'On this Island...'

I first saw the seashore as a toddler. I was on a day trip with mum from York in May 1944 when Dad, his armoured regiment of Shermans maneuvering on the moors preparing for invasion, had a brief furlough. On the sand at Bridlington - or was it Scarborough - there were caltrop shaped tank obstacles mixed with barbed wire; the sea unapproachable. I first saw the sea as it should be when I was about 5 or 6 on a coach we'd boarded in London taking my great grandmother, Lucy Halkett (1866-1966) and my 4 year old sister for a week in Bournemouth. The driver stopped the coach on a gentle slope above the town on the edge of the New Forest so all on board could catch a glimpse of the start of their holiday - first sight of a blue horizon distinctly above the intervening trees. It was so wonderfully straight. ‘The sea!’ the children cried, other passengers too "the sea!". That was on a single highway like all the roads of the time before the coming of bypasses, dual carriageways and motorways. 

May has been different in Greece this year - 2025. News from home in Gloucestershire is of sunshine for days. Here it’s been cool. The shallow valleys below Ano Korakiana chilly in the evening. There've been regular showers and full nights of rain - all of which, with the hot times between 11.00 and 5.00 has been good for vegetables and the gift of wildflowers in the uncut meadows and along the verges I pass almost every day on my bicycle. 

A road between Doukades and Skripero

On May 1st Lin and I observed the tradition of turning a bunch of collected wildflowers and grasses into a wreath to display on the wall of the house, celebrating Πρωτομαγιά - a pre-Christian ritual coaxing food from the soil, not needed at the moment. The sun dries out the wreath in no time. On midsummer evening the wreaths are piled together and burned as young people leap together over the smoke and flames. It still happens. Our rather temporary Papas Evthokimos, unmarried and and just out of a monastery forbade the celebration which under Papa Costas - here 30 years until he died to lie beside St Athanasios Church - was allowed even encouraged - in the appropriative style of Christianity - in the yard of Agios Georgios, the village’s main church. 

“Why do people go to church?” asks our Dutch friend Gerard, bemused. I enjoy such questions and the surrounding silence. 

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent*” said the philosopher. Wittgenstein didn’t intend to limit enquiry or shy away from reason but he had a wise recognition of its potential clumsiness - note his imperative ‘must’ - treading softly in places where intuition has the greater reach. It was about being polite. Jenny, with Dutch no-nonsense puts me to gentle shame if I break silence with some derivative anthropological explanation “Simon, You are only interested in these things because you are very old and soon you will be dead.” Which is probably true. In the dusk of my long life I’m a lapsed atheist. I enjoy listening to famous atheists speaking of the utter ‘lack of evidence’ and, in Richard Dawkins’ case, kind puzzlement that anyone should be so mentally ‘avid’, as to need more than the ability to see and explore the wondrous beauty of the universe - infinite layers of the macro and micro - revealed again and again over eons by science and sweet reason. 

View from Ano Korakiana towards Vido Island on the edge of the Sea of Kerkyra

I sit on our balcony here and gaze across the horizons - to the east the sea of Corfu, as serene as an inland lake (some visitors mistake it so), between us - inland just over three miles - and the mainland of Epirus. With my old East German Zeiss monocular I examine distant fishing boats, and even smaller pleasure boats hired in season and yachts out for a day sail or cruising further between the town and Benitses or Cassiopi, north and south or further to the mainland port of Sayada or Parga or Preveza or other Ionian islands, Levkada, Paxos, anti-Paxos, Ithaca, Cephalonia and Zakinthos. 

The sea of Kerkyra lies just south of the channel between Corfu and Albania, a small diversion from the larger Adriatic, leading by a gentle course change eastwards to the port of Igoumenitsa whose ferries ply daily between Greece and the Italian ports of Bari, Brindisi, Ancona and Venice. We’ve sailed on all those routes over the 20 years we’ve lived here - now accredited ‘residents’ of Greece.  I see in a compressed view the smaller ferries - sometimes three even four at a time - coming and going to and from Igoumenitsa 40 kilometres away to Corfu, steering on azimuth.Watched for a while their courses follow a long gentle curve between the mainland and here, hiding all but their upper works behind the woods on Vido island opposite Corfu's main port. I glimpse occasional coasting tankers bringing fuel to the marina at Gouvia; also cargo ships carrying I don’t know what since I don’t see them dock in Corfu. Colossal cruise ships glide like moving tower blocks between the Tyrrhenian, and Adriatic to the Aegean sea and the Gulf of Corinth, docking for the day in Corfu, their passengers boarding coaches to the Old Port Square to join a leisurely bustle up and down the city's narrow paved streets. 

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

The shore of the Sea of Kerkyra at Ipsos (photo: Richard Baddeley)

*Wittgenstein's notes say such concepts as 'God, beauty, justice, love' are essential in being a human, but speaking of them cheapens our understanding of them. Other means of expression take over when words fail to express; other forms of art - poetry, rituals.