Dreams

Angele, Leftheri's cousin, finds insects. We saw him catching them from foliage on the fig tree behind us; after dark peering with the other children – and us – at fireflies, small lanterns, flashing inside a jar. Mark beckoned me outside his front door the other evening, as we finished supper with him and Sally. A pair of swallows perched in easy reach, unalarmed but mildly vexed at being woken by our curiosity. Far off on the Kerkyra Sea five sailing boats are working up the centre of the narrows towards Kalami disappearing between forested hills and the barer shores of Albania – sundappled under lofty nimbus. I can sit in the sun and close my eyes and almost drowse, dipping in and out of nearly seven decades – what a thing this memory to have it there with voluntary and involuntary access, drifting on the liminal margin. Jack was talking about one of the few times he’d seen the enemy “If you weren’t infantry you only saw them as prisoners. Then we were curious to see them.” This time he was in an AA battery early in WW2 with report over the radio of a German plane hedge hopping for the coast. The relaying of co-ordinates between spotters and guns was getting good by then the land divided into imaginary grids. “We realised as the grid codes were radio’d through it was coming our way…then, it came …almost over our heads. I saw the pilot. A boy. I shall never forget the look of fear on that face.” It was the only time J told me anything about the war that wasn’t funny or fascinating stuff on the back of an envelope about strategy – El Alamein, D-Day, the German’s last ditch breakthrough in the Ardennes, analyses I borrowed years later to try to make sense of Market Garden. The way he said it echoes, surfaces, so that I even feel compassion for that dying pilot (“He went down a few fields away.”), his parents, feeling the pity of war the poet taught and gratitude for the peace we’ve enjoyed for a lifetime. Dad was in an ambulance near Nijmegen 4 October 1944, in and out of consciousness, deep wounded by shrapnel while reconnoitring orchards on foot. Beside him lay two SS soldiers, casualties of the same skirmish. Dad’s sergeant-major was sat beside him in the ambulance. “There was so much blood. He was sure I was dying” so dad told my Greek half-sister from his deathbed 22 years later, confessing he watched helpless and horrified as his NCO “finished them both off with a bayonet.” I still wonder if that wasn’t the same Guards sergeant who approached me in Westminster Abbey, taller even than me, in his bearskin (or is that just my memory?), red tunic, Coldstream buttons during a royal wedding there (I was an usher; tail coat, wing collar etc…smell of innumerable cut flowers). “Excuse me Sir. Are you by any chance related to John Baddeley….thought so. Spitting image. I was your father’s sergeant. Remember me to him…must be away.” Rumours: 99 planning officials arrested for corruption on the mainland; foreclosures on loan cars and foreign mortgaged houses on the island; EU threat of financial penalties if the island’s new EU funded hospital by Gouvia is not completed by Christmas '09 but there’s a problem of recruiting medical staff to EU standards; a journalist from a Greek Sunday paper is doing a feature on why British residents of Greece are returning to the UK. Friends, who are among those, have been contacted to be among the four to be interviewed on Corfu. How to say it? We embrace the faltering of the market. So much excess - faltering, slowing, stumbling, and so many possibilities of things that were once opposed becoming, at long last, common sense. * * * I woke just before six on Mayday from a dream without violence or bereavement. I was on campus and arrived at a meeting about to start. Some of my colleagues were there with others I didn’t know, but some who ought to be there weren’t, so wondering if I’d come to the wrong meeting I left and checked another room where I found more of my colleagues and our director (in actuality, long retired) and a number of those half-known people from sibling schools (we don’t call them faculties), whose names I catch on circulars, at a meeting that had already begun. I slipped back along a corridor and saw two of the colleagues I’d have expected at the second meeting coming out of the first. They were speaking of a new memo. J said to C or was it the other way round “she’s saying it was a bad mistake”. “Who? What?” C pointed vaguely to an anodyne remark that said nothing of the sort buried at the bottom of the file he held. “Vivienne Westwood” he said. I guessed, with wrenching dismay, that I’d stumbled on a moment in campus politics – or politics anywhere – where two meetings have been arranged at the same time, humiliatingly unbeknownst to some of the key players. Our small part of the university was to disappear, the victim of an accidental mix of arbitrary decisions about university reorganisation begun far above the heads of those at either meeting. As I wondered back towards the second meeting in the wake of J and C we ran into our Director and others coming out of it. “Vivienne Westwood. Is she…?” I asked. “Yes and she’s a really nice person…” His defining self-possession displaced by unfamiliar disquiet. Don’t blame her he’d implied. He and the rest there wandered, silent or twittering beneath an almost palpable cloud of consequence, into another room. I still didn’t understand what was happening, had happened, but intuited its irreversibility – a part of the university I’d worked all my life, that had existed successfully for over forty years was gone. I wasn’t sure if I should follow but no-one was paying me attention in the buzz so I wandered in. A roast beef and Yorkshire pudding buffet was laid out in a high floor room overlooking a tree filled panorama of Edgbaston – the Muirhead Tower from which we’d moved decades ago to another building but where interdepartmental meetings occurred. The food looked good but was insipid - the beef grey and tough. Our director, sat across the room, said something I didn’t catch then directed a question to me I didn’t hear. J, beside me, muttered “I think he’s asking you about the Institute.” (0630 The eastern sky over Epirus is growing lighter behind grey overcast). Rather hesitantly I said something like “I’m angry. But I’m not angry with anyone – not in a personal way. I’m just angry that…” People were listening, some seemed embarrassed at my hesitancy, and then, in my dream, my mind and tongue seemed to engage and I could speak and I awoke in the dark. It has always seemed strange that some humans feel diminished by discoveries which make reality more, rather than less, mysterious, as though religion were only about propitiation; science only about explanation. Both are about discovery. Did I always know this and was lucky enough to have no-one disabuse me? As a small child I saw the sky at night, wondered where it ended and realised even if it did, beyond was infinity – a word I didn’t know. I saw a green woodpecker on a gravel path when I was three and thought God would let me pick it up. I walked forward and picked it up and looked into the green pillow of small feathers like miniature brushstrokes between its shoulders and knew, for sure, it was God. Then I think I was called in for tea.

* * *

Zorba the Greek – a wonderful film remaindered by its success in creating a stereotype of the Greek character that Kazantzakis never intended (the book’s narrator played in the film as an English introvert is also Greek - a young intellectual) – begins with it raining chair legs – καρεκλοπόδαρα - (‘cats and dogs’ to us) on a Piraeus quay, a damp crowd huddled with their bags in the waiting room for a stormy passage to Crete. I like that. It’s not what foreigners – especially northerners - expect of Greece.

Epirus from Corfu on a February morning

Populations north of the olive belt – the mainly Protestant areas of Europe - have, for half a century, been mass consumers of Mediterranean summers, encouraged by authors who invented a seemingly timeless Hellenic paradise – Henry Miller, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, Patrick Leigh-Fermor – fast supplemented by commodifying images (postcards, bathroom prints, posters, dishcloths, ashtrays) of azure sea, dazzling sand, hot stone, ancient ruins, plaka’d villages of blue and white houses clustered on steep hills, icons in small glinting churches, vine shaded gingham tables loaded with delicacies, good cheap wine, its people, for half a century, content to include among their ardent transient visitors, that social indulgent strain in the northern population that uses alcohol to escape rather than meet the world. No wonder that, amid this celebration of heat, light and - for the Protestants – a rare chance to strip to their knickers (U.S.: panties) out-of-doors, the Hellenic year has been compacted by the economics of tourism into four or five summer months, losing six, even eight months of autumn, winter and early spring, with its teaming rain, frost, chill winds, snowy massifs shedding blue-grey torrents, towering nimbus, lightning and thunder and grey weeks when the washing stays indoors, or, even when it’s mild, too cool for short sleeves. Unlike my dad, my stepfather said once that he preferred not to venture into ‘the olive belt’, but how he’d have enjoyed Greece between October and April. * * * Nick phoned Thursday morning. “Your 600 thigh tiles. Want to come over and see where they’re stacked”. We drove four kilometres to the old house he’s restoring on a lane above the road through Skripero amid a higgle-piggle of old houses, apothikis and tumbled garden walls, open to a panorama stretching from the sea at Ipsos in the east to the crags above Paleokastritsa, fringed by luscious greenery up to Mount Tsouka which rises 700 metres above the village. We picked our way down a short steep path to the centre of site. “Take care. Nancy was walking down here when she was eight months pregnant.” Typical Nancy. If there was a Greek Sound of Music we know her part. Ian, his builder, who’s also helping restore Mark and Sally’s house by St George’s Church in the centre of Ano was at work “This wet’s messed up work”. This morning it was clear, fresh, warm. The view from the fine windows in the grand upstairs room towards the compact villages of Doukades and Liapades, on the high saddle between us and the island’s western shore, presented us three separate landscapes – more enticing than the long rectangle of a ‘picture window’ lessening the contrast between bright outside and dark interior. The house is robust but long exposed to the weather. “The staircase is rotten but Ian can copy it. Stonework’s loose. We’ve found rats’ nests in the masonry”. Sub-woofed house music booming from a neighbour’s house. “He’ll have grown up a bit by the time we move in proper. Might even be playing classical.” Concrete, iron rods, and metal grids are marrying in with the older walls. The picture’s clear: "this’ll go there, that here." The work looks daunting but exciting. “When do you hope to complete?” asked Lin. “We’re hoping part can be lived in by Christmas.” The thigh tiles Nick’s offering us gratis, which we need to replace the ones taken from our apothiki when our roof was remade, are neat stacked below the lane. “You can throw them up to each other.” Nick grinned. He’s peak strength and confident with it “OK I know a man. I’ll let you know.” Saturday morning I was at Nick’s by 1100 and with help from Nick, Mohamed - Nick's man - and Lin moved over 600 tiles from Skripero to a stack at 208 in five journey’s and hardly kept anyone waiting, as we unloaded them at the stop of the steps off Democracy Street. Mohamed from Morocco, helped translate the best conversation we've had with Katerina - he speaking to her in Greek and then back to us in French. It allowed us to say to Katerina and vice versa how much we'd been wanting to explain to one another.* * * Thursday morning: Sun, warm, the sound of childplay, greetings as people pass in the street, grown-ups chatting – half familiar words like “perimeni, tora, milaou, orea, zestos, ella-ella, kanite, mazi” - breaking off conversation to call to the children – “pethia! grigora, elatho.” Sparrows, pigeons, swallows, cats reclining on shed roofs; lizards – for safety on freeze-dash-freeze; a cloud of flies sorting through the discarded greenery of fruit and salad and egg shells on our compost; a red admiral hesitatingly opening and closing its wings, appearing and disappearing in the same spot of sun. A dreamy torpor. Sounds mingling with light and the sudden waft of orange blossom, jasmine and…many more flowers, colourful and wild, outside my mean olfactory range, tended by myriad bees. Smoke rises from a distant bonfire, to catch a breeze that ruffles the nap of the glassy sea turning it blue. Distantly a ship floats slowly behind a green hill on the way to the port, while another emerges, moving with similar languor against the backdrop of hazy mainland mountains towards the channel between Corfu and Albania. Sweeping, letting the earwig run clear, finding one of the smaller stones collected from the shore at Agni the other day; a piece of wire; making a wasp trap to hang under the veranda, as I’ve seen with the funnel top of a smaller bottle inserted in the side of a larger, then sugar water, wine a spoon of tempting honey; hanging washing in the sun; gathering plants – by bins or from deserted gardens – to plant here; collecting windfall lemons or shaking some down for friends; more sweeping outside and inside (“I’ll leave that web by the stairs” “No. It’ll build another and can you see a fly in it?” “They’ve all been eaten” “No. Spiders leave little desiccated corpses after they’ve sucked the fly’s insides out” “Clear the web!”). We completed laying the wire frame for the plaka, (Behind the hardware star by Tzavros we found a sand and cement supplier; asked about laying our remaining plaka. €8.50 for 50 kilos of cement mixed 5/1 with sand. Can that be? No! We're being teased). Rescued a trayful of good dusty bar glasses from a bin at Pyrgi – some for us, some for neighbours; an umbrella and an injured director’s chair. The glasses sparkled. The umbrella needed a strut refitting; a little rust removal and a hanger on its straight handle - one of the small lengths of loose rope John had spliced. A rod from the apothiki cut to length with the angle-grinder fitted the groove in the chair that held the seat; a split clamped, glued and screwed and a few squirts of WD40 to have it folding and unfolding again. Mr Leftheris accepted six of the glasses and came round with a round sweet loaf for St.George’s day advising, at my request, on the vine growing lustily up a column of our veranda. He pointed to several tiny clusters of white grapes already forming - “Krassi!’. I signalled our intent to run wires for it under the veranda. “No” he signalled “ilios, ilios.” The dictionary gave us ‘sun’. Of course. * * * I’m enjoying yet another Alan Furst – Dark Voyage – and I’m two thirds through John Reed’s account of the Russian revolution, at chapter 9 ‘Victory’; last night a horror film over an omelette - worse than Philip K Dick’s Screamers the evening before, about interplanetary war in which one side have invented intelligent robot burrowers that cut attackers to bits, evolving, autonomously, into an indiscriminate menace, masquerading as vulnerable children to enter the bunkers of surviving humans. Vinyan features a stylish couple, taking a costly ride from Bangkok to the outland littorals of the Andaman Sea in futile search of ‘a white child’ - the son they lost to the tsunami. Their local guides - violent, calculating, bereft by the same disaster- try to sell them a surrogate who calls “mummy, mummy” to the desperate mother and angry deceived father. They travel on by boat, then – abandoned - on foot amid beauteous but sinister seascapes, through forsaken villages, muddied, sweating under warm torrential rain, hallucinating glimpses of their child wandering in misted jungle, until lost, starving, maddened and divided he encounters a hoard of feral orphans. The last he hears from her as she appears staring at him accusingly, encircled, almost voiceless, across the growing frenzy “You let him go. You let him go.” After, she stands in crazed ecstasy above the children as, with small bloodied hands, they stretch to touch and caress a new found mother. “William Golding started all this with…” I said, washing up, “Lord of the Flies” said Lin from upstairs “Coffee?” In bed I turned too suddenly and struck my face on a corner of the bedside table bruising my face. In the night I dreamed about Fred Emery turning up in England to visit me and other ex-colleagues, chatting in that vague but friendly way that put me at ease even when I wasn’t sure what he was saying. He had a sheave of pictures - I remember there was a brilliant Australian artist whose work he’d bought – of which I could make little, but these were not Nolans. They were formulaic wash landscapes with a pretentious self-regarding signature. Then I saw a good painting - no signature - and suddenly realised it was one I’d given Fred that he still had after forty years. He went indoors to chat with others. I sat outside wondering if I should go in so as not to miss the rest of his short visit, but half grasping he was going, going and had indeed been long gone. Then, abruptly he came out again. “I’ve got to be going.” He was hiding his face with one hand. There was some blood. He mumbled apologetically “I need to be off. Sorry mate.” He was dissolving. I stared. Emelyn, his wife, and another woman both whom I’d noticed earlier, came out with a wheelchair and cheerfully helped Fred into it and wheeled him away repeating apologies.

Over 600 Corfiot tiles brought from Skripero

* * *

On 30 April 2009, the South Australian Parliament formally recognised the mass murder of Christians in Anatolia:

That, whereas the genocide by the Ottoman state between 1915-1923 of Armenians, Hellenes, Syrian and other minorities in Asia Minor is one of the greatest crimes against humanity, the people of South Australia and this House – (a) join the members of the Armenian-Australian, Pontian Greek-Australian and Syrian-Australian communities in honouring the memory of the innocent men, women and children who fell victim to the first modern genocide; (b) condemns the genocide of the Armenians, Pontian Greeks, Syrian Orthodox and other Christian minorities, and all other acts of genocide as the ultimate act of racial, religious and cultural intolerance; (c) recognises the importance of remembering and learning from such dark chapters in human history to ensure that such crimes against humanity are not allowed to be repeated; (d) condemns and prevents all attempts to use the passage of time to deny or distort the historical truth of the genocide of the Armenians and other acts of genocide committed during this century; (e) acknowledges the significant humanitarian contribution made by the people of South Australia to the victims and survivors of the Armenian Genocide and the Pontian Genocide; and (f) calls on the commonwealth parliament officially to condemn the genocide.

Dean Kaliminiou, Australian lawyer, writer and journalist of Greek descent. celebrates this motion:

... I sympathise with members of the Turkish community who will feel enraged at the South Australian Parliament’s recognition. After all, they, just like us, share nationalistic myths about the destiny and character of their race. They, just like us, have been brought up to think that there race is noble, just, courteous and of great benefit to mankind. An official recognition of the genocide shatters such myths just as it calls them into question. As a corollary, why does official Greek historiography skim over the massacre of innocent Turks during the taking of Tripolitsa, or the atrocities committed by the Greek army in Asia Minor? Simply because the Greek people are also, to some extent, informed by the same nation-building myths. What the recognition teaches the Turkish community, as well as us, is that crimes against humanity are not committed by races. They are committed by human beings...

Note: Earlier reflection on these events at 'empty chair by a window' and 'internal polity'.

εαν ταις γλωσσαις των ανθρωπων λαλω και των αγγελωναγαπη δε μη εχω, γεγονα χαλκος ηχων κυμβαλον αλαλαζον.

Politics or therapy?

Some in the streets of Athens write or hold up banners saying 'Death to the police' spreading similar messages through the web. Are these views endorsed by many of those on the streets? Do demonstrators crying "Batsos" ("uniformed thug") want police officers to be done to death? Do those who disagree with these statements allege that they are made by agents provocateurs? International journalists are usually good at getting graphic image of injuries incurred in street riots - or passing on images gathered by others, on mobile phones for instance. I've seen more bloodshed at rugby games. My continued impression is that both police and demonstrators are being - so far - quite skilled at avoiding causing serious injury to one another - with the fatal exception of the death of Alexandros Grigoropulos - where the officers allegedly involved are in custody and the PM has expressed deep regret, personally and publicly. The other shooting, from an unknown source, a few days later seems to have caused minor injury to a student's hand. The language being used by demonstrators seems disproportionate. There have been dramatic pictures of smoke, tear gas and flames, but I'm wondering where politics - the mobilisation of power to bring or prevent change - enters this crisis. From here it looks more like therapy. Others have observed that the most dramatic and genuinely political event in the last few days has been the national strike and its offshoots across Greece - but I'm reading students being as polemical against these kinds of political expression, as they are against the police, and the media can't capture sufficiently dramatic images from peaceful industrial action. How do you film a walk-out, a slow-down, or even a peaceful march when there's noise and smoke round the corner? There is malaise across the economy. It parallels the impact of recession across the rest of Europe and the world. I look to see if new ideas will emerge from events in Greece, but I'm seeing nihilism, despair, 'rebellion against the drudgery of life', street theatre and widespread petty crime (not petty if it's your shop that's trashed). The 'uprising' may be understandable as a social phenomenon but it has, so far, little standing as an historical one. It makes no discernible contribution to political innovation - though it may be a seeding ground for the future.*

We hypothesize that the rioting in Greece is not simply an inevitable result of economic recession, but a proactive radical initiative that speaks to the general public. CrimethInc.Workers' Collective 20 December 08

Social upheavals of the past have been associated with striving for equity - in confrontations with the state involving extended and fatal brutality. Such campaigns are happening even now in other parts of the world, characterised by lengthy imprisonment, torture, suppression and pervasive state cruelty. Greece has its own history - of courage and brutality - in this respect but I can't quite see if the events of the past week have anything very much to do with that past. It's more akin to football violence. I want to be wrong in this. It is clear there is a need for social and political reform in the Hellenic Republic and beyond. Why else have I spent much of life pursuing environmental issues, joining in campaigns to press for sustainable policies and 'divorced my car'. I'm familiar with the role of 'situationism' in protest. It was part of student rebellion in the 60s in the USA where students and their supporters faced far more lethal forces than those deployed in the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki and a few other cities in recent weeks. Those student campaigns against 'Amerika' (a slurred view of misused US power that has endured), pale beside the dangers incurred in the Civil Rights movement of the same era. Some Greek students have been digesting post-modernist texts about breaking out of the matrix of a virtual society in which rebellion - or any kind of political dialectic - is absorbed, but it looks from here as if they are failing; even reproducing the processes against which they rail. With ugly undisciplined exceptions - the Greek police have digested contemporary manuals on managing urban disorder - among other things to avoid returning violence with stronger violence and to ensure escape routes from confrontation. In Greece such escapes, apart from those the police allow, are provided in the colleges where they are forbidden to go. Panos Livadas, General secretary of information at the Greek Embassy in America wrote this to the Washington Times on Boxing Day:

...The fact that a huge number of the demonstrators were teenagers expressing - peacefully - their frustration over the killing of their fellow student compelled the police to adopt defensive tactics in order not to risk further loss of life. No one would want a repetition of the tragic experience of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, with 53 deaths and more than 2,500 injuries. It is certain that the Greek government is determined to protect law and order (375 arrests have taken place), and it guarantees safety, as it did during the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. It should be noted that the police tactics will be re-evaluated when the dust settles. Since last week, tension has been de-escalating, and we are returning to complete normality. In the past five years, we have worked hard to strengthen our economy (our growth rate has been double that of the Eurozone's average, while the International Monetary Fund forecasts a 2 percent growth rate in 2009) and to implement bold reforms in order to provide answers to young people's uncertainties. These are understandable uncertainties, I might add, especially in the light of the deep global economic crisis. Finally, we will work even harder to address young people's needs, to create more opportunities for the young, and to restore our young people's trust in us.

I keep hoping that lively debates are being held in these safe houses and that, from a population skilled in using the social web, novel ideas will spread. If there's a more positive way of understanding what is happening I long to know it. For me the lesson is to spend more time seeking out those figures in Greek society who are campaigning and, in a variety of ways that don't hit the headlines, working for change. I know these people exist and that they have been working for many years to develop new ideas, to spread them and to influence reformation of the Greek polity. My relative ignorance of such people is a reproach to me and, since my ideas are of minimal significance, a much more serious reproach to those in the media who follow only smoke and the flames. BTF - From Kathimerini's 29 December 2008 Editorial:

...There are many police officers, judges, academics and politicians who are quietly doing their jobs, honoring the institutions they are meant to serve. We have an obligation to discover these low-key figures and appoint them to key posts. There is no need for sweeping changes. We just have to be more eclectic and make sure we pick the right people for the right jobs.

*I remain intrigued with the possibilities that I am observing this crisis through the distorting lens of the present. Throughout my career the ideas of Fred Emery, my boss at the Tavistock Institute, for a few years after I left university, have periodically recurred - especially his thoughts on understanding future possibilities in a paper he wrote for the ESRC in 1967:

From Section III Methodologies for predicting the future: …It is not simply foolhardy to think that we may enable ourselves more readily to recognize the future in its embryonic form. There are almost certain regularities about these emergent phases. Social processes which, in their maturity, are going to consume significant portions of men’s energies most likely have a lusty growth. They do not, by definition, command human resources at this stage , and hence their energy requirements must be met parasitically, i.e. they must in this phase appear to be something else (my italics). This is the major reason, we think, why the key emergents are typically unrecognized for what they are while other less demanding novel processes are quickly seen. A social process which passes for what it is not should theoretically be distinguishable both in its energy and informational aspects. Because it is a growing process, its energy requirements will be substantially greater (relative to what it appears to do) than the energy requirements of the maturer process which it apes. Because it is not what it appears to be, the process will stretch or distort the meanings and usage of the vocabulary which it has appropriated. F. E. Emery (1967) 'The Next Thirty Years: Concepts, Methods and Anticipations' (excluding FEM’s 1997 postscript – in the year of his death), Human Relations, 1967, 20, 199-237. p.15

This suggests we should assume that what is really happening lacks, for the moment, the characteristics of a whole or a gestalt, that can be named and analysed. What may be emerging may have a 'lusty growth' - but currently exists as a diversity of disconnected trends and events - unjoined dots - which may, with the benefit of hindsight, be seen as converging. Though this is the result of human actions, inevitably imperfect awareness of these possibilities can induce the false causality of millenarianism, cargo cults and conspiracism - paranoia made confusing for occasionally being nearly correct, as with astrology. Fred would suggest looking out for the debilitation that caused by parasitic action on familiar institutions. From where is energy being sucked? Where is it going? Is language being stretched, distorted, 'appropriated'?

[John Psaropoulos of Athens News gives a quite detailed account of events in Athens in the immediate aftermath of the death of Alexandros Grigoropulos - one that captures the confusions and contradictions that befog my understanding of what's going on] [...and see this piece in the blog Diatribe called Phoenix by Dean Kalimniou in Melbourne, dated 22 December '08:

...The Greek revolution was underlain by an ideology of liberal enlightenment developed by profound thinkers and underwritten by powerful financiers. It was a co-operative effort of all sections of society aimed at re-building a viable, cohesive state in accordance with western values. Modern Greece is a member of NATO and the European Union. As such, it purports to espouse the values guiding these entities and aspires to take its place among the great nations of the world. Yet it cannot hold itself out to be a proponent of the rule of law and democracy when it allows its citizens to run amok and cause harm to each other. For this reason, and in the face of the howls and curses of the ashen lunatic fringe, the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes against Greek citizens must be brought to account and be punished. A properly functioning democracy has no need of a violent steam valve. In that way, citizens will all be made to feel responsible towards each other and can set upon the task of making themselves and the State more accountable. Abigail van Buren may have quipped that: "People who fight with fire usually end up with ashes," but I prefer this, by Miguel Cervantes, if only the Greeks could take a good, long, hard look at themselves: "The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies and still defying fortune's spite, revive from the ashes and rise." It is time we reject ashes for good, and embrace the regenerative qualities of our immortal bird.]

[Back to the future 5 January 2009: Dimanadis Matzounis, a 21 year old police officer on duty outside the Culture Ministry, was shot and wounded in Exarchia by two men with Kalashnikov automatic weapons] * * * * Harold Pinter died. Ann Wright is a US Army veteran who retired as a Colonel. A former US diplomat, she resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the invasion of Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience. Her tribute to Pinter speaks of her pleasure that he had chosen, on being awarded the Nobel prize, to make a speech excoriating George Bush for his failure as a self-declared leader of the free-world, and Tony Blair for sullying us with his support for US foreign policy, for suspending the rule of law at Guantanamo, for legalising torture, for their suave moral incompetence. I envy him for the eloquence with which he could express his rage at US foreign policy. These gangsters and their followers - claiming to put my safety and my family's safety - ahead of the principles in which I'd been brought up, put those principles in harm's way. Principles for which one should be prepared to face injury and death. In my name these ghastly people with their pally ways found legal justifications, playing on artfully sustained ignorance and terror, for unravelling Lincoln's resounding proposition. That their governments have made the world more dangerous rather than less is beside the point (since our danger is nothing to that faced by the wretched of the earth), though it compounds the shame that will mark their place in history. Ann Wright's words about Pinter console me, especially as she's a citizen of that Manichean world where the devil has learned not to waste good working time in the company of those already his own. Back to the future 1 January 2009 - Harold Pinter's funeral on 30 December 2008 at Kensal Green Cemetery where Dad and Maria are interred:

Michael Gambon at Pinter's request read this from Pinter's No Man's Land (1.11.42-1.12.36)

I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it that might remind you of your own of what you once were. You might see faces of others in shadow or cheeks of others turning or jaws or backs of necks or eyes, dark under hat, which might remind you of others whom you once knew, whom you thought long dead but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them but who knows what relief it may give to them

[Back to the future 23 March 09: I found these words of Pinter, when he was accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize, below the profile of an exceptional photostream on Flickr:

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

* * * * Obama and Biden will travel south by rail from Philadelphia's 30th Street (where I arrived for my first job from New York) via Wilmington to Washington Union for the Inauguration on 20 January - a fillip for America's long blighted railways and a celebration of good architecture. [Back to the future 16/01/09: NY Times photo album of Obama's government] * * * My family bought me some well judged presents - deep dark chocolate, the first Swedish police procedural (even before Mankell), a Richard Wilson thriller, some pudding wine, a Macallan single malt, a wind up LED torch, a monocular and DVDs of BBC dramatised versions of Vanity Fair and North and South. Richard also told me about using Handbrake to convert films I made into DVDs some years ago to MP4 so's I can edit them - a present in itself.