Greece from far away

My blood pressure as measured soon after the June 2016 Referendum on leaving the EU

On a day in June 2016 I was the subject of one of many research projects into healthy ageing at QE Hospital 

"Your blood pressure's a little high" said one of the researchers.
"Seriously?"
She showed me her readings; in the hypertension range.
"That's odd. That's never been a problem for me"
"Well I need to point it out. Check with your GP"
"Gosh Emma, do you think I'm stressed by the Referendum result?"
"Could be." she said "We'll see how your blood pressure looks on your next visit next week"

Sunday lunch with the family - Oliver, Amy, Guy, Hannah and Linda. - weekend after the June 2016 Referendum. New potatoes from our allotment in Handsworth 

Three and a half years after the Referendum vote to leave the EU,  a friend posted on her Facebook page:

1st January 2021. MM: I wanted to write a Happy New Year message but ended up writing this instead. If you hate doom and gloom please scroll by. This is an X-rated post.

And so it comes to pass (weeping emoji's). We have woken up today no longer able to call ourselves EU citizens. And I am unspeakably sad. I don't know whether, in the long run the UK, will be better off in or out. I don't know whether there will be queues in Kent or food shortages in Tescos. But I do know that all of us who value that delicious sense of tumbling into a new culture, a new language, a new landscape have been left immeasurably poorer by the UK's decision to leave the EU. 

I speak for all of us in here who one fine day, wearing but a pair of skimpy shorts and an old T-shirt, clambered onto a charter at Gatwick to some random destination in Greece and drank so deeply of the delights of this beautiful country that we mysteriously find ourselves decades later sharing our (zoomed) βασιλόπιτα with children who speak two languages, in-laws who have never set foot on the green shores of Britain and Greek friends and colleagues who we hold dear in our hearts. 

We are heartbroken that the next generations will not know this. Those who already made it out of the gate will have their rights protected. The (richer) retirees will retire. The well-heeled will inevitably find a way. Some of our young will no doubt make it through the portcullis even after it clangs shut. But please allow us to shed a tear on this inauspicious day for all those who won't, and will never come to know what we know.

SB: Happy New Year, M. In your eloquent lament you write "But I do know that all of us who value that delicious sense of tumbling into a new culture, a new language ..." I know so well what you mean. I didn't so much 'tumble', given that my Dad - divorced post-war, then married to Maria in the lovely little church of Panagia Kapnikarea off Syntagma in Athens in 1949 - first invited me to beloved Greece when I was 16, during Easter 1957, and I, on my occasional stays with the 'Greek' side of the family in England was used to hearing my dad and Maria speaking Greek. I never looked forward to those brief childhood visits on which my mum insisted. Too much shouting and disorder and kissing and hugging among unruly half-siblings, though I liked being entrusted with a glass of wine now and then. It took four days, travelling alone on the Simplon-Orient from London, turning Balkan-wards after Venice, to get to Larissa where in the middle of the night this callow English youth, with a compartment to himself, was interrupted by a wedding party bursting in, joyfully noisy. I - a foreigner had the nerve to glare at them and ask them to be quiet. Instead of taking justified offence they laughed uproariously "Oh Englishman!" and had the effrontery to offer me a drink which I turned away. A few hours later I arrived in Athens…There, at dawn, on a low platform, the Greek side of my family awaited with joyous greetings and many disturbing hugs and kisses. Through a tiny window from the loo of Yia-yia's flat in Kolonaki I saw the Parthenon - no longer the familiar schoolbook illustration, the real place!.. ... ... Well! ... Two weeks later, when I departed from Greece, all had changed; changed utterly and forever, but that's another story, a good one. That first visit over 60 years ago was the start of an affair that I will take to my grave. You could say that 'some enchanted Easter' long ago, I saw Greece 'across a crowded room.' Even now, in dear Ano K, strolling or cycling on a small back road I hear a family, perhaps on a Sunday afternoon, laughing and talking under their veranda, and I'm possessed by an impish impulse to stroll over "Excuse me! Με συγχωρείς. Θα μπορούσατε να είστε λίγο πιο ήσυχοι!" They will laugh indulgently, even ask me to join them. I know that the UK leaving the EU can never efface - nor portcullis block - that 'delicious sense of tumbling' you describe so beautifully and which I still feel over and over when my old feet touch the soil of mother Greece.

James S, neighbour on National Opposition Street below our Democracy Street in Ano Korakiana: it’s exactly that Simon! The total mind opening of travel that Brexit seems so ignorant of!

Hi James. For people who have learned - or, in my case, taught against my will - to be happy the new border bureaucracies may bring temporary impatience, frustration and even misery, but love finds a way. I 'tumbled' (M's good word) into Greece long before the UK joined the EU, when post-war restrictions enveloped all Europe, customs examined our cases spilling out our belonging, transfers of cash were strictly limited. Through Yugoslavia I saw how the communist guards abused their own citizens, fellow passengers trying to cross their border (they were scowlingly deferential to me on my dad's diplomatic visa stamped in my dark blue passport). I was alerted by my father about the dreadful psychic scars of occupation and civil war in Greece - things that could not be spoken of, better forgotten. I've learned to accept - or, at least, to live with - queues, rationing, paperwork, inconvenience. I've been abused by immigration on arriving in New York, waited hours to enter Canada and Australia. I suspect from now - COVID restrictions notwithstanding - there'll be a couple of years of 'pain' as this bizarre event is sorting in the wash, but far worse pains have been surmounted in the past. I voted Remain, but I know other people voted to Leave the EU. who enjoy other lands beyond the English Channel as much as I.

The mainland of Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra from our home in Ano Korakiana 

I know about inventing paradise. Byron, Μπαϊρον, who came first in 1809 called her 'the wondrous land'; sailed to Greece in the brig Hercules in 1823, arrived at Kefalonia on the 4th August, to die at Mesolóngi eight months later. I first came to Greece, to Athens, by train via a three day stop in Venice - walking for hours, entranced, along damp paved alleys - in 1957, but in 1962 I sailed to Greece from England with a friend, my skipper Chris Jameson. In July we left Messina in Sicily. The first morning of our two day crossing on Danica ...

Danica

...bouncing and swaying on a swift etesian reach; came on our reverse, a sleek Greek frigate cutting smoothly through the cresting waves, heading west. In return to our salute, we saw a young sailor in perfect whites, almost sprinting to the fantail to dip her flag to us. My chest swells at the memory of seeing that lovely ensign falling and rising again in the seconds of her passing as though official Greece was saying "yasus" - just to us. 

That was 59 years ago. After that swift reach from Sicily. sunrise on the third day, the good wind abandoned our small vessel on a limpid mirror. The moment remains as dreamlike as at the time; glimpsing the forms of land melded to white sky and coppery sea - a way to the mainland of Greece between Kefalonia and Zakynthos into the Gulf of Patras. Next morning we made Byron's landfall. Shapes - north and south - that appeared and disappeared and might have been no more than dawn shadows - though we knew otherwise - lay before us. All day, in zephyrs, we sailed towards them, passed between, and anchored off Killini in Ilia where we rowed ashore to be sat at a table (my memory is flawed by so many photos of Greek tables and chairs), offered ouzikis and welcoming curiosity, before a polite policeman - reproached by our hosts - "po, po, po" - told us we were supposed to clear at Patras, but "please finish your conversation." 

170 miles from Piraeus and the city to which I’d determined to return.

I spent, as I recall, my first twenty five years in a fog of schooled and inherited insensibility, almost impervious to the wisdom of generous parents – English and Greek - who probably knew that, as perhaps for them, only time would tell me. 

In 1968 I was with the Greek side of my family again. They’d flown on to Greece. My dad wanted a car while we were there. Over four days I drove his small Hillman through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy and by ferry to Greece, sleeping one night in a field above the sea, a few yards from a winding road through olives. From Piraeus I took another ferry to join the family in Aegina. We returned to Athens for a day, where, with my diplomatic family, I attended a house party somewhere near Vouliagmeni, hosted by a man whose bald head I glimpsed for a few seconds, Colonel Stylianos Pattakos.

It was only in Detroit, married a year later, meeting American Greeks - and Greek exiles from the Junta - that I grasped the discomforting notion of ‘sides’;  of Greece as a polity, of animosities and moral positions, words and facts and opinions that left the paper-fragranced sentences of my superlative education – in one ear as others' thoughts, out of my mouth as words for conversation and essays, and out of the other ear, unedited. Though it seems so in memory, I could not have been quite that one-dimensional, except perhaps at my mother’s breast. My CV, by the time I was thirty, was enough to ease me into academia where, mostly fuddled, time did begin at last to tell and I began to listen.

It was 25 years before I came to Greece again.

After many years, return to Greece in 1995 with Amy, Linda and Richard

Standing in the cockpit of our Airbus (full of screens and no joystick) where passengers could – pre-9/11 – still be invited for a pilot’s glimpse of the world ahead, I stood behind my family, as with Linda, Richard and Amy, we flew high over the border of Greece; able to see, to port, the glow of Thessaloniki; ahead the greater glow of Athens; to starboard a moonlit Ionian Sea and far below, in inky blackness, clusters of tiny glittering diamonds - villages in the foothills of the Pindos.

“Children! There’s Greece”

In the dim cabin tears welled from my eyes with the delight – and the idea – of sharing ‘my’ Greece with my wife and children. I could not speak for a moment, and Linda, more English than I, was irritated at me. 

A third generation in Greece - our Amy with her cousins Natasha and Anna at sandy Pylos in 1995

*** *** ***

A decade later we spend months in Ano Korakiana on Corfu. Πέρα δόθε:

Winter 2009: The sun came up into a cloudless sky. It’s so bright and hazy, but for the crackle of awakened logs I’d mistake this winter morning for summer. Yesterday as we pottered on tasks I became so chilled I began to sniffle. By evening I was squeezing fresh lemons to mix with honey to warm in a glass. We’d been down to CJs Bingo Quiz in the evening, me in two under vests and long johns, to struggle with questions that were almost entirely about things in films and TV series. Our friend Trish, in CJs after cold day’s work cleaning charter boats at Gouvia, won. She was playing with Sally who runs CJs for Chrissie and John, also there - the latter cursing merrily to the delight of all. Trish is married to Dave, met at Ipsos Harbour in the first hour of our arrival in September 2006, who first raised our spirits as we surveyed Summer Song’s worn and musty interior, wondering if we’d been sensible buying her on ebay, sight unseen. “We’ll make a list” he said “Norman and Pauline loved that boat and she’s worth it”. And so she was and is. Dave keeps an eye on Summer Song – not only on the boat but also on the harbour politics that allow us to keep her safely berthed there. C remarked from far away on the Pacific coast. “Enjoy Corfu. Greece, no matter what, is a beautiful place to wake up in the morning" but I’m as superstitious as any atheist about reflections on the rewards of fortunae. 

'Greece, no matter what, is a beautiful place to wake up in the morning'

The names of people who rejoice in their luck are selected by a divine factotum and placed face-down on a gilded dish that passes around the table on timeless Olympus. Amid merriment, each God selects the human whose card is to be their post-prandial plaything. Here a brilliant climber says “There’s a window for the summit at dawn”; there a mother says “Our child is so perfect”; and over there a father says “There are police officers, a man and a woman, at the door. Must be about those parking fines”; and here a wife who says “no need to hold the ladder darling. Go and make us a cup of tea”; and there, in the deep ocean, an exhausted sailor says “We’re through the worst” but see this one, here’s a gem “The war will be over by Christmas”, but what about that popinjay Confederate General who said “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist…” Far below a fisherman on the Peneios and a woman waiting for a train at Litochoro know they hear, not the rumble of endless thunder reverberating among the peaks of Olympus, but laughter.

Good Friday picnic on a shore in Corfu. A fourth generation in Greece

In England in early January 2021 Greece seems remote - for all the continued contact via the social web. Here in the inner suburbs of Birmingham Lin and I are locked down under Tier 4. I am not to go further from our front door than our front garden. Linda - under 70 - can shop. Our neighbour, J, 'allowed to meet one other person outside', sat for a chat with me by our porch and passed the time of day. He works for Fareshare, one of the neighbours who've offered to shop for us if necessary.

Covid Tier 4. Restrictions from 00.01 Thur 31 Dec 2020

The weather is intrusively grey, wet, creating a world of pervasive sogginess that sticks to shoes hands and sleeves; which I can't avoid trailing into the house when I bring in logs, damp and stuck with rotting leaves, slimy too. I dry the wood in front of the stove before we can enjoy their warmth. Kindling I've even put in the oven for 30 minutes to get things burning in the mornings. 

Before the latest lockdown was announced I could cycle in and out of town, visit the rag market, buying a baked potato mashed with butter, salt and pepper plus a cup of tea, or a butter croissant and filter coffee eaten stood warily in on New Street. Wednesday morning I called in at the Birmingham Donor Centre in New Street to give blood. The first drop during the preliminary test for sufficient iron wouldn't dawdle down the green liquid filled test tube as it's meant, but Sarah - name off her tag - tried an alternative test. ""Yup, that's fine" "Phew". I lie in the plastic chair arm pierced skilfully almost painlessly to extract my very common 0 positive blood, but after a few minutes I'm being ministered to by three, no, four, nurses, urging me to squeeze my fist and wiggle my toes, as my blood's not coming out. "Oh no!" I think, but then "There we go! Fine now" says Margaret cheerfully. Privately I suspect the needle wasn't accurately placed in the vein.  After 10 minutes, I'm on my way, exiting through a world of masked donors and masked extractors, making another appointment in March - if I'm not breaking rules. Once home I get a text message thanking me for my blood. 

From Greece we've brought a lemon from one of our citrus trees, which, after two years barren, has fruit - - a generous load - following scale insect infestation affecting citrus, and now, other shrubs and trees, all Corfu. 

Perhaps our treatments have begun to work, as recommended by Sophia and Niko, neighbours, and Evangelina at the new Tzoulou garden shop. She recommended we spray a mix of Sivanto (2.5 m/l to 5l water) and Electro pesticide (ditto mix), to kill, and by resting on the leaves, break the life cycle of what she calls the ‘black spiny insects’.   

A lemon from Corfu back in Brum

Checking lemon leaves for citrus scale insects

*** *** ***

With some poignancy I travel 10 years back in my time machine to Ano Korakiana in February, when the village celebrated its annual Carnival ... February Carnivali, brightening the greyest chilliest and wettest day of the year. Part of the band in motley, military, priest and police, made 'oompa oompa' with drum and fife. The king enthroned, priapic with crown on his heart-covered float, accompanied by courtiers, male as female and other reversals of carnival, paraded upwards preceded and trailed by bouncing umbrellas, a phalanx of pink parasols, women in silvery wigs dancing up to the start of Democracy Street, twirling round a ribboned pole amid whistles, bangers and music.

Stopping and starting the procession gathered more people – some in masks, a long nosed Pinocchio, some as they were; streamers and confetti thrown from windows, hugging and greeting, planned and spontaneous, impossible not to smile and laugh in the chill wet. Up we went to the bandstand, round the carpark and back down the street in rain that poured from low cloud obscuring views to the sea. Nico and Sophia, standing by their front door, invited us in from the cold and wet for coffee and rich chocolates to meet their family.

“All the news is bad”

“Indeed it is” we smiled.

At 7.00 two hundred or so were gathered in the upper room of the Farmers' Co-op on the lower road to watch a demonstrably hilarious dialogue between two women we didn’t understand but clapped with everyone else. Then a formal reading by a top hatted master of ceremonies naming people in the village to theirs and everyone else’s amusement and applause.

Then a more disposable carnival king was carried out to the road and burned, with a bit of diesel to overcome the rain. Everyone began moving through a small door down short steps to the lower room to sit at long tables under a beamed roof. We were ushered to Leftheris’ family where dishes had been brought to pass with village wine in jugs, water and cola – lamb, pork, salad, cheese pies, olives, bread in chunks. As we tucked in along with every age, the dancing started with a band that created the mood of the evening, responded to people as they danced and sang – dances for couples became threesomes, foursomes until chains of us were stepping forward six steps one way, two back in that way that can’t help look elegant because the clumpers like me are carried hands held in the ring, six right, left two, unpausing until well after midnight the band made up of two guitarists, lead singer, keyboard and lighting mixer – played unceasingly. The dancing space was seldom empty. If not filled with pairs and chains, it was taken by men and women dancing solo amid clapping support, nimble and beautiful. I danced with Lin and in the circles – like Scottish reels.

“We all drank a lot of wine” said Katya when I saw her at the shop a couple of days later. As at a family wedding, wine added to the enjoyment; none crass. There was a break in the music around one in the morning. I thought we were going home, but after a few minutes, the room filled with lively chatter, the band came back with renewed energy. It wasn’t only the young on tables, though one couple danced with especial virtuosity, the young man - minutes previously in ballet skirt, tights and pigtails now entwined with a young woman who’d begun alone shivering her hips in the Arabian style. This duet had others joining in. The whole room floated on the music and swayed with the singing, happiness making us all even more good looking, and some especially handsome and beautiful. As the band said its goodbyes, an older lady led the Ano Korakiana song singing two line verses, unaccompanied, the chorus picked up by the moving circle. We walked home just before three-o-clock. “I’ve so enjoyed myself” I said “Me too” said Lin.

The song to the dance is a paeon to Corfu "Kerkyra, overflowing with greenery and beauty...into each and every corner and the seashore..." a list of all the green island's attributes 

Weather, dreams, scorpions in the woodpile

After raining steadily all day, the sky has cleared, the wind gone down, the thunder wandered eastwards into Greece, lightning winking off the sides of clouds, too far to hear thunder. After midnight a moon rises, gibbous and big; orange streaked with nimbus above the mainland mountains; brightening and shrinking as it clears the distant clouds to silver the Kerkyra Sea. The Belt of Orion glimmers high to the west and below the village, among trees, street lights glow into the distance through a film of mist diluting the adequate moonlight, wasting energy.
By morning the rain had returned for the day. I’d dreamed of arriving home in Handsworth to find the support staff of the institute going through my possessions. I pretended not to be me; smiled at one of them. “Riding on the cross-bar” she sneered, knowing I’d understand her expression of shared contempt for my relished and indulgent liking for cycling to work. I woke sweating. Next I arrived at a rail station which might have been mine; asked fellow passengers its name.
“What what what what what?” they chorused quietly.
I phoned National Rail on my mobile – an insane idea when awake – and someone said, mockingly, “mmm, mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.”
Furious I threw the phone onto the platform where it shattered. No-one noticed. I peered at a wooden board scraped to its painted grain and made out the name 'Joyford'. I was in my pyjamas – which I never wear – having wandered into an event attended by my old friend and colleague Tanya, who was acting a part in a scene in which she played a cake. Her decorated head stuck out of the top of a round table, intricately braided with a ruffled cake band round her neck.
“What’s happening?” I asked, gazing round at lots of well dressed smart people.
“It’s the something or other event…didn’t you get it on...?”…she mentioned an obscure social web name to which I’d failed to subscribe. “Could you turn off my mobile for me?” she indicated it with her eyes on the table beside her.
Someone grabbed my arm and rescued me. I was involved in keeping Saddam Hussein captive in a butterfly suit – seriously Red Admirals – below the surface of a dank pool, but when we went to drag him out the suit was empty. He’d escaped. I, knowing how dangerous he was, fled but left my credit cards and my bicycle. Later I was in an office trying to explain who I was without ID, regarded as deranged with my tale of Saddam on the loose. “He’s got a gun!”
I was rescued by the head of school – still in my pyjamas – who said “Your daughter, Helen Baddeley, wants to see you. She’s in the Philosophy Department over there.”
He led me by the arm to the door to outside.
“But I haven’t got a daughter called Helen. My daughter isn’t a philosopher. She’s in the police.”
We were having a meal – four of us including Richard Pine – the only people in Harry’s Taverna in Perithia. The rain was a torrent, spouting from the gutters, streaming along the roads. “We have cod” said Harry “and stiffado”. “Ah” said Stephen “the piece of cod that passeth all understanding.” “Fercrisake” said Richard “It’s only one o clock”

Harry's in Perithia

The last wasn’t dreamed. It was a good meal in good company. I’d driven 26 kilometres round the north east coast to have lunch with Richard, who’d encountered two friends in the post office in Perithia. We talked of everything under the sun and rain. Playing with ideas. Mentioning nothing in the news, talking as if spectator sport didn't exist. Yet I could roam through my experience of living in the most profound opposition to the Lausanne Principle that has run through the history of 20th century Greece and its neighbours – Nansen, Venizelos, Curzon – engineering the biggest enforced exiling and banishing in the history of  Europe.

A book lent me by Yolanda the other day

“Our PM has talked of his concerns about multiculturalism. But until nationalism became the game of the last century, the word multiculturalism needed no inventing. People’s co-existence was imperfect. Yet until the nationalist faith was used to create new states and boundaries older faiths governed relations between people linked to the land on which they worked and worshipped in landscapes known for millennia in cities where the congregations of churches, mosques and synagogues, where it did not arise from neighbourliness had civility enforced by autocracy. This is why Ivo Andrić, at first a liberal, came to believe that people – in his case around a bridge over the Drina in the heart of the Balkans - would only live together if forced by firm and even harsh rule from above. This is why my great great grandfather wrote of the potential tyranny of popular government; that it may liberate people, co-existing under law, to indulge their ugliest potential, sometimes even turning those same neighbours into strange fruit. “You don’t have to love your neighbour” said Thelma, the fourth of our party “but you need willingness to negotiate.” If thy neighbour’s curry offends thy nose, work out the days, lest as the smoke of roasting meat on thy BBQ cause equal offence.

The Lausanne Principle emerged from a conference held there in late 1922 and early 1923 attended by Greeks, Turks and representatives of the leading world powers - USA, France Britain, Italy. Article One of the Lausanne convention includes the words:

…There shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory…

This drastic expedient entailed the compulsory mass migration of millions of people from places their ancestors had lived for centuries. It was widely a seen, at the time and even today - especially in the versions of the exchange told in childrens’ school history books in Greece and Turkey – as a form of disaster relief, even a humanitarian measure. Who am I to pretend, even now, that this is a story that can be seen from a neutral position, the eyrie of the objective historian. Aristotle used the word catharsis to describe a dramatic technique - a purifying of the emotions brought about in the audience of a tragic drama through the evocation of great fear, intense pity…Καθαρμός ή ψυχοκάθαρση μέσω της (δραματικής) τέχνης ή της συνειρμικής ανάμνησης…Music, writing and myriad artistic expressions evoked by these events renew and recall them – as with all disasters – but the purgation implied by catharsis remains far from complete in Greece and Turkey and their diaspora communities. This has as much if not more to do with events leading up to the exchange of populations. On this subject it is difficult to speak, Suffice it to say that after the butchery of the first world war, what followed in Asia Minor was a thoroughly appropriate link to what happened across the European continent into Russia between 1930 and 1945 - Europe's most dreadful century so telling described by Mark Mazower's book Dark Continent. The journalist historian Bruce Clark who wrote – in 2006 – his excellent account of ‘how mass expulsion forged modern Greece and Turkey’ tells in the preface of an incident in 2004, in Kosovo, when the Lausanne convention that maintained the principle of dealing with inter-ethnic inter-faith strife by partition, expulsion and separation was vigorously implemented, but this time not with the support of the great powers who, 80 years after the Treaty of Lausanne, now justified their Balkan interventions as being ‘to enable all the region’s peoples to live decently and amicably without fear of persecution on ethnic or religious grounds’. 
Representatives, police and soldiers of almost the same national signatories that had attended at Lausanne, this time constrained by the fragile United Nations’ consensus that had just about allowed a monitoring and strictly defined humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, watched with appalled impotence as ‘thousands of people, mostly Serbs were driven from their homes’, their villages burned, churches destroyed, 20 people killed. Wasn’t it Charlemagne who once said of Christ’s crucifixion “Oh that I had been there with twenty of my Frankish knights”? As it was our soldiers could only watch and report the mayhem; try to pick up the wretched pieces. ‘Oh why do the nations so furiously rage together?’

In response to these events, a statement was issued by a think-tank known as the European Stability Initiative (ESI). Its authors, young Europeans with experience of political or humanitarian work in the Balkans, made an appeal: whatever governments now did, they must not succumb to the old temptation of using the ‘Lausanne Principle’.(p.xi)

We have not succumbed; in part a result of the rigorous diffusion in almost every part of private and public life, that certain attitudes and behaviours towards ‘the other’ are unacceptable. Racism is an obscenity, and that’s just a start – so is discrimination against anyone’s prospects of employment on the basis of anything other than their qualification and competence to do the job for which they are applying. More than that we have invented terms to define engrained organisational and cultural processes that may have made it more or less difficult for certain categories of people to gain those qualifications and competence – ‘canteen culture’ in the police, institutional racism and sexism in government and corporations. Our research and literature has delved deeply into the embedded subtlety with which prejudice may be sustained by self-dislike – the tragic image of the black child scrubbing her skin. In nurseries and primary schools across the western world teachers attend courses on the devious tricks of language that can sustain such feelings – the conflation, for instance, of the word ‘dirty; with the word ‘black’. The casual and unintended impoliteness that can cut to the bone. We wrote about it, Kim and I, in 1991 (Baddeley, S & James, K (1991) The Power of Innocence: from Politeness to Politics Management Education & Development, 22 (2) pp.106-118). At the Cambridge Footlights in 1965 I watched a telling sketch in which a mild mannered ‘official’ with a faux-German accent spoke of all the work being done to ensure ‘it never happens again’, as people are educated to respect their neighbours, and with increasing fervour of how ‘ve hef vays of making people love one another’; ultimately, beads of sweat breaking out on his convulsed face, raising his arm in the evil salute, of ‘his government’s’ great project of achieving "a final solution" to the problem of discrimination between humans. The much derided notion of ‘political correctness’ is about the interpersonal and organisational etiquette that might just guarantee co-existence in a world that eschews the Lausanne Principle of solving an intractable dispute over territory by putting up a wall across a disputed area and compelling people on one or the other side of it to move, until boundary and ethnic group coincide.

Coming home I drove over the mountains via Episkepsi and on to Spartillas. Rain and mist all the way.

The road over the mountains

** ** **
I’m gradually working through the wood pile in the garden – the wood given us by one of our neighbours last October - turning nailed, woodwormed, termite eaten beams into firewood that will fit in our stove. The smell of the sawed ends of the old pine and olive, still with undamaged cores, something to be inhaled like a fine wine before the released smell of the wood disperses.

It must be centuries old – mature when first cut then a long time holding the roof or floor of our neighbour’s old outbuilding. I’m minded to take a small piece of this wood home for Richard Hill as a gift to carve, perhaps a fish or an owl. I lift the wood carefully, avoiding reaching under. Nestled in the wood pile were scorpions, crumpled to avoid the attention of light. These were gently persuaded to scuttle off to another refuge after we’d enjoyed gazing at them “They are alien aren’t they?” said Lin. Quite ugly while squat they become exquisite emblems as they move, pincers spread, tail erect, across the old wood, swifter than their sibling arachnids.

Scorpions in the woodpile

** ** ** **
Now I'm clearer. I think. There's a party in Ano Korakiana on Saturday evening - as per this notice posted on Democracy Street - starting at 2100 in the Agricultural Co-op and then the Ano Korakiana Carnival Procession will be on the following Saturday, March 5, starting around midday, after which there's another party, like last year, in the Co-op. Oh blimey - another correction - Carnival is Sunday 6 March!