Place

We're all in the kitchen here, Amy. Liz, Oliver, Lin and I, with Flea watching us making lists...

Going back to an afternoon in 2009 on the other side of the world:

Meanwhile in the small town of Newstead, in Victoria, population according to Wikipedia, 487, I was taken to a community meeting in the main street coffee shop where there was a Sunday afternoon get together to discuss the implications of Social Networking with an invited academic, Barry Golding from Ballarat University, gently expressing his reservations about the difference between real face-to-face contact and that offered by, for instance Facebook or Twitter, and reminding us just what en enormous part of the global population has never made a phone call let alone having access to the world wide web, while someone working for the State of Victoria, Ben Hart, suggested - with equal politeness - the potential of the medium. We had WiFi where we met and after the Q & A session I couldn't resist asking to have myself pictured 'in country' by a page of Democracy Street blog.

It's not that I'm out of touch with information technology, nor anything but fascinated by inventiveness, No amount of communication via the vast but invisible stringing and switching of the internet can impart the sense of place I'm not at. I scan the Ano Korakiana website and follow a couple of Facebook sites on Corfu - one proving very popular among ex-patriats for buying and selling, co-ordinating searches for missing dogs and cats and finding accommodation - Corfu Grapevine - and another - Only Corfu Society started by our friend Aleko Damaskinos - for exploring facts and and sharing fictions about the island, and of course there are many others in many languages, not to mention panoramic photographs of beloved places and unique Corfucius. There's skype and email and ordinary telephone and of course memories I've streamed on Youtube and Vimeo. None impart the sense I associate with the places from which I'm absent in a way that consoles me for not being there. A place is touch, smell, sound but above all direct human contact and in a smaller but important way the anticipation of those in imagination, a kinaesthetic sense of things akin to the absolute reality of a dream. Music can evoke it; a sudden burst of a familiar sound on radio or TV  and I know - as if an internal sluice is opened, my chest flooded with such fullness, I suffer a momentary difficulty of speech.

Mother Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra in winter

Getting ready to leave the Highlands

Farewells said. The younger ones ready to leave

The other morning Amy and Guy left early to get south before there was more snow on Slocht summit or Drumochter Pass. Margie F, my mother's carer, drove in convoy with them for a while. heading on to London then a flight home to South Africa, having transferred her role to Fiona W. Abruptly we were two dogs less; my daughter and her husband gone back to work and Margie no longer here. The house seemed to empty. After I'd gone to bed, halfway through Kadare's The Three Arched Bridge, just after the builders had immured a man in their stonework:

The bridge ... demanded a sacrifice. Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bards sang. The monk, sure that no one would volunteer, was aghast to learn that Murrash Zenebisha, an average local worker had been immured into the bridge's first arch in the night, his face still visible, staring out from the bridge, where his corpse could be made out beneath a veneer of plaster. It was something that violated everything we knew about the borders of life and death. The man remained poised between the two like a bridge, without moving in one direction or the other. The man had sunk into non-existence, leaving his shape behind him, like a forgotten garment.

I'd left the laptop up-loading a film I'd made with mum. I woke to the ring of a Skype call.
Lin "What are you doing in bed so early with your computer on? Watching porn?"
"Why should I when I'll be home soon?"
"Ha ha" We chatted about things, she smoking at the kitchen table in Handsworth, me in my nightie looking tired.
"My leg's swollen" I said "I bruised it tripping over a big flowerpot and the swelling's still there after a week."
"Yuk" she said when I showed it to her "Ibuprofin? It's anti-inflammatory." We can both play Carrie and Charles Pooter. "I've got us a flight for Easter to Corfu. When can you get away?"
"April onward. Do you ever think of saving the environment?"
"OK. I'm going now."
Boo-peep goes the Skype hang-up. A frog jumping into a pond. Awake again I read some more Kadare. I so like him but I don't think this tale of a bridge being built - an idea I like - can compete with Ivo Andrić's Bridge over the Drina. K's Broken April still has the strongest hold on my imagination and my thinking about Albania.
On Monday morning Oscar and I will take the train from Inverness to Edinburgh Waverley, and change there for Birmingham New Street, arriving at 1900 - eight hours. I've made myself a picnic - grainy brown bread sandwiches, one with hand carved ham and mustard, the other with cheddar and pickle sauce, plus some buttery shortbread and toffees. Fiona's prepared one for Oscar. I've the book to finish and then perhaps some DVDs - John Ford's cavalry series, extinguished myths of the west.
I managed to have mum make one more video, in which she speaks of how she and Angus came to live at Mains of Faillie forty years ago, creating such a special place for so many of us.

Mum's memories: coming to live in the Highlands from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
****
As well as pointing me towards the nicest news from Corfu about the long long awaited new hospital at Kontokali, and a web diary by the Prime Minister's brother, Nick Papandreou - from which I jumped to Dreams in time of Greek Austerity - Jim Potts has left me two poems - one 'more like a haiku' - he wrote about Sotiria Bellou in the comments at the bottom of my previous entry - 'The greatest voice in Greece, for me' he writes...

      Greek Music

      The salty tang of sea-ports;
      The belle-laide voice of Bellou:
      Rebetic.

** ** **
John Martin in Bendigo, who when I first visited Brisbane with him in 2009 about the catastrophic floods that struck the city in 1974, mails:

Morning Simon, more rain overnight, all along the east coast of Australia to add to the floods in Qld. Brisbane will have flooding the next few days. Your time in Scotland with your mum and Amy and Guy sounds delightful. Good on you for asking about your mother's history. I am sure your attention is much appreciated. Delighted to have your video greetings on your blog. It was a nice short summary, very appropriate, and generous. Thank you. Not long before you are back in Corfu. I imagine February would be an interesting time being colder than when we have been there. Lots of time to explore the island, read some good books and just take it easy. We are off to Adelaide later this week. When is a good time for a chat via Skype the next few days? Cheers, John

Source: BOM December's rainfall deciles for Australia 2010

Hi John. Have a good visit to Adelaide. I missed it this time and recall how much I liked the place – especially the hills and the pier at the end of the tram line. I do like a return trip to a destination on an edge. Climate dislocation, sovereign risk...I’ve been seeing it. Bizarre to think that last year this time you were concerned about fires – and may yet be. By and large the UK is without weather extremes or earthquakes, which is why even small variations from the average cause us such problems stirred by superlatives frenzy in the media. “Terror of vicar’s wife after Oldham earthquake worries her carp” “I was woken by it” says Wolverhampton plumber “I had to call in sick.” “After the loose tile dropped off my neighbour's roof I became agoraphobic claims another quake victim” “Quake failures. Coalition government must go” etc. I’m back in Handsworth tomorrow night and could call you around 0930 your time or the next day. In Corfu January is famously the wettest month, but February can be too. I got lots of firewood ready last October. As I scan the internet – not just mainstream media – it seems there are an enormous number of unique separate initiatives to enhance sustainability. Something emerging not easily recognised amid the confusing landscape of the immediate.

...and via Global Voices,  (and here up to 12 January '11) came to Christopher Joye's Aussie Macro Moments, oh, I commented on the removal from the mouth of a white southerner of over 200 n-words in a small school's edition of Huckleberry Finn in Alabama brought to my attention by Corfucius - my favourite blogger ever.

That there's an argument to be made for Alan Gribben's action speaks to our times. Looking back in another generation or two, if we really have come to live in a world where color of skin means less than the content of character, we will be as puzzled by this censorship as we are now by those Victorians who draped the legs of their pianos with frilly lace.

...and as brilliant Chris Rock famously asks and answers "can a white man use the word...not really"
*** ***

Me and my Amy in the Highlands

I took a final walk with Oscar, before leaving in the morning, in the woods near, and figured the way the path though mildly sinuous had seemed straight yet led me the way I'd come; an undetectabed curve in what seemed direct. I walked slowly to spare my ankle, stopping to  hear the soundlessness of the woods, though my tread was muffled by snow. Two people, one a child, had walked ahead of me in the day, also with a dog. Their prints guided me where the path was unclear.

Whose woods these are

Rain and floods in Victoria

The Loddon river overflows

On Saturday morning we woke in the soft home bed of John and Annie’s home in Bendigo – their guests. Late Friday night Melbourne Domestic had teemed with midnight arrivals. Our flight out of Brisbane landed at 9.15 to be held an hour on the apron without an exit tunnel to the terminal, weather having delayed preceding flights. By the time we were at the carousel awaiting our bags, travellers bound to Sydney had missed that city’s landing curfew. Stuck in Melbourne, their bags already loaded on departing flights, an apologetic announcer offered them taxi vouchers and A$220 each for a local overnight hotel. We were headed for the carpark and John’s car, the freebus was packed first time round. Catching the next we were at the carpark by 11.15, plonking luggage and ourselves in the warm car and on our way north through driving rain. “One thing goes wrong... the smoothness of the system makes for a bigger mess,” I said “Yeah” said John “As Fred used to say, there’s no redundancy of parts.” Now and then through the wet dark I glimpsed the rising tail lights of planes departing on international journeys. In an hour and a half we were gliding through the empty wet streets of Bendigo, past the floodlit statue of Queen Victoria, familiar buildings, then dark again towards Junortown and home for cups of tea, Annie fast asleep already, and Lin and I to bed. Next day, after a night of further rain John and Annie went to vote in the state elections, we spoke to some of the party workers at the polling station. Labour, in power for three elections is likely to be displaced by voters moving rightwards in favour of the Liberals and the Nationals. "It's more a vote against the incumbents than a vote for their replacement" said John.

He drove us south from Bendigo past surging creeks, overflowing brown rivers, streaming ditches, noisily through long puddles across the road, to Daylesford to a delightful BBQ with friends serving local wines, tasty steaks, fried chicken and well dressed salad with juicy camembert to follow. We debated and agreed that we’d eat al fresco despite the rain and sat in happy conversation, almost dry, beneath a sloping awning that we took turns to lift to release the gathering pools. It was all strange, having visited at the same time for the last two years, to see the land like this after twelve years of drought.

Lunch at Daylesford

***** ***** So we’ve completed five workshops in Queensland – all successful with almost uniformally excellent evaluations. The state local government association had done a great job advertising our work and recruiting a level mix of senior local politicians and CEOs to share experiences with us and each other as they’ve digested our thoughts and examples of negotiating the overlap of political and managerial responsibilities in government. A remark on the final seminar in Brisbane has set us thinking: “You focus on just two people – the Mayor and the CEO. What about the others involved in the overlap?” Good question. My answer has been that the CEO-Leader/Mayor relationship models the others. Get that right and you’re positioned to ensure that the rest are OK. There’s the methodological point – that it’s tricky to track the dynamics if you have more than two in camera. John and I discussed this at the depart gate at Brisbane, and then at greater length this morning; questions coming to mind:

• How do elected politicians share out, if they do, different policy tasks among political colleagues?

• What’s the division of labour between councillors in relation to maintaining political oversight of the work of the council?

• What criteria apply to the selection of elected members to these roles?

• Who decides and how?

• By what procedures are delegations shared and organised among councillors?

• What forms of accountability are applied to the work of councillors in these roles?

• What form of language – titles, briefs, portfolios – is used in referring to the organisation of separate responsibilities?

• How is the organisation of political leadership matched to the organisation of managerial leadership?

“You know where this fits,” said John “in the content and focus? We’ve got ‘learning’, ‘negotiating’ and ‘governing’. It’s the last of those. Let’s ask people about this next seminar.” The work I’d done in UK a few years back with Michael Lyons on ‘cabinet-chief officer relations’ could apply here, indeed a twenty minute discussion at the end of the last Brisbane seminar had been all about how the Mayor and his or her political colleagues organised ‘portfolios’. There’s little or no party politics in Australian local government, and no reference, as in UK to a ‘cabinet’ or before that ‘the group’ of senior members who the officers, and other members in many councils, looked to for steer. I realised, with excitement, that we didn’t know enough, or in some cases, anything about how local government politicians were organising themselves collectively around the task of government. ** ** ** I’m rereading The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I read it first when I was still in callow teens and was disappointed at finding it so unfrightening after all I’d been warned. I guess I’d have had the same experience with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which I read much more recently. Neither of these novels have their full effect on an innocent reader. They're not revelatory and for that reason can leave the young reader – that I once was – hoping for more literal terrors as in Poe or even the brothers Grimm. With the awful knowledge of human depravity, not, thank god, experience, that comes with time’s education, these two works written not far apart at the turn of the 20th century, are landmarks in the documentation of evil, of things unthinkable in kinder times or among a more blinkered generation. Conrad pretended to be speaking about Africa’s stereotypical ‘darkness’ but he was, through his fictional interlocuter, Marlow, sat quietly on that vessel moored in the estuary of the murky Thames where the yarn was spun, referring with awful prescience to us in Britain and Europe. In Turn of the Screw James’ circumlocutions, once opaque, are now read as what he intended, an adult’s increasingly frightened search for internal fiends; ones she thinks may be figments of her imagination, hopes they are, but which she gradually realises have possessed the children in her care, inveigled them into innocent collusion in the crime against them. There has always been child abuse, but only in the last half-century, or less, have we opened the furnace door, exposed its banal frightfulness. James uses the diversion of unreality – the supernatural - to tell a story about a hideous reality. When I first read this book, like a million others who didn’t acknowledge or even believe in such things, I couldn’t make out what was so scary about it, nor did the films of the book help. Now I fully grasp the famous dying quote from Heart of Darkness - ‘the horror, the horror.’ ** ** **

In our hotel in Brisbane

It's not as if we aren't kept pretty well reminded of Europe's currency while noting how well A$s and NZ$s are performing against the pound. Poor Greece and Ireland too... "default" say the people - and then I learn from a piece in an Australian newspaper that Europe tried monetary union in the 19th century and failed. I didn't know that. * * * In Brisbane’s Art Gallery we came across a striking picture - a surrealist painting by James Gleeson - Structural emblems of a friend; – one in which I recognised across the length of a large gallery a startling likeness. Lin came over as I gazed at it. “So like your Dad." He died in 1972 the year before she and I met. “I’ve seen photos - that one of him with your brother.” She meant the one of him taken with George in 1969 in a caique off Aegina, but I was thinking of an older portrait, taken about the time Gleeson painted his self-portrait in 1941.

*** ***
Meanwhile the local shop at Inverarnie in the Highlands is almost snowbound. Margi Fleming, my mother's carer sent photos of the weather and mum, when I skyped her from Sidney, spoke of temperatures of -20° "Worse than last year and much earlier!"

Longreach in the outback

The first workshop for councillors, and some officers, from Longreach and surrounding Shires - council areas in central Queensland each larger than Wales - has gone very well. The day after Lin and I and John toured the township of Longreach courtesy of John Palmer, the Mayor, waving at and being greeted by fellow citizens as he passed - a world away from my metropolitan world, as was the small town's showcase exhibition, the Stockman's Hall of Fame, celebrating Australia's wild west, in historic terms hardly a century that changed the Australian landscape, formed a stereotype fast fading into modernity.

By CityCat to downtown Brisbane

So now we return to the bustle of the city, staying in Hamilton on the edge of Brisbane, heading this afternoon to the coast city of Mackay, for a second seminar, before returning to Brisbane from where we fly to New Zealand on Sunday. Also in Lonreach we visited the QUANTAS Founders' Museum - conspicuous from above and on the ground some of the retired airplanes that conquered the 'tyranny of distance' - historian Geoffrey Blainey's phrase for the vastness that was the Australian settlers' experience of their new continent.
*  *  *
And just before countrywide local elections this Sunday, an op-ed piece from Richard Pine, living in Corfu, in The Irish Times, heralding the acrid blast of modernity upon the Hellenes and their economy, threatening much that Greeks and non-Greeks associate with 'Greekness':

....These elections are not about Greece’s image abroad, but about Greece’s image of itself.

As Kathimerini newspaper put it: “Every institution, every group and every individual will have to redefine itself with regard to society as a whole.” Talk of “the rebirth of a nation” is widespread. Papandreou declares, “We are changing Greece.” At the same time he insists, “There is no intrinsic flaw in the Greek character – it’s not in our DNA to have these problems.” But many critics insist that it is the very Greekness of that DNA that has created the problems.

As Athens-based journalist Nikos Konstandaras observes, “The underlying cause is the absence of personal discipline, which has cultivated a mentality that anyone could do what they liked.” There is a fundamental problem here – Konstandaras says, “this mindless tolerance is not a manifestation of democracy: it undermines it.” But to a vast number of Greeks, freedom and democracy are identical.

An index of this is the reaction to the new ban on smoking in public places. The law was introduced on September 1st but is widely regarded as an intrusion into personal liberty. As William Mallinson, a former British diplomat now lecturing at the Ionian University, puts it: “The price of freedom is chaos.”

Papandreou has acknowledged that “the crisis derives mainly from the lack of transparency in state power and public life, and from a clientelism that has corroded everything”.

The Brookings Institute in Washington reports that bribery, patronage and other corruption cost €20 billion per year, or 8 per cent of GDP. Much of the clientelism stems from the “sins of the father”: it was under Papandreou’s father Andreas, prime minister in the 1980s, that the flawed system was created by vested interests influencing political decisions. Ostensibly, and to a large extent truly, this was a reaction to the right-wing exclusion of the lower classes – urban and rural – following the civil war and under the military junta, between 1967 and 1974......

The recovery has been a personal crusade by George Papandreou to highlight the self-delusion his father’s crusade inadvertently encouraged: cronyism, over-employment in the civil service, excessive consumer spending. The programme on which recovery is based involves four key elements: a fundamental reform of public administration, including a reduction of the 1,034 municipalities to 340; locally-based initiatives to stimulate economic growth; privatisation of state companies such as Hellenic Railways; and liberalisation and deregulation of restricted professions, including lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, accountants, architects, truck drivers and taxis.......(extract)

** **

Wednesday late afternoon we arrive in Mackay to run a seminar on Thursday with councillors (plus Chief Executive) from the Regional Council. A hotel behind palms, shorter trees, shrubs and grasses along the Pacific shore. The taxi driver spun a mile journey from the airport to our hotel into a three mile fare - A$24 compared to a crow-flies fare of under A$10 - talking the while about the right pronunciation of the town - "Mack-i" or "Mack-a". "What do they make of climate change?" asked John "I think it's just the natural way of things. But who knows?". Later another driver, about to take us on the same run-around said "That's what the sat-nav says."
I have strong feelings about continued coal dependency, including a local economy's reliance on selling it to others. Parents who continue to deny or ignore the need to more than greenwash 'clean' coal may answer to their children and grandchildren.  Coal power costs the environment. It hinders the pursuit of renewable energy, yet a young men earning A$125k a year toiling 5 days on, 5 days off in the mining business of Queensland, can well feel pride spending and investing his wages on home and family; "Who needs education? Bastard climate change hippies." [See Stephen Schneider's recent book Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to save Earth's Climate - a review with good links, including this guide to debate with a climate change sceptic. Given that scientific thinking entails maintaining doubt and scepticism about the nature of truth you can see the problem. Political truth is made at the ballot box, which has no slot for shades of grey.]

China continued to be the largest and one of the fastest-growing coal markets in the world, with usage rising 9.6 percent to 1,537 mtoe in 2009, or 46.9% of total world coal consumption. The increase in coal use in China between 2008 and 2009 was greater than the total 2009 usage in Germany and Poland combined. In 2009, China became a net importer of coal for the first time, thanks to a surge in imports of steam coal (the grade used in boilers for electricity generation) from Australia, Indonesia, and Viet Nam. 

Colliers off Mackay

Once settled in our room, we stroll the shore - sandy soft and clean; on the tide line - leaves, twigs, small seawashed logs and coconut husks; not a plastic bottle or other human detritus. Flat Top and Round Top islands just offshore and further off the big colliers arriving at Dalrymple coal terminal further down the coast and departing for China. The sand crabs re-create on the beach, in fractal style, the spinifex landscape we've seen from the air around Longreach.

** ** **
A very funny piece in The Australian about aca-zombies by Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan, co-editor of the forthcoming Zombies in the Academy.

The deadly hand of corporatism has drained all life from campus. Universities are increasingly populated by the undead: a listless population of academics, managers, administrators and students, all shuffling to the beat of the corporatist drum. Perhaps not surprisingly, the terrifying zombie plague that has swept through the sector is now the subject of serious scholarly attention (books, articles, conferences) as surviving academics investigate how we have descended into this miasma. So who or what exactly is responsible for tertiary zombification? Is there an antidote? Perhaps a clue lies in the recent independent movie Pontypool, in which the zombie virus is spread through endearments such as honey and sweetheart. The contagion is rapid and lethal, infecting all those who come into contact with such banal sweeteners. Similar lexical vacuity exists in today's university campuses, which have become hollowed-out spaces containing soulless buildings: food courts like any zombified shopping centre; eerily deserted libraries; and hi-tech lecture amphitheatres. In this bleak landscape the source of the zombie contagion lurks in the form of dead hand, mechanical speech....

The article is just a reminder that where the Victorians treated primary education as an instrument of the state, in pursuit of a workforce sufficiently literate to work in the new factories that were part of the industrial revolution, and secondary education expanded for less material motives after the second world war, now tertiary education - universities, academia - is treated by government and its business partners as the lead instrument of national economic survival in a globalised economy.

Studying this interest in the metaphor of zombies I was led to a recent publication called Zombie Economics by John Quiggin about the dead ideas that still walk among us and this led me to a most interesting overview of commentaries on the economic paradigm in which we are now entrapped - a piece by Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in The National Interest, of which he's a senior editor. Drezner's title takes up the zombie theme - First Bank of the Living Dead. Quiggin blogs a gentle rebuttal of Drezner's review, but the words I'm drawn to - not least because they are so lacking in the 'lexical vacuity' described by Andrew Whelan, are Keynes' - quoted at the end of Drezner's piece.

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed. John Maynard Keynes 1933

Meanwhile Tom Tomorrow's cartoon describes the credit industry going about it's daily work:

I wonder which society, which country, or which town or village will invent and maintain a way of living without growth without resorting to the terrible 20th century experiments of Nazi Germany and its allies or Soviet Russia, China and the failing experiment that grips the rest of us as the only alternative - turbo-charged global captalism.  I remind myself to read Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson, leading the economics steering group of the UK's Sustainable Development Commission.

I am inclined to agree with Max Born, the German physicist, who reckoned that the acceptance of a new quantum theory would occur only with the passing away of the old physics professors. The acceptance will await a new generation that starts off with a question mark. Fred Emery, one of my first employers

Back to the future ~ 18/12/10: Terry Eagleton on The death of universities.
18/01/11: Henri Girou on Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University: Higher Education in the Service of Democracy

*** ***
Pleasing news from Ano Korakiana. The greengrocers we thought was closed at the western end of Democracy Street has re-opened...

'...fully renovated owned and managed by Maria Binou, welcoming its first customers. At 7 last Saturday evening the Pappas gave his blessing to the opening of the store while Maria had prepared a buffet for guests with the support of her large family. The new shop will undoubtedly provide benefits to our village and deserves our support, along with the 2-3 others remaining ... in an area which up to three decades ago was served by 30 different stores.'

The portico at 208 Democracy Street

We've had a chance to look at and discuss details of the portico Alan's finishing under the new balcony. He thinks our door's now looking not quite right; suggests at least a coat of white paint. Lin had been thinking a Corfu green would suit, with a plain panel under the window edged with a moulded frame. I'm sitting at the kitchen table in Handsworth enjoying photos of the work, relaxing after a ride up to Erdington to lift someone's patio of york stone advertised on freegle.

From Honey in Corfu:

...the pictures as promised. I think it is mostly the harsh contrast from the smooth flowing white lines that the door interferes with. That's why we thought white. Actually, I thought sanding down the door and white-washing it to give it a soft look. But, you will have to see it and decide what you think. Alan probably has another week, or even two, for getting all the fine details done. Those details make all the difference. So, when you're viewing the pictures, remember there are still unfinished corners...You will continue to see small changes as he completes it. He draped a blue sheet of plastic over the walkway to keep from being in the scorching sun while working and Katerina liked it so much she asked if he could buy one for her. He brought her one the next day. Then she asked for a little of his cement mix which he put in a bag she brought over. Now she is very pleased with her newly acquired shade. Lefteri asked Alan where he could buy a cornice mold like the one he put up on your balcony. It's really rewarding to have everyone being so appreciative of the job he's doing there. That was totally unexpected. Well, at least to the degree it has been happening. I know it's hard work on that allotment, but just be thankful it's not in 40 degree weather, like here. I guess you'll be in Scotland soon and relaxing with tea and buns, oops, I mean Mum. Enjoy. Love, Alan and Honey

παιδιά στοά

* * * * *

Plans are in place for me to take part in another series of seminars in Australia from early November to early December with a date in New Zealand too.

***

Dimitris Reppas

30 July 2010: Greek truckers continue to block highways, ignoring a government order to go back to work. Drivers rallied outside the Transport Ministry on Thursday 29th July to protest against an order to force them to work. Truck unions were meeting with the general secretary of the Ministry, Charis Tsiokas, ahead of a talk with Transport Minister, Dimitris Reppas. Military trucks are resupplying critical sectors such as airports, electricity plants and hospitals. Businesses from car rentals to fruit growers have been hit by the protest which began on Sunday versus government plans to liberalise the tightly-controlled freight sector. Costly HGV licenses are traded for thousands of euros within a small pool of professional drivers now seeking to protect their big personal investment in those licences. All over Greece, people are being cold turkeyed by lack of petrol and diesel. Gas stations are empty; closed.

One day this grim reliance on oil will be history. I don't like cars, even as at times I need them, à cause qu'elles polluent la terre, écrasent les gens et salissent l'air. I want to see an end to fossil fuel dependency, escape from the fossil-fuel trap. I love my bicycles. I've divorced my car.

** ***

Page 7 of the August Agiot Newsletter - Working on the Allotment. Nice but it omits the video illustrations.

A glimpse of the new porch

Ο Άλαν Μπάρατ το έκανε

As well as replacing the balcony and stairs on the outside of the house on Democracy Street, Alan has designed and is now putting final touches to a new porch, which we saw as a sketch at the beginning of May. Honey has emailed us latest photos:

Hi, Simlin. Here's an early look at the porch as it's coming along. Still a lot of finishing work to be done. It's all the details that need doing now. We'll send another shot in a few days to let you see the progression. The neighbors are coming there every day and seem delighted and surprised at each new additional detail. We hope you are equally pleased. Love, Alan and Honey

Lin replies:

Hi Honey. The porch looks fabulous! We love it. I particularly like the curve down to the bottom of the steps - it has a very art deco feel to it. Only 6 weeks till we see it 'in the flesh' (so to speak). Can't wait to sit on the little bench with a cuppa - it's like getting a new house. lol. Please pass on our admiration to Alan. He's very lucky to be so talented and makes me very jealous! My cousin Val from New Zealand is coming in September, followed by friends from Australia, so I'll be taking some time off from roofing, plaka-ing, painting, etc. Hope to see a bit more of the island this time - we hardly went out last time. Simon has work in Australia again at the end of October and I've taken the plunge and booked to go with him...Simon's been digging our new allotment and I've ordered seed potatoes, which I hope will arrive tomorrow. We're not planting anything else this year, as we won't be here. We reckon that potatoes can look after themselves. lol Must go - lots to do before I go to bed. Love to you both, and give our thanks to Alan for his beautiful porch. Linsim xxx

The cubby's just right for my Brompton, and a cat or two

** ** ** We are hearing that at last Greek forest maps could be in the public domain during September.

Kathimerini 22 July '10: An ambitious draft bill that aims to curb illegal construction on forestland by drawing up comprehensive maps delineating the boundaries of the country’s forests is to be submitted in Parliament next week and the first few maps are to be put on public display in September, Environment Minister Tina Birbili said yesterday.

...and although, it's not a story for the redtops I'm impressed that after years of politically massaged statistics on the state of the Greek economy there is an independent statistical office responsible for producing national information - especially financial.

* * * *

Two good sessions with elected members - one near London, another in the Midlands - on overview and scrutiny.

Tailored to address the needs of new and more experienced councillors this evening focuses on driving the work of scrutiny, aiming:

• to familiarise councillors with the unique dynamics of chairing scrutiny as this relates to roles, activities and processes that contribute to successful scrutiny

• to help members assess their own learning, and practice the skills required,

• to explore the organisational role of scrutiny and its contribution to good governance

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

Part of the pleasure of in-house work with particular councils is travelling there and back with the opportunity to rehearse on the train, mark papers, read, gaze from the window and cycle to and from my station. I travel with others, part of the teeming diversity of the public domain - in trains, on platform and concourse, on the street - interesting people, noisy, silly people, puzzling, distracted, eccentric, beautiful, zombie-like people, reading, sleeping, chatting, phoning, working on laptops, watching films, playing computer games, earphone absorbed. I'm so acclimatised to this motley, accustomed to being the anonymous author of an involuntary internal commentary, mostly curbed by public civility - emitting cartoon bubbles of vexation, amusement, frustration and curiosity amid a stream of impressions I'd feel slightly trapped on my own behind the wheel of a car compared to the openness in all weathers accorded by cycling, walking and the company I share on public transport.

I’ve been untruthful about some public exchanges lest the extra detail shadow the good light I hope to shine on myself or to avoid the whimsy of self-depreciation. An encounter at the end of May on New Street Station concourse, when I called out to someone “Your shoelace is undone” and he replied, “Piss off”. It didn’t end there.

I got out my taser, the one I use for repelling aggressive dogs, and brought him to his knees pleading for mercy…no, no of course not, but I did cry out

“What a horrid thing to say!”

and when he ignored or failed to hear me, I repeated

“Hey! that was a vile thing to say…” He turned to stare at me “...really vile. Don’t you know small incivilities lead to big ones?”

“What do you mean?”

I had his attention

“What you just did when I tried to do you a favour. That way leads to Auschwitz, Birkenau and Belsen.”

“O fercrisake”

“You share the same moral deficiency”

By now we had an audience; amid the early commuters, one witness - a man from Network Rail stood observing our exchange.

“It’s you who’ve got the serious moral deficiency, if you think me saying 'piss off' makes me a concentration camp guard”

Now we were communicating I felt embarrassed.

“OK I’m sorry of course the comparison’s disproportionate. I promise you’re not a concentration camp guard. Of course you’re not, but I was really vexed”

“OK. Yes...well...I apologise. I’ve had a lousy night”

I put out my hand; he his, and we smiled ruefully at one another as we shook hands. He went his way his lace still undone. I turn towards my platform and the Network Rail man said, “You were dead right. One thing leads to another”

I agreed with him privately but didn’t press the point, thinking Norbert Elias’ ghost backs me. Small incivilities do lead to larger.

The other day I went to the Public Convenience on the edge of the chapter grounds of Winchester cathedral. I wheeled my bike into the foyer; left it there to go to the men’s WC. It was clean without a trace of malodour or horrid perfumed camouflage. Going out I saw the attendant in his office.

“Your toilets are excellent.“

He realised I was talking to him and came out to the yorkstone street

“A civilisation is measured by the state of its public conveniences. Yours is an example.”

He was wearing a Serco badge on spotless blue overalls. A bulky man in his 50s.

“Have you been to the Abbey Gardens ones?” he asked

“No”

“They’re even better. Classical music. Rodgers and Hammerstein.”

“Right. If I get caught short in that vicinity I’ll call in, but meantime thanks for these.”

“They could be cleaner but it’s raining. People bring in…”

He unlocked the disabled WC door to show its pristine floor.

“A tiny difference.” I said

“Well thanks" and we waved goodbye. Now I thought of one 'who sweeps a room…’ which reminds me of something that happened on Sunday afternoon as I worked on the dry earth of our stony allotment with so much more to do. I was thinking what a long way I have to go before I can begin to plant anything when I saw, below my upraised mattock, an oak sapling hardly six inches high, that must have been missed by the developer’s weed killer. It had planted itself amid the scrub. I levered it gently from the ground and took it, still with a tiny root ball of dried earth, to the foot of the plot and replanted it, watering it in from the plastic bottle I’d brought to slake my thirst - the first thing planted on Plot 14.

In Perth

Stayed overnight in Bendigo, drove back to Melbourne and flew to Perth, and took a taxi to our hotel apartment - overlooking the Swan River - where we could refine the detail of our first programme tomorrow; selecting short clips that will be instantly ready to illustrate debate. John and I view a filmed conversation and make a selection. I clip that bit out of the longer film so it can be placed on my desktop with the other clips.

First thing this morning John and I hired bicycles from reception and did a 20k circuit of Swan Reach under grey skies as the city high rises drifted across the near horizon. We were ignored by pelicans and cormorants as we passed sharing space with other cyclists, strollers and joggers. In a café in town we discussed transport politics over eggs benedict, melon juice and coffee cycling back to our apartment by 1100 to continue work. I caught Lin on skype for a couple of minutes - staying up late as usual. From the quiet of our room we are in immediate contact with the rest of the world. My sense of time and place is especially fluid.

One of John's filmed 'conversations'. Mayor and CEO of Marion

We've worked on through the day, John liaising with some of those whose films we'll be showing, getting a grand view of sunset over Perth. It is hard to express my enjoyment at having, in John, someone who shares my fascination with what goes on in the fuzzy messy grey area where politics and administration overlap in the making of government. My self-confidence on this subject has always been fragile - because the subject is so intangible and my approach more descriptive than prescriptive depending deeply on the engagement of those I presume to teach.

John confirms permission to use a film from Toodyay

We've done as much preparation as possible. Now to get a night's rest - and start on my next police procedural - This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas - before sleep overtakes me.

Flying to Australia tonight

I've been packing all day ready for a flight to the other side of the world - more or less directly SE from Birmingham to Melbourne on my map - arriving 0840 Saturday morning with short stops at Dubai and Singapore. It's not that I'm fearful of flying, rather enjoying watching films and reading and snoozing in a long dark rumbling tube 30000 feet in the sky. It's that had I the time I'd far rather make the journey by sea or even airship.

* * * Yesterday morning I rapped on the kitchen window to see off a heron fishing in our pond, ignoring the plastic deterrent a few feet away . Later on Wednesday, my last day with my Japanese students we visited Walsall Road Allotments, guests of the secretary who gave us tea, cakes and a tour of the plots. Seeing a well run allotment site, going for at least 40 years, made me even more aware of the work that will needed on the new Victoria Jubilee Allotments starting an 80 plot site from scratch, with a tiny staff from Birmingham City allotments section to guide us.

Mami from Japan and Betty, allotments secretary

Back to normal routines

Yesterday I cycled in early to New Street, caught the train to London, cycled across town to Victoria and was in Brighton by 1030 to plan a workshop for councillors on Overview and Scrutiny
- then back the same way, except I got off at Clapham junction, dropped in on friends who live near the Common, and cycled on, late afternoon, crossing the Thames via Chelsea Bridge, along the embankment, up Whitehall and Charing Cross Road to busy Euston again, and home on a Pendelino.
Gosh! How I enjoy cycling through cities and then using train time to do work - marking papers this time, then reading a Japanese crime procedural - All she was worth by Miyabe Miyuke - given me by one of my students in Tokyo who knows this is a favourite way of taking in the detail of another culture. As I entered our home road I got a puncture. How nice it should happen so close to home.
* * *
On Saturday we'd been to a family christening - near total immersion for a small nephew who took it very well, and altogether good to embrace so many relatives in one place and...and...my half-cousin has got some of the historical detail I've been seeking about the life of my Greek stepmother, Maria's father, Admiral Roussen about whom I know so little. P's mailing me a file.
On Thursday Annie Guthrie phoned from Cairns, in Northern Queensland, while I was teaching – the lecture room at Park House being wired and the Skype screen behind me showing via a data projector. Having sped through cyberspace, she entered into the spirit of the moment; said ‘Hi’ to my class who said ‘Hi’ back and waved. On Sunday Annie's husband, John, was sat at his laptop speaking face-to-face with me at the kitchen table in Handsworth - across 16000 miles - planning a future visit, touring further around Australia with a richer version of the workshops we’d just done on political-management leadership. Cycling home a heron stood watching the canal, flying lazily off to another perch fifty yards along the bank, as I approached in time to snap a picture.
* * *
When I got home last Tuesday I found Lin had tidied places I’m used to leaving stuff. It’s a pleasure to see the neatness but hard to observe in the return to home routines. I’ve always wanted to be tidy; never succeeded for long. It’s like that in my head. There've been some seriously good changes in the garden - joint work by Linda and Amy - which is looking as good as it's ever been. Lin's fitted an ultra-violet gadget on one of the ponds to try to get the water crystal clear.
* * *
I keep thinking that we'll be in Ano Korakiana in the first week of July.