Yacht Summer Song for sale

Simon on Summer Song a few years ago

Selling Summer Song. I’ve been putting it off. Procrastinating for months, but here goes....

For sale in Greece - Yacht Summer Song Snapdragon 27 sailing yacht with possibility of local mooring in Corfu. Length 8.28m, 27’2”. Beam 2.59m, 8’6”. Tonnage 7.5. Draft 1.40m, 2’9”. Bilge keels. Roller reefing foresail. Reefing cringes on mainsail. GRP construction. 5/6 berths. Full inventory. Reconditioned 16hp Yanmar diesel auxiliary engine. Registered Poole UK. Certificate of British Registry SSR01977.  Third party insured to Oct 2018. New 2m inflatable tender.
Corfu is a beautiful island, famous for sailing holidays and friendly weather, lying a few nautical miles from mainland Greece, both shores dotted with safe harbours, coves and beaches, many with jetties for tavernas. Summer Song is a sturdy seaworthy boat, sailed from England to Mediterranean Spain, to Turkey and back to Ionian Greece. She has given her present and previous owner, and their families, much enjoyment. ‘Summer Song’ can be seen almost any time by arrangement.  €4,990 ONO (please no time wasters) or part-exchange, for smaller yacht, to suit my age. Contacts: Simon  07806 816730 simon@baddeley.be or Dave 0030 6994895948 daveincorfu@gmail.com

How did we come by this boat? 12 years ago, our daughter, Amy, sitting at our kitchen table in Birmingham, drew our attention to an ad on eBay for Summer Song. I phoned the owner in Corfu. 
Pauline answered “Hullo?”

“Hullo. I’m Simon phoning from UK. We’ve seen your ad. Can I ask why you want to sell your boat?”

“I don’t”

“Oh?”

“It’s my husband, Norman”

After brief further enquiries, I clicked on ‘Buy now’.

Now I’ve arrived at a decision for someone else to make about Summer Song's future

Simon and Lin on Summer Song

Our grandson Oliver sailing to Pirate Island

Summer Song's interior - photo taken yesterday - 11 May 2018

Basic diagram of Snapdragon 27. We don't carry a spinnaker though

The Youtube clip is of Lin and I and friends on Summer Song up against a typical katabatic headwind on a summer afternoon. We had to motor-sail to make any progress. It was then I decided to buy and install a reconditioned and more powerful engine. 

Moored at Agni, Corfu

Reconditioned engine

Out of the water for repairs and antifouling two years ago

Selection from 'Democracy Street' <Οδός Δημοκρατίας>

On Democracy Street, Ano Korakiana, Corfu

Democracy Street Οδός Δημοκρατίας Odos Dimokratias is the street that runs through the centre of Ano Korakiana, a village in the centre of Corfu, part of the Hellenic Republic of Greece - Άνω Κορακιάνα, Κέρκυρα, Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Ἑλλάς. On Google maps the street is (2012) still called Επαρχιακή Οδός Αγίου Βασιλείου or St.Basil's Provincial Road - 39° 42.438', 19° 47.679', even though a name change occurred during the Regime of the Colonels - a tale that will be told in another place. I started this blog on 1 April 2007 with a reference to our home in Handsworth, Birmingham...and in the years since Linda and I have gone to and fro - πέρα δόθε - between two places of matching importance and on the blog indulged in the happy technology of hyperlinks - something not so possible in the written diaries I've kept since 1975.

My Birmingham - no mean city

I also use Democracy Street to explore my enduring interest in the working relationship of politicans and managers in local government - relationships that make democracy.

I also use it to record my interest in preserving, keeping on record, the television work of my stepfather, Jack Hargreaves...

...who among many other things was the inventor of an entertainment broadcast by Southern Television between 1959-1981 called Out of Town, commenting without sentiment or nostalgia on a growing disconnect between men and the land (see also Facebook) - On Parsonage Down. He also invented the children's programme 'How' - about which Richard Dawkins, years later, wrote:

I use the blog to speak of Greece, my feelings about the 'wondrous land', of memories of the Marble Emperor, and of Corfu Κέρκυρα and 'our' village - now and in history - especially the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands between 1815-1864
I also speak of my allotment, Plot 14, on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments, subject of a ten year local campaign - 'small island in which I rejoice', 'worth a few onions and a turnip' - which continues.
I also write, have written papers on local government, on political skill - Owl, Fox, Donkey, Sheep...

Baddeley, S & James, K (1987) 'Owl, Fox, Donkey, Sheep: Political Skills for Managers', Management Education & Development, 18 (1) Spring, pp. 3-19

- and on Political-management Leadership and my preoccupation with agency - Internal Polity and information technology, the governance of cyberspace - Governmentality. Taught in different lands, most recently in Australia and New Zealand.
I dreamed of sailing on the sea. I think my mum and dad had taken the train from York to Scarborough in 1944 where perhaps they bought the toy boat. It's tin keel cut me. How? I remember the cut and I still have the small white scar on the inside of my right knee.

I remember days and months I've spent at sea in small boats, my first steps mentored by Denys Rayner who wrote:

In any reasonable weather it is the diminutive size of the yacht which makes long passages under sail such thrilling affairs, and one of the reasons why I, for one, find the smallest possible craft the most rewarding - as well as costing less.

- once crossing an ocean, other times voyaging in the Mediterranean, sailing to Athens from England and back, borrowing old photos from drawers and boxes.

Of course I write about cycling, about my Brompton folding bicycle. It's an indulgence I can enjoy parading - moral mobility - since I and my car conducted an amicable divorce.

I've explored family history - especially the more or less invisible one that took in my Dad and my maternal grandfather, grandpa Henry - both spies. Also his grandfather, Sir Henry and Mill End Dairy Farm in Clavering, Essex, where I was born in 1942.

I do voluntary work as lots do, because I get annoyed and excited about things - green spaces in cities including playing fields, allotments and parks, especially Handsworth Park - about whose early history I wrote an essay -  and Black Patch Park and now Lin and I and friends are running Handsworth Helping Hands (ditto Facebook), and all through runs the lovely catalogue of friends and neighbours, some fleeting, others lifelong, my family - odd and as we all admit semi-dysfunctional, therefore I suppose close to the norm, as if that mattered much. There's cat Flea and dog Oscar, who comes with me to Scotland, travels in my cycle pannier and stays with friends when we're away....

...and then there are parties and parties and parties - especially Easter, meetings, Carnival, encounters.... Lefteris, Natasha, Foti, Jim, Maria, Dimitra, Effie, Adoni, Aleko, Pavla and Andrea, Niko our Greek tutor, Nico and Sophia, Sebastiano, Katya and Thanassis, Mark and Sally, Paul and Cinta, Richard P, Paul again and Lula, John R, Rajinder, Ziggi, Denise, Robin, Tony and Helen, Karen, Emma, Phoebe, Liz and Matt, Danica, Kim, Tanya, Leslie and my cousins, my sister, my half-sisters and half-brother - Maria my late stepmother on the Greek side

Maria Roussen by Yiannis Moralis, her first husband

 - my mother Barbara Theodora in the Highlands which I've known as a visiting place since I first took the night sleeper from Euston to Inverness when I was 9 years old.

I'm 80% Scot. I relish the train labouring through Drumochter; I'm sad when going south it speeds up on passing the watershed between Dalwhinnie and Blair Atholl.

our children

and grandchild

Amy and Oliver

What else? The search for the 'letter' from Ano Korakiana prompted by Kostas Apergis,village historian and Thanassis Spingos, who runs Ano Korakiana's website. There are lots of entries on this subject. It revolves around the rather conditional relationship of Corfu with mother Greece, the story of the Ionian rizospasti, revealed by Eleni Calligas, and why for many years while celebrating the anniversary of  Greek Independence on 25 March neither Ano Korakiana nor Kinopiastes celebrate the anniversary of Corfu's 1864 enosis with the Republic in May.

Mother Greece over the Sea of Kerkyra

...and my enduring annoyance with bottled water and commodified philotemo, expressed in passionate anger by Maria Strani in The Pimping of Panorea

Το πούλημα της Πανωραίας 

Other pages:
A chance to talk about my stepfather Jack Hargreaves
On Bell Hill, Lydbrook
The realm of wonder
The banality of good - Η κοινοτοπια του καλου?
I entered the home of a women...German Occupation of Greece
Dimitra's 16th birthday party
What it means to be a Brummie
Carnival in Ano Korakiana, Corfu ~ Καρναβάλι, Άνω Κορακιάνα, Κέρκυρα
Phaedo
In the Highlands - "Love let us be true to one another"
Visit to Butrint
The best of all possible worlds
Written stuff
"'Like' is not strong enough"
Golden Dawn
Kevin Andrews - understanding blame for the Greek Civil War
What makes a village?
Ano Korakiana pastoral - friezes of Aristeidis, the village sculptor
Carnival Guignol and the King James Bible
Όλοι μαζί
Tour of Greece
Political-management leadership - negotiating the overlap
Managing in a political environment
Phew! Μολὼν λαβέ 
All of a sudden the fine weather's here
What the Greeks went through
Σκέπτομαι
The earth turns towards the sun - civil war
Beware the gentry when they get scared
Seeking Sir Henry in British Columbia
A ladybird on my specs
Bacon and eggs
Μόνο αν κερδίσουμε την κοινωνία
Nightmares of the contented
Η γεωγραφία της φοροδιαφυγής
Voyage to England
Learning Greek «Η ζωή είναι δύσκολη»
"The horror" ~ how corruption works
Third visit to Greece
My mother in Ano Korakiana
At Kernovel
Πλήρης ημερών ~ farewell to mum
Cycling to the top of Mount Pantokrator
Handsworth
"..while there's moonlight and music and love and romance"
A missing commentary
ΑΣΩΤΟΣ Β΄
Work and play ~ learning about the rizospasti
Independence
A bumblebee in the cockpit
Others
She got married
ΤσικνοΠέμπτη
"No, don't blush"
"Να μη γίνει η Κορακιάνα "μη-κοινότητα"..."
Albania
Another village - Distomo
Kanun and the public law of Europe
A richer dust concealed
"...Think of the effect of your work on other people's views"
Our shed and all it contains
A walk in the snow
Putting cycling on the map
Βρεκεκεκέξ κοάξ κοάξ
On such a day as this
Small island in which I rejoice - allotments
Power cuts in Ano Korakiana
Dreams and scorpions in the woodpile
Pontikonisi ~ being economic with the truth
The blue of the sea we've left behind
Golden Dawn
Sept 2017 - my allotment after 6 years
Jan 2018 Christmas in the Village

Australia
Albania
New Zealand
Japan
France
Jersey
Venice
Rome
Sophia
Athens

Dancing at Effie's and Adoni's

*** ***
The sun was out for several hours on Sunday and I had time to mend the re-roof our garden shed and extend the allotment shed veranda, and feel warm especially as more or less rain is forecast for the rest of the week and I have a 'to do' list.

*****
Pual McGovern in Ag.Ioannis has sent me a circular about a collaboration between his company OCAY - which started and runs Agiotfest - and the photo club (Photoleke Η Φωτογραφική Λέσχη Κέρκυρας ΦΩΤΟ.ΛΕ.ΚΕ.) and the Corfu Environmental Initiative NGO (EcoCorfu) - a non-profit organisation to help needy people and improve the environment. The photo club's Journey of Life exhibition opens 18th Jul-3rd Oct'12 at the Asian Art Museum at the Palace of St. Michael & St. George in Corfu Town (see also this facebook page - Επιτροπής Αισθητικής Δήμου Κέρκυρας Committee for the Beauty of the Municipality of Corfu with images and conversations - in Greek -relating to improving the environment)

Young Tiger - we sailed her across the Atlantic

Corfu slides

A few of the photographs taken and images captured since we first touched down at Kapodistria Airport amid thunder and rain in September 2006. It's a vaguely sequential set - showing maps of the island, the village of Ano Korakiana, work on our house there at 208 Democracy Street, Οδός Δημοκρατίας, before and after - various journeys by plane, ship and train to and from Corfu, views over the local landscape

Our washing in the wind

 - from the village -

Prophet Elias before Mother Greece

and from other parts of the island to mainland Greece and Albania - beaches strewn with plastic rubbish, fly-tipping in the woods, friends, the weather, our boat Summersong, different places in the beautiful town - The Liston, the Old Port and the new, the narrow streets and pot-smashing on Easter Saturday.

Also videos of events - Carnival, Vassilopita, Easter lamb-roast with our best friends in the village - and a skype chat with Alan Barratt from Agios Markos who, last year, transformed our house by replacing its balcony, so oddly demolished by its previous English residents, creating a wonderful curved porch to his own design beneath it. There's also a constant source of enthusiastic fascination - research into the history of the British Ionian Protectorate (pause the film to read the longer paragraphs in this presentation at the Durrell School one evening last year):

An August storm seen from Democracy Street

and the quiet that follows

Meetings

The title of this blog is Democracy Street - our address in Ano Korakiana. Furthermore our neighbour is called Leftheris which means 'freeman'. On February 4 while travelling to Corfu by train and ship, John Richfield and I had alighted from the train that brought us from Paris, crossed a canal bridge to Piazzale Roma, and cycled, on a slightly confusing route towards our Adriatic ferry. Entering the maritime basin, we had woven among the parked supertrucks on the vast apron of the ferry terminal where we spied our ship rising above the waiting road traffic. There were very few independent travellers at that time of year. We got into conversation with one in the small cluster waiting to board. Travelling south on his motorbike, he was an academic, a philosopher - Alex Lloyd-Kapodistrias, descendant of the first Prime Minister of Greece, who's statue stands prominently in the city of Corfu where he was born on the 11 February 1776. Before the War of Independence, Kapodistrias, aged 25, had practised medicine in Corfu and was made a minister of the seven Ionian islands - the Septinsular Republic - the first self-governed territory of Greece.

Dear Alex. I hope you are prospering.I hope you don’t mind me sidling up to mentioning you in my diary. Connectionism and synchronicity. Herete. Simon

Not at all! Always a pleasure getting a message from you! In a few weeks I will be in Corfu for a month. What are your plans? If you are there, let’s meet! Cheers, Alex

I'm sad that we will not return to Corfu until September. Best wishes, Simon

* * * *
As well as being the birth island of Greece's first Prime Minister, Corfu can also claim Nicolaos Mantzaros, who composed the music for National Anthem of Greece, based on the 'Hymn to the Freedom' by the Ionian poet Dionysios Solomos, from Zakynthos.

Keronvel, Brittany

Sun in the early hours was the last we saw on Saturday. Laurence, the Moals’ son, knocked on the door and asked if all was OK. Speaking fluent English he confirmed some of my conjecture about the farming economy, using the word ‘balance’ severally, mentioning the need to match supply and demand of vegetables by timing of crops and investment in distribution – transport and storage. I surmised he held an agricultural degree to which he’d added a Masters from Abersytwyth; lived in Brest working as an agricultural advisor. He spoke of the problem of keeping people on the land; the need to balance local and international, tourism and agriculture, town and country, then he must dash off to play the Breton pipes. In the late afternoon, I took a cycle ride along the coast towards St Pol discovering small places – an oyster farm, a château with high walls, a chapel by the shore, back roads, lanes and alleys. Out of the car the landscape was, as always, rewarding – closer and slower. The grey wet didn’t matter. NEWS FROM HOME Richard phoned. “The weather’s fine here”. Our electricity faltered and went off altogether in the evening. After an hour without power we found the main switch tripped. Watched ‘Mississippi Burning’ dubbed in French after a supper of roast chicken and one of the three cauliflowers M’sieur Moal brought us yesterday. The rain increased. Mum phoned. Ill news. She heard last week the people planning to buy her house have been let down in their chain. Mum’s going to wait and hope and not put the house back on the market at once. “X says she’s going to raise the money one way or another. The children are down for the local school.” VACCINATION AGAINST CRUELTY? Watched Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogart in 'The Night Porter' until late – in a film from 1973. The plot follows an affair in peacetime Vienna between a concentration camp victim and her Nazi torturer. To be snide, it looks over 30 years later, like a film that moves between two camps. In 1973 submission and dominance was underground, now via Punk, Madonna, Gay Lib, and myriad other routes S&M is High Street, referenced in M&S. The psychology is known. Human’s have ingeniously eroticised real cruelty into a consensual game. By 1992 Iris Murdoch (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: Chatto & Windus) was saying this sort of thing was sentimental. It could also mean that many people more sensitised to the vile cruelty around them have sought a substitute for denial. Of course, there’s the quiet struggle of Tutu’s conciliation commissions in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Ruanda; the work of forensic teams on the body pits of Bosnia and elsewhere, collecting evidence for the International Court at the Hague (may Phil Shiner and his colleagues bring our righteous man from No 10 there), but a local council chief executive used the adjective ‘vanilla’ the other day to decry unimaginative policy, and he would have understood what I’m saying, alert in ways I respect most deeply to a lurking folkish layer in the prosperous leafy suburb where he works. (03/01/10 See The White Ribbon on the rural roots of fascism) Is there now some collective intention to know about the closeness of evil? Is the pervasiveness of S&M imagery a way to keep our nature before us yet bearable? I conjecture, most cautiously, that large tracts of the population are less likely than the holy righteous to project impulses to do evil outwards, seeking enemies deserving punishment and elimination among decadent strangers. Are we vaccinated against cruelty by perversity? Not if you read the news. Cruelty has gone indoors and into cyberspace. This April a tourist magazine I read, while at our estate agent in Corfu town, described a moment in the Easter celebrations when believers chorus “A curse on those who killed Christ”. In Durrell’s book on Corfu he writes of the crockery smashing we’d both enjoyed last Easter Saturday as ‘a ceremony for the casting out of Judas.’(p.84). He says it happens ‘at eleven o’clock on Good Friday’. Is he wrong or has there been a politic shifting of the event to less doleful Saturday, when more visitors from the modern secular grind can assemble at the weekend just to enjoy the spectacle - another less circuitous transformation? Saturday 16 June 2007 Steady rain driven before a steady westerly dripped off canopies at the Saturday market in Morlaix. I bought some roast potatoes to eat as we strolled and tasty crumbly pâté to take home. By the time we were back at Keronvel the sky was lighter. We headed to a small peninsular between two rivers – Guillet and Horn – just west of the hamlet Kerbrat where a walk runs through shore meadows with views, under the overcast, of rocks lining a ruffled grey sea criss-crossed by tiny figures skimming the shallows inside îsle de Siec attached to colourful kites. I like these habits of pleasure that draw on the quiet power of the elements – sand yachting, wind surfing, sailing and gliding – and detest the noisy pleasures of those who get disruptive fun from the pervasive noise, smell and waste of internal combustion. A beach can provide a setting for all sorts of fun – swimming, sailing, handball, sunbathing, rowing, canoeing, diving, fishing, surfing, picnicking, strolling, sandcastle building, birdwatching, rockpooling, jogging – and then along comes a prat with an outboard motor and everyone else’s pleasure is interrupted – an insult to that idea within democracy which says ‘do what you like so long as it doesn’t stop others doing what they like.’ On Friday we drove twenty miles west towards a growing patch of blue and came to Brignogan and the coast leading north from Grève de Goulven. Boulder lined coves provide shelter from east or west with pleasant paths amid flowers and grasses close to car parks - coastal parkland made the more pleasant by the stewardship of local authorities and the care of visitors. Litter is rare, benches not vandalised. Agriculture and tourism co-exist. When we arrived the sea was distant. By late afternoon it was lapping close under an almost unclouded sky. We examined a menhir with a small crucifix on its summit. I imagined a local bishop claiming this ancient landmark for the church. It wouldn’t stop some of his flock touching it for luck, fertility and potency, but they’d be doing it beneath a cross.

At Kernovel, St Pol de Leon

Delighted to find a free and instantly working WiFi connection at the Hotel de France in the centre of St Pol de Leon and so sat with laptop and coffee, a friendly dog and aimiable proprietor while Lin and her parents provision us at Leclercs.

There was har in the Channel. The ferry sounded her fog horn at the start of the seven hour crossing from Plymouth to Roscoff. Visibility improved but the cool drove us inside, where we had expensive snacks to a background of competing muzak.
The gîte, just south of St Pol de Leon, is one of three attached to a farm of exemplary efficiency called Keronvel. Madame Moal accepted our €150 deposit ushering us into an attractive accommodation of surgical cleanliness approved by a category of consumer who’s taste for hygiene is formed by commercials for cleaners that eliminate dirt and hurt it in the process.

























Gone are the forlorn roofs of a rural population driven by globalisation to the cities and its colleges. I’ve not noticed small bakeries and bars on their last legs. They’ve faded away. Shining cars are everywhere, their landing zones expansive aprons around supermarch hangers ringing marketless towns whose coiffured centrevilles have signs to direct the new harvest to places for the kids, for gazing and strolling in reach of parking. Old churches have a new liturgy- the guidebook. At Keronvel - power to their elbows - the farmers have outbuildings for the likes of us (stables, workshops, accommodation for long gone labourers, converted to gîtes for Sat-Sat hols) but they’ve also found ways, with state help, to up their yield to compete with the world, investing in spacey glasshouses, cultivating Stepford vegetables that meet the exactions of bigbox procurement aimed at meeting the demands of those same dirt fearing car born shoppers.

After driving to a couple of places we found a path to a brambled shrubby point east of Carentec where we could see islets, passing boats, birds and strollers on the edge of the Morlaix estuary. Here Arthur and Dorothy strolled gingerly down a slope to a small sitting place where we picnicked, chatted, and later read. I found a place to recline in the foggy sunlight of a humid afternoon, woken by the buzz of a jetski looping in the sea below – two young people filling the air with the noise of their fun, that silly stream of water shooting up from the back like boys competing to pee up a wall.
I’ve just finished Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Bitter Lemons’ between a more leisurely read of ‘Prospero’s Cell’. They make fascinating reading, but I’m glad I didn’t read Durrell on Corfu before we came. We weren’t guided there by his suite written before the second world war. Our Corfu was one we saw first in September 2006. One that we knew would have piled layers on earlier accounts. I was given Gerald Durrell’s ‘Corfu Trilogy’ by Amy for Christmas. A thoughtful gift, but I decided it was a unreadable as the diary of a parent’s old lover – engendering a mix of disdain and jealousy. This is not Gerald Durrell’s fault. He’s an admirable human. I just don’t want to look to closely at what his Corfu has become, preferring to enjoy our affair without reminders of her past lovers and their pleasures. His brother I can read - now. Corfu, like Cyprus later, separated from him as he became focused on universals, while Gerald stayed involved until he died, sharing apprehensions about the ecological blight attending the great spread of equality in travel. Lawrence Durrell is seductive. ‘Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins.’ His first line on Corfu and the last in that first paragraph ‘Other countries may offer you discoveries in manner or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself.’

I am slightly less interested in his landscapes (the same difficulty I have with Gerald – mine not the author’s) than in his reflections on Greeks – heroic, cowardly, impulsive, generous, intrigue-prone – and their complicated feelings towards the English, especially where intimate local bonds – family, love, friendships - were drawn into larger pots stirred by bigger spoons. On such things Lawrence Durrell - who would be odd if he were not something more more difficult than his writing - brings grief close to the surface now, because experienced before but written after, and published even later, they are pregnant with unexpressed emotion – ‘not conscious of separation’ ‘regret so luxurious and so deep that it did not stir the emotions at all’, ‘we never speak of it …’ he wrote in from Alexandria in the final chapter of ‘Prospero’s Cell’. This I suspect is the source of the keening unleashed to my startled impression at Cambridge, as I absorbed his Quartets from cover to cover and enjoyed in happy innocence the ravaged country, to which my post-war father - part stranger - introduced me with attentive love. I was told years later that Dad, the very model of an Englishman, caused amusement because he spoke such fluent 'mountain Greek'.

This delicate ground is being carefully sieved by Mark Mazower and his contributors. One of the names to whom the essays are dedicated is Mando Dalianis. Inside the collection is a chapter co-authored – apparently – by Dalianis and Mazower, ‘Children in Turmoil during the Civil War: Today’s Adults’. An endnote (p.104) records this chapter written by Mazower ‘based entirely on the published and unpublished work of the late Mando Dalianis.’ In July 1996, very ill, she’d delivered a monograph at Sussex University. In August Mazower visited her in Stockholm. Over a week they agreed to him bringing her work to wider notice. Dalianis’ life as a scholar - I’m sure she did many other things - began when ‘At five p.m. on Wednesday April 13, 1949, the heavy iron door of Averoff Prison was opened to admit me, and my name was added to the register of prisoner’s awaiting trial’. It was completed with the delivery of her paper 47 years later.

It is the greatest mark of character that an individual who inherits every reason to recycle their anger becomes someone through whom the evil men do is not passed on. Dalianis, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, followed the children and parents she encountered in prison for the rest of her life. She could easily have darkened her interpretation of what happened to these children imprisoned with their parents, then, as punishment to their mothers, fostered or sent to children’s homes. Never glossing the cruel consequences of the civil war and its worse aftermath, she concludes that recovery from trauma for most of the children was made possible through the occasional kindness of strangers, the conscientious nursing of extended families, the love of surviving parents, and the unprecedented opportunity that arose from Greece’s economic growth and urbanisation.

It is salutary for me to digest the fact that the sprawling ugliness that now blights Durrell’s exquisite landscapes has also meant ‘that in less than four decades, the animosities of the civil war had receded much further from the forefront of people’s minds and lives than anyone might have predicted at the time.’ (Mazower, op. cit. 104).

Such is the scholar Dalianis, whose good work was not with her bones interred. I’m grateful to Mazower for finding her. I would have liked to have been a witness to the collaborative week in 1996 that brought about this hopeful chapter – a tribute to all who, having cause to make war, make peace. [A detail: Dalianis wrote that the gate of Averoff ‘opened to admit me.’ Prisoners usually speak of gates that ‘closed behind me’?]

The realm of wonder

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Yesterday we started clearing the small garden, to see what lay beneath. I opened the gate onto the path to the lower road. Neighbours brought a house gift. Our builders arrived to measure up the roof for an estimate of complete repairs as well as removing the concrete rubble blocks that the previous owners had set up beside the house to stack rubble and which have brought damp into the lower rooms. A young woman from the house behind when asked said “It was very nice” leaving unfinished her view that improvements had been unsuccessful. We agreed. An outside staircase to a balcony had been removed. I cycled back to Ipsos and Lin came down in the car. Shared a lager and an altercation with itinerant topers whose game is to ask questions, top the answer until someone remonstrates and then say ‘sorry’. We were part rescued by a friend who’d winked across the space at the bar into which this couple had barged.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Summer Song lies near the end of the seaward arm. of Ipsos Harbour. The owner of the little yacht moored next to ‘Summer Song’ until February, sailed for Italy while we were away, but Magnus, her skipper, is now in hospital there after he became ill while crossing the Straits of Otranto. The Italian Coastguard came alongside his drifting boat but in trying to lift him from his boat he dropped into the sea from which they only finely rescued him after two hours in the water.

We went into town and drew money from our bank behind the Liston, bought bedding, shower curtain and paint in the Evraiki [Back to the future reference: Look out for a forthcoming book by Marcia Haddad to which I was referred on 27/7/07 by Stan Boardman-Jacobs' 'The Day My Heart Broke']
We drove to Democracy Street - the back way, turning off the Sidari Road along roads lined by the pink blossoms of Judas trees, to gaze from our balcony at the sea and the woods and the village above and below and discuss plans for the house. I checked the shop nearby could receive our mail. “Yes, two or three times a week it comes.” I said the bread was good there. The owner said he used to have a bakery there. The wood meant the bread lasted 5-6 days, “but I don’t want to talk about that.”

Monday, 9 April 2007 Ano Korakiana, Easter Monday
We visited 208 Democracy Street and met the builders. It may be necessary to redo the whole roof rather than just repair parts of it. Ano Korakiana’s Easter Monday procession gathered round the bend by Little Venice. We had a coffee – skirto and nescafe – at the kafenion and gingerly wandered up Democracy Street to the ravine bridge where we waited. The drums started. The procession moved off. A troop of cub scouts, cross bearers and then the Ano Korakiana band. Woodwind – clarinets and flutes – to spice the grander sound of the swaying trombones, trumpets and the drums. They were playing San Tomasso. Solemn but not sad. Then three ranks of dignified women in suits with purple ties – part of the choir. Then passed – St.Peter and St.Spiridon and St Michael on banners, then priests. One saw us and nodded and said “Christos Anesti, Where from?” “From England.” I should have replied "Anethos Anesti".



We waited a little and than strolled on, wary to follow, but not join the procession as it played down Democracy Street. We visited some friends at the bottom of the village. Later on the low road past olive trees, Lin stopped the car and we could hear bees not yet recruited to the killing labour of monocultivation, doing voluntary work among the wildflowers.

Edward Lear, Corfu, 1871, w/c & gouache. Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA

Saturday, April 7, 2007


The big ferry from Bari sailed hardly a 100 metres by the corner of north east Corfu in the dark and on to Igoumenitsa where we landed and trollied our luggage a kilometre along the seafront to the Pantokrator. We remembered how when we'd come this way the previous November a south wind had blown with such strength off the shore our ship had been unable to dock for two hours - a wait that had given us a new friend in Hy from Ayios Markos who'd ridden home with us once we'd made it to Corfu.



She was very full, convivial chat drowning the noise of unwatched TVs in the familiar saloon. One family, at least, had brought a whole lamb for Easter. It lay wrapped beside them but as the crowd increased was stowed below their seat. 'One vast realm of wonder' (Canto 88 Byron's 'Travels of Childe Harold') - words of a lover, blind to flytipped refuse, strip mall development, bleached menus selling 'pise and ships', UK redtops and eurotrash porn, dumb t-shirts, fuming traffic, wall-to-wall football on TV and shaven lads with rosy bellies. But Greece makes me blind. I get a lump in my throat as I see it twinklng below from a late night plane or rising from the sea from the deck of a ferry.

The air was crisp as the ship headed north west over a flat sea. At the Port of Corfu by mid-morning Kostas' boy met us with a car. We left it outside his office with our luggage and strolled towards the Liston until we were standing tightly surrounded by people of all ages below fine balconies packed with onlookers, some preparing to drop terracotta pots on the marble streets below. As even larger pots appeared in the windows above we "ooh'd" and "aah'd" in anticipation. At noon the cascade began. 'Crash" "huraaaaaa" "crash" "huraaaaa". The water in the pots, as well as holding the sins of the preceding year, ensures shards don't explode among the onlookers. The sun shone bright. the crowd was civil and happy. A few minutes later with bands playing we strolled through pottery strewn streets, eating roast lamb, onion and tomato on pita bread.

Friday, April 6, 2007
All seats to Bari from Rome were reserved. At Termini by 8.30am we walked through the bustle and boarded a Eurostar for Bari hoping for the best. Another passenger, a young teacher, Valerian, helped translate, asking the guard if sitting on our luggage would be OK. He nodded. A young woman ran to catch the train as it started and the guard opened the door so she could hop aboard with a broad and slightly out-of-breath smile of gratitude. In a spacious lobby at the end of the last carriage we could gaze through glass at the receding lines as our train sped south.



The snack trolly was a door away. We enjoyed hot chocolate and espresso. Later Lin made a picnic – bread and wine. Cassino, Caserta, Foggia and then some seats came free. We ate, chatted and read. The train was clean and roomy; the passengers civil without needing words. No-one sought our tickets or made announcements.
At Bari we left our luggage at the station and soon found ourselves in a Good Friday procession through the high sided streets following or being followed by a brass band in grieving sonour swaying amid a procession of saints carried on biers behind Jesus - ecce homo - bearing a cross to Golgotha by crowded pavements, shops (few shuttered) bars (none closed) a nunnery and commuters in their cars queueing to get out of town.