Context

Before first light the parched island is soaked by a drenching downpour, a timely damping down of hectares of tinder. We lie in bed surrounded by unaccustomed gloom, lightning flashing through the curtains, crashes of thunder, constant rumbling. Mountains and sea are obscured; our forested foreground, now grey-green under a drifting overcast. The trees beside the house are wrung by the wind. Pouring rain spatters our windows, its fall muffled on the roof tiles, echoing in the downpipes. Water spills over the gutters splashing on the common path. Where I left a small gap in the kitchen windows, the counter’s wet. Water glosses the plaka under the veranda, the decking and concrete of our balconies, dribbling from the  yellowing leaves of the wisteria, soaking the green and red of the bougainvillea, bowing its branches. Abruptly a quilt is welcome on the bed and I switch to shirts with long sleeves and socks. I wear underpants again; even a jumper in the evening.

From this day of rain a fortnight follows of clear blue skies. The mountains in the east – rising in Epirus and the southern tip of Albania – return, during these unexpected days of early autumn , to their Wedgwood blue haze. The strip of sea between Corfu and the mainland could be mistaken for a placid lake, our green hills along its western shore, barer land over the strait.  

After weeks of washing clothes by hand – no great problem - we’ve bought a washer to replace the old one Lin couldn’t mend. Mark took it away for scrap after I’d unbolted its concrete steadying weights. I've carried them down to the garden where they stand as modernist shapes. From the same store on the road to Lefkimmi we’ve also bought a new wood stove – exact match of the one that came with the house 12 years ago. Age and misuse had warped the old stove's lid; its body leaked smoke from cracks at each corner. I manhandled three hundred weight of cast iron down the balcony steps, through the apothiki, to the garden where, filled with soil from the compost heap, the old stove sprouts a young bougainvillea we’ve bought.   

In search of context I’ve been reading a school text describing British economic and  social history from 1700. It ends in 1975 when I was 33 - just starting to live in a grown up way so it seemed; helping me to try understanding the next 44 years – my small life's window that included marrying Linda, her having our two children, getting our own house, the job I’ve had until I left the university a few years ago; my bicycles and my travels on them, the advent of Mrs Thatcher, the routing of the public sector, privatisation, the ending of the narratives and ideologies of modernism with its vision in many dimensions of 'one society'. About ten years ago I was strolling, with my folding bicycle, along the slab pavement of the Thames South Bank in London. Under my feet I found a commemorative plaque celebrating the Festival of Britain - marking its centre. For a millisecond I caught a full-body memory of a 9 year-old holding mum's hand in just that spot pausing amid many people - an enthusiastic crowded space - in 1951. "I have no wish to return to that time. I'd rather be in the now and the future" I thought. But I liked the thought of having been there long ago. 

So...the changing fabric, population and demography of our city, Birmingham, and other cities, the implosion of empire, the blatantly diverging fortunes of rich and poor, automation, artificial intelligence and the spreading role of decisions by algorithms indecipherable by their authors, the vast harvesting of personal data, the end - almost - of posting letters in mailboxes, the ubiquity of screens and roving phones, the hours spent dealing - over the phone - with energy service companies, the world wide web which I entered only in 1995, personal data harvesting, the dilution of place as a product of vast increases in the ease of transience "I'm both somewhere and anywhere",  identity politics "I'm a type on a bureaucratic check list which is useful to know, and I'm not at all which is also a lesson"; the tsunami of superficial distraction, but also my allotment, my continuing work with family, on getting the work of my stepfather  - Jack Hargreaves - restored and published, and also our project with his descendant family ("such a privilege") to give a a wider profile to the laic sculptor of Ano Korakiana, Aristeidis Metallinos (1908-1987), my involvement with local campaigns especially Handsworth Park, the Victoria Jubilee Allotments...

With our grandson, Oliver, on Plot 14 of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments (photo: Tim Hamilton)

... Black Patch Park and our small charity Handsworth Helping Hands,

Handsworth Helping Hands committee meeting

...our encounters with the law, my membership of 1000Elders and participation, as a subject, in research into healthy ageing, the growing up of our children, the arrival of our grandchildren, our homes in Handsworth, the Forest of Dean and Corfu, the boat Summersong, and, the long association with the Highlands from a childhood Christmas at Fasnakyle through the time my mother married again and went to live near Inverness for forty years, to go back to the 35 years before 1977, my childhood, my abrupt encounter aged 12, on a desk in the study of a schoolfriend's father of black and white photo's, in a hard backed book, of thin bodies bodies piled on trucks and being pushed by a bulldozer into a pit, and youth, my old travels on land and sea, sailing the Channel...

Sailing to France in Two Pearls in 1963 (photo: Barbara Hargreaves)

... the coast of Brittany, the Mediterranean from France to Greece, across the Atlantic in Young Tiger from the Canaries to the Caribbean, my time in America, the faces of those who loved me and taught me, long dead but ever in my mind, the panoply of art, literature, poetry, film, music, sculpture, design, architecture that educates me, and enriches my understanding, my ever-present confusions, vexations and perplexities…

I’m also re-reading – much more closely than in earlier years - Out of Town: A Life Relived on Television by Jack Hargreaves. Published in 1987

‘...this book, like my programmes – is concerned with those times, with the feeling of the old, small-farming life and the know-how of it’. The story my stepfather tells is of the time when his mother and father met in 1889 to 1929 when Jack would have been 18 - ‘until I left the farm to go to London University and read Veterinary Science’  

*** *** ***
There can hardly be a citrus tree on the whole island of Corfu that is not now infested and blighted by citrus scale insects, which over the last two years have settled in numberless scores on the underside of every young leaf, sucking its sap to access its sugar, bringing black mould to the leaves' upper surfaces. We are almost entirely bereft of once plentiful oranges and lemons. We see no end in sight for this grievous blight.

Our orange tree struggling against citrus scale insect infestation, beside three more similarly affected lemon trees

Some cut down their citrus trees. Others pollard them severely. Many paint the tree trunks with asvesti (white wash) but these insects do not travel up the trees from the ground. They move through the air on broad vectors across large areas. The insects, sometimes in a symbiotic relationship with ants, return as soon as new leaf shoots appear. Some spray with insecticide, which works temporarily but is not good for the fruit. We try regular spraying of non-toxic olive oil soap solution under the leaves. It works a little. So far we have avoided the blackened waste that has afflicted some trees we see in passing. We've heard that Bayer have a systemic insecticide applied to the soil around the roots which kills to insects leaving the fruit 'safe' after 3 weeks, and lasting a year. We are considering this option. Meantime we maintain the soap solution spraying with a pump action garden spray. Naturalist friends say there may be a chance of the trees learning to resist the harm caused to the vital photo-synthesis of leaves by insects and mould. They also say that a predator on scale insects may emerge. This is a low visibility catastrophe affecting tens of thousands of lemon and orange trees on Corfu and surely elsewhere. I'm always pleased when travelling on the island I see, now and then, a citrus tree bearing fruit, it's leaves unaffected and healthy. I saw a tree full of oranges in a garden on high ground in a village west of Agros a few days ago. Is it are resistant species? Have the pest insects not yet arrived? Waiting like a evil character in the wings is the olive tree plague Xylella Fastidiosa.

A memory in black and white

Our Christmas card was posted on the Ano Korakiana website...

Ευχές

Γράφει ο/η Κβκ

25.12.13

Mother Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra in Winter Καλά Χριστούγεννα  HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ANO KORAKIANA ~ GOOD NEW YEAR 2014  SIMON AND LINDA, RICHARD, AMY AND ALL +OSCAR, THE DOG

Victorian aristocracy, including the Queen herself, embraced the Scottish landscape - thanks in part to the new railway. Dr Johnson was more critical. But he and Boswell travelled to the Hebrides before Romanticism trained the lowland eye to delight in highland scenery and railways made them easy to visit from the cities of the south. It was depicted as a wild heather-strewn wilderness. In fact it's an enormous park, stocked with ornamental fauna to shoot, paint or photograph; and now every track that doesn't pass under Forestry Commission plantations can be viewed from the air via Google maps. Does this make me love it less?

I'm not an explorer here, more a traveller, even a life-long tourist, inheriting the safety of the land's long habitation by people who made roads and place markers for centuries before the Victorians, let alone me, coming first to the Highlands in 1949 on the sleeper from King's Cross to spend Easter with my aunt at Fasnakyle, her home beyond Cannich, in Glen Affric, and later to celebrate a magical Christmas (in this photo I found at Am Baile, Bay and I are in the middle row, left and right of the tree - Bay just in front of Father Christmas).

My aunt had hired a film projector and we all sat down to watch Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. We and the rest of the children were laughing so loud and so continuously, one or two little ones had to disappear to be sick before rejoining the general hilarity. (It's so good to have help identifying the others in the picture and hoping they also remember all that laughing at slapstick custard pies and silly walks from so long ago). Then Father Christmas - the estate's head ghillie (I believe), I was told years later when I no longer entirely believed in Santa Claus, arrived - and presents were handed out to all after which my aunt organised us to have a group photo with many calls to settle down and look serious just for the camera. This is why we show little sign of the excitement and joy that suffused us. I know I was fit to burst - needing one titter to set me off again.

The human past is part of the area's character - kingdoms, invasions, depravity and civilisation, even where the rigour of the landscape suggests wilderness, anyone with a little thought can see there's more wilderness in the blighted estates of our population-diminished cities than in this sublimely landscaped garden for the enjoyment of those with time to spare, good raincoats and midge repellent. It's true that in the depth of raw winter you're sensible, if stuck somewhere on a drifted road, to have a care to stay in your car and phone the rescue services

Quote from Am Baile: This is a Christmas party held at Fasnakyle House in the early 1950s for the children of employees on the Fasnakyle estate, Strathglass. The estate was owned at the time by Captain Clark. Four members of the Mitchell family have recently been identified in the photograph - Marcelle Mitchell and three of her daughters, Monique, Christine, and Lesley. Marcelle is the lady kneeling beside the little boy on the right hand side of the photograph. Monique is standing near the back, next to Father Christmas. Christine is in the second row. (She has a ribbon in her hair and her face is half hidden by the girl in front.) Lesley is the small blond girl in the front row, holding a present. The girls' father, Mr. William Mitchell B.E.M., was the General Foreman for Messrs John Cochrane & Sons, Ltd, the company who built the Hydro Electric dam in Glen Affric. A fourth sister, Lyn, was born in 1952.

A letter received 19 Oct 09:

 “Also in this picture are Margaret and Kenneth MacLennan, family of John MacLennan, (Johnny to guests, Jock to natives), who was head stalker at Fasnakyle. He succeeded his father, also John, to this position in l941.
Kenny is the little boy (2nd, front row, left, holding his present), he still lives
nearby on estate with his wife and family. Margaret (1st back row, left) has
married and moved away. Their mother Mary was caretaker for Fasnakyle Lodge. Beside Margaret is Lily Henderson whose sister Cathy is (2nd row right,
kneeling, nearly out of picture). Their father, James Henderson, also a stalker,
worked and lived on Fasnakyle Estate.

On 31 Oct 2011 I received this letter:

Dear Mr.Baddeley. I can identify two more people in the Christmas at Fasnakyle house photo. I loved the photo and was very touched to see the innocent faces that I shared a portion of my young life with. The little girl center right with the mask is Frances I think her mother is behind her to the right. I also knew Kenny Mclennan, the young boy to the left.We were all playmates at the time, living on the Fasnakyle estate. My parents were German immigrants who emigrated to Scotland in 1950 to work on the estate.
I was allowed to join them in 1952 and experienced one of those wonderful Christmas' at the Fasnakyle house, one year later than the photo. My father was the Chauffeur for Captain Clarke. The two men met during the British occupation in Northern Germany where my father acted as an interpreter for the British officers. The two men must have hit it off. A small reason may have been that they had something in common. My name was also Margot. My mother was the cook at the house. Frances and I went to school together in Cannich, she was a close friend and I have a school picture of her. What wonderful years they were. I think about them often...My life in the Fasnakyle House was a major event in my life and I am planning to take a trip there next year. I have not been back since 1955. Best wishes, Margot Luedke (Ludke)

Strathnairn in January 2012 - on many walks I'll not make more

*** *** ***
Clear skies for Christmas Day in Handsworth.

As Linda and Dot worked in the kitchen getting ready for lunch, I cycled with Oscar to our allotment and raised a couple of pounds of Jerusalem Artichokes from the clogging earth, washed them clean under the tap by the plot, and took them home to bake with the rest of our Christmas meal. Three generations of us gathered, and with crackers and a bombardment of poppers, sat down.

Lin and I, Christmas lunch - Richard's picture

I took my turn in washing up before, in falling dusk, my son-in-law and daughter and I and Oscar strolled about Handsworth Park, having the place almost to ourselves - an oasis of quiet amid the muted hum of traffic; the calling of duck and geese, black dots on the still water; window lights glimpsed through the branches of leafless trees. Oliver fought sleep so we did a second round of the pond getting home in darkness, to sit down again for Christmas pudding, flamed with blue-burning brandy, laced with cream. Oliver wakes. We rise and go next door where there's a coal fire and sparkling tree. We share presents. For me a jar of Marmite that'll last half a year, Patum Peperium pots, thermal underwear, chocolate and several police procedurals from other countries.

Oliver seemed to like his Christmas present - the toy cooker we've made out of a wooden locker left in the street and collected by Handsworth Helping Hands a few weeks ago. Washers, handle, nuts and bolts, hinges and screws came from a small ironmongers up the Lozells Road; cookware from Poundland; cooker rings, used DVDs; controls sawn from a discarded broom handle.  Into the evening the boy struggled to stay awake; the first Christmas he will remember? At last he, and then his father, fell asleep.

**** ****
Τα πρώτα Κάλαντα στην Άνω Κορακιάνα - The First Carols in Ano Korakiana

Τα πρώτα Κάλαντα ήχησαν ολίγον πρώιμα, χθες το απόγευμα, από παιδιά μικρών ηλικιών του χωριού και μάλιστα με τη συνοδεία οργάνων. Πολύγλωσσα ακούσματα, από τα παραδοσιακά κορακιανίτικα κάλαντα, έως και γνωστά ξένα χριστουγεννιάτικα κομμάτια, δημιούργησαν μια χαρούμενη ατμόσφαιρα με αρκετή δόση από «Βαβέλ». Η πρώτη Λειτουργία των Χριστουγέννων θα τελεστεί σήμερα το πρωί, παραμονή της εορτής, στο μοναστήρι του Αγίου Ονουφρίου, ως είθισται τα τελευταία χρόνια. Με λιγοστό εκκλησίασμα, ένα ψαλτήρι (και αυτό κατά τα δύο τρίτα κορακιανίτικο), αλλά και τέσσερεις ιερείς (παπα-Κώστας, παπα-Γιώργης, παπα-Αλέξανδρος και παπα-Πέτρος)…Κεκλεισμένων (λόγω κρύου) των θυρών, υπό το φως των κεριών και τη ζεστασιά μιας σόμπας. Στο απολείτουργο, η επίτροπος της μονής θα μας προσκαλέσει στο αρχονταρίκι για καφέ συνοδευόμενο με κονιάκ, ούζο και κουλούρια, ενώ ο εκ των ιερέων θα ανανεώσει το ραντεβού στον ίδιο τόπο, για την παραμονή των Φώτων. Υ.Γ.1.Μετά το αρχονταρίκι και τον εξωτερικό μαντρότοιχο της μονής, υπό επισκευή έχει τεθεί το καμπαναριό. 2.Φετινές Κορακιανίτικες παρουσίες: ο Γιώργος Κένταρχος και ο Γιώργος Μαρτζούκος στο ψαλτήρι, ο Γιάννης Κοντοστάνος στην επιστασία του ιερού και φυσικά ο παπα-Κώστας.

**** **** ****

'Σε σύγκριση με προηγούμενες χρονιές το γενικότερο κλίμα της εορτής στο χωριό θα είναι εμφανώς συγκρατημένο, λόγω και της δύσκολης συγκυρίας' - 'Compared to previous years the overall tone of the celebration in the village will be visibly restrained, because of the difficult times'

So Brin Croft is up for sale

Brin Croft and Brin Rock beyond

On Monday 22 July my mum's house, which Lin and I are clearing next week, will be officially for sale. Once Brin Croft is gone I'll probably not go to the Highlands again.

The Farnack runs below Brin Croft

I've been visiting since 1950.

Christmas at Fasnakyle

What an evening! I was so delighted to find this record of the Christmas party held at Fasnakyle House by my aunt and uncle in about 1950. Victorian aristocracy including Queen Victoria embraced the Scottish landscape. Dr Johnson was more critical. But he and Boswell travelled to the Hebrides before Romanticism trained the lowland eye to delight in highland scenery and railways made them easy to visit from the cities of the south. It was depicted as a wild heather-strewn wilderness.
In fact it's an enormous park, stocked with ornamental fauna to shoot, paint or photograph; and now every track that doesn't pass under Forestry Commission plantations can be viewed from the air via Google maps. Does this make me love it less? I'm not an explorer here, more a traveller, even a life-long tourist, inheriting the safety of the land's long habitation by people who made roads and place markers for centuries before the Victorians, let alone me, coming first to the Highlands in 1949 on the sleeper from King's Cross to spend Easter with my aunt Margot at Fasnakyle, her home beyond Cannich, in Glen Affric, and later to celebrate a magical Christmas (in this photo I found at Am Baile, Bay and I are in the middle row, left and right of the tree - Bay just in front of Father Christmas). My aunt had hired a film projector and we all sat down to watch Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. We and the rest of the children were laughing so loud and so continuously, one or two little ones had to disappear to be sick before rejoining the general hilarity. (It's so good to have help identifying the others in the picture and hoping they also remember all that laughing at slapstick custard pies and silly walks from so long ago). Then Father Christmas - the estate's head ghillie (I believe), I was told years later when I no longer entirely believed in Santa Claus, arrived - and presents were handed out to all after which my aunt organised us to have a group photo with many calls to settle down and look serious just for the camera. This is why we show little signs of the excitement and joy that suffused us. In fact I know I was fit to burst - needing one titter to set me off again. The human past is part of the area's character - kingdoms, invasions, depravity and civilisation, even where the rigour of the landscape suggests wilderness, anyone with a little thought can see there's more wilderness in the blighted estates of our population-diminished cities than in this sublimely landscaped garden for the enjoyment of those with time to spare, good raincoats and midge repellent.
It's true that in the depth of raw winter you're sensible, if stuck somewhere on a drifted road, to have a care to stay in your car and phone the rescue services www.ambaile.org.uk/en/item/item_photograph.jsp?item_id=3621 Quote from Am Baile: This is a Christmas party held at Fasnakyle House in the early 1950s for the children of employees on the Fasnakyle estate, Strathglass. The estate was owned at the time by Captain Clark. Four members of the Mitchell family have recently been identified in the photograph - Marcelle Mitchell and three of her daughters, Monique, Christine, and Lesley. Marcelle is the lady kneeling beside the little boy on the right hand side of the photograph. Monique is standing near the back, next to Father Christmas. Christine is in the second row. (She has a ribbon in her hair and her face is half hidden by the girl in front.) Lesley is the small blond girl in the front row, holding a present. The girls' father, Mr. William Mitchell B.E.M., was the General Foreman for Messrs John Cochrane & Sons, Ltd, the company who built the Hydro Electric dam in Glen Affric. A fourth sister, Lyn, was born in 1952. A letter received 19 Oct 09: “Also in this picture are Margaret and Kenneth MacLennan, family of John MacLennan, (Johnny to guests, Jock to natives), who was head stalker at Fasnakyle. He succeeded his father, also John, to this position in l941. Kenny is the little boy (2nd, front row, left, holding his present), he still lives nearby on estate with his wife and family. Margaret (1st back row, left) has married and moved away. Their mother Mary was caretaker for Fasnakyle Lodge. Beside Margaret is Lily Henderson whose sister Cathy is (2nd row right, kneeling, nearly out of picture). Their father, James Henderson, also a stalker, worked and lived on Fasnakyle Estate.
 On 31 Oct 2011 I received this very interesting letter: Dear Mr.Baddeley. I can identify two more people in the Christmas at Fasnakyle house photo. I loved the photo and was very touched to see the innocent faces that I shared a portion of my young life with. The little girl center right with the mask is Frances I think her mother is behind her to the right. I also knew Kenny Mclennan, the young boy to the left.We were all playmates at the time, living on the Fasnakyle estate. My parents were German immigrants who emigrated to Scotland in 1950 to work on the estate. I was allowed to join them in 1952 and experienced one of those wonderful Christmas' at the Fasnakyle house, one year later than the photo. My father was the chauffeur for Captain Clarke. The two men met during the British occupation in Northern Germany where my father acted as an interpreter for the British officers. The two men must have hit it off. A small reason may have been that they had something in common. My name was also Margot. My mother was the cook at the house. Frances and I went to school together in Cannich, she was a close friend and I have a school picture of her. What wonderful years they were. I think about them often...My life in the Fasnakyle House was a major event in my life and I am planning to take a trip there next year. I have not been back since 1955. Best wishes, Margot Luedke (Ludke)

Walking in Strathnairn

Last page of the estate agent's brochure

**** ****
Amy came round with Oliver on her way to work. We're babysitting while she's on duty.
"It'll be the hottest day of the year so far"
"Maybe we'll go to the park"

Linda, Oliver and Amy in the garden at Handsworth

I've just finished clearing yet more ivy intertwined with a climbing rose and honeysuckle and replaced the collapsed and rotting frame that supported this exuberant mingling of shrubs, using a few plastic ties to guide the disentangled branches.

The Moray Firth

Yesterday I drove my mother and the dogs down to the Moray shore where an abandoned road runs a mile beside the firth towards Inverness. It was chilly and calm; easy to hear the cries of waders, quieter at high tide. We recalled things that happened, especially Christmas 1952 at my aunt's home, Fasnakyle, far up Glen Affric, Cannich children laughing fit to die at the Chaplin films she'd shown on a specially hired projector, and the head gillie come as Father Christmas with presents in a great sack for everyone, and snow on snow, overflowing the banks of the Beauly, running black and deep beside the house.