Estate work

Lin holds the rope I've slung round the upper branches of the tree that overhangs Rock Cottage; ties it for safety round a tree trunk. Up a ladder leaning on the fork of the tree, I start sawing through a limb of the heavy soft ash, having sawn a wedge on the side we plan the branch to fall. Up a ladder I use a bowsaw.

Trollying kit on the path up Bell Hill to Rock Cottage

No garden tidying has been done since summer 2011, and then when I was on my own and avoided felling the larger limbs...

...As the branches start to chuckle I climb down the ladder and both of tug the rope, rocking away at the half-cut until it gives, cracks and slowly begins to fall while we keep pulling. So each of the five spreading branches drop where they should, missing the roof of the house.

On the ground the amputation is further de-limbed; cut into smaller lengths with a 12" chain saw. Other smaller trees - mainly birch behind the cottage - succumb. More will come down on our next visit when we'll need to scythe, sickle and mow grass. Meanwhile, Lin wields the hedge cutter clearing spreading brambles, cotoneaster, dog rose, ash saplings, hazel tips and ageing budleia, building up a stew of logs and foliage around the edge of the cottage.

"Next time we're here, we'll get some order in this chaos...cut logs and kindling and stack it below the lean-to. We'll have to get a professional to cut the ash trees along the path. They're already too tall and heavy for me. We'll get a good load of fire logs from them."
Now at least the repaired walls and roof of Rock Cottage are open to the sun needed to dry out the parts that had dampened from wind-driven leaks now sealed.
The garage by the road below us has been full of cast off objects for too long. Lin phoned G W Edwards, scrap dealers, in Cinderford who sent round a man with a small truck in half-an-hour and - for £5 - off went an old fridge, a doorless washing machine, along with a bicycle last used twenty years ago, the old wood stove now replaced, a couple of Calor gas stoves tattered by rust, a fireguard and length of stove pipe.
"How much will you get for that lot?" I asked
"Ooh, we'll be lucky to get £2.00"
"I think not" said Lin later

*** *** ***
Yesterday saw an annual celebration in Corfu in honour of the island's patron Saint Spyridon, our village Philharmonia taking part, and there's our neighbour Dimitra, far left in the first picture...

Λιτανεία τ' Αγιού 11.08.13

Λιτανεία του ιερού σκηνώματος του Αγίου Σπυρίδωνος στην πόλη της Κέρκυρας, σήμερα Κυριακή 11 Αυγούστου 2013, σε ανάμνηση της σωτηρίας του νησιού από τους Τούρκους, που  για 40 ημέρες πολιορκούσαν  την πόλη, το 1716. Μια ισχυρότατη βροχόπτωση, που αποδόθηκε σε θαύμα του πολιούχου Αγίου, έτρεψε τότε τους οθωμανούς σε άτακτη φυγή. Με ψήφισμα της, η Ενετική Γερουσία  καθιέρωσε λίγους μήνες αργότερα, την Λιτανεία της 11ης Αυγούστου. Η πομπή με εκκίνηση από την εκκλησία του Πολιούχου, θα κάνει το γύρο της πλατείας (Σπιανάδας), με δύο στάσεις για ισάριθμες δεήσεις μπροστά από το Παλιό Φρούριο και το Παλάτι αντίστοιχα, συνοδευόμενη από 8 Φιλαρμονικές, μεταξύ των οποίων και αυτή του Χωριού μας. Το ιερό σκήνωμα του Αγίου θα συνοδεύουν 8 Μητροπολίτες, εκ των οποίων οι δύο από Ουκρανία και Λευκορωσία. Έντονη η λιακάδα στο νησί, αλλά σαφώς λιγότερος ο κόσμος που παρακολούθησε τη Λιτανεία. «Λιγότεροι οι πιστοί, αρκετοί οι περιηγητές» θα σημειώσει μονολογώντας ο ιερέας δίπλα μας και ανάμεσά τους και αρκετοί χωριανοί μας. Χθες, παραμονή της εορτής, στην μικρή εκκλησία της Πλάστιγγας, θα τελεστεί όπως κάθε χρόνο Λειτουργία, με τη γενική φροντίδα της οικογένειας Σαββανή… Οι «επιτελούντες» θα απολαύσουν στο τέλος καφέ και αναψυκτικό στη σκιά από τις δαφνιές της αυλής. Υ.Γ. Ανέλπιστη η φετινή παραγωγή σπύρδας για το Γιάννη Κένταρχο... τόσο που χρειάστηκε φορτηγάκι για τη μεταφορά, αφού δεν χωρούσαν στο αυτοκίνητο του γιου του, Σπύρου...Πιο πάνω, στο στένεμα του δρόμου, η κυρά-Χαρίκλεια, απτόητη από τη ζέστη, τραγουδάει από το παραθύρι της «Δυο μαύρα μάτια», καλωσορίζοντας ταυτόχρονα τις δεσποινίδες Μαρία και Έλλη Βαρβαρίγου, άρτι αφιχθείσες στο χωριό.

(My rough translation) Litany of the holy relics of St. Spyridon in Corfu Town, took place today Sunday, August 11, 2013, in commemoration of the salvation of the island from the Turks, who in 1716 besieged the city for 40 days. A cloudburst, considered a miracle of the patron saint, distracted the Ottomans and forced their retreat. A few months later the Venetian Senate proclaimed the Litany of August 11. The procession, starting from the church of the patron saint, will tour the square (the Spianada) with two stops for as many prayers in front of the Old Fort and Palace respectively, accompanied by eight bands, including that of our village. The sacred relic of St.Spyridon is accompanied by eight bishops, including two from Ukraine and Belarus. The island lay under strong sunshine, but far fewer people attended the procession...Yesterday, on the eve of the feast, the small church of Plastingas, (after this my Greek fails me and I shall ask for help from Aleko D).

*** ***
An email circular just received:

Victoria Jubilee Allotments Association Committee
Minutes of extraordinary meeting held on July 6th 2013

Present  Apologies
Phil Rose
Sue Rose
Scylla Parkin None received
Robin Clarke
Gill Preston
Danny Webster
Jeevan Singh
Ralf Decambre

Some accusations have been made by a Victoria Jubilee plot holder about the committee, one of which is a very serious one directed at one member in particular. 

This particular accusation was made official when sent to the Big Lottery suggest misappropriation of funds.

This issue has been passed on to Clive Birch of BDAC and Adrian Stagg of Birmingham Council allotment department who will deal with the situation.

A personal libel case is also being sought which will be dealt with separately. 

It was suggested and agreed that we put in writing to the plot holder a request for an explanation and an apology to the committee and a retraction of the accusations in writing to the Big Lottery Fund.

The following were suggested and agreed as ways to improve communication -
We send a trial email to check our email contacts and update them. Gill will do this. 

Also that we publish our meeting dates a year in advance.. 

Committee members who have access to other members email address’s were reminded that they are only to be used via the vjallotment gmail site and strictly for allotment business. 

Sue Rose added – we should be grateful to committee members and other plot holders who give up their time to carry out all aspects of running the allotment. 

**** ****
Sunday supper at our daughter's - three happy hours with Amy, Guy and Oliver and, of course, the dogs.

Arriving at Amy's and Guy's home for supper

Mum's wooden owl which used to fly in Brin Croft

Ollie in the garden on Summer Lane

Simon, Amy, Lin, Cookie and Oscar on the sofa after supper

*** *** ***
A catch-up account as work proceeds on the JH archive:
It has been difficult to mine and refine the ore of the collection of old film and tape left me by my stepfather Jack Hargreaves! Others with more skill than I had been puzzled as to what to do with this collection of largely unmatched 16mm film and ¼" tapes. We still are! It took me longer than I like to think to grasp how Jack and his team at Southern had put OOT episodes together. I hadn't realised the film was in positive for a start; hadn't realised it had a magnetic strip down one side containing library sound effects added to an edited version at Southern TV's studio in Northam. It took a while to grasp that there were no recordings on film of Jack in the studio at start and finish and that the film didn't include title or credit sequences. I was puzzled as to the reel-to-reel tapes. Why had each programme been recorded in sound effectively rendering the sound effects on the film irrelevant in any reconstruction? Thank goodness tho' that these tapes were made at all! I recognised early as had others that the lack of 'shed' sequences with JH talking to camera would make commercial interest in the material improbable. We are now pondering in what medium to preserve reconstructed film - DVD, DV or Betacam. After hesitation I have selected Betacam (with DVDs for me to play around with) and found a skilled technician in Francis Niemczyk who has begun the long process of synching matched tapes (of Jack's musings) with Stan's location film. I forgot to mention how much of that vital tape-film matching process had been carried out and inventoried as a labour of love by Roger Charlesworth at the collection's second home in Plymouth (not even an OOT area) - the South West Film and Television Archive where it had been deposited by Jack's old friend Nick Wright after he moved to a house too small to house the unwieldy collection Jack had left him. The key issue of seeing off copyright claims on Out of Town despite Jack leaving them to me in his will was dealt with last year after I bought all distribution rights in OOT from Endemol who had been licensing the only collection of so-called Out of Town videos that was commercially available - all made by Jack to sell as VHS and later DVDs with the support of Endemol's predecessor Primetime, long after the demise of Southern Television in 1981 and never broadcast, tho' they use a selection - initially uncredited - of Stan Bréhaut's location film over a new commentary JH made at his home in Dorset in 1985-6. There remains one key challenge in bringing the JH archive back to life from its current location in a lock-up near my home in Birmingham. How do we (I say 'we' because I have had so much help on FB pages and from the informal JH committee) 'fill' the imageless gaps (no titles, no credits and no 'shed') when Jack is talking in his studio 'shed' before each episode dissolves to one of the myriad locations Jack and Stan had chosen for that week's episode of Out of Town....We are making progress! It's exciting to take on a challenge that has, so far, defeated other experts and amateurs - how to bring over 200 old episodes of Out of Town - some going back to the 1960s - back to life and suitable for a variety of media not available to JH (tho' he anticipated how the web might be used) in a way that is sufficiently inexpensive yet professional to have satisfied someone as expert as was Jack in the craft of television. This little essay may go some way to explaining why no institution or even keen individual is that interested in this invaluable archive in its unrestored form.. Jack Hargreaves - the invention of the camera from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
I am very aware that this account omits the story of how Kaleidoscope unearthed the only surviving 34 'lost episodes' of Out of Town that, so far as I currently know, exist - complete episodes rescued, as explained in the leaflet that accompanies the box set created and marketed by Delta in 2011 having been rescued almost literally from a skip by David King.

Three bloggers on Greece

There are three blogs in English I rely on for news and thoughts about Corfu, Greece and the world - via them and the hyperlink that can turn one sentence into a tapestry of reference** across which I can roam with the ease of a monkey swinging through the canopy of a rain forest. I’d start with Richard Pine, founder of the Durrell School of Corfu, author among many other things of The Diviner, a major work on the Irish playwright Brian Friel, guest lecturer on campus's around the world, but though the opinion goes unsaid, Richard regards blogging as somewhere on a par with glue sniffing, so we get, instead, regular emails announcing a fascinating, informed op-ed in the Irish Times, (in which even he does not eschew an occasional hyperlink, inserted, I suspect, by an editor in Dublin) and I’m told there’s an unpublishable manuscript on Corfu.
Of the blogs, the least introspective is Teacherdude’s, citizen-journalist Craig Wherlock, based in Thessaloniki, also on Flickr, exploring with camera - un-pressed. His words are from the left; seemingly without dilemmas or historical perspective, but his pictures brilliantly catch contradictions others write about.
A blog of greater economy, Corfu Blues - writer, poet, musician Jim Potts is Philhellene, citizen of an imaginative Greek landscape; seamless elision of classical and modern Greece. enduringly married to a dear and talented Corfiot who's also a writer. Jim’s more perfectly that English invention André Maurois describes – a gentleman - than I; discretely, unashamedly in love, as open-eyed with Maria about Hellenic depravity (her Jeremiad against the corrupting greed of fellow Corfiots) and weakness as Homer, and with the best links to intelligent contemporary analysis – especially his relatives Bagehot and a TV journalist daughter, Nina-Maria.
Most entertaining is Corfucius, musician Chris Holmes (died in Corfu - January 2018)...,

...the uncourtly courtier, son of a war hero, on a perch above Kontokali, apt with a keyboard, does acrobats with grammar as conjurors spice their acts with mistakes, issuing lasciviously illustrated comment on gossip in Britain’s reptile press, reminiscence – un-English revelations about family perfidy - and invention, revelations about sins of lust and alcoholic indulgence cleansed by the Church of England in Corfu, he’s the Greekest of the three, son of an exceptional mother only now gone to her long home, he's silent on anything as tedious as ‘the crisis’, venomous on anything as worthy as housework or gardening (honouring Lin and I with the monicas - Charles and Carrie), a sweet recluse, seductive misanthrope, artful in flattery. How pleasurable it would be to get these three together for a day. Impossible because Potts is likely to be in Dorset while I’m here, or I’m on my allotment in Brum while he and Maria are in Zissimos; Wherlock’s a teacher - too poor to travel, too proud to accept expenses - and Holmes hates company.

**I know I know, human expression has always been able to perform this miracle of resonance, the poet’s auditory imagination, musician’s leit, the painter’s reference in colour and form…but we tap into a level of intra-species communication that Fred Emery and Eric Trist anticipated forty five years ago as ‘a greater mutation than if man had grown a second head’ p.217 ‘The Next Thirty Years: Concepts, Methods and Anticipations’, Human Relations, 1967, 20  

** ** **
I'd been in Gatwick overnight so slept on the Easyjet south, and woke to see blue, aware of islands*, Erikoussa passed below, then the north coast at Sidari, the zig zag road down to Trompetta, then Skripero and Ano Korakiana.

Ano Korakiana - the village north east of a small cloud

Later at Easter lunch in the village, Mark said "We saw you coming over. 'That'll be Simon and Lin!'"
A cup of tea in the house, greetings to Effie, Vasiliki, Natasha and Adoni about to start their Easter lunch, and we strolled up Democracy Street to watch our lamb turning on the spit

The table sat twelve, a mix of Greek and British, both languages mingled, wine and beer and then the food.

Just before lunch

Around five I was being teased for dropping off, sometimes mid-sentence, feeling the effects of little sleep, happy company, food and wine
"Yeah! And being old" said Lin.

After lunch

*A phrase I stole
At my peril
From the poet
Lawrence Durrell

*** ***
On Tuesday we woke just before noon - which stills feels like 10 GMT. There was an email from Charles Webster at Delta:

Hi Simon. I thought you might like to know that we have a signed, sealed and delivered contract with Endemol for the 34 Out of Town episodes. Our copies of the original nine DVDs, formerly from Contender, go into shops from this week and we expect to see sales immediately. I think these will be the only products in the market for at least six months as we work out the best way to sell the “34 missing episodes”. I am delighted that we have done the deal with Endemol and I hope they see the wisdom in sharing their royalties for the “34” episodes with you. Fingers crossed. Now you have the tapes back from the SWFTA perhaps we can look forward to more releases in the future. See you soon. We should celebrate with fish and chips and mugs of tea! (Sound like the Famous Five…..) Regards, Charles

Dear Charles. Wet and grey in Corfu. Thought that might please you (:)) My chief worry about the letter to Cathy M to which she’s not yet replied (18/4/12) was that it might distemper our friendship given I was questioning Endemol’s right to buy and sell the ’recovered' episodes on the grounds Southern TV or its agent had no right to sell them having agreed to sell them to Jack for £1 in lieu of pension. Instead you approved my letter. Furthermore, given present understanding of rights in relation to these tapes you had no obligation to even tell me of your intentions or indeed the progress of your plans to complete a contract for their distribution with Endemol. I don’t call that just good customer relations...Now the tapes and the film from Plymouth (minus Old Country masters which I let David take home to Hythe to look over) are in Birmingham I am waiting royalties on the re-issue to help pay for the transport and storage. These expenses are not that much but I want to keep accounts and could even afford to buy you the next lot of fish and chips (I owe you four of those so that we’re even).
There’s also the simple fact that we must transfer any film and tape we think may match to digital before splicing them, as to do that operation with raw film and tape over 29 years old is just too risky. At present I’m only at the stage of trying to get shelving installed in the store locker so I can take the film cans and tapes out of the boxes in which we transported them and line them up so that possible matches of image and sound can be surmised and a batch of - say - five can be taken somewhere to be digitised and hopefully matched. David Knowles, as you can see on the short video I made of the transfer, knows as much as anyone I know about this material and the challenges of creating workable matches. A lot of it has his writing on it. He is hoping that the letters and numbers on the cans and tape boxes will be good enough to identify potential matches, but given how little they did at SWFTA I am wondering whether he is right. I’ll start on this in June. Congratulations on the whole project of the 9 DVDs...Simon

Hardly dressed we heard the band approaching, marching down Democracy Street and around the village boundaries to finish with sweet bread and wine at St Athanasios.

Easter Monday on Democracy Street

The road was closed to cars, so I cycled down to an appointment a mile below the village with Mark and his brother Paul, to see and touch a 70th birthday present to myself - a new or rather nearly new - well - wonderfully re-conditioned engine for Summersong which Mark had been seeking in the secret workshops of Corfu, relying on word of mouth...and now after nearly a year it was here, looking spic and span with new pipes and belts and all attachments - starter, gear box, alternator - a Yanmar 2GM, about 18hp. At my age I need a reliable engine, and one more powerful than the present ageing 9hp engine in the boat. The regular calms are one problem; the other's getting home in half a gale on the nose.

I’m lucky and wise in my friends. These skilled guys work year round, often, and certainly for the season, six days a week - often at weekends - applying their energy, craft and experience to mending, making, building, maintaining, transporting, checking just about everything – heating and electrical systems, all types of yachts, all kinds of engines, every sort of building. They’re all round grafters who do work, work, and more work, and yet they took the trouble to track down this engine, the means by which in my pension years I and my friends can continue to mess about in boats on the mercurial sea of Kerkyra. I left out other gifts, since it wasn’t immediately my point - knowing how to be friends, playing a full part in preparing food for delicious eating, hunting and fishing, tending stock, looking after the land, studying and knowing the wild things – insects..

One of the wild things on the steps

...plants, chickla, raptors, the lively repertoire of our Greek garden, entertaining, speaking another language, being in and of this village, conversing and drinking and – to embarrass them – sharing their lives with women of equivalent and complimentary art and skill.

Cycling home I bumped into Dr Savannis getting into his car.
"Have you collected sweet bread from the church?" he asked
"No"
He handed me a loaf. Mark had given me two new laid goose eggs from the stables, and I reached into the cycle basket and gave one away.  Later Lefteris arrived next door - back from the church. We embraced and he too gave me sweet bread. So to work, Lin tidying and weeding the garden, while I cleared greenery along the path below that leads to the bus stop. Swallows are all about feeding inches above the ground, bells are ringing, bees exploring despite the wind and wet.

Wesley up the road had made a damper for our stove chimney. Re-installed it's already saving fuel - in this wind you hear the draft slowing with a turn of the small handle mid-way up the pipe

Kindling

*** ***
Key dates in the run up to the next Greek General Election on Sunday 6 May'12

Φωνὴ ἐν Ραμὰ ἠκούσθη

<Φωνὴ ἐν Ραμὰ ἠκούσθη κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὀδυρμὸς πολύς·Ραχὴλ κλαίουσα τὰ τέκνα αὐτῆς, καὶ οὐκ ἤθελεν παρακληθῆναι,ὅτι οὐκ εἰσιν.> ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 2.18

Prableen Kaur wrote.'It has now been several hours since all this happened. I'm still in shock. Everything has not fallen into place.'
*** ***
On Friday I cycled over, with Oscar, to Livingstone Road Allotments to attend a presentation of a cash donation by the Bank of Ireland to Birchfield Residents Action Group. I was invited by Mike Tye, who chairs Central Handsworth Practical Care's Advisory Group, is also Secretary of Birchfield Residents. Before the presentation I wandered along the hedged path between the Livingstone plots - what a cornucopia of growth of every kind of vegetable, rank after rank of rich greenery from hedge to fence, hardly a square inch of uncultivated ground. It was a salutary reminder of what can be done, of what a way we have to go on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments, almost a reproach to us.

Once home again I got ready for my lecture on campus on this afternoon on Working with Officers, a session in the Inlogov Summer School for Newly Elected Members. 
The day before I'd sent an email to Tim Pfeiffer, lawyer at Endemol who licence Contender, previously Southern Star International, to distribute the DVD series of Out of Town:

Dear Tim...I've been getting royalties on the Out of Town DVD series from Endemol which I share with their director Steve Wade's widow, in accordance with my stepfather's wishes. My query is about your stewardship of this product. In recent years lack of availability and marketing has meant sales of the DVD series of Out of Town are a fraction of what they were a decade ago. Yet the contents of several of these Contender branded DVDs have been streamed to viewers numbered in thousands on the web. Endemol, my family and the Wades are affected by this leakage of copyright material. Can the licensee act to achieve higher distribution of my stepfather's material in all our interests as well as achieving wider viewing of the excellent entertainment my stepfather's work offers - especially to many people over 50 who recall viewing his programmes in their childhood? Kindest regards.

Within a day YouTube had closed down nearly all the sites showing versions of Out of Town licenced by Endemol to Contender, previously Southern Star International.

Where sites were still working for other material the Out of Town clips showed:

*** ***
I've just received in the post a new gadget for logging into internet banking - one that will no doubt soon become the norm for personal banking security. It feels ironic that nearly a century after Arthur Scherbius invented a mechanical cypher gadget that was to become famed in WW2 as the German Enigma Machine cracked at Bletchley Park by the British, I'm carrying out the mundane tasks of personal internet banking on a gadget designed on similar principles.  It means that every time I log into my bank account I have to use this small keypad to generate a new number. I wonder if this will actually increase personal banking security or just cause more inconvenience for customers.

** ** **
Ήχος α´ ποία τοῦ βίου τρυχφή διαμένει λύπης ἀμέτοχος. Cycling back from town with Oscar I decided to video the well known tendency of Jack Russell's to hang a back leg when jogging. Our Oscar, though half Border Terrier, is no exception. When we had him as a puppy he did this. People pointed out his hanging leg as though we'd not noticed. The vet could find no problem. Eight years old now, he still hangs his back right leg now and then. It's a Jack Russell thing and if the Kennel Club got its malign hands on the breed they'd no doubt have a competition class for specially bred three-legged terriers - for which there'd be a rich novelty market.
In the evening during visiting hours Linda and I went over to City Hospital to see our neighbour, Jo, who collapsed at home a few evenings ago. She was taken by ambulance to hospital and is waiting for the results of tests. Long long wide corridors, doors and doors and everywhere notices, posters, warnings, directions, the smells of the medical cosmos, beeping of monitors, rows of spaced beds like cradles for space travel, screens, tubes, buttons and keyboards and old bodies half awake peering around, gazing up half comprehending at small clusters of family and friends sat quietly about half-helpless, tableaus, a frieze. So this is how it could be. Jo was cheerful, sitting up, the nurses we saw kind and competent. She said she wasn't too bad. People were visiting. She was getting rested; had plenty to read and puzzles to do and could walk about the rest of the hospital. No it hadn't been too difficult to park. No a short walk. Oscar's fine. We've been working on the allotment. It's been a lovely day. The doctors will talk about you in the third person. Did they use you as a table to write on a clipboard? No not that bad. There's a lady can't speak a word of English who comes and tries to make conversation just to have the company walking up and down the ward at night. Another crying out for help. It's her legs. We're keeping an eye on John.  We send Oscar over to keep him company. He's getting fed. We age. My eldest Greek half-sister when we were young .Ὄτι ἐγενήθην ως ἀσκος ἐν πάχυη.

*** *** ***
The hard wind of rationalisation, the Bill for Rural Co-operatives promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture in Athens, is threatening the future of Ano Korakiana's Farmer's Co-operative whose building on the village's lower road has, while we've been there, used for village celebrations and other local events. Ano Korakiana's was the first Co-operative to be founded in Corfu - ο πρώτος Συνεταιρισμός που ιδρύθηκε στην Κέρκυρα  - at the beginning of the last century. The Bill requires the co-operatives in each region of the Republic to join up with a larger market-tuned company - The Co-operative Company, ένα νέο α’θμιο Συνεταιρισμό η Συνεταιριστική Εταιρεία. If a Co-operative is unwilling to join the new entity it will, by the end of this year, be treated as unable to continue - θα πρέπει να έχει καταβάλει μέχρι 31/12/ 2011, unless it can demonstrate an annual budget of €60,000. If it cannot do that over the next three years it will be judged as being not economically viable and forced to dissolve. This would entail clearing debts to third parties and distributing the remaining money among the other Co-ops - Αλλά ακόμη και αν έχει καλύψει τις 60.000 ευρώ μπορεί να οδηγηθεί σε αναγκαστική εκκαθάριση εφόσον για τρία συνεχή έτη η λειτουργία του κριθεί μη βιώσιμη οικονομικά. Τι σημαίνει αναγκαστική εκκαθάριση: εκποίηση περιουσιακών στοιχείων – εξόφληση υποχρεώσεων προς τρίτους – διανομή του υπολοίπου ποσού στους συνεταίρους. In the next few months the village faces two choices in relation to its Co-operative, join the new regional Co-op Company or show an annual budget of €60,000....'otherwise face obligatory liquidation and closure', διαφορετικά, ο Συνεταιρισμός μας...θα οδηγηθεί σε αναγκαστική εκκαθάριση και κλείσιμο...
Economic trends far beyond Greece have long been threatening the Hellenic Agricultural Co-operatives. Vassilis Patronis, who may still be at the University of Patras wrote a paper (undated but I think around 2000) whose title speaks to the problem - Between state and market forces: Greek Agricultural Cooperative Organizations (ACO) in transition period. Patronis suggests that ACOs are a typical product of the Hellenic political culture. Greek ACOs are did not come into being as a result of a grassroots movement by farmers - the way they emerged in other parts of Europe and indeed the world - but as the top-down creations of government aimed at aligning farmers’ interests with state politics. His paper finishes with a smidgin of hope, that  has echoes of Elinor Ostrom's ideas about the governance of the commons or common-pool resources, that the only way to evade the pervasive forces of economic globalisation, is via the organisation of local farmers promoting local produce locally retailed - in other words local 'bottom-up' action.

In a period when the ‘modernist’ policies seem to predominate, the future of the ACOs is based upon their reorientation and their virtual reconfiguration. The era of state indifference which ‘neutralizes’ the ACOs leaves at the same time a unique opportunity to cover the lost ground of organizational and managerial autonomy. During this period of transition the Greek ACOs still have ‘room for manoeuvre’ by taking advantage of the existing EU regulations (e.g. producer groups) and their closeness to the family farms. It is a period when the agricultural cooperative mobilization ‘from the bottom’ carries more power than it did in the past. (Vassilis, p.25)

The difficulty in Ano Korakiana is that the Co-operative has seen minimal recent connection with local agricultural production, tho' there lots of community involvement in the use of the building for social purposes, but for farming I'm inclined to say 'what farming?' There is less agricultural activity around beloved Ano Korakiana than there is around Handsworth and across Birmingham where the drive to produce home grown vegetables has created a private-public compromise that with a lot of ground level political support and capacity for local organisation secures a sound future for urban farming and the self-help activities associated with it. This entry on Democracy Street 'Small island in which I rejoice' gives a small feel for this kind of activity. I am conscious that we proceed with our local activity under an umbrella. This protection in the form of legislation and linked local and central government policy is one that has to be constantly reviewed, propped up, repaired and defended. You don't just get to grow vegetables on prime urban development land coveted by other interests by assuming it's some sort of god-given historical privilege. The plot we rent for £35 lies on a piece of ground with a fine view over Handsworth Park. If it a house were built on it its rent would be in the region of £7000 a year, or equivalent mortgage payment. That such market forces don't apply to our Plot 14 and its neighbours is not something that just happens. We enjoy the fruits of political activity supported by research, public meetings - all kinds of lobbying - letters, petitions, legal actions in favour of setting aside and protecting by law, a proportion of marketable urban real estate for growing foods, instead of building houses, roads, shops or factories. The arguments are complex, refined, evidence-based, well documented and illustrated.