Digging

I woke to pattering on the dry earth dreaming it was Sunday. Flea, the cat, paused at the door of the conservatory before tip toeing into the garden. She's pondering rain we've not had for nearly a month. She scurries over to the flower border and works her way fastidiously beneath the intertwined greenery of honeysuckle, verbena and trailing wisteria to lurk where damp won't reach. Our water butt's already brimming.

Yesterday I worked on our allotment - on and off. Some gardeners, often with the help of their families, including toddlers riddling stones, have been making stalwart and enviably impressive progress on their plots since the allotments opened on 12 June.

Working our allotment on the VJA from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo

On Sunday afternoon, I took the video camera with me and made a record that I shall enjoy using as part of a before-and-after diary of progress. Right now I'm very much 'before'. At the Sons of Rest pavilion on Saturday those present agreed to defer setting up an allotments association and arranged to have a larger and better publicised meeting in the community shed on the allotments on Saturday 11 September. On Saturday about twelve turned up - typical of first meetings. Though few, we were optimistic about being able to form an association and a management committee to oversea the collection of rents due to the City on 1 October 2010 and carry out the other tasks that Clive Birch, who was there with Christine Brown from the Birmingham & District Allotments Association, outlined for us, handing round a model constitution. Rachel and I, community activists over years in Handsworth, have made an informal pact to be supportive but not to get involved. We really don't want to distracted from the work needed on our adjoining plots. Yet the incident of the missing beehive is already attracting my attention, and I find myself discussing it with other gardeners. The plotholder next to the one with the beehive complained about it on the grounds that he was allergic to bee-stings.

I understand the complaint was considered by one of the council allotment officers and it was suggested that the beekeeper moved to another plot. Not wanting to get involved in repeated movement of her bees the beekeeper has taken her hive to a local apiary. Gardeners I've spoken to think this an unfortunate precedent. We already miss the hive, good for the vital process of pollination. I'm allergic too stings, but regard that as my problem not the bees' or their keeper's. No doubt this will be an issue for the association when it's formed. (see: June 3 piece on popularity of bee-keeping)

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Honey sent us a composite of Katerina, Eleni and Vasiliki, dear neighbours, who've been saying nice things about Alan's work which is now focused on the porch below the near completed balcony.

Email from Honey earlier in the week:

...Leftheri has asked Alan where he can get a cornice mold like the one he used for your balcony. I'm surprised at how all the neighbors come and admire the work being done. The old woman across the street has gotten so enthusiastic about it, she has offered you a 6 foot plant with purple flowers that climbs. I told her that you didn't know yet what you were putting on the pot spot and you could tell her when you come. You are still having your heat wave? Ha! First it's nonstop rain, now a long hot summer. You'll probably come here with a good tan. From England!

Reply:

Dear Honey... Good things make more good things. It’s not just a porch, stairs, railings and balcony...What a joy to see our dear neighbours together. Next time you see them send our love and let them know how we look forward to being with them again...those people whose kindness we value so much laughing together in front of Alan’s porch. I think there’s an energy in the village at a bad time for Greece that goes with the news that the old band building is going to be restored and there’s a real prospect that the football pitch down by St Athanassios will be made playable, and a fine new wall around St.Nicholas Church on the way into the village, and then there’s all the improvements in a time of unprecedented recession being carried out on different houses in Ano Korakiana.

*** Corfucius publicises a rather good new free service advertising events on the island. WhatsUp-Corfu@live.com

** ** ** My friend and colleague Prof Tony Bovaird has gives predictions about the impact of public spending cuts in the UK - his blog giving an opportunity to narrowcast what he couldn't cover in Tuesday's broadcast interview on BBC Midlands Today. There's 'bad news and good news'.

...Of course, you may well be able to turn from the Big State to get some help from the Big Society. But there’s likely to be bad news there, too. The recession has increased the number of people volunteering to help out others – but reduced the capacity of third sector organisations to use them productively, because they too are short of funds to organise themselves.

So, some tips:

• Don’t get ill (just protecting NHS spend won’t be enough to provide the likely number of future users with current service quality levels).

• Don’t let anyone you depend on for support get ill (or leave the neighbourhood).

• Be (VERY) nice to your neighbours (you may be needing them a lot more in future).

• Start saving – if you need any public service in the future, you may well not be able to get it or you may have to pay a large part of it when you do get it.

• If you’re young, start learning a foreign language (you may need to go abroad if you want a public sector job in the future – or a public service).

• Take up ‘easy access’ leisure activities like walking and birdwatching – anything that requires public sector provision, like swimming or sports centres, may be too expensive for you or too far away from you in the future.

It’s a pity that the coalition government parties don’t want to talk about these inevitable consequences of their decisions. The new era of ‘transparency’ is being spun as fast as the previous era of ‘transformation’...

** ** ** On gardening our allotment Paul Peacock sends me reassurance - of sorts 'Keep it up buddy - it's a marathon, not a sprint.'. I follow his podcasts on starting from scratch. We'll meet up on Thursday.

** ** **

Sir Muir Russell's report on the Climate Research Unit's (CRU) email leak/theft, though supportive of the science, will do rather little to erode the accelerated scepticism that followed last year's scandal at the University of East Anglia.

Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt

The second of the three key findings is positive for CRU:

In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments. The report does find that issues relating to openness.

But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.

We find that CRU’s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive.

The biggest criticism relates to the 1999 WMO report:

…the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.

* * * On the Greek economic crisis there have been two competing 'narratives' about the Greek economic crisis - one os the story of a corrupt top-heavy public sector; the other is the story of a debt crisis precipitated by feckless banking practices:

...There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors...

.

Under Mount Korakiana

Another chilly blue dry day - perfect for our odd jobs. Aln came up in the late afternoon and fitted our flue. We sat enjoying the fire and the slight scent of the wood smoke drifting back through the rough hole that Lambros is coming up to finish tomorrow along with putting final touches to the roof, putting in a botched window properly, plastering and generally tidying the mess made of our upstairs last year. The weather promises to stay fine over the weekend and beyond.
* * *
E-mail makes arranging future work pleasantly easy - over a soup and bread in the Beer Bucket in Kontokali. I got a circular from the university yesterday on an agreed ‘sustainable cooling policy’. It aims to limit the use of ‘active cooling’ - air-conditioning:

With the expected increase in temperatures due to global warming the need to adapt buildings to prevent overheating and ensure acceptable working conditions will become increasingly important…The University will adopt a cooling strategy based on the ‘switch off, absorb, blow away and cool principles’ with active cooling being a last resort. (i) Switch off: Reduce internal and external heat gains by minimising gains from lighting, IT and heat producing equipment. This includes minimising the need for heat producing equipment, locating such equipment in dedicated areas, and the use of passive techniques such as solar shading. (ii) Absorb: Where practical use the thermal mass of the building to absorb heat and/or by the introduction of phase change materials (SB note: technology for collecting night cooling for use in the day) (iii) Blow away: Ensure an intelligent ventilation strategy. For example the use of night time air to cool buildings, limiting ventilation when external temperatures are greater than internal. (iv) Cool: Where cooling is unavoidable, ensure that the system used is well controlled and is designed to minimise energy use and the production of CO2

* * *
I finished Kevin Andrews' The Flight of Ikaros. I’m grateful for the web friend from Ikaria and the English north country, who is making a study of Andrews, who told me of him. Andrews' writing makes his book universal, but it could be read alongside Nicholas Gage’s Eleni – the latter first, partly for the summarised history inserted to give context to the story of his mother’s murder in the village of Lia in Epirus – by any non-Greek wanting to understand the Greek Civil War. Andrew's only meets communists very briefly, on their way to prison, but spends much time in the company of those who fought against the andartes.

The understanding that is emerging – very slowly as my stolid intelligence reaches for it - is the role, only recently teased out in a number of doctoral theses focusing on small areas of Greece in the period to which Professor Mark Mazower and fellow contributors refer in his sombre and scholarly collection After the war was over, is the way the civil war, so often viewed as the first surrogate hot war spawned by the Cold War, in which ignorant armies clashed under the aegis of greater powers, was also an occasion for escalating the violence of traditional feuding between villages, families and brothers. In Kevin Andrews’ encounters across Greece during that dire period people talked less of differences over the future government of Greece – the preoccupation of the Americans and the British and, to some extent the Russians, though Stalin had graciously agreed with Churchill to cede Greece to the West at Yalta – than about the settlement of scores, revenge and retribution. This is the story of all civil wars including ours - now entertainly re-enacted as a fancy dress picnic on Bank Holidays. Imagine that here. Thucycdides wrote of it with the start of the revolt in Corfu. Its ingredients include envy, jealousy, rage, the availability of weapons and the opportune moment. These fine grain interpretations are bound to be less welcome, even 50 years later, not just because they become so tortuously detailed, but because their currency is made up of villages, streets, families, the names of individuals and the messy subjectivity of personal accounts among people whose scores, even now, remain unsettled. No wonder some say ‘leave it be’.

Andrews, who’s sense of severance at leaving for New York at the end of his fellowship in the early 1950s perhaps surpasses Lawrence Durrell’s (‘The loss of Greece has been an amputation. All Epictetus could not console one against it’ Ch 8 Prospero’s Cell), recalled from the caique nosing past Cape Matapan towards Crete in April 1941, returned (unlike Durrell) to become a citizen of Greece, living there with his family until his end. Nicholas Gage, on the other hand, was born a Greek but, through his mother’s courage, escaped, as a child, to America to return as a man to research and tell her story.

‘History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember: that is our function’ Lawrence Durrell op cit 1945

* * *
I had a good dream last night about ordering wet work on the person who set me up over the credit card theft – only joking. Katerina came up from the bus stop yesterday afternoon with more horta for us with names like famous battles – moskalahánu, prikalíthá, zaxhouliá and zágouna. It’s chilly but sunny enough to dry washing and feel warm in the day. Katherina sighed and exclaimed ‘Krio!’ I made gesture of flexed arms ‘Stin Anglia einai zesto!’ She laughed. I might have made some doltish sense despite every tense wrong. God how I wish I could speak this lovely clever language – and a hundred others but that can wait.

An Athens News horoscope tells me ‘its getting creepy but getting moving as the week goes on’ and that I should ‘get good luck from low-class little men up the backstairs and avoid the great and the good…’

Last night I took my new stick for a walk up the village. Lin held my gloved hand in the chill. “Left or right?” she asked at the top of our steps. “Let’s go up the village”. We strolled against the wind funnelled between the houses until we came to the wider slope that leads to the car park and bandstand and the lights of Corfu and the mainland coast twinkled between the dark shapes of swaying cypresses harking the winter breeze. ‘How could you prove to a child those lights, which look just the same, are closer than those stars?’ We strolled over the performance area by the bandstand and traced out the words on the low iron-fenced memorial to those who’d died for their country. Lights shone behind the windows of a substantial overlooking house from which hung the national flag. We walked on to where the road narrowed between small houses, some occupied some clearly not for some time. A heavy dog chained on a terrace barked suddenly and loudly as we passed and went on being noisy out of boredom. We came to the derelict music school. An earth tremor had made a crack that ran from the lintel above its third floor to the street. We started back from the second of the hairpin bends as the road starts to climb to Sokraki and the street lights end. ‘It’s got the same magic as Lydbrook’ - the village where we’ve had a home for over twenty years. On the fringe of the forest between high steep slopes sprinkled at night with lights along its steep unlit footpaths and a night sky almost free of city glow, we’ve walked on similar windy evenings and enjoyed the long village to ourselves as people sit snug indoors. Coming home we passed quietly by the new music school where a piano was being practised and the kafenion where elders were playing cards and backgammon.

In Ano Korakiana

The drinks are made of juice from some of our blood oranges. The books, CDs and DVDs I bought, from all those I’d gathered in the last fortnight, were Angelopoulos’s Τοπιο στην Ομιχλη or Landscapes in the Mist (with English subtitles), another version of Theodorakis' setting of Axion Esti, in which the soloists include Grigoris Bithikotsis, 30 Nocturnes by Manos Hadjidakis (which I’d given Lin for Christmas), the film of The spy who came in from the cold which I've not seen for decades, The Third Man, and an inexpensive CD of songs bought on ebay called Ανάμνηοη Σμύρνης – laments for the destruction of Smyrna. For books I’ve bought a Robert Wilson thriller, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and Kevin Andrews’ The flight of Ikaros. My detached liberal histories remain in Handsworth for the moment.

Writing on contentious subjects – and what else is worth reading – brings to mind that hoary distinction between the separate roles of egg and bacon in breakfast. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed. Eleni by Nicholas Cage is committed and should perhaps be read in conjunction with The Flight of Ikaros. Its author makes early mention of a group of shaven headed young men on his inter-island steamer, guarded by soldiers with rifles, on their way to the island concentration camp of Makronisis - having spent the war years in the mountains fighting the invaders of Greece.

Reading these books about the Greek Civil War, a chicken, like me, can be confronted with the difference between themselves and the bacon makers. I still strive, with the books of liberal historians – like Veremis and Koliopoulos (who, push come to shove, I'd strive to defend with bacon fervour) – to maintain the position of a chicken, but perhaps I should endure the confusion of listening simultaneously to Gage and Andrews. They are very different people.

Henry Miller’s loathing of war and eschewal of possessions puts him in the bacon party, but then I recall the story of his ‘colossus’ - George Katsimbalis - on his own, starting to sing the Greek National Anthem - the Hymn to Freedom - at a funeral in occupied Athens for the great poet Palamos, under the guns and eyes of Nazi soldiers, being joined in the second verse by ‘a fat Corfiot’, and then by the whole crowd. Perhaps Miller should be read beside Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy as writing this I'm reminded of its ending, after a dying woman, who's hand he was holding after helping rescue her from a bombed house, says "I see they got you too'. His initial rage at her (one needs to read him to explain this) is directed to his realisation why some things must be fought, and again he didn't mean just Germans or Nazis:

'... for I had recognized in that moment what it was that Peter and the others had instantly recognized as evil and to be destroyed utterly. I saw now that it was not crime; it was Evil itself.'

Through some of Sunday I’ve been reading Dh’s thesis outline ‘Shiísm, politics and development in post Saddam Iraq’. It’s a reminder of my lack of knowledge of other worlds. I’ll e-mail it back today with comments. Dh describes the impact of Muhammad Baqir As-Sadr on ‘the formation, roles and development of governance’ and the continuing influence of his son – the Second Sadr – both killed by Sadaam. My friend aims to describe ‘a world of imbalanced power relations’, and to devise a model ‘whereby the hegemony of a given discourse within the community under consideration, is curtailed to give way to development and well being’. I find this subtle and exciting. He says before this ‘The dominance of a given religious discourse and a particular faith group, and how this discourse is related to the construction of reality, cannot be seen in value-judgmental terms.’ I think ‘cannot’ is too strong and have said as much to Dh. We chickens have some neck too.

‘On 19 February 1999, as he was heading home from Kufa Mosque after a fiery sermon delivered in the Friday prayer, Sadr’s car was intercepted by gunmen who showered it with automatic rifles.

SB comment:‘fire’ or ‘bullets’ not ‘rifles’ were in the shower.

His two sons, Mustafa, the oldest, who was driving, and Muámmal, next to the youngest died immediately. Sadr was taken to a hospital in Najaf center and died there. News, from various sources, confirmed the regime’s involvement in the incident. Delegates from Saddam were sent to the hospital to confirm Sadr’s death.

SB comment: So often the innocent get caught. Should Sadr, though he should have lived, have traveled with his children. Sorry I lose my academic detachment. Lin said "They were intelligent young men and probably knew the risks and chose to share them with their father."

I have been drawn into another world by Dh’s writing, having to concentrate on pointing out small errors of grammar. Here in England, and even in Greece (so long as I respect the flag), I can say what I like – except shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, calling for attacks on other ethnic groups, praising paedophilia on the internet or joking about bombs to airport security – and fear little. One could be killed in a street in Birmingham for not showing ‘respect’, but in the public domain I’m free to say more or less what I like and the powers that be will defend my right to do that. In the world Dh describes, and has long inhabited, men and women say things in public which can lead to their imprisonment, torture and death and – worse – the imposition of similar penalties on family and friends - a hideous double punishment. It is not that my milieu doesn’t demand courage, but not this kind, which I associate with England and the rest of Europe up to and during the Reformation. It is strange and humbling to come across this world today. Dh has made it more real for me.

Sunday. The island lies under a wet overcast, with a distant beam of sun brightening the sea towards Igoumenitsa; a parade of white cloudlets over the strait and the lightest of south winds turning into rising rivulets of white mist as it encounters the wooded face of Trompetta. With my umbrella I strolled along wet Democracy Street to dump the rubbish in the bins beyond the platea.
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Drip drip drippa drip-drip, drip drip drippa drip-drip … and so on - despite Aln clambering lithely on the roof on Saturday to staple interim cover over the existing mess of rucked and missing felt. Leftheris had said “Beaufort 10” and signed - pointing to the lower ground - serious damage to a brother’s house. I, aware of needing to curb exaggeration about wind, imagined this true. The roof, already bare of tiles through the work I’d stopped when I came in December, had been subject to the feral shucking of a big wind. F8 bangs on the door. F10 breaks and enters. Some felt strips had landed over the hedge opposite from Leftheris. A sheet of insulation, from a pile left on the balcony, hung in a tree. The neighbours had retrieved other wayward pieces. “The rain was coming down in sheets” said Aln later. Our roof is letting in rain. I woke Sunday morning to find Lin spreading plastic sheets and bowls on the upstairs floor. Most leaks were sorted by Aln later in the morning, but his best efforts had not sealed the other end. Rain came in the night. This time Lin woke to find me catching more drips. “That ceiling’s done for” she said gloomily.










On Tuesday evening we’d arrived safely at Kapodistria, having passed through security at Birmingham, Zurich and Athens. Shoe removal has become random, but our taxi could not drop us at the terminal at Birmingham – barriers instituted since the doctors’ fiery drive-in assault at Glasgow airport last year - meant a short walk with luggage to check-in. In Zurich a tin of chicken in cream sauce that Lin had forgotten to put in our hold baggage – so we’d have a swift supper if the shops were closed in Corfu - and which had been noted but passed hrough at Birmingham, was discovered by X-ray and confiscated. ‘The white sauce is the problem’ said the guard apologetically, throwing the tin in a bin. One of Kostas’ and Georgia’s cars was parked for us at Kapodistria. Lin drove the familiar route, on quiet roads, to Ano Korakiana via a supermarket. The house was chilly but most rooms were dry and soon warmed. Over a light supper we made lists, then unpacked. The electric blanket, plus two hot water bottles, warmed our bed. In the morning we’d begin errands. Check Summer Song, phone re work inside and outside the house, sweep and tidy balcony and veranda, start bagging the pile of rubble removed from the roof, read the water meter and pay the bill, buy another heater.

Untutored rage - many monsters to destroy

Lin and Dot left the gîte flawless. Arthur did his magic loading the car. I did departure errands. We paid the Moals less than €20 for electricity. The transfer from abroad to home is so straightforward when you don't fly. A ticket and our passports get a 15 second glance then we're on the ferry and, after five hours, off it with similarly simple formalities and on the road. The boat seemed overfull of squealing children. Lin drove us flawlessly the 204 miles from Plymouth to Handsworth. We arrived just after midnight. Now Dorothy and Arthur are gone home to Cannock. Amy will be home from Glastonbury tomorrow. France which slipped behind us under a great sweep of cloud as we ferried north over a sunny breeze-blown sea seems far more than a day away. Here it's a question of unloading the car and tidying a house after a fortnight's rule by the feckless young. Black bags left uncollected and holed by foxes; objects left turning grass yellow on the back lawn; nuts and seeds to fill neglected bird feeders; a hose pipe to be coiled and hung up; a porch to be swept and tidied; a window broken by a piece of ice being broken to make a cocktail; a mix of wine, liqueur and spirit bottles to be carried to the neighbour's recycle bins just three doors away, paper to be collected and put in their recycling bins; surfaces to be sponged; a broken shower bracket to be replaced - all the while checking the mail that accrues in just 14 days. It's not that we are especially tidy but I do like to feel our version of chaos restored. Oscar came bounding over this morning and leapt on Lin asleep - licks all round and welcome squeaks and tail wags.
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No more news from Corfu, but I have read and thought so much more about the island and about Greece in the past months. Awaiting me from Amazon comes Stephen Dorril's 'MI6' whose chapters on the Balkans I have started to read to supplement what I've learned from Mazower about British policy in Greece between 1940 and 1949. My slow brain is digesting Mazower's account of a country corrupted by occupation in which opposing conceptions of Greece's national identity enflamed bloody rivalries over ownership of the country's future. One revolved around the unique ethnic identity of those entitled to be citizens of Greece - a rumbling across the Balkans; another, the one most organised in resisting Axis occupation, sought to create a new Communist Greece; and another sought to create a liberal Western democracy. Such philosophies, debated among friends of opposing views, would have made for many an entertaining evening at the pub or kafenion. Instead they became imprinted on the banners of heavily armed and ignorant armies. Each group, even as it becomes distinct, turns out to have been riven by rival and distorting extremes. The justice of Greek nationalism fuelled racism and ethnic cleansing; the dream of a people's republic realised coldly planned pogroms against class enemies; while the idealised inclusiveness of 'liberal democracy' helped it to become a shelter for vengeful Rightists, many of whom had served under the Nazis, but now armed by Britain and, later, the USA, to prevent Greece 'falling to the communists'. The deadly brawl was fuelled from below by ancient village vendettas; from above by high politicking among the great powers. But see Peter Bien, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Dartmouth College, speaking about - inventing Greece: the emergence of Greek national identity. The Nicholas E. Christopher Memorial Lecture in November 1997, part of the G.P.Savidis Memorial Colloquium on 'Modern Greek Literature Today: Across Europe and Beyond'.

I feel impelled to say that I think the world has now had quite enough of nationalism. In its two hundred years of existence among Greeks and other Europeans it has accomplished much, to be sure, but I fear that its creative potential is exhausted and that it has become primarily a force for stagnation and evil. We need to develop a dream/myth/fantasy/idolatry beyond americanness, irishness, greekness, germanness (to be printed in Greek in plain small characters). Nationalism is not an inevitable human phenomenon. It did not exist before the modern era, and there is no reason why it should continue to exist in the postmodern era. Indeed, given the vast worldwide changes that have occurred recently there are ever-increasing indications that we may be headed toward a post-nationalistic time in which the earth as a whole, and mankind as a whole, become primary, replacing or displacing nationalism just as nationalism replaced or displaced Christianity as our primary source of meaning. But let's not forget Christianity entirely; let's remember St. Paul's 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in ...'...in... - well, perhaps not in Jesus Christ, but in humanity. [back to the future - 26 Oct 07 - see this piece about Britain in Prospect Magazine - especially the para beginning ' Partly through immigration...']

The closer the focus the greater the fog. Especially poignant is the fact that civil war brought levels of violence to which the Greek population was largely unaccustomed. People innocent of the depths of human viciousness were - for 10 years - exposed to, and participated in, a brew of carefully planned and arbitrary cruelty from which no category of the population was protected. The confident reasoning of psychopaths ravaged the wondrous land. We know now that such things happened across Europe, but in England there were those whose love for Greece included the view that what happened was somehow not Greek. I suspect that view is shared by many Greeks who, on the subject of the civil war, blame it on foreigners, preserving a silence based, consciously or unconsciously, on profound and ashamed disappointment.

* * * * * *

Incomprehension is part of this. It is not only that for many the horrors, being beyond imagination, become invisible, it is because people's motives for their actions are not only unclear to observers, they are unclear to those who act. Intricately interwoven threads of ethnicity, geography, religion, nationality, kin, village and domestic rivalries within the calculus of international alignments and tension is one of the defining characteristics of civil war - its intimacy. A young Muslim who would come as a guest lecturer to one of my courses told us that before he went to Bosnia - as an aid worker during the worst of the war there - he had not understood what was going on. "After I went there I understood even less." Wars between nations - equally complex in reality - are made simpler because the authorities, as part of warcraft, impose and maintain official accounts of what is happening and what happened. In After the War was Over, Mazower and his co-writers are digging through the collective narratives of winners and losers and the analyses of diplomats and political leaders, to sift hitherto unrecorded experiences of individuals, families, streets, villages and regions. It will not make things much clearer, certainly not more logical, but what I think it will do is what local history always aims to do, which is to raise the profile of the experiences (and therefore the responsibilities and agency) of individuals. Nicholas Gage did this to produce probably the most widely read histories of this kind - almost a lifetime's project to find out who killed his mother, Eleni, at the village of Lia in Epirus (its mountains in clear sight across the narrows from our house on Corfu); to name him and even to contemplate personal revenge against the man he judged most complicit in ordering her torture and murder. At the same time he does not omit the involvement of neighbours, her village, and even her relatives, in what happened, but the larger formal story - history - of the Greek Civil War is consigned to two or three pages inserted at intervals in bold print, giving formal context to the story of Eleni Gatzoyiannis - and one whose intensity would be put in the strongest parentheses, if mentioned by any of Mazower's contributors. In the whole book it gets one passing reference. It's not that they necessarily disagree with Gage, it's that such emotions could leave them lost for words. [Back to the future - see some thoughts about Nicholas Gage in Sept 07. Since it was written his story passed through many hands; been drawn into Republican arguments against liberals; received the fixative treatment of film. Emotions engendered by Gage's book, finished while waiting at Rome Fiumicino in April, have been diluted by later knowledge of how the book's been used, and therefore suspicion that I might have been. Nicholas Gage's website is inactive http://www.nickgage.com/au.html Perhaps he's withdrawn from the chatter, but there's a cheerful website by his daughter] We cannot try to understand if we are blinded with tears, unable to speak through the lump that tightens the throat. I wonder what Thucydides did with his feelings. In Mazower I see researchers - sensitive to the most intense, tightly sprung, dormant feelings - padding delicately through crime scenes drenched with blood, clutching the delicate instruments of scholarship. 

* * * * 

To get a tiny flavour of the combustible feelings that fester I googled some current group forums on the Balkans and Cyprus. Botflies fattened on anger and hatred are buzzing in cyberspace. Here we see one of Mazower's categories - 'ethnic justice' as it relates to forms of legitimacy based on nationality and ethnicity, categories that really really matter to some people and, even when their meaning is understood at a cerebral level, have no resonance for me or thousands of others. All I hear is anger, hatred and the frightening fear that underlies those emotions. But just as I can name the phenomenon of arachnophobia the experience of being frightened of spiders is beyond me. And yes I am aware that the map of Greece I used at the start of this blog refers to the FYROM. For some I've already taken sides. 

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While here the weather is wet and cool there is a heat wave in the eastern Mediterranean. * * *

If I were attempting to design a course on the things I'm trying to understand I'd start by recommending all my students get a copy of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War which between 431 and 404 BC ended the Golden Age. It's a book of suppressed intensity. Its only monsters are men.

Don't try to read it through yet - though it's not that long. For our purposes look over pages 109-119 (in my copy), chapters 69 to 87 in Book Three - Revolution at Corcyra, and read, especially, chapters 83 beginning 'Thus revolutions give birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas, and the simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared' and 84, 'It was in Corcyra that most of these audacious acts were first committed and all the crimes that would be perpetrated in retaliation ...' in fact I'll read you this paragraph now '... in retaliation by men who had been governed tyrannically rather than with good sense and had the chance of revenge, or that would be unjustly designed by others who were longing to be relieved of their habitual poverty, and who above all were animated by a passionate desire for their neighbors'...' I have an American edition - 'their neighbours' property; crimes too that men commit, not from greed, but when they assail their equals and are so often swept away by untutored rage...'

In this class any rage will be tutored. I'd like to know what actual Greek adjective or compound was translated here by Benjamin Jowett '...into attacks of pitiless cruelty' - the adjectives are for effect, the nearest you get to seeing this Thucydides' feelings - so don't quibble that cruelty was by definition 'pitiless'. Thucydides lived through much of this war and took part in one of its failures before being exiled to his estate in northern Greece.

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools. Θουκυδίδης. Private Lynndie England, who suffers from severe learning difficulties and was almost certainly acting under orders in Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq in 2004, from Flickr 'The Gallery' - an image composed by doublevelvet while still on Flickr and here's another sent me 30/08/07. Somebody might read this entry and get dispirited, so how about this from Seferis' Banquet Speech in Stockholm in 1963 when receiving the Nobel Prize for literature?

In our gradually shrinking world, everyone is in need of all the others. We must look for man wherever we can find him. When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: 'Man'. That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus.

Flying home

Sat in the cramped space of our plane from Rome to Zurich – buying pace for discomfort. Whether more speed also buys time is debatable given the things you can do in the space of a ship or train, and clouds, though beautiful, are hardly an exchange for the surroundings enjoyed when going slower. Boarding a plane is also complicated, entailing boarding the right bus or train to the airport, identifying the correct terminal, finding your check-in desk, locating departure gates, while negotiating concourses, corridors, escalators, lifts, moving walkways and serial queues, while submitting to luggage x-ray, random body search, baggage restriction, showing of papers at successive checkpoints, check-in, security, immigration and departure gate and, all for good security reasons, and having to start the process hours before take off. It’s not that good a deal – but for the moment flying is often the only choice and costs less than other ways of getting around – until we start paying more for carbon. At Rome we had a text message giving us a SWIFT code for the builders’ account and the news “ALL MATERIALS PURCHASED TODAY EXCEPT MARBLE. WILL LEAVE LATE TO AVOID ACCIDENTS.” Then another at Zurich “ROOF DONE. START WALLS MONDAY. MATERIALS ARRIVE TUE. KALOS TAXHIDI.” I’ve just finished Nicholas Gage’s account of the life, and death in 1948, of his mother Eleni Gatzoyiannis from the village of Lia in the Grammos Mountains, whose peaks can be seen from 208 Democracy Street.