Seeing Aleko

It’s so quiet indoors I can hear the inside of my ears. Outside thunder roams. It’s a dark grey watery day with a wind that’s almost warm gusting from the south, shaking things that don’t matter.

Poking my head out the front door the plaka’s dry but for wet blown in from the sides. Our efforts last October to cover our planked balcony – laid felt, builder’s polythene sheet, fibre blanket, battens around edges and extra patches carefully cut around railing uprights fixed and filled - works for the moment, despite friends’ scepticism.

Cycling along the corniche road to Nisaki to see Aleko yesterday, the sky cleared shining on waves marching against the coast on a sea that’s usually calm, dappled with mercurial breezes, scuffed nap on blue velvet, sliding down from Trompetta - zephrys that can turn into fierce katabatic squalls. Now the Kerkyra sea’s a dazzling wheatfield of regular waves, long rows of white caps marching north, breaking with a deep clunk as they strike the rocky shore, sliding back on tumbling gravel, releasing the iodine smell of sea, blowing incubi away – which is why someone who was a stranger to the English countryside, said long ago - as we rushed by it in a train -  of places where even Romans had been fearful
“The ghosts that walk by day are worse than those by night.”

On the road to Nisaki

The cypress trees twist, the leaves of the olives turn greyer in the wind. I’d checked gradients on an earlier bus ride and so cycled to Nisaki, thus a 15 minute car ride becomes a small expedition - why I like Elizabeth Bennett for her walks:

Caroline Bingley: Good Lord. Did you walk here?
Elizabeth: I did.... I'm so sorry. How is my sister?
Darcy: She's upstairs.
Elizabeth: Thank you
Caroline: My goodness, did you see her hem? Six inches deep in mud. She looked positively mediaeval.

I did the journey in under an hour, with a slow puncture that had me stopping three times to pump, passing through blighted Barbati, its serried empty rental villas and concrete skeletons, shopless in winter, views of the sea for hire and only honourable houses with dried up wooden shutters and finely carpentered doors, sans central heating, air-conditioning, modern plumbing, or a pool, clothed in climbers, overgrown gardens, flaking stucco, unstuck thigh tiles, derelict within and without. At Kafeneon Mitsou where there’s no plasma screen nor amplified beat box, just a small four pane window, between the bar and dexion shelves, through the thick western wall looking over the sea letting in a blast of sunlight, Aleko bought me a beer while I changed an inner tube and found the offending thorn I suspected had, despite earlier inspections, worked through the back tyre.

Καφενέων Μητσός

“Bloody acacia – διάβολος ακάνθινια” I said showing the tiny thorn inside the tyre to Aleko and his companions, halted on their way to Kassiopi, a philologist, a mathematician – like Aleko who lectured for many years at  Edinburgh - and an English teacher. It took me twenty minutes - not to replace the tube - but to fiddle the rear wheel axle back through the derailleur.

The cold water in the kafeneon WC had only a slight effect on my oily hands.
From the kafeneon I went with Aleko a few hundred yards to his home to meet his mum and sister and enjoy mezes in front of a warm stove and recount my memories of journeys to Greece, first by train via Venice and Yugoslavia and later by small boat:

 I sailed to Greece from Messina with a my friend Christopher Jameson as skipper of  a five ton sloop - Danica - in July 1962. We'd left Lymington seven weeks or so earlier. The first morning of our two day crossing of the southern Adriatic we were bouncing and swaying on a swift etesian reach. A sleek Greek frigate cut smoothly through the cresting waves heading west. In return to our salute she dipped her flag to us. I get a lump even now at that gesture - seeing that lovely ensign falling and rising again in the seconds of her passing as though official Greece was saying "yasus" just to us. Next morning we made Byron's landfall. Shapes - north and south - that appeared and disappeared and might have been no more than dawn shadows - though we knew otherwise - lay before us. All day, in zephyrs, we sailed towards them, passed between, and anchored off Killini where we rowed ashore and were sat down at a table and offered ouzos...

 ...and how I came, after not seeing Greece for 25 years, with my family:

...being able to go - as one still could before 11 September 2001 - with Richard and Amy to the cockpit of the Airbus (the one that doesn’t have a steering lever and is flown by buttons) and seeing the mainland laid out in dark marked by the glow of Thessaloniki to the east, the moonlight on the Ionian to our west, tiny jewel-like clusters of villages thousands of feet below and far ahead the loom of Athens. Saying to my children to whom it mattered far less than me "There's Greece"...

...how Lin and I came to be in Corfu. Earlier Aleko had recounted a tale of being on the shore near Lake Korrision where the waves have made long sandy beaches and there, heaving dangerously in the shallows, in waist-deep sea was a container, one of the great boxes that sit on trucks to be transferred via moving gantrys to the decks of modern vessels.
"It must have fallen off the back of a container ship" I said
"I waded out to it and opened the door. Guess what was in it?"
"Whisky?"
"No no that's been done. Whisky Galore."
I made more useless tries. Stationary? Coffins?
"Fridges - two hundred of them"
"We" - he was with a friend - "managed to get hold of one. I cut my hand on an edge. We got it ashore. I was bloody. A kilometre to the nearest road"
"Where were the police?"
"They didn't get there until the next day. Meantime people - there must have been two hundred gathered on the beach - the ones who couldn't carry a fridge were taking trays, drawers - anything they could prise out of them." He told me to ask Cinty as she was on the beach with Aleko as a girl. I wonder how many of those fridges are still around.
*** ***
I wrote to a friend yesterday and included in my letter a summary of my  focus:

Values, whether a means or ends, usually a mix of both, are seldom avowed directly. They may be mentioned, usually not convincingly, for effect; a little like actually saying “you can trust me”. They are skilfully or messily embroidered - verbally and (where film is useful) non-verbally and (where sound is) para-linguistically (tone, emphasis etc) into conversations about what’s technically, legally and financially workable. Film more than transcript especially with current A/V technologies allows pretty minute examination of the dynamics with stills, slow motion, repeats, without sound, sound only. I don’t pretend that filming such exchanges is a guarantee of some unique authenticity (the first question asked). If I can claim credit it would be for a methodology refined over quite a time which determines a contract between researcher and between participants and their future audience which frames, for further investigation, an exchange between them that is always going to be a performance. I don’t talk on these films as I did when first making them - an imitation TV interview soon abandoned. Goffmann helps on this - that we perform even to ourselves facing each morning. Some of the most rewarding episodes I’ve had entailed going over the film with the people in it - fine-tuning their working relationship. I’m asked if I record relationships that don’t work - that aren’t relationships. Apart from the fact that in government no political-management relationship is ever secure, I’m not trying to collect evidence for divorce. The analogy with marriage is not so far out. You can learn, I argue, a great deal from a good marriage, if you can get access but I’d expect to be told - effectively - to piss off. There are vital differences between a private relationship of marriage and a public relationship of government. If there isn’t you have corruption.

*** ***
I've been writing letters and postcards. They take around 6 days to get to England or Scotland but if I keep up a fairly steady stream they will be dropping through letter boxes in a regular stream. I like the routine writing, of addressing an envelope, of going down to the post office - at Tzavros or in Alexandros Street in town - getting a stamp and posting. I'm assured none of the mailboxes in other places get collections in winter.

I imagine explaining this to my grand child, when he might be interested. Of course there are emails or phone for emergency but letters! You ‘write’ with a ‘pen' on ‘paper'. Put it in an ‘envelope'. Stick a ‘stamp' on the envelope ("Blimey grandpa, what do you do then?"). You lick the envelope and take it to a post box and…("a postbox?") Yes yes and then the same piece of paper with the writing you put on it with the same lick on the envelope arrives at the home of the person you sent it to - about two weeks later. Lin’s letters to me arrive at the local shop and are handed me by Stammatis with groceries.

Mother Greece from Corfu: on my way to the main post office

A skull in the well

Having made a general slander against the signorini as a universally oppressive class I had to go back to the best living expert – to my knowledge – on the social history of the Ionian polity, Dr Eleni Calligas who’s 1994 Phd. Is called The ‘Rizospastai’ (Radical-Unionists): Politics and nationalism in the British Protectorate of the lonian Islands,1815-1864. More than any other scholar I know, she draws on the widest range of primary sources from this period in Greece, Britain and, of course, the Ionian islands - sources in Greek, English and Italian. Her English prose is immaculate, her scholarship impeccable.

No-one wanting to study the modern politics of Corfu, or any of the other Ionian islands, can claim to be properly informed without either digesting her sources or ensuring themselves a thorough study of her thesis, which, wonderfully, is now available free on-line from the British Library as a PDF file, allowing detailed searches of Calligas' text. It may be necessary to join the Library to access this and get a reader number, but that's a process with which I once struggled, so great was the demand for on-line access, but which can now be carried out fairly easily on-line. (see also: 'Constructing Ionian Identities: The Ionian Islands in British Official Discourses; 1815-1864', Maria Paschalidi, University College:London 2009)
I had an email a week ago from Ann Arbor, from someone researching his Ionian ancestry; in particular his connection with Dimitrios Nikolaou Karousos, a signorini from Cephalonia, who received the office of the last Lord High Commissioner, Sir Henry Storks at the end of the British Ionian Protectorate on 21 May 1864.  Along with other information about sources he might like to pursue, I’d recommended Dr Calligas:

Dear Simon. Thank you for all the great information. I will contact Dr. Eleni Calligas after Easter. I just downloaded her thesis using a link on your blog.  I will send you an update when I discover my connection to the aristocrats or the radicals. Regardless of the outcome, I am enjoying learning about the history of the Ionian Islands.  I hope you and your family have a wonderful Easter. Thank you, Brent

My derogation of the signorini as a class, doesn’t stand up. There are too few pixels in my sketch of a bunch of exploitative villains. Calligas' scholarly winnowing records how it was via certain members of the signorini, not only younger family members infected by European radicalism following studies in Italy and beyond, that dangerous ideas of liberty, justice and union with Greece diffused to the island peasantry, many of whom joined a range of secret clubs set up by educated radicals. They organized subversive public ceremonies shrewdly mingled with traditional celebrations, making them frustratingly difficult for the ruling authorities – British and their supporters -  to control or suppress. So the songs, poems and tracts of radical-unionism spread through the islands, vexing the government. Calligas documents the who, when and where of this and other rebellious activity over the first half of the 19th century in fascinating and, I suspect, unprecedented detail.
Nonetheless stories of signorini despotism pass through generations. As well as her story of the Robin pie, our friend Lula told us over supper last year that her father had taken her, as a girl, to visit the remains of an old Venetian estate. He showed her a large dry well.
“I could see something round down there. I kept looking, trying to make it out”
“A skull” her father said
“Then I could see there were other bones down there” She told us how it had been a valued right of signorini to give asylum to people on the run from the authorities or a family feud. A man would come to the lord to seek his help. The signori would invite him to sit in a big chair opposite him and explain his situation. Then, to the petitioner’s gratitude, he would assure him of protection in return for a fee. Once obtained, perhaps a large proportion of a man’s possessions collected by himself and family, he would hand this to the signori. Hands would be shaken across the table, and at the touch of a lever, the man’s chair would tip, dropping him in the well. Family members asking after him would be reassured by the signori that their relative had been given support to cross the narrow sea to live in secure obscurity on the mainland. They would be warned of the risks of trying to communicate with them. When after a long time he had still not returned nor sent any news, it could be explained that he must have encountered a fatal mishap while in exile.
*** *** ***

An old noble house with Corfu shutters

There are few windows in Corfu without shutters  παραθυρόφυλλο – to protect window frames against the weather and provide security – and match the style of other houses. Furthermore so many of these are louvered, with so familiar an arrangement of small angled slats,that one could be excused for assuming that these are the norm for all shutters. Most new or renovated buildings have their louvered shutters made of metal, constructed to order, often to match standard metal window frames also made in factories outside Corfu, the familiar green - though sometimes white or brown or even blue - applied by hot dip at the time of manufacture. Some modern shutters are now moulded with LDF (low density fibre), colour in the original mix, making wood look even more out of date. Such external furnishings can sometimes be detected by a uniformity that exceeds the regularity of skilled joinery, though unless touched they are, certainly, at a distance indistinguishable from wooden shutters.

All metal shutters

Even wooden shutters have become more uniform with the advent of powered routers and larger scale manufacture, easing the complicated challenge of making and inserting the louver (or louvre) slats. They’re normally in pairs. One set of wood shutters on our house – four hinged and folding louvered doors folding back on either side of the window, contains 120 slats in eight apertures. Imagine making, finishing and painting these, let alone stripping them to repair and renew them, and you understand why people opt for modern metal shutters, made and delivered to order. They are very strong, look nice and endure with minimal maintenance. We, being inclined to wood, were still not looking forward to renovating our wooden shutters. Our remaining  wooden framed windows have shutters that are flaking, and faded with bleached shrinking, even decaying, wood.

A set of our wooden shutters

Other windows have been replaced by the previous owners with metal double-glazed ones, so robust they survive the heat of the summer and the wind and rain of winter without needing shutters. We found the shutters for their wooden predecessors stored, in sorry state, in the apothiki.
Despite the logic of modernity we’d prefer to stay with wood, a preference strengthened before Easter by watching Lefteris, next door, mending his louvered shutters and replacing others with ones that had none. He made them from tongue-and-groove deal in front of his house, removing the strap hinges, right-angled to avoid the louvers on their predecessors, and transferring the door length horizontal bolts from his old ones.

Lefteris' made his new shutters in time for Easter

He told us that these were traditional Corfu shutters. They are simply double doors over the windows, like some shutters we’ve seen on old English houses.
“Those” he said, pointing to louvered shutters over the road “are Italian "and these” - pointing to shutters which had a vertical wooden bar attached to all the slats, allowing them, to be swivelled - στρεπτή - from inside the house to adjust the amount of light allowed in - “are Venetian.”

Wandering along Democracy Street I began noticing the different types, having missed such detail before. Of course grand houses on the Liston and across town, though not on some churches, have the Italian and and Venetian type...“But not in the village” said Lefteri. Yes! he said it in Greek and I understood.
I saw from looking at pictures of some of the Noble houses in the countryside or villages from the book Cinty’s lent us, how attractive were some of these unlouvered shutters.

Corfu shutters on Democracy Street, Ano Korakiana

As we laboured stripping a set of our ‘Italian’ shutters, Lin said, “Why not have the other kind? The Corfu ones. They can hang on hinges in the wall outside the window, and need no frame."
“I do like the inset ones” I said. We contemplated the time we’d spent making the inset shutters on the little window downstairs
“Small window. Much work?”
“Let’s hang Corfu shutters outside the windows” she suggested
This seemed to make sense. It seemed not too difficult to make whole new shutters like those Lefteris had just made, until the matter of pintle bolts and strap hinges for them arose. Where could we find the traditional hinges – the male pintle driven into the wall, the female, a band of iron that sits on it? M suggested we might recover some from an abandoned ruin - somewhere. 
Also, we don't want to discard our existing wooden louvered shutters, already inset in our windows or sitting in the apothiki, ready to fit over our new metal windows. There’s just one window, to our bedroom, that actually needs a new frame, and one for our sitting room. The rest are already in place – if in parlous state. 
"Why not" said Lin "fill in the slatted sections of these with rectangles of 4mm plywood?"
"Hm! We could cut a neatly angled groove along the edge of each section – 16 per set of shutters for one window -  fit them firmly in place on each side of the shutter with glue and small nails, prime, undercoat, paint and rehang."
“We’ll have traditional Corfu inset shutters with a sealed cavity containing the slats adding insulation from heat and cold” 
“That I had the sense to marry you!” I cried. 
We drove to Simoneti on the Lefkimmi Road where they cut us 27 strips to the right width from a sheet of 4mm plywood, leaving two tiny off-cuts from a standard sheet, enough for 54 insets – the lot for €17 with €6 for the cutting. 
“You know this is beginning to look like enough insets to turn three sets of Italian shutters into Corfiot ones.” said Lin setting to at dusk

** ** **
To supper this evening at Vitamins at Nisaki with Aleko Damaskinos to check with him some of this material, on shutters and signorini.

A bump in the night

Mark's Royal Roast

Earlier in the week – a roast at Sally and Mark’s in company with his brother Paul and Cinta – and what a roast! Lin photographed Mark's painstaking collation of goose, pheasant, duck, partridge and chikla cooked by Sally before it went on the table with her small roast potatoes, roast carrots and parsnips with crispy cloves of garlic and a rich gravy passed round in a steaming jug. Oh my! What a meal, and then the cheesecake Cinta’s made for pudding - all with village wine, then cheeses and – made of what was not included in the roast - one of Mark’s patés topped with clarified butter and bay leaves. When we went home he gave us a piece to take for picnics.

Chatting with Paul, Mark's brother, we made sketchy inventories of the wildlife we’d encountered on Corfu. “There are more than 3000 species at least“ he said. Lin and I have seen the short-toed-eagles, kestrel, skops owls, swallows, jays, sparrows, a blue looking thrush. "Ah a Blue Rock Thrush" said Paul. We've also seen at least one hoopoe, and…”
Paul reeled off more mentioning the number found by a twitcher friend who, even as they spoke of the wryneck, had seen one perch on a branch yards away.
"Hundreds and hundreds of seagulls"
"Heading for the tip at Temploni"
“Then there are the lizards, geckos, tortoises, turtles, snakes – several kinds – and pine martens, hedgehogs, weasels, stoats, foxes, rats and…”
We enjoyed lists down to shrews, before getting on to insects and arachnids. He’d had an entomologist friend who’d found, looking in just one place on the island, five species of butterfly he’d not seen before.
“So many species are here for those who know how to watch and look.”
“I remember the first time Lin and I saw fireflies on the edge of the village, and the rose beetles bumping around the house. But” I said “the worst harm, the most blighted environment, for all the concrete on shore, is the marine. Isn’t that where pollution and over fishing have really taken a toll?”
“Probably but I suspect, and I’ve heard it said that there are many species around which have so adapted themselves to our predation, that they’ve found niches where most don’t find them any more.”
“I wouldn’t rely on it.”
“Friends have told me they’ve seen fish they thought could no longer exist around here.”
I’d been speaking of Gerald Durrell, whose biography by Douglas Botting had been lent us from the Durrell School Library by Richard Pine; read at one sitting, into the early hours.

“I’m embarrassed at how little I knew about him. My mind had always been on Lawrence and his novels. I’d not properly grasped the work his brother had done and which continues across the world; his thinking about breeding endangered species in a zoo, quite different from other zoos at the time, until such a sanctuary would no longer be needed, over years of inertia, even active resistance, from the zoological establishment. Now he's among the leading founders of a new orthodoxy, with momentum given to ideas and practices that were once anything but common-sense. I’d started to grasp this when visiting London Zoo last year with my dear friend Ziggi. I'd not been there for decades. The Zoological Society had been critics of the younger Durrell. This time there were no self-harming stir crazy beasts - worst the lions, tigers and bears - rubbing bare patches on themselves pacing back and forth against the tall iron bars of their cages in front of gawping customers - a younger me among them. In those days they were the dangerous animals; we their victims; far far to go as we humans teem upon the planet, but a significant reversal in less than a lifetime, and the seed for Durrell was planted over a few innocent childhood years in Corfu not eighty years ago.

The Garden of the Gods

GD...even today the majority of people do not realize the extent to which we are destroying the world we live in. We are like a set of idiot children, let loose with poison, saw, sickle, shotgun and rifle, in a complex and beautiful garden that we are slowly but surely turning into a barren and infertile desert. It is quite possible that in the last few weeks or so, one mammal, one bird, one reptile, and one plant or tree, have become extinct. I hope not but I know for certain that in the same time one mammal, bird, reptile, and plant or tree, have been driven just that much nearer to oblivion.
The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider's web, and like a spider's web, if you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we're not just touching the web, we're tearing great holes in it; we're waging a sort of biological war on the world around us. We are felling forests quite unnecessarily and creating dust bowls, and thereby even altering the climate. We are clogging our rivers with industrial filth, and we are now polluting the sea and the air.

*** ***
On Friday night we drove over to the Kafenion beside the church on a tight corner in the middle of Nissaki to have a drink with our Greek teacher, Aleko. He was ensconced at one of several sturdy wooden tables. We were introduced to the owner Yianni, his son Mitsou and another friend, Kosta.
“Two beers for Simon and me, a wine for Linda”.
The place was without a TV. Dim, with a bar and behind us stacks of dexion shelves, and a dappled conglomerate stone floor – 1950s; congenial, with no background sound of half-glanced TV – the dead music and second hand voices to be endured in so much public space, a furnishing so ubiquitous that its absence has to be remarked.
I glanced at jars of honey for sale. “Blimey Lin” I muttered  “€13 a kilo! Who can pay that for honey?”
“Aleko” I said “It’s not just inside. This bloody infotainment. In Birmingham, they’ve allowed - no - encouraged, the installation of a permanent television screen – big as a double decker bus - one side of Victoria Square in front of our grand Council House where the sound and sight of sport and newsak are forced on all. The Birmingham screen's tuned to BBC, though, if they could get away with it, we’d have commercials there alongside the posters.”
“Well they’re converging anyway. Haven’t you seen how the posters are becoming animated. Some clever-clogs are pondering how, once we’ve all got retinal ID, they can circulate eye-spam that knows our name.”
“It’s such a pleasure when you meet a young person who dislikes this as much as we, but they’ve been brought up to it from birth so tend not to notice; even drink it up. Disconcerted by its rare absence.”
We talked about Corfu, and Scotland – which Aleko knows well, as a mathematics teacher at Edinburgh and a mountain climber in the Highlands. We got to naming villages we’d visited on the island. “Sokraki, Zygos on the way to the road over the mountains between Spartillas and Acharavi. Remember that hail storm last time we were passing Strinilas?” I said to Lin
“The car was skidding on hail the size of marbles on a slope below the spreading tree in front of the taverna in the middle of the village."
Another day thirty years ago, Aleko had been on a tour of villages, writing about them. He's stopped to explore...
“The man in the Taverna asked me ‘why are you asking all these questions? Are you from the tax office, the police?’ I explained I was writing a book. He was helpful then…As we talked into the evening there came on such a storm.”
“Hail?”
“No rain rain rain. You know they have no WC there?”
“You have to go up steps, round a corner to a public loo.”
“Then, there was one of those with a hole and two size 70 footprints to stand in. The rain went on and on. You could hear water streaming down the hill. I was on a motorcycle, up a mountain with miles back to town, in the dark. You know those roads?” He gestured their winding turns. We nodded.
“‘You must stay in my house tonight’ the man said. It was up an alley just round the corner. There were no electrics. He lit a candle. We were in the sitting room. It had two doors off the back. ‘I sleep through that one. You sleep in that one. First we’ll have another brandy.’ We talked more, then he said ‘goodnight. Don’t forget to blow out the candle before you go to bed.’ In total darkness I crept into the other bedroom. I got ready to sleep and reached around until I found the bed but it was all bumps. As I tried to smooth them down in the pitch black the bumps moved. I was frightened. What is this? I crept out of the room feeling my way to the sofa in the sitting room. In the morning my host woke me. ‘Why are you sleeping here?’ I gestured to the bedroom. ‘You didn’t like my daughter?’ I went away from there in haste, and ever after would dash quickly through Strinilas. If I’d stayed in that room I’d have been married next day. Passing through the village if I see a woman who looks in her 50s, I still wonder if she was the bump in the night...The old man’s dead now.”
Before we left I shared my yearning for a wooden boat – despite the work it involves – not only that but with something other than a “bloody Bermudan rig”. That got us onto sextants vs sat-navs, a subject on which Aleko shares my views on lost skills, not to mention “modern charts that omit nearly all the land features you could use to take bearings. There’s GPS for you.” Then I got onto my thing about a loose footed sail on a spar that could be lowered and raised” “Like the Arabs, a felucca” “Yes but those were normal here, Aleko. Perfectly adapted over many decades, centuries even, for the fickle weather here, especially is you don’t want an engine other than an oar. Me I’d like to scull.” “Ah sculling” he replied with enthusiasm “I taught myself to do that even though I’m no sailor, preferring mountains, but my brother has a boat, a very nice one with all the kit. I wonder if he knows how to scull”
We made figure of eight sculling motions, holding an oar in the hand, toasting one another with the other.
“I know an old man in his eighties who knows the old boats. I’ll find him for you next time we meet.”
****

Now and then looking over to the sea, I realise how much I'd like to sail on it - not motor, but sail and row and scull. At Ipsos Harbour we’ve enjoyed free mooring for our boat Summer Song since we came to Corfu. The harbour, being constructed with an EU grant ring-fenced to encourage the local fishing economy, doesn’t offer the power, mooring rings, water or security to pleasure boats that would allow charging the few privateers who’ve taken up a space and laid their own informal moorings.
The fishing boats - fibre glass motorboats and graceful small wooden caiques – nestle deeper into the little harbour with access to power and water and a smooth concrete jetty. How much longer can this indulgence last for us, moored on the rougher rubble made projection that protects the harbour from the strong easterlies that now and then drive across the narrow sea from mainland Greece? Word about this rare opportunity has spread among local boat owners. Now and then someone will arrive from the sea, take a temporarily empty space even though most of the twenty or so regular users have put names on their mooring buoys and small landing stages, arrayed them with ropes and bumpers. exhibiting shared resistance to interlopers by reminding them a particular space is ‘taken’.
While we’ve been doing work at 208 Democracy Street we’ve spent less time with Summer Song. Dave who keeps an eye on her when he can spare the time, has twice had to bail out rainwater that's leaked into the cabin. For nearly a year I’ve not been covering the cockpit with a secure awning. The heat of summer and wet and wind of winter having made it unusable. Today I drove down to pagrati bros – ‘number one for awnings systems’ – on the airport edge of town, 38 Lefkimis National Road, carrying the old cover sewn by Pauline, Summer Song’s previous so-owner. I’m not sure how these things go but I guessed that the price would be less than if I’d gone to a marine supplier. The first price mentioned was €320. I looked as pained as I could. The boss suggested an alternative to canvas at a third less. I accepted, knowing Lin would blow her top at the way boats drain money.
I drove homeward via Dave’s patch on the Kato Korakiana road; parked by his camper and swapped gossip. He, Trish and their family and friends had spent Christmas at our house.
“It was great!” He told me there’s an office of some kind near the west edge of Ipsos Harbour. “They’re collecting €40 a month from the yacht owners.”
“Haven’t approached me yet.”
“They don’t know you. But you’ll come across them if you spend time on the boat. They don’t say you must pay, just ask if you’d like to pay. I guess they keep a sort of an eye on the place.”
It was George Gedling, back in September 2006 when Lin and I first arrived in Corfu and were living for a fortnight on Summer Song which we’d just bought on ebay, who told me about the way things worked for yachts in Ipsos Harbour. He lived on the roomy catamaran Symphony moored on the road side of the harbour, running local day cruises out of Ipsos, doing landscape gardening and other odd jobs around the island, including tracking down a woodyard near Calafationis that would supply the tongue and groove cypress we needed to repair our upper floor, and latterly leading a local rock group – that we enjoyed last spring in Gouvia, the last time we saw him.
George as Dave had told us by phone this Christmas, had just gone into the Queen Alexandra in Portsmouth. He died on Sunday. For the last few days there’s been a glass on the counter at Sally’s to collect a wreath. He and his wife had divorced only recently.
Dave told me “She and her new husband and family have taken Symphony to a mooring down Benitses way.  All very quick. There’s another catamaran next to George’s. He’d been looking after it for years after he owner died. There’s been nothing from relatives in UK. The harbourmaster’s posted notice it’s been so long abandoned it must be lifted out and moved. There are two Yanmars I put in that. They’ve been wet a few times but almost new otherwise.”
Lin and I think Summer Song’s present engine is on its last legs. Unwilling to spend the money needed to install a new engine we’ve been prevaricating.
“Let me know about one of those engines, Dave?"
"Will do and I’ll get that broken pump mended or replaced.”
“What about the little old inflatable dinghy?”
“That went” Dave shrugged.
This is the sort of mush I’ve got into, half hoping someone will find me a small day boat with a lateen rig, a lug sailed cutter, something loose footed and shaped like a boat.

Shaped like a boat

I’d so like to distance myself from a yachting universe that's more or less glass fibre and Bermudan sails, and sail a rig - lateen, lugger, gunter, gaff - which might actually function on the mercurial sea of Kerkyra.  I don't really like the internal combustion engine. I so want to just sail or row...or scull. I want to recover the duration and waywardness of wind and oar, not forcing upon myself the scheduling made possible by engines and the miasma of fossil fuel.

Traditional Greek sailboat

So why am I concerned about an engine for Summer Song? She’s a slow old boat better suited for the gustier regularity of English Seas than the wiry treacherous weather of the Mediterranean with its long languorous calms and zephyrs that can hardly move her, or the bang-crash squalls that jump down from hot mountains stirring short steep wavelets that catch her in stays, turgid on her twin keels. In the tideless Mediterranean, her shallow bilge keels that would be useful in tidal waters for cleaning and painting between high waters make her even slower here. If I can't get my loose footed lateen boat of wood then I must have an engine we can trust in Summer Song.

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I've just read, again almost in one, Mary Henderson's book Xenia - A Memoir, beautifully written, of someone both English and Greek, loving both countries, able to be critical of both, with powerful accounts of life in Nazi-occupied Athens and then of the Greek Civil War. It is another of the books generously loaned me by Yolanda who we met on the ferry from Venice a month ago.

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Carnival tomorrow! Procession starting Sunday afternoon at 4.00pm, and a party after (see: last year's). Get out the fancy dress and prepare some food to share at the old olive press.
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Back to the future - 19 March '11 - on local boats with a loose footed sail. I should seek out a vessel called the falkusa, built in the village of Komiza on the island of Vis in Croatia (see also and this). And here's a forum discussion with links to which I'd like to be able to refer including - Traditional Greek Shipbuilding by Kostas A. Damianidis (Athens 1996 ISBN 960-244-038-4)

Croatian Falkuša

First lines

They seemed at first like floaters inside my eye, or the blemishes on a digital image which can be brushed gently off a laptop screen, but their musical mewing showed four short-toed eagles soaring over the crags above the village. A group around the shop gazed up at them as I paused with another barrow of firewood from Steve's house to ours. Overnight Tuesday's weather changed back to wet and windy.

The sun has hung his hat up
Drip drip drip all day
The sun has hung his hat up
‘Cos he doesn’t want to play

Now we’re all unhappy
Drip drip drip all day
The sun has hung his hat up
‘Cos he doesn’t want to play

He ‘s not up this morning
‘Cos he’s blamed for global warming
Now he’s staying in all day
To give us all a warning.

I’m glad I sawed and stored most of the latest firewood yesterday. What’s left is sheltered under Alan’s new balcony. So...‘what to do on a rainy day’. Read, feed cats, make the bed, keep the stove working up a cosy space all day, ponder the news - I understand enough Greek to follow Katerina when she told us that she’ll be moving to a new school between Ipsos and Ag. Markos now that the village school is being ‘amalgamated’ along with many schools across Greece. I’d seen this on the village website, mentioning there are now only 12 children at the school in Ano Korakiana.

Το 2ο Δημοτικό Σχολείο Κορακιάνας σήμερα έχει 12 μαθητές. Προτείνεται η κατάργησή του και η συγχώνευση με το 6θέσιο Δημοτικό Σχολείο Αγίου Μάρκου, σε απόσταση 3,5 χιλιομέτρων. Δημιουργείται σχολείο με 103 μαθητές

Such eventualities have been occurring in villages across the modernising world, though not where rural populations are still large, as in Tikli in Rajasthan, where Martin and Annie Howard, who we know, have started a local private school in the country 15 miles south of the outskirts of Delhi. That would be so unlikely in Europe where young parents feel they can only make a living for themselves and a future for their children by moving to larger settlements. At least there’s a viable 103 pupils in the combined school three and a half kilometres away on the lower ground between Pyrgi and Ag.Markos.
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What to read?:

When the same nightmare awakens her, she sits bolt upright in the middle of the bed.  McBain Alice in Jeopardy 2005

Towards the middle of July, in the year 1838, one of those vehicles called milords, then appearing in the Paris Squares for the first time, was driving along the rue de l’Université, bearing a stout man of medium height in the uniform of a captain in the National Guard.  Balzac Cousin Bette 1847

First lines. Like the tips of icebergs, skirted by the less attentive, an indicator as to what may lie beneath. I’m equally attracted to both beginnings, written a century and a half apart. Go on to the whole first page and I may be reading what the author wrote last - distilling the essence of their story in those first 30 or so lines, after the rest was completed, or I may be reading the page the author needed to get right before they could progress. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.’ I remember Olivier speaking these lines in the film of Richard III, still better than the versions I’ve seen on stage. Good first lines are like poems, or clever advertising copy – containing a weight and depth beyond the number of words in them, the meaning and intention of the writer. I love ‘once upon a time…’ because I remember having enchanting stories read to me. This will be timeless magic. ‘In the beginning darkness was upon the face of the waters’ or is it ‘the deep?** I can’t recall exactly, but nearly as good as 'The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of...' and so on, for a good paragraph, introducing the universe of Pickwick. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged...'  starts Jane Austen’s great novel Pride and Prejudice  - her first wasn’t it? ‘It was the best of the times. It was the worst of times.’ A Tale of Two Cities. ‘It was a crisp April morning and the clocks were striking thirteen’ I don’t know if it was crisp or April, but the 13 chimes I do recall. Knowing what was to come in Orwell’s 1984, imagining how I could be persuaded to embrace a lie even though reality is presented to my eye and ear. ‘I first met him in Piraeus.’ People who’ve only seen the film of Zorba the Greek will guess it. They seem so simple, yet these first words are steeped in the genius of their inventors. Kadare’s Three Elegies for Kosovo 1998 ‘Never before had rumours of impending war been followed by a confirmation of peace.” I looked that up to see how Kadare started that little book, but what about the ones I can nearly remember? For some reason I’m always thinking Dostoevsky and not Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina which starts 'All happy marriages are the same; all unhappy marriages are different.'* Is that correct? It was far better than that but until I check it on the memory-stealing internet that's what I recall. How about the first great historian Herodotus’ History of the Greek and Persian War 430BC ‘According to the Persians, best informed in history, the Phœnicians began the quarrel.’ “I like that” said Lin. “It’s as good as the Ed McBain.”

*Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way -  Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
**And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
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We had our first class in Greek here. Superb. Our tutor Aleko Damaskinos, teacher of mathematics at Edinburgh University and Queen Mary, University of London, used the blackboard around the dartboard at Sally’s on the Ipsos esplanade to take us through a number of nouns and verbs that we’d been using to make some simple sentences, taking some of the hard work out of learning the frustrating inflexions of Greek (inflect = to change the form of a word, for example, to show a change in tense, mood, gender, or number). Eight of us – two Dutch - Anneka and Laura, - an American – Mickey – and the English - Roman, Jane, Carol, me and Lin, paying a small sum each for an hour’s very good tuition.

Words we will require for this lesson Aleko told us:
Η θέση (thesi) = place, έχω δίκιο (thikio) = I am right,
Δεν έχο δίκιο = I am wrong,
Δικός μου  (thikos mou) = mine/my (m)
Δική μου = mine/my (f), Δικό μου = mine/my (n),

Δεν πειράζει (pirazi) = it doesn’t matter.
Ίδιοσ-α-ο (ithios-a-o) = the same,
Γυρίζω (girizo) = I return/I turn,
Γύρισα (girisa) = I returned/I turned,
Γύρισε = return! (command),
Η δουλειά (thoolia) = work/job,
Ευχαριστημένος-η-ο (efharitstimenos) = happy.

We started sentences: I returned home = Γυρίζω στο σπίτι
He went back to his place = γύρισε στη θέση του,
What did he/she do? = τι έκανε;
What did you do, Andrea? = τι έκανες, Αντρέα;
What did you see? = τι είδες;

"'See' is very irregular. A bit of a stinker" said Aleko.

βλέπω-εις-ει = Ι see (you see, he/she/it sees)
είδα-ες-ε = I saw (you, he/she/it saw),
δεν είθα τίποτα = I saw nothing

On to some imperatives: βάζω (vazo) = I put, βάλε = put!
δίνω (thino) = I give, δώσε = give!
παίρνω (perno) = I take, πάρε = take!

And some prepositions, μέσα = inside, επάνω = on top

Then a little test: Take the book and give it to Dimitri = πάρε το βιβλίο και δώσε το Κύριο Δημήτρη.
Take the bag from the chair and put it on the table = πάρε τη τσάντα απο τη καρέκλα και βάλε την επάνω στο τραπέζι.
What are you doing, Andrea? = τι έκανες, Αντρέα;
I took the bag  from the chair and I put it on the table = πήρα τη τσάντα απο τη καρέκλα και την έβαλα έπανω στο τραπέζι.

Τhus we continued for a rewarding hour, practising our pronunciation, carefully assembling usable sentences, transposing them to other settings with slightly different nouns. Meanwhile I'm smarting because I seem to have told someone who asked, not, as I intended, "I am taking firewood (zeela = ξύλα) to my house", but "I am taking a bitch' (skeela = σκύλα) to my house." I wondered why the person to whom I mentioned this, slightly proud of my diction, looked puzzled, even a little alarmed.
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Ian Wegg who's been helping me research broadcasts involving my stepfather, Jack Hargreaves, has found me this 1949 news item from the British Pathé website:
Howard Marshall does commentary for the BBC, from Peckham swimming baths (long demolished), as Jack tries to reel in strong local swimmer called Harold Elven. I recall JH telling me he'd set this up hoping he could 'catch' Harold, but the rod broke. Even now I can remember being vexed for my stepfather. In my seven-year-old mind he never failed at anything. Ian writes: '... possibly the oldest existing film of JH? It shows he was recognised as an angler even then, 10 years before his first Southern broadcast."