Τελικά, μετά από αρκετά χρόνια ο καιρός ήταν σύμμαχος του φετινού Καρναβαλιού της Κορακιάνας. Λίγο πριν από το μεσημέρι είχαν ρυθμιστεί και οι τελευταίες λεπτομέρειες της προετοιμασίας και έτσι κατά της 5 το απόγευμα η πομπή του Καρνάβαλου ξεκίνησε από τη Μηχανή, τη «μεγάλη της πορεία».
Το πλήθος που ακολουθεί μεγαλώνει καθοδόν και τα άρματα που πλαισιώνουν την πομπή και σατιρίζουν την κορακιανίτικη και καρναβαλική πραγματικότητα, ακολουθούν αργά την προδιαγεγραμμένη τους πορεία, έως την άλλη άκρη του χωριού, στην πλατεία. Εκεί θα πραγματοποιηθεί το πρώτο μικρό σκετς, με πρωταγωνιστές τη «στρατιωτική» συνοδεία του Μεγάλου Βασιλέως.
Στην Πλάστιγγα, θα πραγματοποιηθεί η επόμενη στάση. Καταμεσής του δρόμου, θα λάβει χώρα ο «κλασσικός» κορακιανίτικος χορός της αποκριάς με σκωπτικούς στίχους, «ακατάλληλους δι’ ανηλίκους» και αμέσως μετά, από το βάθρο που έχει στηθεί ειδικά για την περίσταση, θα διαβαστεί η Διαθήκη του Καρναβάλου του 19ου. Τα «δώρα» του, θα μοιραστούν όπως πάντα, απλόχερα σε όλο σχεδόν το χωριό. Στον ίδιο χώρο θα καεί, σύμφωνα με το έθιμο, ομοίωμα του Βασιλέως και η συνέχεια θα δοθεί στο Συνεταιρισμό.
Εκεί, στον όροφο, θα παιχτεί όπως και τις προηγούμενες χρονιές το «σπονδυλωτό» σκετς των νεαρών καρναβαλιστών, ενώ όπως και πέρυσι, ένα άλλο σκετς, θα παρουσιαστεί στην κάτω αίθουσα του χορού, λίγο πριν από τα μεσάνυχτα.
Τα σουβλάκια που ψήνονται από καρναβαλιστές στον εξωτερικό χώρο, το ποτό και η ζωντανή μουσική θα δώσουν το έναυσμα για τον αποκριάτικο χορό, που θα κρατήσει μέχρι τις πρώτες πρωινές ώρες…
Υ.Γ.: Όπως κάθε χρόνο, από την αναβίωση του κορακιανίτικου καρναβαλιού το 2008, έτσι και φέτος, για την επιτυχή διοργάνωσή του εργάζονται εθελοντικά περί τα σαράντα και πλέον άτομα, τα οποία χρόνο με το χρόνο ανανεώνονται. Επομένως, η δημόσια αναφορά επιλεκτικά σε τρία πρόσωπα, ήταν ατυχής…
*******
Drumochter Pass
For us the long journey south from Inverarnie to Birmingham, leaving the Highlands by Drumochter Pass, the great Boar of Badenoch our marker for the steady descent to the Lowlands, Blair Atholl, Pitlochry, Dunkeld and Birnham.
In the pre-checks for my last blood donation on Friday morning - my 99th - I thought I got a whiff of the impact of the crisis in Greece. The nurse, who knows me well, sees from my questionnaire, that I'm recently returned from Corfu. She looks in her 'book'.
"Hm. Yes. I think it's OK"
"Corfu isn't included in the West Nile Virus. It's just the mainland isn't it?"
"No longer"
Well maybe it's nothing to do with the malaria creeping back into Greece.
After a 40-year hiatus, malaria is returning to Greece. Some 70 cases have been reported there this year, and at least 12 people appear to have been infected in the country. (The others picked up the disease elsewhere.) That's a concern for health workers because it means malaria may now be endemic to Greece — and not just hitching a ride with travelers. Plus, the parasite is showing up in regions where it has never been reported, the U.S. Centers of Disease and Prevention said in a statement last week...
Celebrating my 75th donation - six years ago
I'm rather looking forward, in a Boy Scout way, to making my 100th donation next March. We'll have been back to Corfu before then. Might there be a problem?
*** *** ***
I'd heard that Patrick Leigh Fermor suffered from writer's block but only recently turned up what is probably the original reference to this condition. On 29 Sept'11 Colin Thubron wrote in the New York Review of Books:
Fifteen years ago, swimming in the Ionian Sea beneath his home, where nobody could overhear us, Paddy (as friends and fans called him) suddenly confessed to me the writer’s block that would plague the rest of his life. The expectations of a now-avid public, and his own obsessive perfectionism, were taking their toll, and he could not overleap this cruel impediment...
Forging his prose must have been an effort. I imagine him walking or travelling on sea and land, his broad intellect at work on sentences which would capture with precision an understanding - as rough stone takes form under the chisel and rasp – of the ancient divergence of Eastern and Western Christianity, something that's long intrigued and eluded my capacities for understanding history and theology. It was not perhaps accurately a writer's block; it was a thinker's block.
I have lots of facts. I understand almost nothing of why such differences divided whole populations for centuries. Why should the words 'and the Son' - filioque - matter so much?
Greek creed: Καὶ εἰς τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ Ἅγιον, τὸ κύριον, τὸ ζῳοποιόν, τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, from the Father proceeding.
Latin Creed: Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum, et vivificantem: qui ex Patre Filioque procedit And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and giver of life, who from the Father and the Son proceeds.
And why should it matter as much to a secular student? That's my problem. Leigh Fermor has an agenda - a lover's search for the continuity of Hellenism. The things that happened in between.
Between when and when?
Well, say, the surrender of Athens in April 404 BC after the Battle of Aegospotami which ended the Peloponnesian War and Byron's death at Mesolongi 19 April 1824- about 2228 years - give or take a few weeks.
No, no, no....from the death of Alexander in 323 BC and the break-up of his empire.
No! Again no.
What of the Hellenistic Period and the Seleucid Empire that ended with the triumph of Rome at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, making that ridiculously vague interval just 1855 years? And why the date of the death of Byron?
I wasn't taught about these dates, these chronologies and sequences. It was more simply 'Ancient Greece'; wonderful pre-historic tales ill-placed in times - about Theseus, Jason and the Argonauts, Perseus, Andromeda, the Olympian Gods and, later, in my spotted learning, Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey and even later the Aeneid which only then, in Latin not Greek, tells the appalling prevenient account - horresco referens - as Sinon opens the Wooden Horse and through the night the merciless sacking of Troy begins - no finer account was ever written of such a calamity.
I didn't hear of the Seleucid Empire until now and I looked upon the history of Byzantium as a different part of the curriculum; a mess of marble fragments.
As with ideas that express a convincing truth, there is so much missing evidence; so much rebuttal. If Leigh Fermor, deeply self-educated in Hellenistic and Byzantine history, claims a stark contrast between the iconography of the Orthodox and the Latin churches, there will be, especially for someone as well travelled as he, be much contrary evidence.
On the grey rainy windy days when I've wandered alone and with Lin and my mother in this chilly church, I've gazed up and not noticed it, but plenty of others have seen the tear that lies on the face of the Virgin Mary amid the gold mosaic of the central apse of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello.
My mother in Santa Maria Assunta
This is a Venetian-Byzantine Church; the image created in the 13th century, over two hundred years before the Fall of Constantinople. The tear seems an oddity, if Leigh Fermor's distinction between western and easter religious painting is correct. Recall that Islam and Judaism eschew imagery, deplore it, in some cases with fatal and murderous intensity...
...in the foredoomed task of indicating the unfathomable mystery of Godhead in visible terms, the Greek ikon painters chose the hardest way. They sought ingress to the spirit, not through the easy channels of passion, but through the intellect. Religion and philosophy were as inextricably plaited as they had been in pre-Christian times and this was due to the same philosophical temper which has saved Judaic Christianity(a brief and local thing) and made it Greek, then universal....Mani, c.15
Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello - where Venice was founded
I imagine phrases forming in Leigh Fermor's head which when he sat to write resisted the journey from mind to paper. It must have been made trickier by his knowledge of Greek words and grammatical forms that could capture ideas and emotions that cannot be expressed in English - ἀρετή, εἴδωλον, φιλότιμο, κέφι, μεράκι, απορία, θυμός, θάμβος...I'd like to see the original manuscript for chapter 15 of Mani.
I've read it over and over; at least, in part because it seems to help me; I say 'seems' to help me arrive at a real rather than a purely memorised mechanical grasp of the filioque difference. Leigh Fermor argues that the Orthodox theology of the Transfiguration - an astounding moment for which θάμβος is apt - καὶ μετεμορφώθη έμπροσθεν αυτών καὶ ἔλαμψεν τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος, τὰ δὲ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο λευκὰ ὡς τὸ φῶς (Κατά Ματθαίον 17.2) ...and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light - is a more or less direct product of Greek Philosophy.
For extent and influence in the world the dual message of Greek philosophy and the Greek interpretation of the Christian revelation stand alone.
He lists pagan sages - Apollonius of Tyana, Solon, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Thucydides, Sophocles - without haloes but in robes 'as honourable as those that adorn the Christian saints' painted with them on the walls of a small church on the edge of Layia in the Mani.
Where but in the ancient schools (these figures imply), were developed the intellectual thews which enabled the great Doctors to hammer the raw material of the Gospels into the intricate and indestructible apparatus of Christian dogma? Without the dialectical and philosophic skill of these rain-swept sages, who would have heard of the Three Hierarchs indoors...(he lists Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom)...who would have unravelled the perplexing skein of the Trinity or confuted the subtle-tongued heresiarchs or championed the Homoousion and the Double Nature? The Greeks do well to honour these ancient mentors...The evolution of Christianity into a logical system which could weather the shocks of millenia, was a Greek thing. The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of classical Greek culture....
'...when two or three are gathered together in thy Name...'
For many generations, writes Stephen Greenblatt in chapter four of The Swerve, learned Christians remained steeped...in a culture whose values had been shaped by the pagan classics. Platonism contributed to Christianity its model of the soul; Aristotelianism its prime mover; Stoicism its model of providence...
Raphael: The School of Athens
This is Cavafy’s territory - eloquent, gnomic, exciting surmise and reflection on Hellenic continuity. It does not greatly surprise me - since our interests so often ran in parallel - to learn that the last - latest – book my mum ordered (and which Bay bought for her in New York) is Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean world from the second century to the conversion of Constantine (a hundred years before the murder of Hypatia in 415AD).
The transition from pagan to Christian is the point at which the ancient world still touches ours directly. We are heirs to its conclusion: on either side, participants shared an education which, until recently, we widely maintained. Like most transitions, it was a slow process, marked by unforeseen moments of sudden significance...
To me, whose school days were accompanied by rituals, bells, hymns, sermons and lessons from the King James Bible, whose parish church was Westminster Abbey, the customs, procedures and etiquettes of the Greek Church - whether observed in the quiet of an empty narthex or as a nervous but respecting participant, are more exotic, almost more foreign, than the services I've attended in Birmingham - in synagogues, gurdwaras and mosques. I delight in Greek Orthodox churches - sat alone, gazing around and upward, lighting candles, quietly praying...
"To?"
No preposition. Just praying.
Why 'to'?
Well just perhaps to a mystery; which is why I like Leigh Fermor's suggestion that the image of the Panayia is more mathematical than anthropomorphic, that in these ikons, he sees 'gilded and cube roots of the Logos' and, seeing the Virgin at the foot of the cross, he reads the message 'Do not worship me...but what I represent' - a reaction that contrasts with the feelings evoked by a Latin pieta - the seering image of a mother weeping over her betrayed, abused, tortured and murdered son.
Someone said the tear on the face of Mary in the church on Torcello is for mankind, not for her son. I remain puzzled and confused, but perhaps I'm also seeing that in the differences Leigh Fermor explores. Torcello is in the west, in the Veneto, and yet's it's cathedral is Byzantine, it's image of Mary - an in-between.
The two hour funeral service for my stepmother Maria at St Sophia's Cathedral in Bayswater was almost an ordeal. It wasn't until afterwards at the Makaria supper when a Greek opera singer with piano accompaniment sang Hadjidakis that I wept - not for grief but for joy at the pleasures of all Greece I'd enjoyed with her and my dad and their friends - and one of my my dry-eyed Greek half-sisters looked on concerned and slightly embarrassed.
On Mani see this from a blog about Leigh Fermor
*** *** ***
I'm not sure there could be a more beautiful and poignant or joyful train journey in all the world. The climax, whichever way I travel is Drumochter Pass, and the passage of the watershed into and from the Highlands, where one moment the river runs toward Dalwhinnie, and when descending from the Pass towards Blair Atholl the other way.
In the bright low light of Autumn the one track railway winds through valleys, through moorlands, by emerald pastures striped with long shadows of tall trees, and now and then sparkling streams with water so clear I see sunlight and shadows on the stones beneath the water. Hamlets and lone farm houses rush by and always the glimpses of water - sometimes lochs with such windless surfaces they turn the landscape upside down. In wet weather torrents jump and splash towards culverts beneath the line. Aviemore, Kingussie, Dalwhinnie...
Dalwhinnie
...Blair Atholl, Pitlochry, Dunkeld and Birnham where I lose my sense of place along a Lowland list of stations on the way to Edinburgh whose names I can't remember.
The Lowlands
And then suddenely here's the bright sea of the Firth of Forth with islands and in the distance, glimpsed before a long bend, the hazy outline of the Forth Bridge over which we'll pass in minutes.
The Firth of Forth
*** ***
We've had regular minor problems with battery drain on the Handsworth Helping Hands LGV. We've got over it by jumplead-starting. Allan Broad in the Handsworth Park compound has been especially helpful - hence our present to him and fellow workers of a supply of biscuits, coffee and tea last August. To get to the bottom of this I took the van down to - Cedric Fernandes - Ceds Car Alarms in Hockley and paid £20 for him to check for battery leakage.
"All you've got" he said "is standard drain from three systems"
"Explain"
"You've got the dashboard, the locking and the electric window and mirror controls - they all leak enough milliamps to drain your battery in a fortnight"
"If I take off one lead" which is what we've been doing recently after parking "will that stop that"
"Yes"
"What's the condition of the battery?"
"It's a bit stale and you could do with one that's more heavy duty"
Ced suggested Bannings - a company on the Lichfield Road. I phoned them. It'd be £95 plus VAT.
"I never knew all this about battery drain as just normal" I said
Ced pointed to a smart looking Mercedes in his workshop, bonnet and boot lids raised, wires sticking out all over like a patient in intensive care.
"He's got round 25 electrical systems in there. He hardly ever drives it. We found one system that was draining more than it should. Took a while to find it. You're diesel and need a heavier push. Why I'm saying get a stronger battery."
I drove back to the park compound, disconnected a battery lead and cycled home through the leaf strewn park.
"I guess learning that was worth £20"
Travelling through a recognisable landscape; broad muirs speckled with snow, mist rolling up higher ridges, black sheep on meadows under wind-break elms, scanning bar codes of regimented pine by the line; a web of power lines on pylons, tributaries to settlements on wooden poles, phone masts and wooden fences, woods of leafless birch, lines of alder marking burns, passing long enough to gaze at highland rivers edged with ice; a wet well salted road among white modern houses, snow on their insulated roofs. After Slochd Summit suburban hamlets in commuting reach of Inverness become fewer. Still on the old one track line built a century ago, we march beside the busy A9 - road bridge, rail bridge, road hill, rail cutting; no tunnels on this route from Inverness to Perth via Carrbridge, Aviemore, Kingussie Ceann a' Ghiuthsaich (head of the pine forest), Newtonmore Baile Ùr an t-Slèibh (new town of the moor) - the geographical centre of Scotland at the meeting of the old droving roads between livestock fairs at Perth, Fort William and Inverness - Dalwhinnie Dail Chuinnidh (trysting place) - no stops at the last two - as the five coach train hurries down from the Pass of Drumochter by the Boar of Badenoch An Toch and the Sow of Atholl Meall an Dobharchain, into Blair Atholl, then through Dunkeld and Birnham, to Pitlochry and Perth; south to Edinburgh via the Forth Bridge, gripped by a DVD of The Stranger starring Orson Welles - its climax as we came into Waverley.
I cycled and part walked this route - between Pitlochry and Inverness; cycling from Glasgow via Loch Lomond and the Trossachs on Sustrans route 7 with my daughter and friend John Richfield and his son Tom, savouring the smaller landscapes between.
Who invented the notion of an 'unspoilt' landscape? Where did I ingest this ... grotesque...idea of a pristine place. How painters and photographers have colluded to omit, to select, to crop and redact their idea of warts - cars, litter, motorways, wind turbines, buildings, runways, crowds, barbed wire. "Psst, want to see a nice view?" "I can take you where you can find landscapes. Very nice. Very clean," "How much do you want to pay?" I'm not alone in thinking a landscape really likes me; imagining I could own it. All landscapes are artefacts; as man-made in the countryside as in the city - a distinction itself man-made. Our rural landscapes are parks between our cities. Many paradises were made by rich people coming to live among poor people; city folk descending on village folk; industrialists visiting the pre-industrial; the disenchanted (Weber called it enttäuschung - the iron cage that our reason has forged for us) returning to worlds where enchantment survives. As for those few places left where the hand of man has hardly reached, they can kill you a surely as a surviving tigers can kill its kindly keeper. There are just too many of us. We teem. We swarm across the land - leaving wastelands in our wake and now there's nowhere left. This is not pessimism. I'm trying to extract from myself the long inculcated and now commodified assumption, that 'there's a place for us'. That was always going to end in tragedy. There is indeed a place, but it's no longer defined by geography, probably never was for all our projection of happiness onto physical landscapes. Geography is no longer about mapping new places - since there are none - but about trying to understand what's happening in places already discovered.
* * *
Our street in Birmingham was looking untidy this morning; refuse uncollected because of industrial action, though since recycling there's less than there might be (bottles and plastic for recycling were collected yesterday but not the black bags). A neighbour has put out garden refuse, forgetting this isn't collected this time of year. I'll probably put it with ours to be composted on our allotment.
12 January '11: our street in Handsworth, Birmingham
*** ***
From Ano Korakiana, news of the vice-mayoralties - some for portfolios or tasks and others for particular areas of Corfu, appointed by the Mayor of Corfu's new Municipality, John Trepeklis:
Οι αντιδήμαρχοι του νέου Δήμου του νησιού μας, ορίστηκαν σήμερα με απόφαση του Δημάρχου Γιάννη Τρεπεκλή. Όπως προβλέπεται από τη νομοθεσία, αυτοί ανέρχονται σε 14 και διακρίνονται σε «θεματικούς» (υπεύθυνοι κάποιου τομέα πολιτικής) και «χωρικούς» (υπεύθυνοι για κάποια γεωγραφική ενότητα).
Εσπερίων, Παλαιοκαστριτών, Αγίου Γεωργίου: Μάκης Φωτεινός
Διαποντίων Νήσων: Σπύρος Αργυρός
Some of the deputy Mayors of the Corfu for 2011 to 2012 - women missing
Όπως προκύπτει από τον παραπάνω κατάλογο, τα θέματα του χωριού μας, υπάγονται γενικά στη νέα αντιδήμαρχο, γνωστή δικηγόρο Φανή Τσιμπούλη, η οποία διετέλεσε επί δύο τετραετίες δημοτική Σύμβουλος στον τέως Δήμο Φαιάκων (στις παρατάξεις της αντιπολίτευσης), αλλά και στους θεματικούς αντιδήμαρχους, κατά περίπτωση. Βέβαια, η κα Τσιμπούλη θα έχει υπό την ευθύνη της ολόκληρη τη βορειο-ανατολική Κέρκυρα, γεγονός που καθιστά κρίσιμο το ρόλο του Τοπικού μας Συμβουλίου…
When I leave the Highlands old sores ache, from days when a train from Victoria took me away to boarding school sixty two years ago. It was normal in those days. People were called away from their families to go to war, sometimes never returning. An echo of that temporary bereavement tightens my chest as I head cheerily for the station with Oscar and my luggage, and a picnic for the eight hour journey to Birmingham. At Drumochter Pass after Dalwhinnie - DailChuinnidh - the train goes by the heads of Loch Ericht and then of Loch Garry, below the Boar of Badenoch and the Sow of Atholl, picking up speed down a long gradient to Blair Atholl and Pitlochry. I see the Truim flowing north, then, passing the watershed, the Garry flowing south. There's still miles to the border at Gretna Green but here's where I feel I've left and where, when going north, I feel about to arrive.
* * *
Staff at Gatwick have postponed strike plans for when we're due to fly having negotiated a better deal than the initial 3% they'd been offered. We'd been apprehensive in a selfish way that baggage handlers and check-in staff would walk out; Gary Pearce, GMB, "We've a new improved offer to put to our members as a result of talks at conciliation service ACAS ... all planned industrial action is suspended until we get the reaction of the members."
****
This landscape on which I surfeit would mean no more than postcards without my mother. That's always been the case, alone at sea, its beauty and wonder is no more than desolation without thought of who's waiting for me, to whom I'm travelling.
The older I grow and the longer I look at landscapes and seek to understand them, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence and that that beauty derives from the human presence. J.B.Jackson
Amy's walked on. I last walked here in January with Richard
Without Brin Croft this beautiful place is an art gallery, full of paintings and photos agents call 'commercial'. Even now, if I walk on my own along the Farnack my enjoyment is the less if I'm not accompanied by the ranging dogs enjoying it with me, catching scores more scents. In their canine way they'd share in this celebration, preferring my procession to roaming alone. The same applies everywhere. What would Handsworth or Lydbrook be without Lin or Richard or Amy, dearly as we value our friends and neighbours? I suspect they feel the same about their treasures. Similarly AnoKorakiana, on Democracy Street - 208 Οδός Δημοκρατίας, Άνω Κορακιάνα, Κέρκυρα, Ελληνική Δημοκρατία - although there's where the sense of a village is greatest, perhaps greater than anywhere I've had a home. And there too despite it's lovely aspect, it's being there with Lin surrounded by friends and neighbours that makes the village - το χωριό - wherever it was. What good thing did I do to be where places so complement the people in them?
Winter was hard in Scotland., especially in the Highlands, so spring was late and only now, in mid-summer, is the heather starting to flower. Banks of violet that give a sheen of blue grey to the hills are still muted. Ripped branches and torn trunks of oak, alder and larch that could not take the weight of snow in January are developing scar tissue. Dried wood and brush lies against bridge pillars, heaped by snow-melt spates. I know places where I trudged through snow in January. At the same time I can't imagine them. Then the land slept beneath thick snow. Ice silenced the rivers and burns. Now they roar with the summer rain; dazzle in the afternoon sun. The land's in a quiet frenzy of propagation. Scotch Argus seeking mates flutter everywhere over the lush grass. More butterflies appear - small exquisite blues, Red Admirals, Wood Browns bouncing in woodland sunbeams and - everywhere - bees, bumble bees, wasps, midges and flies so ubiquitous I stop noticing them. Put my face close to the ground and I'm sneezing in seconds from inhaling pollen swirling invisibly across every inch of open ground. Where's not grass, there's a patchwork of sphagnum moss above the peat; bed for rushes. In the woods where sand is close to the surface, as at Culbin, the woodland floor is rimed with blueish lichen amid dead Scots Pine needles - colonising the ground beneath them for all but their own seed - from which, even so, sprouts a dissident foxglove or rose bay willow; laid in a bird's dropping? In the more open spaces wildflowers proliferate; delicate speedwell, blue vetch, creamy meadow sweet, hare bell, field orchid and Queen Anne's lace, enjoyed by wasps, through to coarser daisies, wild carroway, yellow ragwort (where the fields lack sheep), banks of rose bay willow and avenues of foxgloves and sturdy thistle; in the hedges wild raspberries - red and yellow, the former slightly sweeter, tiny delicacies, some so ripe they fall apart as they're picked. Briers are a long way from flowering, still growing soft tendrils. Hazel nuts are forming, soft and light green still. Across our walks Amy and I were seeing tiny toads working their way through the jungle above them. Reproduction's in the air.
Leave them together another week and Oscar and Lulu, her season forwarded by his attentions, would be tied.
"Keep an eye on those two" said my mother, "Sharon's got enough to do already without puppies".
Above the fields and around Brin Croft three buzzards make passes circling and moving on, mewing to each other. On walks we've starting young red deer, fleet and healthy leaping over fences and brush, sending the terriers into ecstatic hopeless pursuit, yapping with excitement. Hares easefully outdistance the dogs. Rabbits disappear into their burrows under gorse and broom. Young pheasants hurtle in different directions lying low until we're nearly upon them.
** ****
On Saturday morning Amy flew in. Liz and her fiance Matt drove up. We met at The Dores Inn for a fine supper. Back at Brin, Amy with her friends, despite being up since dawn, went for a night walk by Loch Duntelchaig, in part to gaze at the Perseid Showers trailing across the night sky reflected in the still water, missing the invasive loom of Inverness - worse each year as the city expands.
"I wish it wasn't there. That light pollution" said Amy later.
"Yes indeed, but Amy, street lights for over a century have meant safety, civilisation. Darkness was danger, fear of the outdoors, free-range crime. City lighting for most people is still about feeling safe. Not so many have learned the pleasure of darkness from early childhood like you."
Banquo's murderer in Macbeth: ...The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day; Now spurs the lated traveller apace to gain the timely inn; and near approaches the subject of our watch
***
During Sunday morning ebb Amy and I strolled along the shallows of the Moray Firth plashing through puddles of brine, popping bladderwrack amid lugworm castings, the air clear, smelling of iodine. Fort George and Ardersier on the horizon.
Mum hates departures "Bye darling. Lovely to have you" a peck and she's off, as I head with Matt to the station and the long journey home, hours to enjoy Kadari's first novel
** ** **
Mark your calendar for August 27th (Fri) and August 28th (Sat) for the Agiotfest 10, a festival of ROCK, JAZZ and FOLK to be held for two evenings in Agios Ioannis, (Triklino), Corfu. Gates open at 1800. Music until 0100
Car parking available. Coaches available. Food and refreshments.
Memorabilia. Nearly fifty musicians from four countries.
Tickets €20, or €35 for a two-evening package.
Children welcome.
100 metres from the plateia. Clear signposts, easy to find location.
Please help us by coming to our event, and thereby put Agios Ioannis and Corfu well on the international festival map.
Telephone 2661058177 or 6974932408 or 6978206077 and visit www.agiotfest.co.uk....Best wishes, Agiotfest team.
Hi Simon, The Ward Committee is on Wednesday, 21 January, 2009 at 1930 hours, at Welford Primary School, Welford Road. Awaiting confirmation of attendance. Regards Kim
From Simon
Dear Cllr Brom. Since I can't be there, I wonder if it would be OK if on 21 January at the ward committee our ally from the Friends of the Earth had an opportunity to say a little about city-wide support for the VJA project? I am well aware that you and Cllr Hussain are as well acquainted as anyone and committed to resolving this issue, but it would be good to have a minute showing support from outside the ward. FoE plan to put something in their newsletter towards the end of Jan start of Feb 09. This is not about a speech just an expression of support and possibly a query to Alan Orr. Can you ensure there’s a place on the 21 Jan agenda for this?
Charles and Glynis told me they plan to ask questions about the VJA S106A that evening. I wish we could get Cliff Nixon from Persimmon Homes along too but I doubt that would be possible even though he doesn’t live so far away. Kindest regards, Simon. Handsworth Allotments Information Group (HAIG)
From Karen, Friends of the Earth, to me
Subject: Re: Victoria Jubilee Allotments - date and place of next ward meeting:
Ferry has been booked for the 22nd - hooray - so I can attend on evening of 21st. Karen
Me to Karen:
That’s brilliant, Karen. We can perhaps chat by phone. I’m just going over some of the things about current government policy on allotments that I got from a meeting in London just before Christmas with my friend Richard Wiltshire – co-author of the Local Government Association’s report on Growing in the Community(with David Crouch and Joe Sempik) - and someone who’s followed the progress of our campaign re the VJA.
One of the questions he asked me was what exactly were the design criteria for the new allotments. I had no idea beyond the 8o plots shown on the developer’s application map of April 2004. Richard said there were elements that we should press for, drawing on latest thinking about laying out allotments as well as matters like where’s the water supply and will there be concrete paths between rows of plots. Richard mentioned Longbarrow in Bournemouth as a model prize-winning site. I guess we ought to draw attention to such things, even though the greatest concern relates to Persimmon Homes intentions and capacity regarding the implementation of the S106A.
My impression from Richard is that London is leading on releasing land for food growing with a number of initiatives based on the assumption that inner city land comes at high premium, that the government now acknowledges that there is not only demand, but that if it is to fulfil the 1908 Smallholders and Allotments Act 'requirement to provide' they are facing a loss of slack in the system – unprecedented since the second world war. Allotments are full up in many places especially in the capital, where waiting lists are growing. There's the Allotments Regeneration Initiative, but the government's policy of trying to get people into work could mean pushing policies that favour younger people’s employment at the expense of a growing population of old people. Someone has already coined the slogan 'vegetate or grow vegetables'. Urban food growing which, as you will know, is attracting many more younger people, is also seen as a part of policy relating to quality of life for an ageing population.
Another more worrying element here is that the 1908 default dimension for plots (effectively 250 square metres) might be too large, The 1908 dimensions were supposed to feed a family – but average family sizes have halved in the last century, so.... That suggests one way to help solve problems of scarcity and I suspect some allotment sites have done this already.
I’d like to know if Birmingham’s Big City Plan has any plans for allotments other than those that exist. In London Rosie Boycott is stumping for London Food. There's a policy initiative in London called Capital Growth ('2,012 new food growing spaces for London by 2012') focused on identifying new growing spaces for London which includes allotments (also city farms) but is also looking at the use of waste land and interestingly at domestic gardens – talking of short term leasing and other legal arrangements right through to compulsory purchase. Urgent terms like peak oiland the coming famine are circulating. Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University (advising DEFRA) is pushing a policy in London of reduced food miles. The Greater London Authority has published a report on the waiting lists problem (scroll down to 'A lot to lose'). There is talk even in the city centre, where land prices are astronomic, for finding temporary ‘meanwhile’ gardens – very popular in New York in the 1980s – growing food on properties taken over by the city in lieu of unpaid taxes by landowners in financial difficulties.
There is a politics of food growing in London for which we need a Birmingham equivalent. one on which FoE and its allies could have a say. I’d really like to see one of Birmingham’s Scrutiny Committees having a look at this. There was a debate in Westminster Hall on 5 November 08 where the government said they would not impose time scales on local authorities regarding the duty to provide, on the basis they are already being accused of not allowing LAs enough autonomy.
I hope this is helpful. I’m not suggesting any of this gets raised on January 21 at the Ward Committee but it’s very useful policy background. I’d really like to use some of it in responding to the invitation to comment (between 12/12/08-06/02/09) on Birmingham’s Big City Plan – emails to inquiries@bigcityplan.org.uk If I could say that a response by HAIG was endorsed by FoE and other groups that would be good too. I realise the immediate concern is the delayed S106A on the VJA. Best Simon
[11/01/09 See UK town embraces urban farming on a massive scale, and the map of Middlesborough posted with many other exciting projects on David Barrie's blog] (See The Edible Town]
From me to Kim Brom cc: Karen
Subject: Victoria Jubilee Allotments - ward meeting 21 Jan 09 at Welford School
Dear Kim. Karen Leach from Friends of the Earth is able to come to this meeting in my absence. FoE have been supportive of earlier campaigning for the VJA and Karen is well appraised with the issues. Kind regards Simon
From Councillor Kim Brom
Alan Orr has confirmed attendance and will ask Persimmon Homes.
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
* * *
The long expected Greek cabinet reshuffle was reported in Kathimerini on Thursday. Stavros Lygeros' commentary doubts the PM can recover from his government's current poll position. His final sentence:
...While Samaras may not hold much sway within the government, he does have political clout, and this will become of significance should Karamanlis decide to step down either before or after elections, because his supporters and those who remain unaligned will either stand back and watch Dora Bakoyannis’s ascent to the party’s leadership or will seek out the one person around whom they can rally to prevent that from happening
* * *Crossing the Drumochter watershed by the head of Loch GarrySUSTRANS cycle path running beside the railway
The Sow of Atholl and the Boar of Badenoch, Drumochter Pass
I left Brin Croft this morning and caught the morning train to Glasgow and on to Birmingham where Lin met me and Oscar after 6pm. Drumochter Pass is the transition point between the Highlands and the rest of Scotland, something that's marked my journeys for fifty years. In the old days two steam trains were used to get up the gradient on what is still a single track line. It's rare but if heavy enough snow falls it will be Drumochter that will be the first part of the route between Inverness and the south to become unpassable. Looking out of the window you see a river flowing north. Moments later, past the watershed, you see another, flowing south.
* * *
A late night, early morning exchange, with Johnny Prodromous on an forum On the Greek Riots. I wrote:
“The world’s at war with tyrants, shall I crouch?” I’m not an alias for Fontas (Fontas Varidakis, an engineer based in the UK, on the same thread who had been challenging the obfuscatory writing of 'anarchists' and been momentarily confused with me - described as similarly 'deranged'), though I concur with just about everything he says and especially respect his profession. I too can give you my name and address though I’m sure you have it already from my blog ‘democracystreet’ whose URL I always aim to leave. Thanks for respecting me with your ready reply Johnny B4 the Road. You’re up late, watchkeeper. I appreciate the possibility that I’m deranged. Indeed it sounds like a compliment given your feelings about sanity or worse, normality. I’m not ignorant of the history of Anglo-Hellenic relations. Our Lord Byron gave his life for Greek freedom - ‘The dead have been awakened - shall I sleep? The World’s at war with tyrants - shall I crouch?’ (19 June 1823) but see this extract from his journal, as he and his companions waited in Cephalonia, ten months before his death at Missolonghi in April:
As I did not come here to join a faction but a nation, and to deal with honest men and not with speculators or peculators, (charges bandied about daily by the Greeks of each other) it will require much circumspection to avoid the character of a partizan, and I perceive it to be the more difficult as I have already received invitations from more than one of the contending parties, always under the pretext that they are the ‘real Simon Pure’. After all, one should not despair, though all the foreigners that I have hitherto met with from amongst the Greeks are going or gone back disgusted. Whoever goes into Greece at present should do it as Mrs Fry went into Newgate - not in the expectation of meeting with any especial indication of existing probity, but in the hope that time and better treatment will reclaim the present burglarious and larcenous tendencies which have followed this General Gaol delivery. When the limbs of the Greeks are a little less stiff from the shackles of four centuries, they will not march so much ‘as if they had gyves on their legs’. At present the Chains are broken indeed; but the links are still clanking, and the Saturnalia is still too recent to have converted the Slave into a sober Citizen. The worst of them is that (to use a coarse but the only expression that will not fall short of the truth) they are such damned liars; there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise. One of them found fault the other day with the English language, because it had so few shades of a Negative, whereas a Greek can so modify a ‘No’ to a ‘Yes’, and vice versa, by the slippery qualities of his language, that prevarication may be carried to any extent and still leave a loop-hole through which perjury may slip without being perceived. This was the Gentleman’s own talk, and is only to be doubted because in the words of the Syllogism ‘Now Epimenides was a Cretan’. But they may be mended by and bye. (28 Sept 1823 from Cephalonia)
It is one of the core characteristics of Philhellenic sentiment that Greece - classical and modern - is so much in our psychological DNA that we cannot easily separate that in us which is Greek and that which is British.
Friday, January 9, 2009 at 3:57 am. Johnny B4 the Road - Pro-dromos - wrote:
SIMON Thank you too for this almost poetical glimpse into your thoughts, “well spoken phile”, I might add as my regular cliche. At least I reckon we have you inspired. With god’s speed sir.
From Fontas Varidakis
Simon. Greetings. You have articulated your concerns in the most eloquent and relevant way, i.e. by reminding us all how the struggles of today and tomorrow are the same as the struggles of yesterday. It never ceases to amaze me when I learn of, or come across, genuine Philellenes whose core is more ‘Hellenic’ than that of many of our citizens will ever be. As you rightly pointed out, the influences in thought and far beyond (architecture, science, drama, etc.) of the ancients are all around one who walks the streets of London and any European polis. It makes me proud more often than not to see that we modern Greeks have maintained a lot of the political nous of our forefathers…for better and for worse. The Brits are worthy friends and adversaries for the Greeks and I am always amazed at how similar English humour is to the zany Cretan variety. As to who is sane and who is crazy…well, normality is a concept of the majority so you can never win, and what is the point anyway?
From: Z on Sunday, October 28, 2007 4:42am. To: Simon Cc: Dh. Subject: Just 24 hrs made such a difference to my broken spirit!
Dear Simon and Hani, Many thanks! You responded first to my outcry, Simon, just as I opened my eyes this morning, with a friendly phone call after getting my attached message I sent out late last night to both you feeling anxious, helpless and desperate about so many questions that needed sorting out. You later dropped in with your folding bike, a classic image of yours! We discussed how we all could play our respective roles in welcoming Dh to 'the small room in the small house' here in Birmingham which you are most welcome to, as your home. Dh, you will be arriving into an empty house I have given the key for you. What a welcome from me! I shall begin tidying up the room since there is extra time we have, not just the extra hour, with the clocks changing from tomorrow! I don't like long dark evenings in winter. With Warm Regards, Zarina
From: Dh. Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:38:36 +0200 To: Z, B and H
Dear all. Please, don’t trouble yourselves with the many ceremonial acts and etiquettes. With you doing all this for me, the phrase “thank you” would be meaningless and valueless. You know how one needs this phrase to keep its value and power for it is the only thing I can give presently in return of your great favours. Kindest regards, Dh
From: Simon Baddeley Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:25:41 +0000 To: Dh
Dear Dh. Do not be embarrassed by gratitude. We are all too grown-up for this. We shall serve and drink coffee in small cups together no doubt and there will be English tea – though we are such a mixed bunch that few of our rituals are old. Most are invented for the occasion. We are mostly aware of logistics as you are, and the Kafkaesque intricacies of bureaucracy – things that make us curse and fume and laugh and sigh with frustration and puzzlement. I like it that you went to the National Express website. We know the difficulties of coach travel. I got a journey from Birmingham to Scotland a few years ago – 500 miles for only £9.90 but it was a journey I am not keen to repeat. The coach was packed and the seats so close I sat with one foot in the aisle between the rows, and later, changing buses, stamped my feet in the cold in Glasgow at 4.00 in the morning because the waiting room there was closed until 4.30. I got a better seat northward at the rear of a more modern coach but it was next to the toilet and users thinking they were pressing the button for the flush pressed instead the emergency alarm mistakenly announcing to the driver and fellow passengers they were trapped. I got no sleep or rest all the way from Perth to Inverness, but during that night I did have a lovely conversation with an old lady about her popular romantic novel - which she was listening to on a tape recorder having joined the coach 200 miles earlier than me. She was small, and so quite comfortable. Later – on my computer and in between WC alarms – I watched ‘Casablanca’ on my laptop and was very moved when the Marseillaise was called for by Victor and Rick’s nod to the band signalled his move from cynical neutrality to commitment. I think we were somewhere near Drumochter Summit at the time. The sun was coming up but it was cold.
I feel that your Phd has to cover the political and sociological elements but that you will also know of Rory Stewart’s proposition that so much was to do with small but very significant exchanges between unique individuals, rather than grand strategy. Surely too, the work of Norbert Elias will inform your thinking. The notion of psychogenetics, the civilising and decivilising process, will influence your narrative. Whatever your sources, you are uniquely qualified by experience and past learning to tell a story not yet told.
Now yesterday Lin was filling gaps in the brickwork below our kitchen window. I guess some men would be ashamed that their wife does pointing. She does it with more craft than me. She mixes better mortar. Earlier she was filling higher up, relying on a stepladder. 'Some of the holes up here reach back to the back of the brick!' What I notice is that she doesn't do overalls but wears her maroon mac; her handbag on a chair just out of camera. At 208 Democracy Street a few weeks ago Lin was up a ladder mending the guttering on our balcony and was keen to get on the roof itself. At that point I put my foot down and refused to help.
Richard, my son, took this picture of the view from the back of our home in Handsworth, Birmingham. Ours is a detached cautiously Tudorbethan house built in 1935. It has a bell box in the kitchen with little signal numbers for Bedrooms 1 and 2, Front Rm, Dining Rm and Lounge, so that a servant could be summoned from each place. Today this system, if it worked, should allow whoever is in the enlarged kitchen (it was originally a rather mean scullery and small morning room) to call people in the rest of the house, though now it's more likely I will use a mobile phone to call the attic. The darkened houses across the garden are of larger Victorian houses converted to flats by social landlords. Many are semi-occupied, providing transient homes for people who haven't quite made up their minds where they are, in contrast to the more decided residents of Beaudesert Road.
* * *
There are various arrivals, passages or departures that bring emotions to my fairly stiff upper lip:
As the train heads south from the Highlands it speeds down a long gradient through Drumochter Pass between the Sow of Atholl and the Boar of Badenoch. This is part of a journey I’ve been making regularly since Christmas 1950. Until the 1960s a second steam engines was put on the sleeper at Perth to make the gradient when going north – these two mountains – small by Greek standards – have marked leaving or arriving in Scotland, even though Dalwhinnie Station, at the head of the pass is over a 150 miles north of the border. I've been making the journey - on and off - all my life. As a small child with my sister in the care of the guard, as an uncomprehending adult-youth looking for an unknown career, as a happy father of small children and then, in a new millenium, of my teenage children and their friends and the beloved dog Oscar
Arriving by train after being absent for a while, through the scruffy remains of Victorian Birmingham - our city – to arrive at the ugly busy station beneath a low concrete roof below the city centre.
Discerning the Ionian coast from the deck of a ship through a morning haze. I recall, also, flying into Athens after not seeing Greece for 25 years and being able - as one still could before 11 September 2001 - to go with Richard and Amy to the cockpit of the Airbus (the one that doesn’t have a steering lever and is flown by buttons) and seeing the mainland laid out in dark marked by the glow of Thessaloniki to the east, the moonlight on the Ionian to our west, tiny jewel-like clusters of villages thousands of feet below and far ahead the loom of Athens (Photo: Amy, Lin and Richard on their first visit to Greece in June 1996)
It’s a swift transition from heart warming feelings to the noisy modern reality of an airport or port – an antidote to involuntary uncritical sentiments, in the form of a cut to another land with which I feel familiar, despite my ignorance.
