It's still a good nine weeks away, but the first place we shall go when we get to Corfu is home - to unpack, watch the dawn and have a rest - given that we'll get into Kapodistria before four in the morning. In the early evening when it's still light we'll go to Agiotfest - a celebration held each summer in the village of Agios Ioannis in the centre of the island - 15 minutes drive from the city, about twenty from Ano Korakiana. As our friend Paul McGovern, the driving force behind Agiotfest, says: "When many people's domestic finances are at low ebb the Agiotfest and events of its type are just what the doctor ordered to step out of the gloom. So please turn out in your hundreds to enjoy this fabulous occasion where dancing is almost compulsory"
The Steve Gibbons Band which we know from our home town Birmingham is the headline act. Steve was heading the Dylan Project in the very successful first Agiotfest in 2009. This was the clip I made while we were enjoying that good evening of music, dancing, food and drink at Ag.Ioannis...
Friday 15 June, 1900-2300, Jazz and Pop Evening (with Stefania Kaloudis)
Saturday 16 June, 1900-2300, Chamber Music Evening (with Kostas Zervopoulos)
Also, free events on Saturday morning (11am-2.30pm), Open Air Buskers, during the Summer Fair
Running Order:
11:00 - Fair opens
11:30 - 12:45 : Rob Sherratt and Pavla Smetanova and Pavla's son (Piano / Sax / Flute)
13:00 - 13:20 : Chris Holmes (Guitar and Vocals)
13:45 - 14:15 : Jim Potts (Guitar and Vocals) and Raul Scacchi (Guitar): 'Backporch Blues'
...And there is another, neighbourly reason to choose Greece, for if my experience is anything to go by, there is a human story being enacted there about Europe itself that is touching the hearts of regular visitors. Hundreds of thousands of British tourists come to Corfu every year. In some resorts I visited, up to 70% of holidaymakers are from the UK and, of those, two-thirds have been before. They have made friends here...Amid the global uncertainties, there is a feeling among them not just of sympathy but of “there, but for the grace of God, go we”.
Summersong at Agni, Corfu
*** *** ***
I managed a few hours on the allotment on Thursday afternoon, planting some more runner beans, spreading more slug pellets, topping seeding weeds, watering - as it turned out unnecessarily - my seed beds. I driving the Handsworth Helping Hands transit van to the park compound, after which I shall pack for a flight to the Highlands to stay a few days with my mother, sister and niece at Inverarnie - and to walk.
Winding up the HHH meeting - John, Mike, Lin, Leslie, Denise and Oscar
Our little group got a lot of work done last night, finishing well before 9pm, It was pouring rain so I gave Denise a lift home. I typed notes as we met and will turn them into minutes while travelling.
*** ***
Easy flight from Birmingham. Long catch-up chat with my mum - things impossible by phone, including Skype. I had time for a walk with dog Lulu in the long evening; out of the house, over grid, over the esker, up the forestry track to the end of Inverarnie wood....
Strathnairn
...back by footpaths to Brin Croft. Strathnairn is carved by glaciers, notably Brin Rock in the background behind my right hand. Even I, a geological illiterate, can manage rough readings of how this place was formed 20,000 years ago. The valley floor is strewn with isolated boulders - erratics carried sometimes hundreds of miles in the ice and dumped as it melted - and eskers, built up by the meltwaters from the last ice sheet - winding mounds of turfed gravel, rather like railway embankments - enduring forms upon which humans apply their temporary marquetry.
In this wood, hardly a mile long, a half wide, I can pretend I'm getting lost, savouring the mildest apprehension; an echo of childhood stories where people, particularly children, are lost in woods, sometimes led there deliberately on the chance or in the hope they'd been eaten by wolves or bears. These tales scared me as intended and as I wanted. The idea of being lost was frightening and exciting - learnted before I became worried by the idea of being lost in a city or at sea. It included encounters in forests - with dangerous animals, spirits, people. The prospect of Pan - who brings terror in daylight. Since childhood the idea of being geographically lost is near inconceivable - almost a shame. In these woods that mix newer deciduous with serried forestry evergreens there are paths, the remains of paths, marshy clearings that I come at from different directions, small dribbling streams edged by cushiony sphagnum, wider lanes marked by the imprinted tread of big tyres on forestry vehicles and the shattered stems of smaller trees, sudden stretches of rusting wire fence, ridged gullies difficult to traverse, and recent smartly-made fences and gates with signage near the metalled road through the village. This is a wood I can enter at one end, proceed in one what I think is a direct line to its other end, to find myself leaving it at the end I entered. Perhaps I'll stumble upon the remains of some half-hidden village like those in the Grunewald by Lake Krumme west of Berlin. Perhaps I'll have a chance to walk my grandson Oliver through here; see if we can find a ginger-bread house.
...both 31. She had been an adviser in an insurance company, he had been a computer programmer. Unemployed and with no future in the city, three months ago they moved back to his mother's village on the island of Evia, Εύβοια, two hours' drive from Athens. "We wanted a new life in the countryside,'' Simu says. ''We have our own garden: tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, beans, corn. We will make our own olive grove.'' She works in a restaurant to earn them cash but they hope eventually to make a real living out of selling what they grow...Meanwhile, they love the traditional life. ''Every day we are swimming in the sea,'' she says with satisfaction. ''We get up early and collect the eggs. Right now Panagiotis is filling the ground with water and then he will fix the house of the chickens. I make marmalade and all the food for us to eat. We are very happy.''
"We are very happy"
I read these stories with intense interest and a mix of hope and scepticism, Having an inkling of how hard it is for me to grow just my own vegetables, I can guess what a test it will be, what perseverance and sheer guts will be needed, to grow enough vegetables to sell them as well. The earth can be a pig...Zola’s Earth demolished the rural idyll, mocked ‘back to the land’. John Berger, a century later, called it Pig Earth; that working the land is no refiner of character...and the 'traditional' life can be abusive, male-dominated, small-minded, gossipy, superstitious, stiflingly constrained. Tradition's etymology = delivery, surrender, handing down, delivery of doctrine...No, it was the journalist Aspasia Koulira who used this phrase to describe the opinion of Vasso and Panagiotis. What would be most desirable would be for people to make a new kind of village; a community which is sustainable but wisely selective about its 'doctrines'.
A balmy day yesterday. May's issue of TheAgiot - a local web based newsheet published monthly by our friends, Paul and Lula, in Agios Ioannis is running my account of the infamous frog farm scandal on page 6. Lin continues working on the shutters. Mid-morning we hear a strimmer at work and persuade an amenable municipal grass cutter to spare the harebells gathering on the path below our garden. Growth, that would once have been kept gratefully close-cropped by villagers’ goats, sheep and donkeys, has to be cleared by the Demos from miles of paths, verges and commons across the island to lessen fire hazard as it turns to tinder in the heat of summer.
The pollen released set me sneezing, especially as I’d already climbed through our kitchen window to clear the weeds in the narrow space between our house and our neighbours' garden wall.
“Watch out for snakes and scorpions when you’re down there” warned Lin. All I saw were lizards and some cracks in the sink waste pipe which I covered with duct tape.
Yesterday was Lefteris’ birthday. He’s the same age as me - younger by fours days over a month. We were invited to lunch from two, bringing presents and sitting down to a table of goodies and conversation that ranged over 'our' village, the Easter holiday, the death of Osama bin Laden and the 'wedding' about which Natasha knew more than we. We thought Kate – now Katherine – looked like a sensible sort who’d be good as future Queen to William. It was impressive to see all the horses and carriages and crowds down Whitehall and the Mall where I enjoy cycling when in London. Seeing it on their screen I felt a frisson for Westminster Abbey, my local church for the six years I was at school next door, where I sang and, when senior, read the Lesson. We laughed at the short clip of a verger doing a cartwheel in the knave. All very English, though isn't he from New Zealand where they're even more English? Lunch continued with sweet sweet things, small light cakes with honey and quince and raisins and sugar to choice.
Dimitra arrived with greetings for her grandfather and, ensuring our fingers weren’t still sticky, we got to going through one of Lefteris and Vasilikis’ family photo albums, with small nostalgic black and white pictures of when they were married and young - vignettes - seriously handsome and beautiful and, as pictures were thirty years ago, allowing composed faces that endure rather than toothy ads for dentistry.
We emerged into late afternoon, having using up too much of the day for further work. This is when grown-ups are excused to rest emptying the house of children licenced to play the rest of the day, but all siesta Lin continued painting shutters - the ones we’ve altered by covering the louvers to make them into old Corfu ones. These were fixed with glue and tacks, then undercoated, after the plywood insets had been treated with preservative.
Then comes the job of filling the small gaps around each cover and the repairing of cracks and filling of the holes made by the tacks. Once this has dried, each shutter gets an undercoat of green with a final finish. The job goes on and on and this is just one set of shutters. "We'll leave these on through the summer heat. If the plywood hasn't buckled we can convert the others." Also painted – primer, undercoat and two coats of green – are the four pieces for the shutter frame. We are fixing this first set of recovered shutters in front of a new metal window frame only in place since 2005. I, having drunk more of Lefteris’ wine was sleepy and indolent, watching Lin but now and then snoozing in the sun thinking of the throaty croaky voice of Papa Lazarue in The League of Gentleman muttering in Gippog “You’re my wife now” or Hannibal Lecter “I'm giving very serious thought...to eating your wife” or Don Corleone mumbling from Marlon Brando’s cotton wool packed jowls "But I didn't know until this day that it was Barzini all along." Later I woke from dreams I’d forgotten.
** ** **
We skyped Amy the other night; found her at home with Guy and Liz and the puppies. Each puppy was held up for us to see as we sat outside Sally’s in Ipsos.
“They’ve all been sold” said Amy
“How much?”
“£150 each and we’ve been careful about checking who they go to.”
We got onto to talking about how Amy and another WPC had been trying to deal with a gang of youths who were using loud foul language in public. When persuasion failed they’d tried to arrest them. The youths resisted. Amy was pushed over into the road and got an egg-size bruise on the back of her head.
“So what happened?” asked Lin
“They got off”
“How?”
“The CPS need a 95% success rate for prosecutions. The lawyer who works with us - or should - said my colleague, who was also thrown to the ground, had charged them with ‘breach of the peace’ instead of ‘disorderly conduct’. Pushing me and my fellow officer to the ground, instead of being a compound offence of ‘resisting arrest’, amounted to ‘reasonable force’ in resisting a ‘false arrest’.”
Such casuistry has long caused whingeing in the canteen, a precision about the interpretation of civil rights balanced by police misdemeanours on that score – one exacerbated by the other - but this being my beloved daughter I found it tricky to stand back.
“I’m proud of you” I said “for not being angry or bitter. For your grasp of the details. A passing car could have injured you or worse.”
John misread his immaculate timetable - the times crossed over the turn of the page - and we turned up at Darwin Airport this morning to find we'd missed our scheduled flight to Melbourne via Alice Springs. Six hours later we're waiting on an alternative - direct to Melbourne - that should get us home to Bendigo just after midnight. I can't imagine a nicer way to wait - chatting to each other and to strangers, blogging, emailing, phoning, snacking and gazing. There's something about concourse limbo that excuses inaction - giving us unexpected freedom to think and write and read.
** ** **
Extract from an email from someone met on a seminar:
Bran Nue Dae - released 2009, official website and - Samson and Delilah by young Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton ... 'an extraordinary young filmmaker with a unique style and much to say. A very tough film. Watching it, I felt I was in the hands of a master, as I feel when I'm watch a Pedro Almodóvar film. Now I know that's big praise but I'm sure you would be profoundly affected by this film...'
... and a small piece by way of notes for the talk I want to give between drinks at the Durrell School one evening next February on page 6 of the November Agiot and pleased to see Paul has posted my YouTube sketch of the Agiotfest09 evening on the home page of the event's website
Aboriginal aesthetic expression is in itself political, since Aboriginal culture has not 'learned' to de-politicise the aesthetic. Therefore, representations of landscape in a contemporary Aboriginal production such as Bran Nue Dae necessarily reflect a political rather than merely 'cultural' aspect of Aboriginality. The motif of the journey, too, by evoking what is in effect an Aboriginal political practice (the song cycle), also reflects an Aboriginal politics - what might be termed a politics of movement. (p.8)
We’ve sat at the tables of friends and neighbours since arriving a week ago. A village offers proximity; what some want, and what some yearn to escape. Our first night home on Democracy Street we were sitting on a balcony at a table laden with food beneath a vine canopied balcony overlooking the darkened island. I’d climbed upstairs, burst on the assembled company, like a dog just released from kennels, tail wagging the rest of me. Kiss embrace kiss, arms outstretched, broad grin more kisses and handshakes
“Hi hullo hi, it’s so good to see you all. Hi Mark. Hullo Sally. Martin, Angela, hullo. Nick hi. Hullo Nancy!” - and a protest from little Estelle as my gross figure invaded her space.
“Sorry Estelle.”
“Slow down. Sit down. Have a beer,” said Mark
As we’d dropped off luggage at the house the Leftheris sat outside round joined tables finishing supper.
“Sit. Wine.”
“No no” “yes yes”….and also cake, sweet figs in ouzo stuffed with almonds and a discussion of marrows.
“In England we haven’t been able to eat outdoors.”
“In Greece we haven’t been able to eat indoors!”
Later a night breeze let in through open windows cleared any staleness in the house. We slept without covers and let the fan work for us until we turned off the bedside lights, waking to the shifting sounds of radios, children playing, grown-ups chatting and a digger working on the lower road. To the shop for a loaf and milk but no cigarettes. “The police came. I have no licence.” The derelict space across the path where the cats roam and raise their kittens has been cleared and tidied for sitting out with a concrete path cleared, its stone margins painted white, a hammock slung in the shade of a walnut tree. Our garden, so bare when we left, is filled edge to edge with a hairy leaved marrow plant grown from a seedling bought in May and watered by Mrs L. The cats have multiplied – kittens mixing brindle, tabby and marmalade.
* * *
I went down to the harbour at Ipsos. Summer Song’s engine turns but doesn’t start. What is it with me and machinery? Dave, our boat’s paramedic, fiddles. “It was turning without compression.” The spring that holds a small lever to let the engine turn over had failed. Push the lever towards the bow. Turn the key. Engine starts. Despite the heat I set to putting on the sails, attaching the tiller, the sheets; put up the cabin hood; check the bilges are dry and the holes that drain the cockpit clear.
On Sunday evening came the storm, descending from the north west it bounced from Trompetta over to Albania, whose mountains hurled it back to the slopes of Pantokrator, and so forth, reverberating between mighty obstacles like a demented pinball. it descended with torrents of rain on the south side of the crags above the village laying on a display of lightning that compassed the sky, eventually rumbling off towards Paxos cuffing the mountains that got in its way.
Waiting at the bank in Corfu town last week we met Sophia from AnoKorakiana.
“Are you going to St Isidoras on Sunday? Every August on the last Sunday of the month. It’s the church on the way up to Sokraki.”
Sunday morning we rose earlier and walked through the village while it was cool, heading upwards through the narrows of little Venice. As we approached the seventh bend on the Sokraki road we heard chanting and so came to St Isidoras and to the door of the little church where a narrow mezzanine hangs over the road and we could lean on the sturdy spinach green railings for an hour as people of all ages came, lit candles, made the sign of the triple cross, bustled about the chapel, kissed the pictures of the saints – Isidoras and Fanarios. After the service the priests led a procession a little further up the hill to the boundary of AnoKorakiana and back. Tables and chairs were placed in the little square beside the church, invisible from the road, and cakes and coffee and sweet bread were passed around. A large man beckoned us to sit at the table. Places were made for us; plates brought. Another man who’s face I’d often seen at events in the village fetched us delicious custard pastries. “These are in honour of Saint Fanarios whose day was three days ago.” “Your name is Kirios...?” I asked “I am Mr Savvanis...gradually we are becoming friends." [Liana's translation from the village website tells me that Savannis is a name associated with AnoKorakiana since 1473, and I think I was speaking with Dr. Spiros Savannis, a paediatrician. Later note: Ano Korakiana's President living on the Platea, sitting centre left to the right of Pappas in the B & W picture]
* * *
I am struck here by the familiar torrent of enraged and frustrated breast beating that has followed the latest fires in Athens which over four days devastated 20,000 hectares of forest and farmland and 150 homes in the expensive Athenian outer suburbs. The answers are here in the professional and managerial zones - prediction, prevention, staffing, zoning laws, inter-speciality collaboration, public education - but the gap between these measures and the political will and capacity to implement them is glaring. This is less about increasing managerial and professional competence though of course that’s vital, but much more on increasing political competence and capacity.
Law 3208/2003 in the Hellenic Constitution blurs the definition of 'a forest', suspending penalties for destroying forests and building on the land on which they grew. Some say the failure of the Greek polity to mature (and I should be humble following our scandals over MPs' expenses in the UK and vote-rigging a few years back in Birmingham) is because Greece has been for so long encouraged to play the part of a smaller piece on an international chessboard. Almost parented by greater powers, its political classes have never gained the momentum to abandon Greece’s history of suzerainty. When the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 introduced competitive exams for the British civil service, Greece had been independent for hardly 25 years, relying on a monarch chosen for them by the great powers. Athens had for centuries been a provincial town in the Ottoman Empire. If we are still struggling with the idea of government detached from the tribe, little wonder the Hellenic polity still privileges the nod and the smile that mark the grain of a village community; all the small gifts that amid the turbulence of the times, impart the sense of joining a larger family and the intimation that if you flow with that grain you will be protected and liked. The concept of professional neutrality and the mind-set that treats partiality with distaste even contempt and shame is far from being embedded here. Indeed it can seem like chilly detachment rather than a respected principal of daily conduct in public service. Jobbery's a norm. Clientalism, except among reforming journalists and diaspora Greek academics is not a tainted practice here. Patronage feels like reciprocity; favouritism a civil duty; nepotism a selfless commitment to family. Much that is wrong feels right.
Letter on a forum commenting on this NASA false colour image showing the fire scar:
Hhhmmm, in NYC there's a logo: "See something, say something!"
This is what Greeks should do with regards to development in these areas.
See something, say something to your local police who will then go and tear down the developments. Only this way, with the full creation and execution of the law will these fires stop. I'd like to see a list of the big and small developers going into the burned areas.
[Words on the fires from An American in Athens]
* * *
We were picking blackberries in the forest, eating as we went along. Ungainly – I’d clambered up a bank for richer pickings scratching my wrist on the hardened thorns of an old bramble coil, bringing up beads of bright blood. With one hand full of fruit, I slipped. My friend, one finger, similarly scratched, reached up and gripped my wrist helping me down to the path.
Last week in England, Dhiaa and I were once again in the Barber among pictures made centuries before us to be looked at centuries after us. We stopped from time to time to discuss a picture’s provenance, the sensibilities of the times – scenery lying discretely, sometimes exquisitely, behind humans, who, over time, recede; even disappear, as landscape becomes the artist’s interest. Ruben’s Flanders was ‘picture of the month’ - a commentary for visitors telling of sun coming out after a shower.
“People have fought over this land for centuries – turning a lot of it to mud. It’s not as hilly as Rubens makes it.”
“There’s a man - hardly discernible.”
We peer at a farmer beside a hedgerow, locked, to the landscape by a few deft brush strokes. Trusted by the staff, we almost touch the precious canvas.
“Yet the country’s touched by humans; fields and hedges to the horizon.”
We looked at more unpeopled landscapes, marked by distant roofs, a hazy castle on a towering escarpment above cattle beside a ford, church towers or minarets, more meadows. Views like Wordsworth’s from Westminster Bridge. Kind pictures where the quiet of countryside matched the serenity of the place where we were quietly chatting, having as is often the case, the gallery almost to ourselves. I said
“Except for the news I have no images in my head of your country - its trees, gardens, marshes, rivers, highlands and desert.”
“I need to go back to Iraq for the next part of my thesis, to see people.”
“Can you not use email, skype, the phone?”
“Only so good.”
“I doubt anyone wants you to go” I said.
“That’s true and things are getting worse. The Americans are talking to Baathists who argue only they can rule.”
Dhiaa’s children’s English is coming on fast and his eldest had special commendation from his headteacher.
“But I have only so much longer of my grant then…”
Dhiaa’s sent me his completed literature review. We debated - as we do - differences between reason and religion; the evidence of research and of revelation; discussed my preference, my hope, that humans would be reasonable.
“But that’s why we arrived at the Absurd” he said gently.
Dhiaa’s masters thesis from the University of Basra, one that won the highest of grades, was A Pragmatic Study of 'Directives' in Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. In the Barber there’s a Magritte depicting grief, bought by the Barbers’ bequest after the 19th century fell into the 20th.
“You know that Mark Mazower’s proposition is that the 20th was only worse than Europe’s 19th because in its first half Europe experienced at the hands of its dictators what it had been dealing out to its colonies across the globe."
I mentioned crop circles to Dhiaa. He’d not heard of them. Rajinder who is comfortable with revelation has no doubt they’re man-made, while I puzzle, not because I don’t agree but because I don’t understand how people could be so clever, so crafty about being unseen when making such patterns.
“But people are clever” Rajinder said “They know they can’t make patterns with trees, so they use corn.”
I hadn’t thought of that. You can do a lot with corn over a midsummer’s night.
* * *
Paul phoned reminding us of Agiotfest'09 for which we've bought tickets. He mentioned that a piece I'd send to The Agiot about the Ionian Protectorate, about the tension within Ionian politics between the radicals who wanted enosis and those who wanted to see an autonomous Septinsular Republic, was in the September edition just out, along with publicity for concerts at Ag.Ioannis where we had wine with Lionel Mann last week.
John misread his immaculate timetable - the times crossed over the turn of the page - and we turned up at Darwin Airport this morning to find we'd missed our scheduled flight to Melbourne via Alice Springs. Six hours later we're waiting on an alternative - direct to Melbourne - that should get us home to Bendigo just after midnight. I can't imagine a nicer way to wait - chatting to each other and to strangers, blogging, emailing, phoning, snacking and gazing. There's something about concourse limbo that excuses inaction - giving us unexpected freedom to think and write and read.
