What I wanted them to see

Birmingham and the Black Country when they made widgets

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

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

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

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

What I wanted them to see

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

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

Downstairs bedroom

We waited their arrival late that afternoon.

My friend Antony sailing to Corfu

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

From Angelokastro

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

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

Helen and Anthony at Zissimos, Corfu

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

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

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

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

Under the walnut tree with friends

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

Two kinds of party on Corfu

Calypso and her dad, Paul on his 50th birthday

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

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

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

Invisible and incalculable

From England our daughter Amy emails us a picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gates of dawn

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

*** ***

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

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

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

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

Henry Maine at Cambridge

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

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

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

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

Mum enjoys Jacqueline du Pré playing Elgar's Cello Concerto

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

In Venetia above Ano Korakiana

The best of all possible worlds...

Common swallow tail on our balcony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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