A day in Sarandë, Albania - 'Faleminderit'

Democracy Place in Saranda, Albania

I shall view the town of Saranda as less distant, less foreign, having just been there for the day. Lin and I passed through there once before - during a guided tour to Butrint. We were a lightly shepherded group; an unpatronising guide, coaches, laid on food and drink; an enjoyable and fascinating day to visit this old Roman resort – reward for favoured veterans of the empire. This time, in the afternoon before my trip, I bought a return ticket for €33 from Katerina at Sarris Lines in a corner office on a small road leading out of Mandouki onto Xenophoros Stratigou.
The next morning I was waiting before 9.00am in a cheerful crowd of mainly ‘all-inclusives’ by the doors of the Corfu New Harbour Customs House, my cycle folded, my bag provided with folded jacket, passport and money
“They will take euro’s. Ask for change in euros”.

Arriving at Sarandë on a ferry from Corfu

At the dock in Saranda, I and two others are beckoned by an immigration officer away from other passengers heading towards coaches, their paperwork pre-handled. I’d heard one officer on the quay shout to a waiting colleague that we were ‘from kerkyra’, which sorted me out. Passport swiftly inspected, I was directed through a pristine office with a mirrored lift to take me and my bike up to the street - Rruga Mitat Hoxha.
Close to at last, I missed a sense of direction. Our previous guided visit had spared thinking on the arrangement of places. I wheeled to the modest church just over the road that Father Militiades had told me about.
“It is just where you come out from the harbour”.

Kisha Ungilore Evangelical Church of Saranda

It was closed. I would have visited to see a copy of an Albanian Holy Bible that Father Militiades (our friend at the Lighthouse in Kontokali) had a part in getting translated and spread at the end of the Communist era, so some old people without communion for over 70 years, he told me, could take bread and wine from a priest.
As I do on a bicycle, I sought higher ground, walking up a steepish street I left the city’s more polished frontage. I was soon cycling on a level road between modernist tower blocks – Saranda’s principal architecture. The feeling of freedom was almost palpable. This street was one-way. On a bicycle with little traffic I edged where I wanted. The towers were not, as is often the modernist scheme, in rows, but, probably in line with the rising form of their hard stone footings, placed where foundations best fitted the curve of the hill on which the town is built, and still rising.

No tourist guide on places to see in Saranda points to where I was cycling on a smooth road with frequent speed bumps, winding between pavements dotted with small trees.
The internet, as I read it, tells us of places outside the city, with passing reference to tenuous classical ruins inside. I’d like to know the story of the city as it developed from the 1950s through to the end of the reign of Enver Hoxha, when Saranda in Albania and Cassiopi on Corfu faced across the last vestiges of the post-war iron curtain, and people died at the hands of their own people, shot swimming the straits, as East Germans died trying to clamber through the wires and over the concrete of the Berlin Wall.
I roamed between small fruit and veg shops gathering a picnic. From a bakery I bought a poppy seed baguette, cut in half to fit my bag. I tried to recall the Albanian for ‘thank you’ but despite courteous tutoring I forgot it again at the next shop.

Under shade in the foyers of tower blocks were people having soft drinks and coffees. The alphabet of signs was all Latin – momentarily exotic when I’m so used to Greek signs. Change for my Euros was given in Leks. The sums were so small, it seemed ungracious, since they welcomed my foreign money, to ask shopkeepers to return me change in Euros. I bought a dried sausage, a bottle of chilled Tirana Beer and a chunk of feta picked from a floating pool in a freezer and cut to my choice with the help of sign language, wrapped in nearly grease proof paper.
I cycled further towards the northern skirts and came to a cemetery, graves strewn in terraces across the back of a hill above the sea. Besides and opposite the cemetery wall were flower shops – stocked with brightly coloured artificial bouquets. In the distance on an elevation was a mosque with minaret. I had not lost height, and as is the delightful way with cycling where pain, in the end, brings gain, I continued up a new minted road that turned back towards the town, tarmac glistening and smelly.

Between and beyond the widening panorama of tower blocks was the sparkling blue sea, the coast winding down to the Greek border, and, over the way, in haze, Corfu and the coned summit of Pantokrator from which I’ve often gazed down on Saranda’s clustered blocks.

Mount Pantokrator from Saranda. My view is usually the other way around

My new road joined a grander carriageway with a smooth surface on which I coasted gently back into what I could now recognise as the centre of town. There was little other traffic and what there was did not hurtle by in the way that can worry me on a bicycle.

The city is climbing upwards. From afar you can see the form of new access roads for new building carving up toward the city’s scrubby ridge.
As I descended streets became more inhabited, even in the heat of the early afternoon. There were coffee shops, fast-food places, people, cars, scooters, even bicycles, but none of the exotic clothes I see daily in Birmingham. I was searching for a bus station. There isn’t one. Travellers are offered various bus stops and perhaps an office like the one on Rruga Onhezmi – a street crossing my gentle descent. There I could buy a ticket to Tirana – the right stop “just over there” on Rruga Vangjel Andi.
“You buy your ticket here”

Tickets for Tiranë from here

“And how for Durrës, Vlorë, Gjirokastër (birthplace of Enver Hoxha, and the great writer Ismael Kadari of Broken April whose peace with the dictator is sometimes queried but probably produced the artist's most subversive work) and Himara?”
“Buy your ticket on the bus”
Now feeling hungry I strolled a few yards from where Rruga Onhezmi crossed Rruga Vangjel Andi where I entered a square grassed space full of trees, paths, a shallow pool, shrubs, flowers and wooden benches - Parku Miqësia.

I laid out my picnic on a empty shaded bench, applied my bottle opener to the cold lager and cut a slice of beef tomato, bread and a piece of astringent feta. The cheese and tomato combined in my mouth, followed by a bite of bread, a slice of sausage and a swig of lager.  I repeated this combination. Birds sang, and across the park, small children with cries of delight and occasional shrieks, played on swings and roundabouts to familiar cautions from parents. There was an amplified call to prayer, on a pleasant pitch, from a mosque near the park. Later I heard a church bell ringing on one note. I finished my picnic with an orange, juicy but not as sweet as in Corfu. Bottle and peel went in a convenient litter bin.
Leaving the park I came upon a pavement shoe cleaner whose invitation I didn’t ignore. I sat and placed my feet on a stand as he ran his duster over my brogues. He picked up a small bottle of black polish, and poured it into a small container which spilled onto the pavement. He opened a bottle of water to clean it up, which sent a black delta of liquid polish over the rest of the pavement. His companion lounging on the low park wall was holding his hand to his mouth, snickering. With great care the shoe polisher applied black polish to the edge of the soles of my shoes, leaving a rough plimsoll line along the light brown leather.
“Ah!” I thought “an authentic Albanian way of polishing shoes”.
After a few seconds I saw that he had no brown polish. His companion’s suppressed sniggering continued. The polisher made a few more lavishly futile strokes on both my shoes with his rag, and clapped his hands
“Voilà, mister!”
“Your name?” I asked
“Kiku!”
I held out what was now a medley of small change from Corfu and Saranda and let him take his pick. 100 leks and – after hesitation – 2 euros; this sum, the cost of my entertainment, which the polisher’s mate had gratis.
Well eaten, I headed in the heat of the afternoon to the road that passes the Customs House, Mitat Hoxha, running just above the sea behind a series of new hotels. I’d heard gossip that these are financed from money of uncertain provenance around Cassiopi, opposite Saranda, 7 nautical miles away on Corfu. These hotels encroach on what was once a more public shoreline from which people from the town behind could go to enjoy the seaside via dirt roads leading to the beach. I wheeled my bicycle down a finely abraded concrete drive between two smart hotels to a beach where families and couples were splashing in the sea or lying under sunshades beside new laid decking.

These were no more hotel guests than I. A limpid sea, before a warm north west wind, sloshed and surged small waves against white pebbles. I put my specs and hat on the wood beside my bicycle, and stumbled into the inviting water in shoes and the rest of my clothes. Frolicking in the sea, I slid under, tasting salt, floating and swimming in and out of my depth.

Where I swam - facing Corfu

Ashore and cycling again, wind and sun dried my clothes in the hour. On Rruga Jonianët – a short walk from the arrival quay - I identified a bus stop for return journeys via Ksamil to Butrint – every hour on the half hour; an hour’s ride to Butrint.

Further along the same road, paralleling the seafront, is a discrete market, shaded stalls stretching inward from the street. Here I bought some honey, with a comb in the same jar, and a melon with its stalk attached - a present for John and Karen to whom I’d been complaining about irradiated melons that never ripen. They’d already brought me one to try from a stall on the road by Dassia.

By the harbour 

At the Customs House in Sarandë

At 17.00 (18.00 Albanian time) I passed simply through immigration and boarded my ferry. Shepherded passengers arrived in an organised rush and we were on our way back, skirting the Albanian coast, threading the narrows opposite Agni, crossing the wide bay off mid-Corfu to Vido and the new harbour where we crowded in an easy queue for Greek immigration. Katerina from Sarris Lines saw me standing by my bike and ushered me to the passport desk seeing me through without a glance
“You need to catch a bus, Mr Simon” she said, audible enough to save my embarrassment at the queue-jump.
“I could give you a lift to Dassia”
“That’s so kind, but the 20.30 Green Bus will get higher up to the village. Thanks so much, Katerina. I will buy my next ticket from you”
I cycled through town to the Green Bus terminal with 20 minutes wait for the last bus towards Sidari.

Sat up front on the bus to Sidari

It was Saturday evening. Among the passengers were young women dressed for parties and dancing. It pleased me that the infamous male gaze was kept in respectful check, these girls free to enjoy their spaces on the bus, absorbed in happy chat, my libidinous drifting diverted by a love affair of forty years. As requested I was dropped off at the junction of the Sidari Road with the 2 kilometre road to the village. I cycled and walked in the cooler evening, pinging my bell as I freewheeled down Democracy Street to join friends sitting outside Piatsa.
*** ***

Now the summer heat of Greece begins to require the preparatory caution required for winter’s arrival in England. Where I would be remembering to close doors, muffle chills that may enter and keep warmth that may escape, here I guard against heat – pulling in shutters to separate sun from the hope of breeze, opening windows so curtains can stir, prizing shade; walking charily in light clothes, prudent with exertion, careful when gripping metal railing or crossing scorching plaka in bare feet. What pleasure when the village, placed between slower cooling sea and faster heating mountains, is visited by one of Corfu’s local katabatic tempests, squalling like an express train along the village frontage, slamming untended doors and casements, gusting through shaded rooms, flinging up curtains, stirring loose papers.
Before cycling I apply sun cream to face, arms and neck. There’s a slope on the way into Skripero that requires work to ascend. It’s unshaded, with heat from above and off the tarmac. Sweat starts at my temples and seeps into my eyes – salty, stinging. Now I take care to stop and towel the sides of my face. I know my resting places. I know routes that have the kindest climbs and the best descents. For several weekends now I’ve cycled over to Dukades – about 5 kilometres – well prepared, enjoying the draught of my pace. Stopping now and then in shade; walking the last 100 metres up to the platea to rest the bike and myself and sip chill white wine at a table on the dappled plaka of the village square with John and Karen. Later they drive to their house below Ano Korakiana. I follow, cycling down the steep hill south from Dukades onto the Paleo road before turning left onto the country lane that leads through meadows, fences, high hedges, olive groves and vineyards back to Skripero. On the main Corfu-Sidari road I cycle gently down hill to the gravel track that leads to my friends’ home, on a rise among trees with views towards the village a mile away and the mountains above.
A barbecue will be starting. We sit where the shade is best, near the garden’s lower fence, against a grazing where the neighbour keeps sheep and goats. Their bells ring as they wander on their tethers. Now and then a ewe or nanny goat baas in protest as their growing young resist weaning, burrowing at their parents’ udders with wagging tails. Yianni’s a farmer. The village mayor has made an arrangement by which on Friday and Monday evenings Yianni and his wife will pass through the village driving his ‘Mad Max’ pick-up collecting bagged waste from named villagers - we’re on the list - who, being without cars, cannot take their household waste to the designated line of wheelie bins a mile from Democracy Street.
With the spreading aroma of meat on the BBQ, Mark arrives, from working. This Sunday there was another guest - his craft, once electronics - a neighbour from Flanders, who has entertaining prejudices against digitisation. He has, at home, a collection of old working radios. He believes in the recovery of analogue; the grander quality of music on vinyl and pictures on celluloid. He has a low opinion of Walloons - views delivered with a wry disarming smile. I wish we could pore over a larger map of the Low Countries, exploring pre-Belgian boundaries and adjoining nations, to extract in detail the topography of Jos’ discriminations; perhaps even down to villages. There are intellectuals who call this psycho-geography. What can you sense on a vinyl LP of Mozart, Leonard Cohen, Fauré or Freddie Mercury that you cannot on an ipod? What imprints itself in light on celluloid that doesn't on a digital camera? What's Jos' beef with Walloons? The anthropologist in me warms to understanding tribalism and the impulse to prejudice – in myself as much as in others - and isn't this encouraged; even stimulated post-analogue

NYRB 5th April 2018 Beware the Big Five

A New Year

So let's start new in 2013. The sun was bursting over the Victoria Jubilee. I tidied; removing old cabbage stems and slug ridden leaves, pulling weeds from the path, putting dead stalks on the compost. Janet caught me, and as she'd promised, gave me a bag of Jerusalem artichokes; a little note of hand written instructions.
"I slipped" she said "on some wet leaves the other day. My back still aches"
"Thank you so much, Janet. Just be careful"
"Put them in any time from now. Don't leave them in the bag or they'll get mildew"
Vanley was working on his plot - a model of a kitchen garden. I stopped to talk and grumbled about what a bad year it'd been.
"That was last year, Simon"
"I know I know. What can I plant now?"
"Try garlic"
I found a few cloves and planted them with the help of a dibber, but I'll get some fresher ones tomorrow.
My confidence has taken a step back. I'm ready to be surprised if anything springs from this rich damp earth - except weeds.
"None of your weeds are a problem" said Vanley "You got the deeper rooted one's out last year. Bother the others with your hoe. Dig them back in. Think of this as your food."
He makes it seem easy.
I found a clear patch; raked it and dibber planted the dry earthy tubers about six inches down.
"I saw you the other day picking up litter"
"Oh yes. Quarter of a ton of it. I get angry with the people who drop it, the council that doesn't pick it up and the manufacturers who produce so much packaging"
Vanley isn't much interested in mutual grumbling, so I didn't go on. Later when I was working on the plot he stopped by to have a look.
"Not too bad. Keep at it."
My friend Ziggi rang from London too ask how I was and we agreed to meet up in March. She has an allotment.
"Unlike bringing up a child"she said "you can make up in the next year for the mistakes you made the year before. There's always the prospect of renewal. I've come to enjoy the winter for the time spent in preparation; ordering my potatoes and other plants. I'm going to grow my onions from seeds this year. I'll be planting chard in March. In fact that's really when I'll start."
*** ***
Yesterday I was at the blood donor centre in Corporation Street.
"Well well well. It's your hundredth donation" said the nurse.
"Can you take my picture?"
"Yes" said the nurse
"What;s your name?"
"Lauren"
"You're good at this. I hardly felt the jab"
"When you've finished you can hold the blood"
She pulled out the needle, put a plaster over the little bruise in the crook of my arm, and handed me the pack with a pint of blood. I've never held that before. I didn't really feel anything very much but I sported a smile and I do feel quite proud like getting a Scout badge - not that I was in the Scouts.

*** ***

Richard Pine has written another 'Corfu Letter' in the Irish Times ~ 'Raw figures conceal richness of life behind Greek economic collapse':

A recent study, Understanding the Crisis in Greece, by two Greek economists, Michael Mitsopoulos and Theodore Pelagidis (both of whom have been advisers to the Greek government) tells us the Greek economy is dysfunctional.
We do not need an academic treatise to tell us that. Greece’s relations with the EU have made that clear over the past three years at least. The 114 bar charts, pie charts and graphs in the book are unnecessary: we can observe all of them by looking around us.
Anton Chekhov used to say that he got the ideas for his searing dramas by looking out of the window and seeing all human life going by. Brian Friel showed us much the same in his essay on his mother’s home town, A Fine Day at Glenties.
I sit on the esplanade of Corfu town, absorbing the last of the autumn sunshine, and I look across the straits at an Albania already going into winter: a country consisting almost entirely of unhelpful snow-clad mountains.
We live in a world of microclimates, each of which disobeys the laws of economics, meteorology and citizenship.
What I see in town (really a small city rather than a large town) or in the village where I live, is living proof of this book’s thesis: that the political parties are undemocratic in nature and “everyone participates, more or less willingly, in the shadow economy”.
I see poverty, tax evasion, ostentatious wealth, despair and joy. Hope and helplessness. I see widows collecting wild greens (horta) on which they live almost exclusively because they cannot afford meat (although they buy chicken carcases to make stock). But I am also told that one of the poorest-looking widows owns five houses and has thousands of euro stashed away. A microclimate indeed.
One of the strongest indicators of Greece as a divided society is the contrast between town and village: the mutual suspicion of the people. The townies look down on the peasants (not too strong a word for subsistence farmers), who in turn regard the townies as crooks – and have done so since at least the 18th century.
A new dimension to political life has been the rise of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn, which in Corfu polled much higher than its national average in the last elections, and which is suspected of having organised an arson attack on its last synagogue.
It’s a country where women use the genitive of their husband’s or father’s name (the singer Vicky Leandros is known as Vicky Leandrou - Βασιλική Παπαθανασίου - here) and still adopt an all-black wardrobe as widows.
It’s also a country of immense beauty: Corfu town has been declared a Unesco world heritage site because its arcaded streets, built mostly during the 400-year Venetian occupation, and the evident signs of building during the British administration (1815-1864), make it a city of appealing uniqueness.
Sitting on the esplanade, I look at the miracle of the two arcaded blocks that form a replica of Paris’s rue de Rivoli - they were built by the father of the man who constructed the Suez Canal. Miraculous because when the French were routed from Corfu the British finished the job. It’s the social centre of 'le tout Corfou'
But the simplicity of village life and architecture complements and adds to that beauty – even though the inhabitants of village and town are as different as chalk and cheese. How can I reconcile the beauty of the environment – and the added value that inheres in the tourist industry – when Mitsopoulos and Pelagidis document so thoroughly that Greece is so resistant to the sort of reforms demanded by the EU?
I see the kaleidoscope from the opposite end, simply because the economists cannot look at the everyday lives of ordinary people. It’s possible that they may never have seen villagers dunking their local bread into their own olive oil – or seen the sacks of olives going to the oilery where the growers pay 80 cent per litre for production, or spit-roasted lambs at the local panegiri (saint’s day).
It is the celebration of life at the most basic level, even if it does involve bribery and corruption, that the economists can’t see: they may hold the view that Greek people are inured to the grey economy and to dealing with the problem of balancing responsibility to the state with the demands of family, but in a country which last year lost 1,000 jobs a day, and where young people look to emigration as their only hope of survival, the claims of the individual are bound to trump those of the state.
And if, as is rumoured, the local taverna decides to open for only three days each week, due to declining spending power, we will all have to learn more than just dunking bread in oil.

Dear Richard. As I ‘struggle' with The Diviner having downgraded my reading and probably my intelligence this last decade I just saw your latest in the Irish Times. You’ve excelled. It was so good to see you pairing Chekhov and Friel - two artists who’ve managed so brilliantly and magically to blur the ancient and over-revered distinction between tragedy and comedy. See you soon we hope. We come via Naples to Corfu...it was another writer who while ‘looking out of the window’ also placed his feet in a bowl of water (not so much to warm or cool) but to remind himself of his subjectivity when describing what he saw between his curtains.  Best Simon

Jan Manessi in Corfu wrote...fine article, but don't assume that everyone out collecting wild vegetables does so because they cannot afford to buy them - horta gathering has been a popular task for years - at weekends hillsides round Athens were full of people out with plastic bags and a small knife. They are a delicacy, and those with knowledge of the many varieties are greatly respected. The eastern way of changing a name's end depending on sex is just the way things have been done from Greece to Russia- and few of the younger widows, both in town and village, wear black any longer, certainly not after the 40 days mourning has ended. In old times a widow would not even go to church, as this was considered enjoyment, her visits outside the house were only expected to be to and from the graveyard- thank goodness times have changed in some respects.
*** *** ***
One of my half-sisters - Miranda - tells me of a new grandchild. ....

Hi Lin and Simon. Here is Otis (born three weeks early on 14th December - a birth compadre of your Amy!)

Otis Oscar 

Meanwhile Oscar came round to visit with Amy and Guy, Richard and Emma...

*** *** ***
Dusk in Ano Korakiana...

Σερί από λιακάδες το τελευταίο διάστημα, που σε συνδυασμό με το άπλωμα της μέρας, προδιαθέτουν για το τέλος του χειμώνα, παρότι είμαστε λίγο μετά την αρχή του. Στα χωράφια, όπου το μάζεμα της ελιάς συνεχίζεται με τη βιασύνη να προλάβουμε μιαν αλλαγή του καιρού, ο χρόνος κυλάει γαντζωμένος στο άρμα του ήλιου. Με ξεχωριστούς ήχους και χρώματα. Από το μοναχικό κελάδημα του πουλιού, ως το μοναδικό χρώμα του δειλινού, που βάφει κόκκινα τα πρώτα σπίτια του χωριού, κατά την επιστροφή.

A final streak of sunshine, comes with the end of the day, suggesting winter is delayed even as it's begun. The olive harvest continues apace in expectation of a change in the weather. Time is linked to the sun's passage. There's the song of a lone bird as the sinking sun paints the houses red.
*** *** ***
A lovely and fascinating present from Alan Moir who knows my interest in Albania - a book -  Kanuni I Lekë Dukagjini, The Code of Leke Dukagjini, in Albanian and English.

Albanian text is by the priest Shtjefën Gjeçovi, translated by Leonard Fox, published by Gjonlekaj Publishing Company, New York  in 1989. Alan and his wife Christine were friends of my mother's. He worked for a period under an EU-UK Home Office scheme by which senior police officers were seconded to Albania to assist in the reform of their police following the end of the regime of Enver Hoxha. Alan maintained connection with the country and has many friends there. At mum's memorial service in December I met up again with him and he promised to send me a copy of the Leke Dukagjini code: 

The entire essence of the legal code of the Albanians is an unparalleled rigorous respect for this basic principle: non-violation of the dignity of a man- his honour, home and life.”
(Ismail Kadare) 

“The ‘Kanun' or Code of Lekë Dukagjini is an extraordinary monument of 

Albanian culture, essential for the understanding of all the northern Albanian lands. This magnificent edition, with its authoritative translation of the text, is an indispensable work for anyone who wishes to explore the history and traditions of the Albanian people”

(Noel Malcolm, author of Kosovo: A short History, 1998) 

“Certainly the Kanun is an unique document, a codification of practices amounting to law of great historical significance. In addition, it provides the bedrock for the rule of law in Albania even today.”  (Robert W. Sweet, United States District Judge)

For all their habits, law and customs, the people, as a rule, have but on explanation: ‘It is in the Canon of Lek…' as for the laws ascribed to him, the greater part are obviously far earlier than the 15 th century, when he is said to have lived. They probably were obeyed by the unknown warriors of the bronze weapons in the prehistoric graves.” (Edith Durham, High Albania (1909)

*** ***
As well as the Jerusalem artichokes, I planted more garlic on Thursday morning, and a double row of potatoes...

Albania

Ismail Kadare’s Albania makes his country’s mystery every mystery. In our age, where most enchantment’s made by us, the land just across the Corfu strait especially when seen from the summit of mount Pantokrator in such stillness you hear a stone shuffled and great clearness after a morning of rain, emanates enchantment. Kadare’s weather - rain falling on ashen landscapes from a sky that only a few miles from us turns leaden, sends shivers, like the tiny charge of fear peering over a precipice, or into water that rather than being, as you first thought, murky is of immeasurable depth. Albania remains mysterious; more so I suspect, than we'd find arriving there.
A few weeks back, in Scotland over tea at Brin Croft, I'd met a retired senior policeman - friend of a friend of my mother's who does rescue work on seams, darning damaged tweed. He’d been posted to Albania, invited against his judgement to go there by the Home Office pressed by the EU anxious about Albania, soon seeking membership. This was more than a decade ago. His job, with other public professionals from the main EU countries, was to advise on the recovery of the rule of law in a place that had become a haven for money laundering, people trafficking, gun running, continued feuding and drug smuggling to the rest of the Continent and beyond. Gun ownership, always normal in Albania,  – “not just farmer's weapons either” - had proliferated; rife even among children despite amnesties encouraging surrender. "They build AK47s into the walls of their houses. Chip them out again when they need them." He spoke soberly of intractable problems. Criminals put aside a percentage of their profits to cover the cost of buying officials. The sums are enormous; and with less income for officials, bribes more difficult to resist than in the UK, with people competing for such rewarding jobs via patronage. He'd returned from his posting in despair. The honest are confounded, yet amid this mess there will be people who's kindness and hospitality will be second to none, and while some landscapes may be ravaged by unplanned development, isolated parts of it untouched by much desired investment in connective infrastructure will be small versions of Eden before the Fall.

Coming to Greece

Morning landfall on Albania and it's my birthday

We woke on an out-of-season ferry, mainly used by truck drivers heading for the new motorway cutting across central Greece to Thessaloniki and Istanbul that begins on the west coast of Greece - the Egnatia Highway, first built by the Romans. We slipped away from Italy and woke passing the rocky heights of the Karaburan Peninsular in Albania, snoozed, read and had a coffee when, with sun-up Corfu appears from the morning haze, slipping by as we head on to the mainland port of Igoumenitsa.

The nice thing about arriving by sea is the lack of bureaucracy. You walk out onto the jetty with your bags and you’re there, planted on the concrete apron as the super-trucks trundle out of the ferry’s vast hold, escalate through their gears and roar off on their errands, while we take a €5 taxi to the smaller ferry whose crew are impatient to leave for the 15 kilometres over to Corfu. We boarded with a minute to spare. Then the scale of things reduces. At smaller Corfu port our hire car awaits and after a stop at Lidl for provisions - shock at the prices of everything - we’re driving into Ano Korakiana’s narrow street and the alley by our home enjoying greetings from the neighbours, kisses, hugs, familiar children and cats.

Lin helps make Easter things

The Itchen

My sister, mum and great grandmother at Itchen Abbas in 1944

After I'd finished a day's tutoring a rewardingly enthusiastic group of local government professionals in the King Charles Suite at the Guildhall in Winchester, I cycled out of town on the Alresford Road, turned left down back roads towards Easton until I came to a road bridge over the Itchen. I munched a Cornish pastie I'd bought in town staring at the water, a swan working its way upstream sifting the riverbed - it's head below water for a minute at a time. It began to drizzle. A footpath by the bridge meandered across damp wormcast fields separated by wooden kissing gates - slightly tricky to negotiate with the folding bicycle - towards an avenue of gnarled lime trees, home to crows, that runs between the road through Itchen Abbas and the river.

The light was going. On the avenue I turned down where I remembered the land flattened into water meadows, passing through a gate, left my bicycle by a heap of ivy covered logs; strolled past Grey's Plot towards the river. It was running fast and high. I remember, gazing into its swift crystalline water - a first inkling of being in harm's way when I was four; when I'd wandered down here as children could without causing anxiety. I'd lie on my stomach peering over this bridge watching the dappled wild trout inches from my face, edging across the gentler summer current, drifting back with the stream for an instant almost stroking the crowfoot, resuming station, unworried by the small break in the even shadow of the bridge on the sunlit gravel.

As a child I lay, face down, head over the edge of this bridge gazing into the water

The past was far away; something gone. After a few moments I wandered up The Limes - Grey's Lea - to the Winchester road, gazed for a moment at Bignell's Cottage in the gloom. The present was too intrusive - the rain, the constant rush of passing cars, the plethora of signage, the dominating roar, like distant falls, of traffic on the M3 to recover an inkling of an intimation of childhood ... 'the things which I have seen I now can see no more.' It mattered not a jot. Revelations come when they want, unplanned; unlike this small pilgrimage to a place I'd visited only once before in over 60 years. I was content with my present ride and walk. The rain fell more strongly as I cycled back to Winchester in and out of the dark, dazzled by passing headlights, passing tyres splashing my waterproof trousers, rain seeping into my shoes. "This is become the land of car people" I muttered, but I'd enjoyed the ride; enjoyed getting back to my hotel room, putting out my wet things to dry, settling in to read Ismail Kadare's The Siege - written in Albanian in 1970 it's taken over thirty years to get his work first into French and then into English, a reminder of Albania's continuing impenetrability and fascination. And now, on a recommendation of Danica, who met him and lived near him in Belgrade, I've gone and ordered a tricky sounding book called Dictionary of the Khazars by a Serbian writer, Milorad Pavić who died last year. I can almost date my interest in the Balkans - October 2008 - alongside a wider curiosity about Eastern Europe. I saw this article by Tim Judah in my mother's last edition of the New York Review of Books, Vol 57 (4), 11 March 2010 - At Last, Good News from the Balkans [see also Balkan Insight]:

If you only want bad news from the Balkans, it is easy enough to find. You can read the next few lines and then read something else. Bosnia is on the brink of war again. Kosovo's independence is 'a failure.' Serbs are scheming, unredeemable extreme nationalists, and organized crime is everywhere. In the last few years I have come to understand that many people outside the region actually want to believe the worst: they want black and white when, like everywhere else, real life is a shade of grey. I am not arguing that, fourteen years after the end of the Bosnian and Croatian wars and almost two years since Kosovo declared independence, serious problems do exist. It is just that in many respects things are not as bad as commonly believed.

** * **

I was flown from Inverness on Wednesday, leaving the last of the snow, stopped for a few hours in Birmingham to pack and collect things for teaching, a poached egg on top of a welsh rarebit from Lin, then cycled to New Street to catch a train to Winchester for two days on 'Managing with Political Awareness' for Hampshire County Council.

I dislike CrossCountry Rail; noisy trains, dirty lavatories, crowded with little space for luggage, a management that exudes indifference to passengers. I dislike the trainline too*, having the nerve to buy advertising that presents rail passengers who buy tickets at the station as sheep. Even so I enjoy train travel, suppressing my ire at the state of our railways, sitting back and thinking of better times. It's even possible that Lord Adonis, were he given the time, which is unlikely right now, could breath a new spirit of reform into this intractable mess. (*June 2012 and I now use the Trainline website almost exclusively. V. user-friendly)

Dropped off at Winchester

Putting cycling on the map

I'm getting so much pleasure from reading Edward Lear's Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania (1851), especially as a recent previous reader has jotted in the current names of some of the places Lear visits so that I can skim over the spectacularly underfurnished terrain of Albania with Google maps, thus Himarë which Lear calls 'Khimára, anciently Chimæra' p.144 View Larger Map

Explore Vlorë, Albania, starting from Himarë

To the unlearnt tourist, indeed, Albania is a puzzle of the highest order. Whatever he may already know of ancient nomenclature - Epirus, Molossia, Thesprotia, etc. - is thwarted and confused by Turkish divisions and Pashaliks; beyond these, wheel within wheel, a third set of names distract him in shape of native tribes and districts - Tjamourià, Dibra, etc. And no sooner does he begin to understand the motley crowd which inhabits these provinces - Greeks, Slavonians, Albanians, Bulgarians, or Vlachi - than he is anew bewildered by a fresh list of distinctive sub-splitting, Liape, Mereditti, Khimáriotes, and Tóskidhes. Races, religions, and national denominations seem so ill defined, or so entangled ... (Lear's Introduction)

Thus Lear's Aryhyrokastro (shown on the map just before his Introduction) becomes Argyrokastro in my 1911 Britannica and that, sought on the web, carries me to today's Gjirokastër, and with that easy monkey-leaping of the web, I learn of the Protocol of Corfu which takes me to the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus proclaimed in Argyrokastro - Gjirokastër on February 28, 1914 and lasting until 1921, the site of the Northern Epirote issue, alive to this day, as well as the equally confusing way the Albanian population is spread outside Albania, across neighbouring states that include the cities of Skopje in the northern part of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Pristina in Kosovo, and Podgorica in the southern part of Montenegro.

* * * 
Staff circular about Rescue Geography research prompted by Dr Phil Jones:

Hi, I'm doing a project looking at how people cycle to the university and wondered if anyone wanted to take part. Essentially it involves wearing a microphone and a GPS-wristwatch while cycling home, describing thoughts and feelings as you ride along. The equipment is lightweight and fairly unobtrusive ... more information. Thanks, Phil, Lecturer in Human Geography [Phil's blog]

Dear Phil. I've been going to and fro between home in Handsworth, via the city centre or via Rotton Park for over 10 years, often on the canal towpath. I think I'd enjoy participating in your research. Best, Simon

Hi Simon, apologies for the delay in getting back to you, I was away doing the Three Peaks last week. Thanks for volunteering. D... Essentially I'll pop across to you just before you head home, show you how it all works and then you cycle home as normal. When you get home you turn the recorder off and then I'll collect the equipment from you the next day. thanks again, Phil

Dear Phil. Oh dear I hope I got the technology working last night. My concern is the tedium for you of having to listen to my commentary as I cycled. I guess turning my impressions into words doesn't work for me so I was reduced to commenting on where I was which you'll have on the SatNav anyway. I realise that what I like so much about my cycling is the changing experiences - heard, seen and smelled as I pedal my way home...more sensed than spoken. All the same thanks for asking me to take part in your interesting research. Best wishes, Simon

Hi Simon, please find attached transcripts from the recordings you've made as well as the Google Earth (part one, part two, part three) file of your route and heart rate. Everything seemed to record very well; thanks for your perseverance on the technological side. Your commentary was really great - as I think you'll see from the transcript. There's some really nice stuff in there which I can pull out. I absolutely get your point, however, about things being sensed rather than spoken - it's that embodied/experiential stuff which really fascinates me about cycling. If you want to have a look through the transcripts when you've got a moment, send me any corrections/things you would like removed. When you're happy, I'll match up the words to the GPS and post a spatial transcript up on the website. Thanks again for your participation. cheers, Phil

Dear Phil. Nothing I want to censor, so long as you ignore the SatNav evidence of how I walk on water and leap over high buildings. People aren't supposed to know (:)). I'm impressed with the speed at which you've completed the transcription. Best Simon

Hi Simon, excellent, your superhero status is safe with me! Have put your spatial transcripts up on the site as participant #06 …Thanks again for your help. cheers Phil

Phil is doing quite a few of these. It's an undramatic repeat of the panoptical world in Enemy of the State or Body of Lies with geostationary satellites about twelve and half thousand miles above me noting my every move give or take a few metres. Then Phil can link my route to the data from a heart rate monitor and a voice recorder, so that I can click on any of the route markers or the numbers in the map margin and see what my heart rate was at that point in my ride as well as anything I said. I would imagine that a talented poet, conversationalist, singer could make rather special representations of their journey - a cyclist's songline, linked to an idea that I'd first heard of via Bruce Chatwin's book about the Aboriginal Australians' ways of singing their way across the continent. One of my favourite intellectuals, Rebecca Solnit wrote she'd often wished her sentences

could be written out as a single line running into the distance so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is travelling ... the songlines of Australia's aboriginal peoples are the most famous examples conflating landscape and narrative. The songlines are tools of navigation across the deep desert, while the landscape is a mnemonic device for remembering the stories: in other words the story is a map, the landscape a narrative. (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking

It brought to mind a journey long ago - my own navigation - traceable in memory.

'On the small-scale chart taped to the head of my bunk a slightly curved line seems to grow imperceptibly away from Africa and into the space of the ocean. As the days passed and merged, boredom was the least of our worries. We worked steadily through an extensive selection of books - Dante, Lawrence, Flaubert, Tolstoy and many lesser authors were read whilst one or the other of us lay sunbathing safety line attached, or down below propped in a bunk ... Every day now the tall clouds refreshed us with showers, but the wind blew more gently and we felt at home on the sea, carrying our horizons along with us...' A Voyage to America, 1966 Roving Commissions, London:RCC Press 1967 pp.19-20

Today I could be 'people tracked' all the way, unless I borrowed Gene Hackman's trick and put the gadget inside cooking foil...

* * *

I thought it only rained like this in Corfu

How it has rained this week - grey, wet and chilly. Usually I like such weather, but now it flavours the news; prompts moods.

An incident: black sedans, plainclothes, guns

Richard, in town with his camera, caught a glimpse of a man dragged from his car, pushed to the ground at the end of Waterloo Street, held at gun point, then released. Amy reassured me:

The photo wouldn't have been illegal even if it was not fuzzy. I don't know about the incident as we use a different radio channel to the firearms unit. Although the most likely reason is that someone reported seeing the driver with a weapon, so was stopped/searched and nothing found, meaning male was then released.

I often see herons by the canals these days but we've had a closer encounter - a visit to our back garden. Fish have been taken from our ponds. Lin put the plastic heron we've used to suggest to a real bird that the garden's taken. It was raining when I saw, through our kitchen window, side by side - the real and the dummy. Richard dashed out, The heron gracefully unfolded itself and was up and over the treetops in seconds.

* * *
I just read from June Samaras, with her superb website Kalamos Books, yet another vandalising of Jewish graves in beautiful Ioannina ... the latest in a long series of anti-semitic desecrations, this time on Sabbath 9 July 2009. This YouTube clip referred to vandalism in the same place a month earlier. The mainstream press seems to ignore these activities which are only reported in the Jewish press - my impression from web surfing the subject; most worrying is the inertia of the relevant governmental authorities in connection with:

...the widespread practice of the 'burning of Judas' with pictures from the events often taking place alongside the church 'Resurrection' or other religious services, explanations of its meaning, occasional mentions that it is also called 'burning of the Jew.'

If there’s a job, food on the table, good neighbours, good books and companionship, depravity loses its edge, hate becomes a grumble. My self-referential ego ensures that worries about the world are but a mirror of worries for myself, and when I’m content, surrounding dreadfulness sits like those meniscus'd raindrops perched, almost apologetically, on the perfectly waxed surface of important people’s black sedans.

* * *

Here's some background to British National Party Leader Nick Griffin's "Camp of the Saints scenario" mentioned in the interview with the BBC on 8 July. Griffin has cultivated quite clever ways of speaking to the mainstream. He will duck and weave, assuring his hard core that he can still be trusted to fly the BNP flag, while sounding amiably reasonable in talking to fellow Oxbridge graduates on assignment for the BBC. He cuffs the elephant with the occasional slips of an experienced performer, enticing and vexing his audience. The classic legerdemain is 'denied-refutation' - admitting some of what was said, even seconds ago, while trimming meaning to the popular conscience - an unpredictable quantity politicians with risky ideas are always testing.

In this case Griffin, having suggested he approved a European force with powers to sink ships carrying sub-Saharan Africans to Italy, emphasised he meant giving people time to abandon ship and be thrown a life raft so they can "go back to Libya" - an afterthought that avoids disappointing those who'd approved his drift.

The liberals think "phew! He's not nice but he didn't mean actually drowning those people" while his followers are relieved that he's not going back on the case for 'sinking ships' and ... complete the sentence.

Refining this method Griffin teaches his party to develop a public language that evades liberal proscription while reassuring core followers and those who say "I'm-not-racist=but..." that a vote for the BNP is a sound committment to solving problems made insoluble by the feebleness of mainstream politicians. If Griffin becomes too respectable he risks losing the party workers all successful politicians need - canvassers, poster-stickers, leafletters, doorsteppers. letter-writers, phone-in followers and room-bookers. At microphones outside government buildings he exudes reasoned arguments on matters of public anxiety. He's a holocaust-denier, yet I could swear I've heard him agreeing that many Jews had died during WW2. He's spoken admiringly of Louis Farrackan, and - a boxing blue himself - he's expressed admiration for Amir Khan. At regular intervals Griffin tosses a meaty sound-bite to his attack-dogs, then skitters away from another well oxygenated mêlée. It's not quite 'plausible deniability' but it comes close.

The stakes are high. Global population grows, sea levels rise, and in our connected cosmos the chasm between rich and poor cries from the rooftops (literally - given the placing of satellite dishes), and in this distinction, rich means what in the rich world feels like poor - living, for instance, for under €10,000 a year.

I read the book just after it came out in early 1970s. I was disappointed expecting a thriller or a murder mystery, rather than a tract, but it was intriguing and I love a good argument so long as there's no torture involved. Jean Raspail the 1970s author of Camp of the Saints, a master text for the BNP, better written than Mein Kampf, commented on his novel about the swamping of 'the white race' at the hands of its own white liberal elites in cahoots with swarms of refugees whose ships they lack the fibre to turn away from their shores, let alone sink:

So, what to do? I am a novelist. I have no theory, no system nor ideology to propose or defend. It just seems to me that we are facing a unique alternative either learn the resigned courage of being poor or find again the inflexible courage to be rich. In both cases, so-called Christian charity will prove itself powerless. The times will be cruel.

Anyone who opposes Griffin, his allies and followers and those who are sure 'he's got a point' needs a rejoinder to this bold observation. One of the best is a piece For Polite Reactionaries by Charles Sugnet in Transition, No. 69 (1996), pp. 14-34: Indiana University Press. I get to read it via my university but I can't make it accessible which is a shame but a reminder to refine my own reasoning.

This is hardly about preserving the 'white race', even if you believe - as I and 99.999% of physical anthropologists do not - that humans are made up of separate species. So refutation starts by eroding that firm subjectivity, not helped by the classifying bureaucracies that require us to name our ethnicity - something many mistake for race, which then gets conflated with identity, especially when linked to self-esteem. Secondly the rich (richer) world comprises a multiplicity of ethnicities. We are already - rich and poor inside the boundaries of the first world - hybrid, mongrel, polyglot, diverse in skin colour, hair, religion, language, culture, and just about any other category named and yet to be named. The gap between objectivity and subjectivity in the matter of our heterogeneity and homeogenity presents a deep well of confusion and fear.

The ship that turns away the ship - or sinks it - if Griffin's way were approved, is likely to be freighted with the same diversity as its target. The difference is wealth not race but Griffin has a dream of a pure English race, finding it irksome that David Harewood, a rather obvious Brit from Birmingham who happens to be black, plays Friar Tuck in Robin Hood. Raspail is right about the consequences of the differences between them and us when it comes to wealth, but we are a world away from Raspail when it comes to distributing those pronouns on racial criteria. - but then I live in Handsworth, Birmingham and he lives in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

It's not as if the Hellenic population isn't as susceptible to these arguments about purity which is why I like the views expressed to me over a year ago by Lliana when she said she though that even if no Greeks were left in Ano Korakiana it would remain Greek because it's new inhabitants would adopt Greek ways, thus Isocrates:

...καὶ τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα πεποίηκε μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι,

καὶ μᾶλλον Ἕλληνας καλεῖσθαι τοὺς τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡμετέρας

ἢ τοὺς τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως μετέχοντας

(Ἰσοκράτης. Πανηγυρικός. 50.)

...and it seems that the name of the Greeks is no longer denoting a race, but a mentality,

and one should call 'greeks' rather the ones who participate in our education,

than those who share our common nature.

(Isocrates. Panegyricus. 50.)

trans: Katerina Sarri

It's interesting to pick out a blog called Hellenic Antidote. It's author propounds a Griffinesque interpretation of racial Hellenism, which requires a denial of the meaning Katerina Sarri attaches to Isocrates' words. One of the comments following Hellenic Antidote's circuitous arguments mentions the blogger's 'Germanic' version of Hellenism, a side swipe at the Austrian Jakob Fallmerayer's slavophobic theory as developed in his 1827 History of the Empire of Trebizond which, ironically, argued that modern inhabitants of Greece have no genetic connection with the population of Classical Greece. As my half-brother George once said at a family get-together "Ugh! We're not proper Greeks we're all a bunch of dirty Slavs. Yuk!" a cue to roars of laughter from our mongrel family and friends.

No mean city: Soho Road in Handsworth