"Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises."

The summer stays with us a little longer. Oscar contributed to Martin Creed's 'all the bells' cacophony to mark the start of the 2012 Olympic Games in London as I chimed in with St Mary's Church bells this morning - just up the road.

We were in St Mary's yesterday noon. Rev Brian Hall was showing around a group of us involved in designing a two hour Heritage Walk around Handsworth and Lozells. We'd begun the pilot walk at St.Mary's Convent, gone on via St Silas' Square to The Old Toll House...

Outside the Old Toll House

...on the corner of Villa and Hamstead Roads, before strolling on to see the Gatehouse to Heathfield Park - once the Lodge of James Watt's estate.

 - From St Mary's we climbed over the churchyard wall and strolled through Handsworth Park to the bandstand where I gave a short account of its loss and restoration with the re-opening of the Park on 8 July 2006

On this occasion we missed the Victoria Jubilee Allotments though they'll probably be included in the planned walk. We headed on to Soho Road for a lovely vegetarian meal with mango lassis at the London Sweet Centre before going round The Council House a few yards further up Soho Road, now home of the Handsworth Campus of City College.

Richard Trengrouse, Ashok,  Simon and Oscar

In our little group of strollers, Ashok, Aftab Rahman, Sue, Richard Trengrouse waxing enthusiastic about the buildings and green spaces; grumbling at examples of damage done them by lack of restoration or, worse, unimaginative restoration. We agreed over lunch that the tour should take in some family homes. Richard emailed us about an encounter on the way back to the walk's starting point at the Convent in Hunters Road

Hi Aftab. Brilliant day, thought the Convent and the park were wonderful  I didn't realise just how good Handsworth Park is, surely the best in the City. After I left you things just got better! I went down Terrace Rd onto Hampstead Rd to look at the restored terraces there. A rather dishevelled man covered in paint came out and went to go to his car. He saw me and accused me of being a historian, an accusation I hotly denied. It was Colin Simms and I got a guided tour of all nine houses and their courtyard gardens in the ninth house which he has just started renovating he has just uncovered the most spectacular stair rails and newel posts, so spent the end of the afternoon supping iced water with Colin! Best wishes,  Richard

Colin Simms restored terrace houses on Hamstead Road

Terrace House on Hamstead Road

Note to Aftab: I hope the Heritage Walk we are planning in Handsworth and Lozells and for which we have funding, will include the possibility of focusing on bad architecture in the area. I noticed how our conversation as we walked together through the neighbourhood was laced with annoyance, even anger, at the examples we passed of ugly renovation and unimaginative new building. The writer Evelyn Waugh wrote in the 1960s about 'the grim cyclorama of spoliation which surrounds all English experience in this century and any understanding of the immediate past…incomplete unless this huge deprivation of the quiet pleasures of the eye is accepted as a dominant condition, sometimes for mere sentimental apathy, sometimes poisoning love of country and of neighbours.' I hope we can draw attention not just to English but global aesthetics as these effect old and new, private and public buildings in Handsworth and Lozells. Here's an example of what I detest about so called improvement in our area (there's an image next to it of one of Colin Simm's restorations to show how beautiful these terraces on Hamstead Road can be). What was in the mind of the builder, owner, who did this to a house? 

*** *** ***
I've typed up the minutes of the meeting on 12 July at which 17 month after the problems of insolvency and lack of leadership were first presented we formally set up Handsworth Helping Hands, previously Central Handsworth Practical Care Project, as an unincorporated association - an extract:

MINUTES OF THE CHPCP COMMITTEE

& CHPCP VOLUNTARY ADVISORY GROUP JOINT MEETING

held at 19.00 on 12^th July 2012 at 34 Beaudesert Road, B20 3TG

Present:

CHPCH COMMITTEE:   Charles Bates*, Daphne Robinson

CHPCH VOLUNTARY ADVISORY GROUP:   Mike Tye (Chair), Linda Baddeley, Simon Baddeley, John Rose, Denise Forsyth, Charles Bates*

* Charles Bates is a member of both groups

1. Apologies: Cllr Hendrina Quinnen

2. Minutes of last meeting ~ 28^th June 2012: Approved

3. Achievements of the Voluntary Advisory Group (VAG): LB reported:

 Over the last 15 months, the VAG have kept accurate minutes of all meetings, maintained proper accounts, filed receipts for all money spent and paid all debts, including reassessment and payment of income tax and national insurance for tax years 2010-2011 and 2011-2012.

All PAYE forms for 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 have been completed online and submitted to HMRC, (including amendment of incorrect 2010-2011 figures originally submitted to HMRC by BVSC), and the PAYE account has been closed. A £300 fine for late submission of 2010-2011 figures was successfully appealed by LB.

The majority of the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project Committee have resigned, leaving only four members. The two paid employees have both left the project voluntarily and have been provided with P45 forms.

Two vehicles (tipper truck and LDV van, (the former now impractical and the latter untaxed and uninsured and originally parked in the street) and the hardly used wood chipper have been sold. The remaining van has been MOTed, taxed and insured, and secure parking in the Handsworth Park compound has been obtained.

All tools belonging to the project have been removed from the garage in St Peter’s Road to secure storage in the Handsworth Park Compound.

Employer’s Liability and Public Liability Insurance was renewed for 2011-2012, but is now due for renewal again. (LB is obtaining quotes.)

The Voluntary Advisory Group has established good relations with the three Ward councillors, keeping them informed of progress and all matters concerning CHPCP.

From a position of being £20,000 in debt, the project now has a balance of over £14000 in the bank account and the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project is now in a position, in accordance with the wishes previously expressed by the CHPCP committee, to be closed, to be replaced immediately by Handsworth Helping Hands (HHH). Handsworth Helping Hands will have the same objectives as CHPCP.

4. Vote on VAG proposals re. dissolution of CHPCP:

LB proposed the immediate closure of CHPCP and transfer of all assets to Handsworth Helping Hands, to be used for the benefit of the Handsworth community. Three votes in favour, two from the CHPCP committee members present and one in writing from Mr Ilyas, who did not attend the meeting, carried the motion. The fourth CHPCP committee member, Mr Kennedy, did not attend, send apologies, nor put his views on the matter in writing.

5.Official inception of HHH

Acceptance of constitution: LB proposed that those present accept the draft Handsworth Helping Hands constitution. The HHH constitution was unanimously accepted.

Election of officers:

Chair:  Michael Tye

Proposed by LB,  seconded by DF. Carried

Secretary:  Simon Baddeley

Proposed by LB,  seconded by JR. Carried

Treasurer:  Linda Baddeley

Proposed by LB,  seconded by DF. Carried

Vice Chair:  Denise Forsyth

Proposed by MT,  seconded by CB. Carried

It was agreed that JR would shadow LB’s role as Treasurer.

DR and CB volunteered to serve as members of the HHH committee. Cllr Hendrina Quinnen, after council legal advice that HHH does not have to have a nominated ward councillor on its committee, will remain as a ‘friend’ of HHH.  HHH will continue to keep local councillors informed.....(continued)
*** *** ***
When Handsworth Helping Hands were clearing the gardens at CMAT studios in Grosvenor Road last Tuesday 17 July I got talking with people who worked there - Pervaiz, Lucy and Mikey - about the work of the studios. That led onto a discussion with Mikey about the film and tape in the Jack Hargreaves' archive. Mikey suggested it might make sense, in the absence of a Steenbeck machine, to digitise films and sound tapes independently, and worry about matching them later. They had the kit to digitise the sound. He'd explore what would be involved doing the same with the film. I made an appointment to bring samples from the archive in the lock up in Sherlock Street this Wednesday. 

Simon, Pervaiz and Mikey at CMAT

I showed Mikey the sound tape - carbon-fibre rods, picking up - pheasant shoot.
"It's in good condition" he said

"We can digitise that"
I showed him a reel of the 16mm film also from the 1970s, this one with Jack's writing recognisable the can 'Out of Town' programme film made on Colonel Hawker and Terns. 

We chatted. I realised that digitising the film wasn't straightforward. Mikey and Pevaiz had been exploring possibilities - but after some circuitous conversation I realised they had no suitable conversion equipment nor experience of digitising 16mm film. Here's a passage from the internet hinting at the challenge:

If you have a box of old 16mm film, digitizing it is either dead simple or very difficult. The dead-simple op­­tion is to send the film to a transfer service...doing the job yourself is hard and time consuming, as no consumer-level dedicated 16mm film scanner is available. It's physically possible to scan 16mm film frame-by-frame using a 35mm slide scanner or a flatbed scanner that handles slides. But this approach entails endless cropping and reassembly....A maximum 18 frames per second for 8mm film means 1080 images per minute of movie...

No way...and here's another website offering a 'secret' method for digitising film after dismissing standard methods:

...Project the film and video it off a wall then put the video into an all-in-one Video to DVD machine. It still flickers! There is a huge array of cheap and expensive machines all purporting to reduce this flicker. Some of them work, however with such manipulation any detail left is lost for ever as these type of machines compress MPEG and digitise at one set low rate. We have stacks of Documentary evidence to prove none of these methods work. We use a proprietary based system which is a closely guarded secret and the envy of our competitors. This system produces top quality, flicker free film transfers which are a pleasure to watch with rich colour, contrast and crisp sharp detail. You can clearly see the faces in our films....

Later at home I phoned Simon Winter of Kaleidoscope. He and colleagues played a key part in uncovering the 34 original Out of Town videos that Delta will be publishing in October.

We discussed the 16mm film in the collection.
"I know someone," he said "Kaleidoscope use him for digitising films they recover."
*** ***
Those lines came over the tele' spoken by Kenneth Branagh in the Olympic Stadium on Friday night...

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.

Lin said "But...that's not England, it's Corfu, Prospero's Cell!"... the gold and moving blue have stained our thoughts...brilliant speck of an island in the Ionian...waters like the heartbeat of the world...darkness opaque...we see in our dreams the world as if in some great aquarium...

Κέρκυρα

Allowing for that small error I without enthusiasm for the thing, was transported into delight and admiration by Danny Boyle's orchestration of the opening ceremony Isles of Wonder. He and his team surmounted that great challenge of entertainers - working with animals and children, demonstrating, in as brilliant a 15 minutes as I've ever seen or heard or read, that defining event of the modern age - the Industrial Revolution, not sparing us the Satanic Mills, the price paid for its wealth, dissent and protest and destruction of a green and pleasant land. 

As the performance proceeded we saw the empire - about which we're inclined to be like a softer version of the Anglo-German "Don't mention the War" - imploding, accelerating the resentment - already stirred by the plural 'Isles'; - of anyone needing an Island Story whose chief job is to keep the others in their place. The messiness carried many stories - the hybridity of London, the multiplicity of the British Isles. In a ceremony being blogged, tweeted and facebooked across the globe - narrowcast even as it was broadcast it was good to see Tim Berners-Lee feted as the inventor of the world wide web or - rather - as Watt's refinement of the Newcomen engine made steam really 'work', achieving the same for the Internet with HTML. I didn't get some of the more contemporary reference, Soaps and Pop, but it was something to get away with the Punk 'God save the queen, The fascist regime' in the same stadium as 'God save our gracious queen Long live our noble queen'. That was the span - the isle is indeed 'full of noises'. I don't recall having so many laughs at any previous Olympic opener. HM being called on at the palace by James Bond - Daniel po-faced Craig - and helicoptered by him to where she could parachute into the arena. I'd seriously like to see a vignette of the correspondence when that was agreed; Rowan Atkinson getting landed by Simon Rattle with the repetitive note that starts and runs through Vangelis' Chariots of Fire, becoming restless with it, looking, Bean-like, for distraction. Bouncing doctors, nurses and children from Great Ormond Street - part of a cheeky paeon for the NHS combined with fairy stories from Barry through Kenneth Graham to J K Rowling. Boyle had real nurses, kids and doctors - all volunteers - dancing. He saved some cash there and included tribute to that British predisposition - volunteering, something 'we' probably prefer to dancing, though that may be changing. Another of many similarly connected groups, were the relatives of the dockers present at the arrival of  M/V Empire Windrush at Tilbury this time 64 years ago to usher her replica into the stadium - relatives of dockers who might also have marched for Enoch Powell after his 'rivers of blood' speech in April 1968. The visual wit and the fun weren't fortune cooky treats. They vaccinated against the heavy risk of getting too tingly with emotion, let alone welling a tear - just what the doctor ordered for the British dis-ease. This was also my stepfather's England of hybridity, starting with the mixing of two races - preceded on this his last broadcast for Southern Television thirty one years ago by four minutes of commercials.

On the higher ground ~ Jack Hargreaves from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

***
On Friday night in Ano Korakiana, apart from some unknown - άγνωστοι - miscreant spraying red paint on cars parked in the square to the fury of their owners, our news - Τα νέα μας - that on Saturday evening there'll be the annual festival of music, dancing and a roast to celebrate Ag Paraskevi:

1. Το καθιερωμένο πλέον ετήσιο πανηγύρι της Αγίας Παρασκευής πραγματοποιείται αύριο, Σάββατο 28 Ιουλίου 2012, το βράδυ υπό τη συνδιοργάνωςση της Φιλαρμονικής και της Εκκλησίας, που υπόσχονται διασκέδαση με μουσική, χορό και ψητά...
2. Άγνωστοι ψέκασαν χθες το βράδυ με κόκκινη μπογιά τα παρκαρισμένα αυτοκίνητα στην πλατεία του χωριού...προκαλώντας την αγανάκτηση των ιδιοκτητών τους...Τι άλλο θα δούμε!
3.Παλαιωμένο κακοτρύγη από την Πούπουλια είχε υποσχεθεί για τα πρώτα γενέθλια της εγγονής του Αγγελικής, ο παππούς Κώστας Απέργης...αλλά τελικά ήταν από Αλευκιμιώτικο αμπελώνα...

It will also the first birthday of Kostas Apergis' grand-daughter Angela - but like lots of the Ano Korakiana website it's tricky for me to translate. What's Αλευκιμιώτικο? and Παλαιωμένο κακοτρύγη?

Preparing for the party at Agia Paraskevi

Κορακιανίτικο πανηγύρι ~ Saturday night party in Ano Korakiana

On Saturday 28 July - the annual festival and party, panigyri:

Δύο ώρες πριν από την έναρξη του φετινού πανηγυριού της Αγίας Παρασκευής, οι προεργασίες συνεχίζονταν με αμείωτο ρυθμό. Γυναίκες της χορωδίας και του χορευτικού είχαν αναλάβει την προετοιμασία των λουκουμάδων, πλάι στους υπόλοιπους που ετοίμαζαν τις ψησταριές και τους υπαίθριους παγο-καταψύκτες, ενώ τα τραπεζοκαθίσματα ήταν ήδη στρωμένα. Την ίδια ώρα, στη γραφική εκκλησία με το νεόκτιστο και φρεσκοβαμμένο καμπαναριό, ο ιερέας τελούσε τον Εσπερινό, ενώ ο κόσμος που άρχιζε σιγά-σιγά να μαζεύεται περνούσε πρώτα από εκεί για το άναμα ενός κεριού.
Οι πρώτοι ήχοι της ορχήστρας λίγο αργότερα, θα δώσουν το έναυσμα για την έναρξη του πανηγυριού, ενώ καθώς νύχτωνε ο κόσμος γέμιζε το πλάτωμα. Λίγο πριν από τα μεσάνυχτα το υπαίθριο γλέντι βρισκόταν στο φόρτε του, με τον Πρόεδρο της Φιλαρμονικής να οδηγεί το χορό. Μα πέρα από τη διασκέδαση, το πανηγύρι, όπως κάθε χρόνο, θα προσφέρει μια ευκαιρία συνάντησης των Κορακιανιτών κάθε ηλικίας, που θα συρρεύσουν. Αργότερα, θα μοιραστούν λαχνοί προς ενίσχυση των διοργανωτών της εκδήλωσης, Φιλαρμονικής και Εκκλησίας και το γλέντι θα διαρκέσει μέχρι τις πρωινές ώρες…

Two hours before the start of this year's festival of Agia Paraskevi, preparatory work continued unabated. The women's choir and the dance group looked after the preparation of donuts, next to others who were preparing barbecues and outdoor freezers, while tables and chairs were already arranged. At the same time, in the picturesque church, freshly painted with a newly built tower, the priest was doing vespers, while everyone gradually began to gather, pausing to light a candle.
Later, the first sounds of the orchestra will trigger the start of the festival. As night falls people filled the plaza. Shortly before midnight, the outdoor festival was in full swing, the President of the Philharmonic leading the dance. But beyond the fun, the festival, as every year, will offer a chance for Korakianas of all ages who've flocked to the village to meet... the party will last until the early hours...

Moving things

Yesterday morning I'm up early to arrange to collect the tipper truck from the park compound to drive over to the garage in St Peter's Road where the tools and machinery that belong to the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project have been kept for many years. At last we have an alternative place for them in the secure garage of the compound, thanks to Gary McManus of Birmingham Parks and Nurseries, the arms-length city company that looks after Handsworth and other parks around the city.
I'd walked Oscar over to St Peter's Road the night before and introduced myself to Glynis' husband George, who owns the garage. We made an appointment for Monday's move. At the compound in the park where I cycled I found the tipper truck battery again dead. Not a spark. I tried to phone Ian at Cornwall Road Autos. His phone was engaged. I cycled there - about half a mile. He was working in his little office.
"I'll be over in 10 minutes"
Back at the compound I began moving tools already in the tipper's cabin into the compound's garage. Ian arrived to gave the tipper a jump-lead start from his car. We let the engine run a while,
I drove out - pulling in wing mirrors - through one side of the Holly Road Park Gates (the sibling gate currently sags on its hinges, so not easily opened). In St Peter's Road, a mile away, narrow, lined with parked cars, I found a space near George's lock-up. He let me in through his front door then into the garage where I lifted out the heavy iron bolt bar that guards its doors and began transporting an Aladdin's Cave of tools into the back of the tipper; in the case of hand tools into the cabin. The mowers needed two to lift but I managed on my own to heave them onto the tipper bed with the side flaps down. Loaded with mowers, strimmers, hedge trimmers, chains-saws, a leaf blower, and more, I drove back to the park compound. With help from Imran, who works there and has an allotment near me on the VJA, carried the equipment into the garage, laying them higgledy-piggley on the concrete floor.

I rang my neighbour John Rose - on the advisory group of the project - who I well knew was already busy on phone and computer with other community responsibilities - and asked if he could manage half an hour to help with my second trip - towing a wood chipper that filled a large part of George's garage. John came as busy people do, and we lugged and heaved at the chipper to get it connected to the tipper's tow ball. Waving by or stopping drivers trying to get through St Peter's Road as we worked.

Once back at the Park, Allen Broad took over and expertly reversed chipper and tipper into an assigned space on the compound. We spoke of next steps; neatly storing and securing the tools, planning to sell the truck and the chipper. I'm almost exhausted with small but important details like having the right keys for things and the right cable connections between the tipper and the chipper - one being UK and the other a new European connector for which I must get an adaptor, and as the man at Halfords said "Make sure you're clear which is female and male."

UK - er - transgender?

New European female

There has also to be a break-away cable in case the tow breaks. It's there but with no clear means of attachment to the tipper.
"That's illegal" said Allen mildly - reminding me of how much attention is required to detail when handling equipment - complicated and frustrating for the untrained, but sensible for all the grumbling in which I will often share about our 'risk averse society'. It's sensible Health and Safety, with insurance and legal penalties for non-observance. All these tools are assets if properly managed. I'm confident that the best way forward for Handsworth Helping Hands (our new and streamlined name) is to make ourselves into a smaller operation, rely on our transit van - now repaired and fit for purpose - and fewer tools. The sale of what we don't need, especially the tipper, will give us some working capital while we look for paid work and seek funding for work that vulnerable members of the local community cannot afford.

**** ****
Aftab Rahman who runs a successful business in town asked me to write a support letter for a proposed Heritage Trail through Handsworth and Lozells. I willingly sent him one, composed over the weekend:

Dear Aftab. My family and I have lived in Handsworth since 1979. I’ve worked at Birmingham University since 1973, where I remain a part-time lecturer attached to the Institute of Local Government Studies. I’ve been involved in voluntary work over many years, starting the Handsworth Allotments Information Group, campaigning to save urban growing space. I support campaigns for improved transport and safer streets for walkers and cyclists. I’ve written a history of Handsworth Park, co-founded the Handsworth Park Association in 1992, given evidence to a Parliamentary Sub-committee on ‘Town and Country Parks’ and featured in TV documentaries about the area.
I am enthusiastic about your proposal to develop a Heritage Trail in Lozells and East Handsworth. There are many layers of history in this area – past and in the making. It is important for people’s sense of identity and place, and therefore community, that they should have opportunities to align the trajectories of their own journey to this area with those of people whose journeys preceded theirs.

For participants, from inside and outside Handsworth and East Lozells, a trail of the kind you have in mind – one that can be followed by everyone in ways that include access for those with limited mobility - offers an opportunity to re-create, in a defined area of the city, an account of the industrial revolution, the connections forged here to an emerging global economy, life endured through the ordeals of war, fascinating changes in the composition of the area’s inhabitants, as this inner suburb of ‘a great working city’ became the one we know today.
In recent decades the narrative of this, and other inner suburbs of Birmingham, has often been recounted as urban pathology. We who live in Handsworth and Lozells know its ‘notoriety’ is grossly exaggerated, even groundless; that even with its problems, this place is rich in good surprises. A Heritage Trail through its places and spaces – of which you had room to mention just a few - will be a means of imparting a truer and deeper picture of the area, embedding, in the course of an entertaining tour, wonderful stories about ourselves and our neighbours; our ancestors and theirs.
I am happy to support this initiative, willing to join any steering group that might help the project into fruition, and willing to offer my voluntary support as your proposal is developed.  Yours sincerely,  Simon

*** *** ***
Meantime mindful of Durban's Climate Change talks I thank Corfucius for re-posting this comment by Vivek Chauhan, a young film maker, together with naturalists working with the Sanctuary Asia network.

*** ***
I note the blurb for a book I want for Christmas, World Changing: A user's guide for the 21st century...

Five years after the initial publication of Worldchanging, the landscape of environmentalism and sustainability has changed dramatically...This 2nd edition of the bestselling book is extensively revised to include the latest trends, technologies, and solutions in sustainable living. More than 160 new entries include up-to-the-minute information on the locavore movement, carbon-neutral homes, novel transportation solutions, the growing trend of ecotourism, the concept of food justice, and much more. Additional new sections focus on the role of cities as the catalyst for change in our society. With 50% new content, this overhauled edition incorporates the most recent studies and projects being implemented worldwide....

Meantime news that a Russian research team surveying the East Siberian Arctic Shelf for nearly 20 years, have been ill-surprised at discovering far greater methane gas releases than expected.

Dr Igor Semiletov "Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing. I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."
Before long the Merchants of Doubt will be trying to sink their rotting teeth into this depressing news.
**** ****
Tuesday night the Friends of Black Patch Park had their first Christmas lunch together at the Soho Foundry Pub - lamb and roast with gravy and peas and beans and Yorkshire pudding, all for £2 each. Despite the slope up Soho Hill from home it takes me less than 15 minutes to cycle to these meetings - 2 miles there and back via Soho Road. We've been meeting for many years now but this was our first indulgence. Ted Rudge, whose long been a member, was also our guest of honour.

Stacey Dooley, Andrew Simons, Ted Rudge, John Madgwick,  Vera Jones, Harjinder Singh Jeet, Ron Collins (Chair), Sue Goderidge and others from the Friends of Black Patch Park

After eating we started our meeting, focusing on the link between the Gypsies and the Black Patch. Ted announced that the Romany & Traveller Family History Society would like to hold their Annual Open Day on Black Patch Park on Saturday 21 July 2012. We discussed the convergence on Black Patch of the Romany, of Charlie Chaplin born 1889 to Charles and Hannah Chaplin in a caravan on the Black Patch before they moved to London, the Soho Foundry created in 1795 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt at Smethwick, opposite the pub where we were meeting. This is an amazing place, slightly scary at times, haunted, ripe for yarns, a place in space and time. I count myself lucky to be its advocate in such pleasant and interesting company.

The Soho Foundry when I visited in 2007 (Photo: Ted Rudge)

*** ***
In Ano Korakiana people will be bringing their olives - the little black Corfu olives - to be pressed for oil, mainly for household use, in the well equipped mill below the village.

Ξεκίνημα για το συνεταιριστικό ελαιουργείο

Αυλαία για το συνεταιριστικό ελαιουργείο της Άνω Κορακιάνας. Μετά από αρκετές ημέρες εντατικής προετοιμασίας, η ανακοίνωση της νέας Διοίκησης του Συνεταιρισμού καλεί τους ενδιαφερόμενους να προσκομίσουν τον ελαιόκαρπό τους την Τετάρτη 14/12/2011 και από ώρα 14.00 έως 19.00, προκειμένου το ελαιουργείο να αλέσει την επόμενη μέρα Πέμπτη 15/12/2011.
Message from the cooperative mill in Ano Korakiana. After several days of intensive preparation, the new Managing Partnership invites interested parties to bring their harvest to the mill on Wednesday 14 December between 14.00 and 19.00 hours for pressing on Thursday 15 December '11.

Ακόμα...

Christina Fernández, President of Argentina, at the G20 Summit*

Results of the Euro Summit agreed at the end of October...

1. An agreement that should secure the decline of the Greek debt to GDP ratio with an objective of reaching 120% by 2020. Euro area Member States will contribute to the PSI package up to €30 billion. The nominal discount will be 50% on notional Greek debt held by private investors. A new EU-IMF multiannual programme financing up to €100 billion will be put in place by the end of the year. It will be accompanied by a strengthening of the mechanisms for the monitoring of implementation of the reforms.
2. The significant optimisation of the resources of the EFSF, without extending the guarantees underpinning the facility. The options agreed will allow the EFSF resources to be leveraged. The leverage effect of both options will vary, depending on their specific features and market conditions, but could be up to 4 or 5, which is expected to yield around €1 trillion (around $1.4 trillion). We call on the Eurogroup to finalise the terms and conditions for the implementation of these modalities in November. In addition, further cooperation with the IMF will be sought to further enhance the EFSF resources.
3. A comprehensive set of measures to raise confidence in the banking sector by (i) facilitating access to term-funding through a coordinated approach at EU level and (ii) the increase in the capital position of banks to 9% of Core Tier 1 by the end of June 2012. National supervisors must ensure that banks' recapitalisation plans do not lead to excess deleveraging.
4. An unequivocal commitment to ensure fiscal discipline and accelerate structural reforms for growth and employment. Particular efforts are being deployed by Spain. New strong commitments on structural reforms have been made by Italy. Portugal and Ireland will continue their reform programmes with the support of our crisis mechanisms.
5. A significant strengthening of economic and fiscal coordination and surveillance. A set of very specific measures, going beyond and above the recently adopted package on economic governance, will be put in place.
6. Ten measures to improve the governance of the Euro area.
7. A mandate to the President of the European Council, in close collaboration with the President of the Commission and the President of the Eurogroup, to identify possible steps to strengthen the economic union, including exploring the possibility of limited Treaty changes. An interim report will be presented in December 2011. A report on how to implement the agreed measures will be finalised by March 2012.

*** ***
In the Palais des Festivals in Cannes the Group of 20 developing and industrialized nations is discussing 3 options for how the IMF can help euro-zone governments finance their debts...

Option 1:  IMF creates Special Drawing Rights - IMF reserve assets - to be handed over to euro-zone governments. Those governments could then exchange them for euros at central banks around the world.

Option 2: Nations would put money in a trust fund administered by the IMF to ensure financial stability around the world.

Option 3: A call for governments to stop $280 billion of IMF resources - meant to be a temporary boost to deal with the crisis - being returned to government shareholders.

*the photo of the President of Argentina and Silvio Berlusconi at the G20 Summit is on today's front page of The Telegraph and is titled 'return of the leerer'

***

Waiting on the vote - ψήφο εμπιστοσύνης έλαβε η κυβέρνηση 

...and I hear on the radio at 2300 GMT that Papandreou has won the confidence vote he sought from his colleagues and Parliament.
*** *** ***

Strathnairn, Inverness-shire

I've been strolling in Strathnairn with my mother's dog Lulu. I flew from Birmingham to Inverness yesterday morning, after a supper at Henry's, in the Jewellery Quarter, the evening before with my friends Kim and Tanya. The three of us have been treating ourselves to a shared supper for over ten years, catching up with our separate news, wondering about the world. We spoke of families, of my future grandson, the world, of bankers' salaries and bonuses - Tanya said "read Oliver James' Affluenza" - of the tent village in front of St.Pauls Cathedral and 'Occupy Wall Street'...

Image: Rachel Schragis (detail)

...of a neighbour sinking into dementia, of the news that close friends had been woken in the night by police to search their son's room with the news their boy was in custody facing a prison sentence awaiting trial accused of being culpably associated with someone who'd committed a knifing, of Jamie's Great Britain - a foodie celebration of British hybridity, of a dear friend's horse breaking a leg and having to be put down, of children's marriages and about becoming grandparents, of the cost of things, of the dwindling availability of credit and its complete disappearance in Greece, of Papandreou's referendum idea...

Martin Rowson ~ Guardian 4 Nov'11

 ...of Kim's decision to buy herself an e-book after coming across the latest Kindle, of looking forward to reading P.D.James' latest book Death Comes to Pemberley, of my reading - on paper - of Merchants of Doubt recommended by my American friend Tony Scoville (I spoke of the joy of taking up conversation with him again in Corfu after 45 years) of a friend who'd changed gender a few years ago - the full op - but said she was getting "tired of trying to be a woman" and has re-grown a beard "Such a relief to stop shaving"
"But is she still wearing skirts?"
"Oh yes"
"Do you call him-her 'he' or 'she'?"
"I don't know. But it's no problem. F's always been so interesting."
Lin was at home sorting through baby clothes, bought from storage, now and then holding up one of Amy's infant dresses; exclaiming
"Aah. Just look at that! Shame it's not going to be a girl."

**** ****
My email this morning to members of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments Association:

Hi. I’ve already run this idea past Peter (Hon Treasurer, VJA Assocxition) when he was walking in Handsworth Park a couple of days ago. We, Linda and I, and 5 others with voluntary work experience in the area have inherited unpaid responsibility for the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project (CHPCP). This is a handyman/woman project that uses a modern tipper truck carrying a variety of manual and power tools (chipper, chain saw, strummer, mower, drills, chainsaw, crowbars, posthole digger, etc) to carry out a wide range of tasks for vulnerable people in Handsworth. In August 2010 the project’s manager died unexpectedly leaving the care project without clear leadership and so without the means of seeking its regular funding - from grants and payments from larger social enterprises like Housing Associations - but needing to pay taxes, insurance etc. We were approached by a local councillor and others who had been involved in the project to see if we could help get the project back on its feet doing useful work in the area.  Over the past 6 months the voluntary group which includes Linda and myself have managed to ensure the project is solvent and able - we hope - by the New Year to recommence the local services (mending locks, doors, windows, clearing gardens, laying slabs, putting up fences, helping people move in and out of their homes, doing basic work on allotments and gardens, delivering and collecting heavy objects and other loads) for which it was set up over 15 years ago. Our immediate need is to find secure storage for ‘our’ tools and parking for the tipper truck - currently at a city depot courtesy of its manager. Chatting to Peter the other day I explored the possibility of being able to park the tipper on the VJA site and store the tools in the community shed with a view, if my suggestion is approved, of working in partnership with the VJA (with approval from Birmingham Allotments Section) to make the tools and tipper available to the association as part of a quid pro quo for secure parking and storage. We are confident it will be feasible to enable members of the VJA to use the project's tools - with proper training in the case of power tools (for which there is already a precedent on site) - and even to commission jobs that require the use of the tipper (carriage of compost, manure, building materials). The project already has a tradition of working in the area and with local agencies including the council and local housing associations. We suggest that a partnership with the VJA could represent a win-win arrangement, enabling work to be done on the VJA site while continuing the handyman/woman activities of the project across the area for which the project was already well reputed. I very much hope this proposal can be given consideration, and that we might be able to enter into a trial arrangement lasting - say - up until the end of the year to see if the mutual benefits I’m suggesting can be realised. I speak for the Voluntary Advisory Group (VAG) currently managing the CHPCP. One or more of us would be more than happy to present the above proposal in person and answer questions from members of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments Association, especially from members of the committee in the first instance. I very much hope you will give this matter your sympathetic consideration. We in the VAG believe that such a partnership is very much in line with current initiatives focused on community development in hard times. Yours sincerely, Simon and Lin

I suspect our greatest difficulty will be the rule maintained by the Council that motor vehicles may not be parked overnight on its allotment sites. I shall seek to press the view that in the current situation some of the old rules are subject to change. If the prohibition that used to exist on bees and chickens on allotments has been, or is being, reconsidered, then perhaps the idea of a charitable partnership with the Care Project might not be beyond the pale.
** ** ** **
I took the opportunity in the early hours when cyberspace seems less busy - or is it my imagination in this 24/7 world of the web - to stream another of my stepfather's TV films; an episode - or part episode - of Jack Hargreaves' series called 'Old Country' made for Channel 4 in the early 1980s. The cameraman is Steve Wagstaff. The starting title shows my stepfather leading his grey pony 'Ghost'. As usual much gratitude to the viewer who recorded it off-air at the time of broadcast and sent it to me on a CD.
"This is the bird, or rather it's a not entirely successful plastic Italian representation of the bird, which has been known to put up the price of Brussels Sprouts in England in a week - the Wood Pigeon."

*** ***
Jim Potts 1 Nov' entry on his Corfu Blues blog summarises and links a number of announcements of next year's celebration of the centenary of the birth of Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), THE DURRELL SCHOOL OF CORFU will host a one-week seminar Wednesday 20 – Tuesday 27 June 2012, in the Durrell School premises at 11 Filellinon Street, in the historic centre of Corfu Town. The Moderator of this seminar will be Richard Pine, founder of the Durrell School (and now Director Emeritus), and author of Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape

*** ***
Thanassis on the Ano Korakiana website, while announcing a blood donation session at 10.00 in the Co-op on Sunday 6 Nov «Ελάτε να δώσετε ζωή με το αίμα σας», points how heavy rain has washed away the cemented terrace supporting a car-park area, a problem which, with lack of funds, is likely to affect similar constructions. He uses the problem to take a swipe at the 'culture of cement' «πολιτισμός του τσιμέντου», suggesting dry stone walls or stones bound with mortar will last longer and better than substituted cement...

Δεν άντεξε τελικά το βαρύ φορτίο του τσιμέντου που εδώ και χρόνια κουβαλάει και η παλιά πέτρινη λιθιά στη στροφή του Μπή (κατασκευής Γιάννη και Μιλτιάδη Ιωνά πριν από πολλές δεκαετίες) έπεσε, με συνέπεια την «κούφωση» του οδοστρώματος, σε ένα σημείο που σταθμεύουν αυτοκίνητα. Εάν δε, δεν υπάρξει σύντομη αποκατάσταση, η ζημιά θα μεγαλώσει με τις βροχές του χειμώνα… Έτσι, για μια ακόμη φορά, ο «πολιτισμός του τσιμέντου» υποχωρεί, παρασέρνοντας μαζί του την παλιά μαστορική της πέτρας, που όταν μένει ανενόχλητη επιδεικνύει μεγάλες αντοχές στο χρόνο…

In the city again

With Oscar on the Villa Road, Birmingham

I was on the phone to my mother in Scotland.
"The story has speeded up - you'll be seventy in March, Amy's expecting a baby in March, Richard's left home and is living with Emma in town..." and we seem constantly approaching an unprecedented climax of events in the world.
"Yes even for us there's a sense of crisis, Mum. I'll see you in a few days."
For the last few hours the fireworks of Diwali have been detonating across Handsworth increasing in frequency as midnight approaches. Our neighbours who've long looked after Oscar when we're away are both ailing, no longer able to look after him, so there's a small problem. Amy and Guy took over for the last two months, but they'll soon have a babe to look after - a boy whose possible name we were debating the other evening.

To my relief the allotment's not looking too bad despite our absence. I brought some potatoes back for supper  after my first visit. I've paid the rent - just £15 - to which I've added my first annual sub to the Association - £5. Today I started making a veranda for the shed - two cheek pieces of ply now in place.

Tomorrow I'll support these with two uprights, add a plywood roof and cover it with roof-felt. The vine I  gave Lin for her 60th birthday and planted in August can grow up the side and along the front.
** **  **
We've arranged the next meeting of the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project in three weeks - leaving us room to get various jobs done before then. We have various prospects for storing our vehicles and equipment. It looks as if we may not have to wind the project up and start anew as Lin's work on the accounts has so reduced our debts to HMRC and one other creditor.
*** ***
On Tuesday I was at the Wellcome Research Centre inside the old QE Hospital on my university campus as a participant in a project on physical activity and healthy ageing. I gave blood samples, had my bone density measured on a DEXA machine, did some dexterity exercises and - most exciting and fascinating - had an ultrasound scan of my heart.

Clare McNulty, about Amy's age I guess, explained how very high frequency sound waves create images of the structure of the heart and the way it's working - the same procedure used to look at Amy's  baby.
"You can take a picture" she said.

Amy's son

On Thursday morning I go to the University's School of Sport and Exercise Sciences for another set of tests and a psychological assessment. It'll be a rainy cycle ride along the canal to Edgbaston.
*** ***
Nigel, striving for self-sufficiency in County Mayo, has begun building a page on his website - Grow Your Own - that uses some of my stepfather's films.
** ** **
Meantime Linda's without her car. The head gasket's shot. She tried one of those sealant products. I cycled up to Lozells Road to buy it for over £12. Useless.

John, our neighbour "You down wanna do it like that, Lin."

The best of all possible worlds...

Common swallow tail on our balcony

Attempts to preserve a Panglossian perspective are assailed by Richard’s choice of films for us to watch here. Monday night we watched Ajami; last night Animal Kingdom. Superbly filmed and acted they start off at low points – the casual street assassination of a young boy in Palestine, a youth watching an Australian version of Deal or No Deal finds his mother dead in the same room of an overdose - and descend from there in the proper form of tragedy, consequential and predictable – but unlike classical tragedy no relieving conclusion, though I suppose the young man finally shooting his murderous uncle and becoming the family's new strong man in the Animal Kingdom was a catharsis of sorts. In Mike Leigh’s Another Year the happy couple worked an allotment with their happy son, a cyclist, with his sweet sensible girlfriend, but misery revolved around them as unchanged as dead moons circling a living planet  - the last image a long hold on Mary’s desolate face, silenced amid animated conversation about travelling the world.
“You don’t half download some films Richard” said his mum over the phone
“You mean too realistic?”

In a fortnight Anthony Scoville and his wife Helen will be our guests, their first visit to Greece; the first time he and I will have seen each other for forty six years. Tony was attached to me by Prof Russ Ackoff for a few months in the summer of 1966. I had a minor temporary post as research drone at The University of Pennsylvania. I had been supposed to join a Norwegian tanker as a fieldworker to observe the effects of a socio-technical design – which in line with the Norwegian Industrial Democracy Programme begun after WW2 – was intended to create a humane and efficient relationship between the work seamen did and the work done by machines. I still have the telegram.

In May I got a terse message via Russ from my future employer Prof Fred Emery, at the Tavistock, that my ship had ‘blown up’. I’d done anthropology at Cambridge; I’d spent 6 months sailing to America. It seemed like a perfect assignment. Instead I was directed to work at the Wharton School on a project funded by Anheuser-Busch helping analyse data from a survey of US drinking habits, relying, for the calculation of percentages and standard deviations on electric - not electronic – calculators, working through piled in-trays of completed force-choice questionnaires – work that a few years later would be mechanised, results transferred to IBM punch cards, for analysis by computer.
Our focus was to find an answer to a question put by the mightiest beer company in the world “Could Americans be persuaded to drink English bitter?” Guinness had a steady market among the miners of Pittsburgh but could there be a significant market for a brown stout brewed from hops – what some who’d visited Britain called “lukewarm English beer”. Many years later we know the situation was entirely reversed with lager becoming Britain’s default ale, especially among the young. Our theoretical perspective, to assess which I and others were processing data, was that people’s drinking habits evolved, starting as social drinking – where identifiable flavour and even alcohol content were of no great importance – graduating, as people grew older, experienced its up and downs in varying degrees, to one or the other of two main approaches to drink; reparative - drinking to face reality, and so not interested in getting intoxicated, and indulgent - drinking to escape, valuing a drink’s intoxicating qualities. There were plenteous intervening variables but a picture was emerging of the drinks preferred by each type. A spectrum, light in the centre, and dark at either end, with light and flavourless beers popular among the young, and stronger beers, at either end of the spectrum, preferred later. The most bitter at one end were chosen by reparatives, the sweeter at the other, were associated with indulgence.
At various points on this dividing scale people might switch from beer altogether because other drinks better fulfilled their needs - social, reparative,. indulgent and combinations of these. The marketing-production strategy prompted by this research entailed identifying one of these switching points and designing a new beer with a new brand that competed with the profile of the drink to which the consumer was planning to switch. A few years later it was this understanding of social drinking that led to Guinness introducing the first British lager – Harp. Young people, typically men, enjoy the company of their peers but socialising as been known in history, myth and later social research, is inhibited by peer rivalry. Young men are wont to claim they can rule the world, certainly the roost, but very privately they have doubts about this. The company they seek, as they escape the orbit of elders, to allay such hidden insecurity is one most likely to exacerbate it - other men their own age. Inject social drinking into this simmering testosterone soup and internal group rivalry and fear of intimacy is suppressed and companionship enjoyed. Thus was the new lager branded the lad’s sociable tribal drink, quite different from the individualised and classically reparative medicine of dark bitter Guinness preferred by men who ‘can take their drink’ rather than those who seek to become egregiously smashed in the company of peers. As for the indulgent I realised the import of the astute slogan “There’s a promise in a glass of Mackeson” – the brand, in its extreme, of the lonely toper sinking into sugary oblivion. I would have preferred to be at sea – a predisposition that Fred Emery, a brilliant man who switched twixt indulgent and reparative in his drinking, referred to as ‘oceanic’ and I’m not sure where that puts me as a drinker. I recall being in a dark temporary flat in Philadelphia wearing shorts and a T-shirt listening in stifling sweating humidity for the six-o-clock cloudburst to rattle on the corrugated iron stoop roof sipping an ice cold beer, feeling bereft and lonely in my aloneness - something I've never felt when on my own at sea.

Just a year ago, helped by the web, Tony Scoville got back in touch. I replied ‘you made those months in Philadelphia interesting’. He replied, to my surprise, he thought it was the other way around. I recall weekend journey’s with him and several friends by train, plane and automobile from our whitewashed shared basement flat in narrow east-west Pine Street, in whose sitting room he’d found me a bed and book space, to the house he’d designed, and with our help, was building on a ridge above a rolling wooded panorama deep in the Connecticut countryside; no settlement for miles and miles; American space and scale. Le Corbusier was Tony’s architectural exemplar. His house, its lower floors complete enough for living, was called Corbu. We roamed between finished rooms and the skeleton of the future building – minimal difference, stark modernist. There was at least one musician. I recall a lute played from a reclining modernist chair; poetry recited over an American breakfast dish – French toast - bread slices steeped in whipped egg, skillet fried, served with maple syrup to taste, before we set to work. One chillier weekend Tony shot a deer – clean and quick; gralloched it by the edge of a deep pinewood. I was sure this was Robert Frost territory. I felt my lack of talent in this company, hence my astonishment at Tony’s recent reply about our old friendship.

One thing I thought I had going for me amid the Wharton School’s scary reputation for smart practical research for corporate America was that I’d just sailed the Atlantic, but the switch from months of ocean swells sprouting flying fish, azure sea and white sands below trade blown palms to serried desks in air conditioned neon lit offices had created in me a depressed insensibility that matched the repetitive work to which I’d been assigned, while trying to make sense of socio-technical theory from papers sent from England, readying me for the ship-board fieldwork that would take me back to England on the Irish Spruce.
Tony shook me from my daze, making my first sojourn in America a memorable interlude of extended conversation about ideas and events in the world, rather than the start of a sentence. He lent me his Landrover to drive a thousand miles south to Miami and trail my boat back to Washington where I’d managed to sell it to two young lawyers.
Just now we’ve been exchanging emails – about seeing the remains of the ancient in modern Greece, about what he and Helen might make of the Acropolis and its new museum, what they might see in the Peloponnese; their route over the Gulf of Patras to visit coach crowded Delphi; catching the ferry to Corfu from Igoumenitsa, how to get to us in Ano Korakiana; recognise our house in Democracy Street; plan a visit to Albania and later Zagori.

Dear Tony. Yes the Greek code is +30 and Helen’s Greek SIM card will work, if it’s like ours, up to 50 miles outside Greece. Do you recall it was you who introduced me to Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus - and here I am two centuries later again reading Camus’ The Outsider. I realize I understand it better than when we read it at school because our French teacher left out key passages. I’ve only just realized this (we were reading L’Étranger in class in the late 50s in French). Our teacher left out just why Meursault might have helping out his friend Raymond in connection with the woman with whom he’d been having a failed affair. That omission – censored because about a sexual liaison - made the killing look as if committed entirely without motive and Meursault, a ground breaking example of that familiar inhabitant of modern fiction, the predatory psychotic as anti-hero. I’d always thought that was why the novel was notorious. It’s not like that at all, Foolish violence – yes; but the murdered man had, with friends, been trailing Meursault’s friend Raymond threatening revenge for the beating he’d given their sister. Raymond had asked for help. When Meursault came across one of the men on the beach, his victim had drawn a knife at which Meursault drew a revolver. I’ve been labouring decades under a misapprehension that Camus had described a motiveless murder. (:))

But then it is in long retrospect astonishing what in the 1950s we – in our teens - were not supposed to read or know. When Monserrat’s bestseller The Cruel Sea came out, we were reading – at prep school – the 'cadet’ edition. We’d compared passages in full edition one of us had smuggled into school. It revolved round a cuckolded sailor’s wife appearing at the top of the stairs just as he’d come home unexpectedly. She had ‘something on her nightie’. The amount and intensity of censorship seems astonishing now. I recall the courage it took me, at 16, to buy a ticket to The Windmill Theatre where, so long as they didn’t move, women could be on stage without clothes. Things changed with the failed prosecution for obscenity of Penguin, the publisher of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
“Is this a book you’d allow your servants to read?” asked the barrister for the prosecution. I’d been taught by my mother the confidence that sexual passion was neither dirty nor shameful. She mentioning things in passing, gave me John Donne's Elegies to read...

Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below...

...also Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress – 'And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity'. In a round about way I came to understand that most of the unhappiness between people who tried to live together stemmed from something wrong between them in bed – a cruel circumstance because that was something which in those days, and even now, people have no more idea how to discuss with each other than I had in early youth of how a woman could stand naked on stage in front of people. For a good while I was incapable of understanding how men and women who wore clothes got, at some crucial point, not just to take them off but to do it in front of each other – with the lights on, perhaps in the middle of the day, even out of doors.
On reading the headlined verdict, I went in a break to a bookshop in Victoria Street and bought a Penguin edition of Lawrence’s novel. I started reading it unhidden as I strolled back to school, utterly absorbed and moved, especially when Connie in pouring summer rain deep in the forest sees the keeper’s baby rabbits and stroking them begins to weep uncontrollably and Mellors begins to caress her. … Years later I remarked to my 10 year old son that we ought “to chat “ and he no doubt alerted to the possibility of such an approach said, in a wearied manner, “Let me show you my text book from school” In this he had written and drawn things under the tutelage of his human relations teacher which if not in style or emotion exceeded the details I’d explored in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Being the 1980s there was now information about how the AID’s virus could and could not be transmitted.
I mentioned my annoyance at being so long confused about the Outsider, and Linda, who’s also just read it again, exclaimed “Yes that’s the same version I was taught at school. There must have been an expurgated Outsider – the same we read all those years ago.”
“I’m quite vexed about that” I said.
*** ***
On Tuesday evening we were at a WiFi’d hotel to do our mail and swim, a place for Brits Abroad – cacophonous, bleach blond or bald and all ages plump - spraying Sky Sport with frenetic voices over a tape of pop relayed through speakers to the pool and its grassy surroundings, chat peppered with curses; wingeing toddlers. ‘what a fuckup‘ faces. “Why do we come here?” I asked Lin “I’m not sure” she said. “For respect and quiet we’d do better in the company of outlaws.”

** ** **
I was up early this morning in time to see the sun rise over Albania, coming round the corner of Pantocrator. A house away beside Leftheris garden a neighbour has chickens, the cock crowing as the village wakes, still setting too early to avoid the heat, though the days are growing cooler already.

*** ***
We were up late last night as Lin, as the Treasurer for the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project's rescue group, composing a letter appealing against a £300 penalty for being late submitting the project's tax return. It was nearly 1800 words overflowing with detail, summarising extenuation:

....Taking into account the detailed information supplied above, the Voluntary Advisory Group, on behalf of the CHPCP Committee, are appealing against the imposition of the penalty charge by HMRC on the basis of the following extenuating circumstances:

• On 19th May 2011, as a result of the death of Ms Foley and lack of management of the Project thereafter, there was no officially appointed agent with responsibility for submission of end-of-year figures.
• On 19th May 2011 CHPCP was entirely without the means to manage its affairs, with its financial circumstances unknown to the Committee and no responsible individual available or authorised to communicate with HMRC.
• No member of the Committee was aware of the workings of PAYE and the requirement to submit end-of-year figures.
• No member of the Voluntary Advisory Group was aware of the requirement to submit end-of-year figures until informed of this by BVSC in July 2011.
• No member of the Committee had access to or an understanding of the financial information required for the submission of end-of-year figures.
• End-of-year figures were not available until the Voluntary Advisory Group completed examination of CHPCP finances in July 2011.
• Although BVSC were supplied with accurate end-of-year figures on July 17th 2011, figures (which were inaccurate, as already explained) were not submitted by BVSC until August 11th.

Had it not been for the hard work over recent months of a small, unpaid group of dedicated volunteers, the March 2011 situation would have continued indefinitely.

** ** **
The sounds of the village are all about, reassuring, embracing. Lefteris prepares a little wine from his surviving grapes, Fortis takes the kindergarten books from the closed school - soon to be a special school for Corfu - to the bandroom in the centre of the village, Thanassis Spingos on the village website reports a 50th anniversary DVD celebrating the village band and recording its history.

Between times we've been at work on the house, sanding and painting another window frame, general cleaning including the minutiae of niches and corners, preparing the dining room walls for a damp resistant treatment that involves injecting a silicone solution at six inch intervals over the core area of dampness - a problem that has created an impressive landscape of shades on the stucco, leaving a musty smell in the room even in summer. Lin, after I'd drilled, blew the dust out of each hole with a straw, her face covered with a towel, in imitation of the Swallowtail with its proboscis dipped in our Bougainvillea. It's good to be here.