. “And?” I said “It was two gangs fighting. They’d run off by the time we got there – me, a car and a police cyclist.” “Go on” “Well there was this was dopey girl who said she’d only give us a statement if we let her ride a police bicycle”. “And?” “Oh, I had to check on that man you know in town who plays the saxophone. He lost his accommodation. He’s been sectioned a few times.” “Andre? And what happened?” “I just had to check on him.” “And?” “Nothing really. We see him around but he doesn’t listen to us. Just talks about other things.” Coronation Street and Eastenders, represent Britain as a horio, creating narratives that seem, ingeniously, to simulate the shared concerns of a teeming transient over-populated terrain of 60 million people. Their scripts are written by metropolitan talents mining ore from the glop of contemporary confusion and fashioning it into soap. On Corfu the ore lies closer to the ground.

We were in J’s place on Saturday night with a cast of most of those we'd got to know from arriving here in September 2006. Lin was getting a laugh from my latest mishap. I’d tried to enter the local supermarket via its automatic doors and walked into the glass. I told how last December I was cycling down the long hill from Spartillas and I'd been bitten – well, nipped - by a dog. “I know that one!" said D “Big black and white mix. Has a go at everyone passing.” “And I thought it was only me” I complained. In walked X, the man who’d not done a very good job on our roof last year; the reason I’m bagging his discarded mortar and broken tiles as our roof is redone. He greeted us cheerfully. I smiled and shook hands. Later I muttered to D “it galled me to do that” “Why?” “Because I looked as glad as when I greet you”.
This was a moment amid the conviviality for D to tell me some things. I was telling him about the filioque clause. Knowing D's aversion to any talk of religion I said “You won’t be interested in this. Did you know that the Latin and Orthodox Christian Churches have been split for over 1300 years over whether the son – Jesus – is ‘of’ or ‘from’ the Holy Ghost?" I couldn’t even get that right but he took my point.
“This is a small island. People know what happens. You’ve got someone else to do your roof. You told me that. I can handle that. I’m … (what was the word he used?) … I’m broad shouldered (it was better than that)… but (he mentioned Y who’d also been on our roof) thought we had an agreement with you, which we did and now you’ve got someone else. He’s not well pleased, in fact if you were younger, he’d have done what that door did and more.’ I could not speak. ‘You're surprised at two churches splitting straws for a thousand years. Things like that start with a word - one gesture, one action in a small world. Take your decision about your roof. It’s not a problem for me, but for Y it’s different. Now if you’d refused to shake X’s hand that could have caused the same problem.’ I kept silent, chastened. Our exchange was over swiftly, but its import wasn't diluted by another hour of friendly conversation. It ached as I went to my warm bed and was reading Kevin Andrews on the Greek Civil War while Lin went on varnishing our stairs.

'When the wood faileth, the fire shall go out: and when the talebearer is taken away, contentions shall cease. As coals are to burning coals, and wood to fire, so an angry man stirreth up strife.' Proverbs 26:20-21

'Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!' James 3:5-6

* * *
Kevin Andrews' conversation with a Cretan gendarme in Molái, in the Peloponnese, in a coffee-shop full of war weary men:

‘What solution is there?' he's asked towards the end of an evening 'What way do you propose for us?"
He replies ‘There’s only one way for a civil war to be won.’
‘What way?’
‘The hardest of all.’
‘What way?’
‘Moderation.’
He (the gendarme) nearly screamed. ‘Can you speak such a word – and to us!’
‘I said it’s the hardest of all.’
‘Do you say that for comfort? Is that another one of your labels?’
Then he calmed down rather suddenly and said, “In this age there’s only one thing for men of moderation to do, and a lot of them have done it already.’
‘The only thing they can possibly do,’ I said, ‘which is to work at –’
‘No, no. Not work at anything. Just kill themselves.’
The Flight of Ikaros Ch.4 p.78

* * *
On Sunday afternoon Lambros and his mates finished the roof. On Monday we got the money from the bank in town. Aln was up again with H in the afternoon to collect this, start work on our upstairs electrics and prepare for the installation of our wood stove. But they arrived to a stench. I’d put my overcoat on the back of a chair in our dining room and turned on the laptop to hear music. In doing that I’d overlooked the halogen heater on the same extension cord. While chatting to Lin in the garden I got a whiff of burning. My coat made of some synthetic fabric was smouldering. ‘Shit” With smelly smoke spreading through the house I dragged it outside and doused it. Ruined. “You idiot!” said Lin.



















Upstairs we started offering up the pipe to the stove. The installation was complicated by the roof overhang, the exact positioning of a supporting bracket, the angle of the flue-pipe, a piece of metal reinforcement embedded at just the wrong place in our wall...

The last few days

The men were here at 9.00. I’d been up earlier to see the sun rise. It rained all yesterday evening and into the night and, eating downstairs Lin, especially, kept waiting to hear the recurrence of drips through the roof, but Lambros and his men had sealed it with sturdy well laid felt - no nail holes exposed - over the old insulation.

This morning tiling has started. Alan popped in yesterday to make sure things were ready for him to do the electrics upstairs. Two of our first Corfu English friends from down the village visited. They mentioned they could recommend a plasterer. We’ve measured for the stove chimney and went on a stroll in the afternoon, after the builders left, to see some examples of chimneys. Down one of the many Korakiana alleys we encountered M, with whom I’d exchanged e-mails, strolling home with a fine Labrador beside him. He was joined by S who runs stables off the Ano-Kato road. They asked us in for wine. The day was going well. Back home we finished making sure the two planks fitted the gap between door and wall between kitchen and guest bedroom. My cod carpentry, with Lin’s measurements and markings succeeded. Now all that’s needed is finishing touches – a pair of handles for the rust-cleaned lock, paint and lacquer stripper, glass, putty - or its modern equivalent - and tacks for the panes and a couple of small bolts.
* * *
Reading more of Kevin Andrews The Flight of Ikaros, I see parallels with Nicholas Gage’s Eleni. Gage is sometimes seen as writing an anti-communist tract - his op-ed pieces in the New York Times used as evidence. He's too intelligent; too good a researcher for that. It was the village – the horio – that had conspired against his mother in ways made up of vices we have in common.

Plato is called anti-democratic. What democrat isn’t, who knows himself and humans - perhaps Kazantzakis’ Zorba – but only after leaving the earth. Plato said ‘justice in life and the conduct of the state is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of citizens’. My ancestor, Maine, warned idealists for democracy that 'democracy is just another form of government’; its success depended, he argued so well in Popular Government, on the constant exercise of moral intelligence to prevent it falling into the same despotic excesses the idealists presumed exclusive to monarchy.

Enclosed in the intimate company of family and neighbours for months in occupied Amsterdam, Anne Frank wrote ‘I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged.’ (thanks to Information Clearing House 28/10/07 for the Plato and Ann Frank quotes)

Henry Miller visiting Greece, on the eve of its invasion, sees this and excoriates it in the attitudes of some of the Greeks, especially those on return visits from America, and foreigners he encounters. Kevin Andrews travelling between Athens and the rest of Greece during the civil war see it, and unlike Miller is historically well-informed and politically aware, knowing much, for the times, about the foreign policies of the great powers. A propos of the events surrounding 3 December 1944 - the Dekemvria - he notes Churchill’s self-quoted willingness to ‘strike out of the blue without an preliminary crisis.’ (V.11 p.251 The Second World War – tho’ did KA read this and some other histories for his revised edition of 1983? No I think he’s too honest a writer.)

Wed 6 Feb: Where in September the sun appeared round the corner of the mountain to our east, this mornng I first saw it further south over Sayiada, rising over nimbus that took the gentlest shade of pink amid the dawn cirrus. To the south east two prelates, dining with he Holy Ghost in paradise, continued a slightly inebriated argument about their host’s relationship to his father before dissolving into one and disappearing in the spreading blue.
We’ve stayed in the village today. I texted birthday greetings to our son. Washing dried in the sun. In the evening I took ours off the line, but neighbours’ washing still flapped in a gentle breeze carrying the scent of woodsmoke. Earlier Lin planted our garden with things she’d found on nearby waste ground. I bagged more rubble. Together we eased a dusty pine door out of a mess of nail-filled lathes in the apothike, and, with a little chiselling, fitted it back in the gap between the guest bedroom and the kitchen where it had once been. I dug out the pair of brown painted planks that had completed the space. It’ll need handles and new glass. To fit the door required scraping layers of old paint off the hinges, waking them up with penetrating oil. I’ve done the same with the bathroom window hinges. “Change that cracked obscure glass. Put in plain glass so I can see to Albania from that little window” said Lin. On the next warm day the metal frames can be lifted out, cleaned of paint and rust and taken to the glazier when we go there to get safety glass for the bedroom door.
* * *
I finished reading a chapter half way through Kevin Andrews book, where he admits himself worsted in an argument by a young gendarme who was blaming all Greece’s problems on the Americans – primarily by giving too little too late in the interests of their own high politics. It occurred to me that one of Greece’s bad ideas was that they’d once had and could recover an Aegean empire, when what they actually had was a civilisation that spread beyond the whole Mediterranean.

But we know these ideas are born of yearning among bread-fearers and neo-condors who think civilisation and empire the same – rather than in tension. Reading the profile in Athens News of Archbishop Christodoulos’ ‘troubled career’ I thought of the celestial scene I saw recently among the ‘extras’ on the DVD of Zorba that Cacoyannis left out (if he could make it look as if Anthony Quinn could dance, making him God would have been simple), but he knew that, in this case, what worked in prose wouldn’t in film. In the extract, Zorba, as the Pantokrator among cotton wool clouds, meets sinners arriving for selection at the gates of Paradise. He lets them all in. Kazantzakis thus implying they’ve had their time in hell. The film focused brilliantly on the contrasting character of Greek and Englishman, giving northerners a lasting, but over-singular, conception of Greek character, whereas Kazantzakis wrote the scene in heaven as the moral context for a study of Alexis Zorba - less as a Greek than as a character he'd known.
* * *
Last weekend, at evening time, Aln arrived with Lula, Paul and Lambros – our rescue crew – and discussed our roof. We were allowed a word or two on other subjects, but their business was in Greek, putting things right ‘up there’. A good feeling. We’ve felt this reassurance before, but this time it came with an ISO grade.
* * *
Yesterday it was nice to gaze through the window from a warm room at streams of rain carrying small leaves down the path beside the house, the gloom lit now and then by lightning. Thunder played behind a tympani of water drops falling into the containers upstairs while Lin sat reading with an eye on our washing drying before two halogen heaters. Today we’re as grateful for dazzling sun and a gentle breeze to dry the next wash on a line across the garden. Aln phoned to say things would start this morning and that he’d be up tomorrow, then while Lin was showering, Lambros arrived with two mates to shoulder six rolls of felt – thicker than used previously and with ISO markings - to the balcony. Lambros looked at our buckets and smiled ruefully, pointed upwards and signing gently upwards ‘Seemara - problem over’. Now if this was an episode of Casualty … but Democracy Street is neither soap nor series, it’s our life and we woke this morning with all Greece lying beside us. I can glimpse the Adriatic Sea on the other side of the island from our drying balcony – Penta Islet – Πεντανήσια, off Cape Varka, seems from here still attached to the coast due south beyond Mt Paramanos, while the mainland shore, though it’s hazing up in the warm, would be visible to Parga and beyond but for the local hill between us and Dassia. The cat Bubble rolls jocund in the sun, miaous for attention and flirts lasciviously with a marmalade tom twice her size who’s scared by her. Ladies are putting out washing on many balconies. I distinctly heard several lemons asking to be picked - now.
* * *
The knife we found in the apothiki - the length of one of our table knives - was perhaps made by a local smith or bartered from a peddler of useful things. The blade has a slender flattened top, gently tapering fore and aft and broadest in the middle, such as you don't see, and which is probably unnecessary, on a factory-made knife. The initials ΣΚ seem stamped in the blade. We cleaned off a little rust. I can't explain the green paint on the blade and handle. To extend their shared life six turns of copper wire have been made round hilt and haft with the end nearest the blade running under the turns and back to a deft twist - a mend that makes the knife as robust as the day metal and wood were first joined. Its blade could take a sharper edge but can still cut bread. We don't know its age or its wood. I imagine beech, as in chair legs, but olive is common here. I suppose someone might accuse me of Elginism. "You can't bear to leave things where they are, to return from whence they came. Such fear of time! Such lack of trust in human ingenuity! These things were made and can be made again as and if needs be."

In Ano Korakiana

The drinks are made of juice from some of our blood oranges. The books, CDs and DVDs I bought, from all those I’d gathered in the last fortnight, were Angelopoulos’s Τοπιο στην Ομιχλη or Landscapes in the Mist (with English subtitles), another version of Theodorakis' setting of Axion Esti, in which the soloists include Grigoris Bithikotsis, 30 Nocturnes by Manos Hadjidakis (which I’d given Lin for Christmas), the film of The spy who came in from the cold which I've not seen for decades, The Third Man, and an inexpensive CD of songs bought on ebay called Ανάμνηοη Σμύρνης – laments for the destruction of Smyrna. For books I’ve bought a Robert Wilson thriller, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and Kevin Andrews’ The flight of Ikaros. My detached liberal histories remain in Handsworth for the moment.

Writing on contentious subjects – and what else is worth reading – brings to mind that hoary distinction between the separate roles of egg and bacon in breakfast. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed. Eleni by Nicholas Cage is committed and should perhaps be read in conjunction with The Flight of Ikaros. Its author makes early mention of a group of shaven headed young men on his inter-island steamer, guarded by soldiers with rifles, on their way to the island concentration camp of Makronisis - having spent the war years in the mountains fighting the invaders of Greece.

Reading these books about the Greek Civil War, a chicken, like me, can be confronted with the difference between themselves and the bacon makers. I still strive, with the books of liberal historians – like Veremis and Koliopoulos (who, push come to shove, I'd strive to defend with bacon fervour) – to maintain the position of a chicken, but perhaps I should endure the confusion of listening simultaneously to Gage and Andrews. They are very different people.

Henry Miller’s loathing of war and eschewal of possessions puts him in the bacon party, but then I recall the story of his ‘colossus’ - George Katsimbalis - on his own, starting to sing the Greek National Anthem - the Hymn to Freedom - at a funeral in occupied Athens for the great poet Palamos, under the guns and eyes of Nazi soldiers, being joined in the second verse by ‘a fat Corfiot’, and then by the whole crowd. Perhaps Miller should be read beside Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy as writing this I'm reminded of its ending, after a dying woman, who's hand he was holding after helping rescue her from a bombed house, says "I see they got you too'. His initial rage at her (one needs to read him to explain this) is directed to his realisation why some things must be fought, and again he didn't mean just Germans or Nazis:

'... for I had recognized in that moment what it was that Peter and the others had instantly recognized as evil and to be destroyed utterly. I saw now that it was not crime; it was Evil itself.'

Through some of Sunday I’ve been reading Dh’s thesis outline ‘Shiísm, politics and development in post Saddam Iraq’. It’s a reminder of my lack of knowledge of other worlds. I’ll e-mail it back today with comments. Dh describes the impact of Muhammad Baqir As-Sadr on ‘the formation, roles and development of governance’ and the continuing influence of his son – the Second Sadr – both killed by Sadaam. My friend aims to describe ‘a world of imbalanced power relations’, and to devise a model ‘whereby the hegemony of a given discourse within the community under consideration, is curtailed to give way to development and well being’. I find this subtle and exciting. He says before this ‘The dominance of a given religious discourse and a particular faith group, and how this discourse is related to the construction of reality, cannot be seen in value-judgmental terms.’ I think ‘cannot’ is too strong and have said as much to Dh. We chickens have some neck too.

‘On 19 February 1999, as he was heading home from Kufa Mosque after a fiery sermon delivered in the Friday prayer, Sadr’s car was intercepted by gunmen who showered it with automatic rifles.

SB comment:‘fire’ or ‘bullets’ not ‘rifles’ were in the shower.

His two sons, Mustafa, the oldest, who was driving, and Muámmal, next to the youngest died immediately. Sadr was taken to a hospital in Najaf center and died there. News, from various sources, confirmed the regime’s involvement in the incident. Delegates from Saddam were sent to the hospital to confirm Sadr’s death.

SB comment: So often the innocent get caught. Should Sadr, though he should have lived, have traveled with his children. Sorry I lose my academic detachment. Lin said "They were intelligent young men and probably knew the risks and chose to share them with their father."

I have been drawn into another world by Dh’s writing, having to concentrate on pointing out small errors of grammar. Here in England, and even in Greece (so long as I respect the flag), I can say what I like – except shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, calling for attacks on other ethnic groups, praising paedophilia on the internet or joking about bombs to airport security – and fear little. One could be killed in a street in Birmingham for not showing ‘respect’, but in the public domain I’m free to say more or less what I like and the powers that be will defend my right to do that. In the world Dh describes, and has long inhabited, men and women say things in public which can lead to their imprisonment, torture and death and – worse – the imposition of similar penalties on family and friends - a hideous double punishment. It is not that my milieu doesn’t demand courage, but not this kind, which I associate with England and the rest of Europe up to and during the Reformation. It is strange and humbling to come across this world today. Dh has made it more real for me.

Sunday. The island lies under a wet overcast, with a distant beam of sun brightening the sea towards Igoumenitsa; a parade of white cloudlets over the strait and the lightest of south winds turning into rising rivulets of white mist as it encounters the wooded face of Trompetta. With my umbrella I strolled along wet Democracy Street to dump the rubbish in the bins beyond the platea.
* * *
Drip drip drippa drip-drip, drip drip drippa drip-drip … and so on - despite Aln clambering lithely on the roof on Saturday to staple interim cover over the existing mess of rucked and missing felt. Leftheris had said “Beaufort 10” and signed - pointing to the lower ground - serious damage to a brother’s house. I, aware of needing to curb exaggeration about wind, imagined this true. The roof, already bare of tiles through the work I’d stopped when I came in December, had been subject to the feral shucking of a big wind. F8 bangs on the door. F10 breaks and enters. Some felt strips had landed over the hedge opposite from Leftheris. A sheet of insulation, from a pile left on the balcony, hung in a tree. The neighbours had retrieved other wayward pieces. “The rain was coming down in sheets” said Aln later. Our roof is letting in rain. I woke Sunday morning to find Lin spreading plastic sheets and bowls on the upstairs floor. Most leaks were sorted by Aln later in the morning, but his best efforts had not sealed the other end. Rain came in the night. This time Lin woke to find me catching more drips. “That ceiling’s done for” she said gloomily.










On Tuesday evening we’d arrived safely at Kapodistria, having passed through security at Birmingham, Zurich and Athens. Shoe removal has become random, but our taxi could not drop us at the terminal at Birmingham – barriers instituted since the doctors’ fiery drive-in assault at Glasgow airport last year - meant a short walk with luggage to check-in. In Zurich a tin of chicken in cream sauce that Lin had forgotten to put in our hold baggage – so we’d have a swift supper if the shops were closed in Corfu - and which had been noted but passed hrough at Birmingham, was discovered by X-ray and confiscated. ‘The white sauce is the problem’ said the guard apologetically, throwing the tin in a bin. One of Kostas’ and Georgia’s cars was parked for us at Kapodistria. Lin drove the familiar route, on quiet roads, to Ano Korakiana via a supermarket. The house was chilly but most rooms were dry and soon warmed. Over a light supper we made lists, then unpacked. The electric blanket, plus two hot water bottles, warmed our bed. In the morning we’d begin errands. Check Summer Song, phone re work inside and outside the house, sweep and tidy balcony and veranda, start bagging the pile of rubble removed from the roof, read the water meter and pay the bill, buy another heater.