Power cuts in Ano Korakiana

Kostas Apergis - Κώστας Απέργης - was grumbling on the Ano Korakiana website last Thursday about the power cuts that leave the village without lights or heat for cooking, and even without tap water, while his friend Thanassis has added a note - από μια άλλη άποψη - that these inconveniences direct neighbours back to earlier forms of light and heat and the inclination to help one another.

Εωσφόρος ονομάζεται αυτός που αναγγέλλει τον ερχομό της αυγής (έω-αυγή+φέρω), δηλαδή ο πλανήτης Αφροδίτη, ο Αυγερινός που λέμε. Κατά τη χριστιανική διδασκαλία ήταν επικεφαλής των αγγέλων, που όμως λόγω αλαζονείας και υπερηφανείας εξέπεσε στην τάξη των δαιμόνων και έγινε διάβολος, ο Βεεζελβούλ.
Η ΔΕΗ, όπως όλοι γνωρίζουμε, έχει καθήκον να μας τροφοδοτεί με ηλεκτρικό ρεύμα, γι΄ αυτό άλλωστε την πληρώνουμε και μάλιστα καλά.
Για να εξασφαλίζει την ομαλή τροφοδοσία ρεύματος στους καταναλωτές της, διαθέτει τεχνικά συνεργεία, τα οποία προβαίνουν σε όλες εκείνες τις απαιτούμενες ενέργειες προς τούτο.
Τα τελευταία χρόνια κατά τη διάρκεια καιρικών φαινομένων έντονων όπως βροχή, αέρας, αστραπόβροντα η Κορακιάνα μένει χωρίς ρεύμα για λίγο ή συνήθως περισσότερο χρόνο, με ότι συνέπειες έχει αυτό σε άλλους τομείς π.χ. στο υδραγωγείο, ενώ στη νότια μέση Κέρκυρα τα φώτα πάντα συνεχίζουν να λάμπουν! Να αποδώσουμε το φαινόμενο στο διάολο της Κορακιάνας ή σ΄αυτόν της ΔΕΗ;

Σημείωση ιστοσελίδας: από μια άλλη άποψη, η παρατεταμένη διακοπή ηλεκτρικού ρεύματος γύρισε για λίγο τη σελίδα της καθημερινότητάς μας. Η πρόβα της Χορωδίας έγινε υπό το φως των σύγχρονων "λαδοφωτιών" (τα κινητά τηλέφωνα φέρουν και φωτισμό), και το κέρασμα της Κατερίνας και της Σοφίας έγινε στο σκοτάδι. Η χαρτοπαιξία στο καφενείο έδωσε τη θέση της σε συζήτηση υπό το φως των κεριών, ενώ η τηλεόραση στο σπίτι αντικαταστάθηκε για λίγο από το παλιό τρανζιστοράκι. Τέλος, οι παλαιότεροι θυμήθηκαν ότι πρώτο τους μέλημα τα παλιά τα χρόνια, μόλις επέστρεφαν από το χωράφι το σούρουπο, ήταν να ζητήσουν από το γείτονα ένα απόδαυλο για να ανάψουν το τζάκι τους, εάν δεν είχαν προνοήσει για κανένα μισαναμένο κάρβουνο στις στάχτες. Και βέβαια, το αντιφέγγισμα του ουρανού, παρά τη βαρειά συννεφιά, απέτρεψε από την ανάγκη της χρήσης απόδαυλων για το περπάτημα στο δρόμο...

(My rough translation) Lucifer - Εωσφόροςis - announces the coming of dawn, between the planet Venus and the Morning Star. In Christian teaching he was at the head of the angels, but because of his arrogance and pride was cast down and became Beelzebub -Βεεζελβούλ. The PPC (The Public Power Corporation of Greece) - ΔΕΗ - as we all know, has a duty to supply us with electricity. We pay good money for their service. They are there to give consumers a reliable supply of electricity. They have technical workshops to do all that's needed to ensure that. But in recent years during heavy rain, strong winds and lightning, Ano Korakiana has been left without power - sometimes briefly but often for long periods, causing us to lose power for the pumping stations so that the village is without clean water, while further south the lights remain on across Corfu! Is the PPC just telling Korakianas they can go to hell? (note: Kostas is actually ruder - Να αποδώσουμε το φαινόμενο στο διάολο της Κορακιάνας ή σ΄αυτόν της ΔΕΗ;

Note from Thanassis: From another viewpoint, prolonged blackout briefly turns the page on our daily lives. The choir rehearsed by the light of modern inventions - 'ladofotion' - ? cell phones and torches, and Catherine's and Sophia's hospitality (treat) was enjoyed in the dark. Gambling at the kafeneion gave way to discussion under candlelight while TV at home was briefly replaced by old transistor radios. Finally, the oldest of us recalled that their first concern in the past, as soon as they returned from the fields at nightfall, was to ask their neighbour for a glowing ember to light their stove, if they'd forgotten to leave enough coal to smoulder in the grate. And of course, the glow of the sky, despite pouring rain, prevented the need for torches when walking down the street ...

Να αποδώσουμε το φαινόμενο στο διάολο της Κορακιάνας ή σ΄αυτόν της ΔΕΗ;

In the village last Feb I was in Mark and Sally's house one evening: 

...Their house cosy with plentiful candles, Mark, gazing beyond the spacious porch said
“There are lights over to the west” proving the point.
The power came on again but we lost WiFi for a few minutes. As I said goodnight the house lights stayed on, but street lights were out – on a separate supply which also powers the pumps that bring water to the village. Back at 208 I nudged our largest bowls below the gutter pipes; rainwater for washing and flushing; prepared night lights, candles and matches and a small propane stove. I’ve got bottled water for tea – and wine to drink. Reminded by loss of water and power, something familiar at this time of year, Sally and I had been discussing how we’d all experience shortages in the ‘crisis’ – the winter weather’s not unfamiliar but now it's got the feel of a dirge, stirring apprehensions. 

...and here's mention on the village website on 3 Dec 2009 of the same recurring problem

Η προχθεσινή βροχόπτωση, που συνδυάστηκε με δυνατό αέρα, ανέδειξε για μια ακόμη φορά ένα πρόβλημα που ταλανίζει το χωριό μας, χρόνια τώρα. Κάθε φορά που οι καιρικές συνθήκες είναι έντονες, ο οικισμός ξεμένει από …ηλεκτρικό ρεύμα. 

The day before rainfall, combined with strong winds, highlighted once again a problem plaguing our village for years. Whenever the weather is severe, the settlement finds itaelf...running out of electricity.

Gale at Garitsa

*** *** ***
Yesterday the first big removal from Brin Croft, an oil painting that has hung behind my mother's chair all the five years she's been here, after her move from Mains of Faillie in 2006. It's lovely. A painting by Guthrie of Fiona, my step-sister's great grandmother.

In the quotidian language of probate, it's been valued for the estate and can now be moved out. I've put another picture in its place but the wall looks empty. Thus we will disassemble Mum's things, gradually changing everything. Thank goodness the house feels so entirely without her as though she's got better things to be doing than hanging around here. To while the time I wrote an obit in case a local paper wants one:

1917: Theodora Barbara with her mother and grandmother

Our mother died at Brin Croft, Inverarnie at teatime on 1 November aged 95. She was born Theodora Barbara Sumner Maine in London in 1917. Like her mum she was a debutante, but had little taste for 'the season'.

Mum's memories: recalling the Blitz

She became a photographer, journalist and publisher. In 1946 she reported from occupied Vienna as a war correspondent for Vogue. She continued a career in Fleet Street as editor of women’s magazines and the first women’s editor of Farmers Weekly. She had two children, Simon and Bay - "my pigeon pair" - by her first marriage to the diplomat John Baddeley CMG, followed by a long liaison with the country broadcaster Jack Hargreaves OBE. In 1965 she married Angus Burnett Stuart, head of Thompson Regional Newspapers, adding his two stepdaughters, Fiona and Jennifer to her family. In the 1950s and early ‘60s she published, edited, commissioned and part-authored a range of country-life books on smallholding, cookery, collecting and restoring old junk (long before these became widespread hobbies), pressure-cooking and deep-freezing (when these were still novel in the home). Moving to the Highlands on her husband’s retirement, she continued her publishing work as well as sharing Angus’ love of fishing. He was a founder of the Highland Field Sports Fair at Moy the last thirty years. Her sister Margot had long lived locally, at Cannich then Forres. Angus and Barbara settled in Strathnairn at Mains of Faillie near Daviot.

Mum with her daughter, Bay, great granddaughter, Sydney and granddaughter Susie

She worked for various local causes including the Samaritans and created a home for more and more grandchildren and eventually great grandchildren. For most of them the Highlands became a refuge of constant pleasure and happy memories, of dreich winter snow, wind and rain, chilly summer swims, climbs and long walks with many dogs. When Angus died in 2005 in his own home, Barbara, at the age of 88, managed the move to her last home at Brin Croft. She continued to take part in community activity; was an ardent friend of Eden Court Theatre, a gardener and traveller - to many parts of Europe, to Russia, Palestine and Israel, Greece, Morocco and Egypt, the USA, India and the Far East. She was one of those fortunate people whose bodies gave out before their minds, lucid until three days before she passed away, her children at her bedside in her own home. She once said, as she found herself relying more and more on sticks and a wheelchair, “Growing old is not for the young. It’s ruddy hard work!” She was a prolific reader; loved music with no distinction between genres; nurtured long close friendships with relatives and non-relatives.

Mum with great grandson, Oliver, granddaughter, Amy and son, Simon 

She was a companion, listener and consoler. Her five years' carer, Sharon Brown, told of how early this year, she wheeled Barbara into the big supermarket outside town, where her first words in the electronics section were “I want the best iPad you’ve got!’ - a great span from touch-typing and shorthand in her twenties, to Skype, Google and Wikipedia in her nineties. She loved life; more especially she loved the rivers, tracks, woods and hills of Inverness-shire, especially the Findhorn about which she left files of notes. Four chickens were bought and housed just outside Brin Croft this August, providing entertainment for her great grandchildren and eggs for her omelets. Almost until her last days she was planning further projects; death no more than something in her way. 

Mum fishing for shark

*** *** ***
Saturday afternoon: Beth, Tracy's daughter, was waiting on us at the Dores Inn. She's a sweet girl. Liz and she hugged and chatted after she'd bought us a cider and, for me a half pint of Ossian, a pleasant flavoured real ale. The pub was warm, welcoming; busy with Saturday lunching into the late afternoon. Liz drove me down the rough lane from Brin Croft onto the road from Tombreck over the Nairn to the cross-roads, then left up the strath past Tordarroch farmstead, towards Dunlichity, over familiar rises and familiar turns close beside loch a'Chlachain - mum called it Clacken - round a long bend to the wooded banks of loch Duntelchaig. the gentle heights of Creag Bhuidhe luminous with light snow under winter sun, achingly beautiful. Then through the muir over two grids by high Loch Ashie reflecting the flawless blue. The menu was easy. i ordered an interesting vegetable soup and brown bread and a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich. We'd walked where I've walked for years and years the sun blazing on the glittering water of the Great Glen, the great rift of Loch Ness that divides the Highlands, dazzling even through the tall pines, spangling layers of pine needled earth beside our easy track beyond the pebble shore between Dores and Tor Point, the ageless outline of hills dipping into Loch Ness. There's Meall Fuar-mhonaidh. I saw its steep sugar-loaf summit thoroughly snow covered like a Christmas cake when I was 10; first time in the Highlands, for the world, which seemed to lie before me like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new.  
"This is a clearance for my sadness, Liz"
She talked blithely, like Amy, about all sorts of things, a palliation for the inescapable ache of this lovely landscape, trailing away headland by headland to drab Fort Augustus. Lulu yelled at me for a stick. I threw it out twenty feet into the chilly water of the loch and in she leapt, swimming as ever like a little champion, our otter, brought it back and brushed the wet stick against the back of our legs, asking us "throw again, and again!" I argued with Liz about democracy, about trusting it enough to vote as she made familiar generalisations about 'politicians' and 'the system'.
We returned in the dusk, a few coming cars shining up the roadside birch, footlights on a winter's tale. Brin Croft was in darkness; our tyres crunching on gravel sparkling with hoarfrost crystals.
"Doing this is good" I said "I get to cover the old ground. But I don't see how I'll be coming back to the Highlands"
"I love it here. I want to live here" said Liz "so does Amy"
"So you might apply for a job?"
"Oh yeah. It's agreed."
The dogs leap from the opened boot. Heeling us as we shuffle into the warmth of the house.
"Cup of tea, One sugar?"
"Yeah. Cup of tea."
** ** ** ** **
Jim Potts has dug out a newspaper cutting for Corfu Blues in which Gerald Durrell returned to Corfu in 1987 half a century after his and his family's legendary childhood there in the 1930s. I've visited and revisited this dismal falling off; nothing is novel. But like Maria Strani-Potts' recent Pimping of Panorea, Durrell's words resonate now as they did 25 years ago:

I have had a most extraordinary affair of the heart. It started when I was eight years old and I fell deeply and irrevocably in love with a ravishing creature who was mature and beautiful. She gave me joy, brightness, freedom of spirit and opened my eyes to beauty, scents, colours, knowledge, love and laughter.
Her name was Kerkyra, the island of Corfu, and she is probably several million years old.
Going back to her recently was like paying a visit to the most beautiful woman in the world suffering from an acute and probably terminal case of leprosy – commonly called tourism.

It is, of course, ridiculous to expect the places of your youth to remain unchanged while you yourself get older and more withered but somehow, with land and seascapes, if they are untarnished by man you expect them to be immutable, like a beautiful painting.
“Never go back to a place where you were happy,” my brother Larry once said to me, and it is an offered fruit of wisdom with a kernel of bitterness enshrined in it, for have been back to many places where I have been happy and been happy again.
But the place that gave me the greatest joy and enchantment was Corfu and so I have been back many ties and suffered as I watched her demise.
Tourism is a curious modern disease. It attacks the shoeless man, the man of meagre wealth and the bloated man of affluence, whereupon it becomes an epidemic like the Black Death that stalked through Europe in the Middle Ages. It now ranges all over the world.
The people of Corfu were blessed with a magnificent, magical inheritance, an island of staggering beauty, probably one of the most beautiful islands in the whole of the Mediterranean. What they have done with it is vandalism beyond belief.

Barbati in north west Corfu before  the arrival of Lopákhin

All this is true. All this has happened. I've been over it again and again - chatted happily about it with Jim and Maria last February at Rouvas. The world is full of Lopákhins who want to buy and Ranevskayas who, through their own incompetence, have to sell.

LOPAKHIN: I bought it. Wait a bit; don't hurry me; my head's in a whirl; I can't speak. . [Laughing] When we got to the sale, Derigánof was there already. Leoníd Andréyitch had only fifteen hundred pounds, and Derigánof bid three thousand more than the mortgage right away. When I saw how things stood, I went for him and bid four thousand. He said four thousand five hundred. I said five thousand five hundred. He went up by five hundreds, you see, and I went up by thousands...Well, it was soon over. I bid nine thousand more than the mortgage, and got it; and now the cherry orchard is mine! Mine! [Laughing] Heavens alive! Just think of it! The cherry orchard is mine! Tell me that I'm drunk; tell me that I'm off my head; tell me that it's all a dream!...[Stamping his feet] Don't laugh at me! If only my father and my grandfather could rise from their graves and see the whole affair, how their Yermolái, their flogged and ignorant Yermolái, who used to run about barefooted in the winter, how this same Yermolái had bought a property that hasn't its equal for beauty anywhere in the whole world! I have bought the property where my father and grandfather were slaves, where they weren't even allowed into the kitchen. I'm asleep, it's only a vision, it isn't real...'Tis the fruit of imagination, wrapped in the mists of ignorance. [Picking up a set of keys] She's thrown down her keys; she wants to show that she's no longer mistress here. [Jingling them together] Well, what's the odds? [Musicians can be heard tuning up] Hey, musicians play! I want to hear you. Come everyone and see Yermolái Lopákhin lay his axe to the cherry orchard, come and see the trees fall down! We'll fill the place with villas; our grandsons and great-grandsons shall see a new life here....Strike up, music!

"...come and see the trees fall down! We'll fill the place with villas" What remains of the island's cherry orchards is yet amazing. What's happened isn't as black and white as Durrell writes it - the old man remembering and lamenting a childhood idyll; what happened isn't bad or good in that easy sense. It's both tragedy and comedy as Chekov intended his wonderful play to be, and about which audience, directors and critics have debated since.

Sunrise after rain in Corfu

"If you want to find a place" said my stepfather 'be sure to choose somewhere already ruined".
Well yes indeed. That's Corfu. I embrace with such gratitude the happiness that yet remains here; that we have found in this place. Its beauty, joy, love, light, come only in part from the precious remains of its ravished landscape – worst of all the littered shores – but from the people we know here. Without them, like Scotland, as anywhere, there would be no happiness.

At Brin Croft

New York Times Editorial 30/11/12:

What’s Missing in the Latest Greek Bailout...The new Greek bailout deal agreed to Tuesday by eurozone finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund is a clear improvement over earlier deals. It recognizes that Greece’s current and projected ratios of debt to output are unsustainable. It prescribes useful steps to lower that ratio, including lower interest rates on loans from Greece’s European partners, longer bond maturities and a plan for Athens to buy back and retire some of its heavily discounted bonds. Regrettably, it excludes more effective tools, like actual debt write-downs, which Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, finds politically unpalatable. And in deference to Ms. Merkel, the deal postpones some of the promised relief until after German elections next September. But its biggest mistake is conditioning relief on maintaining fiscal austerity.....

I dreamed that austerity would go on for ever. That Athens would shrink to the size it was in the 19th century, and the sprawling suburbs of all the Republic's cities would shrink to their core, their deadly suburbs and strip malls falling into decay, becoming the fields and woods they destroyed; that Greece with all Europe and the world would utterly rebalance urban-rural relationships; reducing the human population to ancient proportions over the next century. My stepfather wished it. I wish it.

Did they think about the skylarks when they built Mayfair
on the grazings that ran down to the Shepherd’s Market? 

Did they worry about the snipe when they drained the marshes
behind St.James’s Palace to build Belgravia?

Where did the kite go when they dug the London sewers?

Do the piles they drove down through the beaver’s dam hold
firm the supermarket in Newbury High Street?

Who cooked the big trout that lay under the village bridge
at Wandsworth?  Who feasted on the last salmon that was
netted at Tower Hamlets?

Now they come to put central heating in the ploughman’s hovel.
They claim the sun that used to bake the hay.  And breathe
the breeze in which the pointing dog caught a hundred scents.

They walk out in trainers and T-shirts that say “Save the
Rain Forest”.

“Stand back!” they say.  “We have a right to walk where we please!”
But we look where they trod before and shudder for what
follows in their footsteps.

I said I must write a warning.  But I was angry and - as the
Japanese say - to be angry is only to make yourself ridiculous.

So we will live out our days in the cracks between the
concrete.  And then they will pour cement on top of us.*

*'Love of the country ~ ode to a book I never wrote' written in 1993 by my stepfather Jack Hargreaves (1911-1994) and probably - forgive me - not intended to be public.

At Solva with Jack

To a rural townie like me this 'ode' of Jack's is contradictory, as I suspect he was well aware. He denigrates people who demonstrate on behalf of rain forests. Yet who, other than illegal loggers and land hungry peasants, does not care about their degradation? He's vexed at people who buy rural labourers' cottages to convert into comfortable second homes - yet all my life with him we switched to and fro between the city where Jack, when he was not filming, did much of his work and earned his living, and the country where we had beautifully converted homes - in Berkshire, Hampshire and then Dorset. I have no doubt that Jack knew our way of living - as is often the case with all but the most dedicated of self-sufficient farmers - contributed to the passing of the way of life he spent thirty years recording on television. That he was entertaining rather than bleak was his gift as an entertainer. All his life JH respected people who lived off the land though they lived by modern agricultural methods, as few cannot. He knew a tiny percentage of those who reside in the countryside actually live off the land; that his stewardship of fowl, cattle, ponies and his kitchen smallholding, was a drop in an ocean; satisfying, even beloved props, for Out of Town. He once observed - earning a kick below the table from my mother - that my grandmother's post-war dairy farm (where I was born) was a 'hobby farm', surviving on subsidy - "a milk lorry winding slowly along country lanes collecting one or two churns from small farms on its daily round, adding a good three pennies to every urban housewife's pint." His position was contradictory. I am unsure what else it could have been.
*** ***
Hurrah for hybridity! Intriguing reading from June Samaras' ever valued Google Group hellas-greece on Greek ethnicity in America, especially when I ponder the diversity of my wider family - Jewish, Greek - Athenian and Cypriot - South African, Turkish, working class, middle and upper middle class, English, Scots, Welsh - an academic paper by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Ohio State University...When “Second Generation” Narratives and Hollywood Meet: Making Ethnicity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding , MELUS, Volume 37, Number 4 (Winter 2012) pp.139-163

....Thus the film reminds audiences that the pursuit of freedom is far more complicated than simply a matter of choice. Obligations lurk in social relations, becom-ing particularly visible in the interface between the dominant society and American ethnics with histories of collectivism such as Greek Americans. They also operate when families and communities invest in the social reproduction of ethnicity. The film values the striving for autonomy while at the same time pointing to the limitations surrounding this ideal. It is compelling to watch because it narrates social life as a drama of longing for autonomy and acknowledging the existence of forces that curtail it. The American ideal of autonomy is not achieved, and it may even be impossible to achieve in a culturally diverse society.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding envisions ethnicity in the multicultural polity by promoting the value of ethnicity while also acknowledging its constraining function. p.157

My take on the polyglot - Internal Polity and Governmentality:

Thirty years ago Michel Foucault (1965) described the spontaneous appearance in the middle ages of the ship of fools. This image reflected alarm among the burghers of well-ordered medieval towns at the movement within their streets and outside their walls of leprous, itinerant and destitute people. From the findings that such people had been the subjects of increasingly attentive monitoring, regulation, sometimes incarceration and later institutionalisation, Foucault showed how disorder engenders order and elaborated an evolving reciprocity between forms of madness and forms of civilisation. This exegesis led me thereafter to suspect concerns I found myself harbouring about disorder in the world. Irritation at litter insinuated a gap in my reasoning. Exasperation at noise implied a failure of logic. Fear of crime might include flawed ratiocination. All anxiety evoked by external events has had to be checked for its possible source in too complacent a need for order. Thus Foucault’s archaeology engendered a reflexive distrust of any impulse in myself to define a polity - local or global - that excluded the aberrant. I do not mean differences absorbed by a liberal civility educated to abhor inhibition of the cosmopolitan. Foucault’s lesson applies where those fine feelings no longer rule and anxiety about otherness and what cannot be understood edges into fear or worse. “Madness and Civilisation” served as constitutional therapy, partially immunising me against projecting fears in myself on to strangers and the strange, and creating a setting for an internal politics that would entertain no appreciative judgement about what was outside without a comparable appreciation of what was inside. Foucault (1978) wrote of government as an art that can be discerned in the way people learned to govern themselves, accept government and govern others. His concept of "governmentality” elides “government” and “mentality”, providing a term that embraces psychology and politics and assumes a continuity between the rule of self, household and state that may be interrupted and require reinvention in crises. It embraces the historical process of government in external polities and the biographical process of self-government in internal polities (Baddeley 1995)....from Governmentality in Brian Loader (ed.) (1997) The Governance of Cyberspace (London:Routledge) (5) 64-96

'Cher Michel. Pouvez-vous m'aider avec un problème...'

X to Y:

Here's the link to that piece. You're very right that we're still only at the beginning of this business. Until Greece elects a Thatcher - and Greeks would have to grow a spine first in order to do that - no-one will be there to tell the hoi-polloi that the happy days of anemelia (Greek for carelessness) are over and we need to radically downsize our expectations. The proletariat are proletariat and no amount of feel-good sloganeering and post-dictatorship populist govts will change the fact that if you work as a plumber you don't get two houses and three cars (except if you were a farmer during the Delors packets in the mid-90s in which case you have that and sex-tourism to Bangkok). Sounds harsh, I know, but it points to the other great danger of our commodified consumerist culture: that the have-nots are not only exposed but full-frontally assaulted by what the haves have. The walls have come down from around the villas, and they have migrated to the corner of our living room inside our TV sets. Again, many thanks for your valuable insight. All best. X

Y to X:

I would be careful about wishing for a Thatcher. She sent inequality soaring to pre-war levels, ruined a generation and was allowed to do so by our rather pitiful trade unions. She created the economic conditions we now face by turning Britain into a giant hedge fund - all financial bubble and no substance. Thanks to her and latterly to Blair/Brown, we are as badly exposed to the crisis as any country in the World. Ultimately, that's capitalism; increasingly speculative booms alongside increasingly vicious and globalized crises. I cannot see anything but despair in the Thatcher road I'm afraid and I honestly think the Greek working classes would have defeated her - as would the French for that matter. She only looked strong because the opposition was so weak. Cheers Y

X to Y:

Of course you're right, and Thatcher is not the way to go. But what I was trying to express was that we need someone of Thatcher's willpower to crush trade unions that are out of touch with where the world economy stands and where we stand with it in relation to our productivity and what we can contribute to the world economy. In the world economy, Greece's tourist sites and energy crossroads geography are its greatest assets. Not much else. The EU has pigeonholed our highly-educated workforce as becoming the economic bloc's middling white collar managers in the Balkans region and maybe even the Levant. But that's about it. The trade unions have nooooooooo clue of where the world is headed and where it's at now. They do not access the Internet even. Forgive me if I sound parochial (they don't access the Internet) :)

Y to X:

The big question is how one conceives of the world economy and what it should look like. Until now, it has been left exclusively to the rich and powerful (including a few Greeks), who have indulged themselves at the expense of everyone else for a generation and they are directly responsible for the crisis now. My question is, if not the trade unions, who will make them pay for their crimes? Put another way, the weaker the trade unions are, the more capitalism will be allowed to run rampant and the greater the eventual cost to the whole of society will be. A 'modernized' Greek economy based on longer working hours and lower wages is a recipe for misery and that is what would happen if the trade unions were smashed. David Harvey's work expresses this perspective most eloquently - his short book 'A brief history of neoliberalism' is well worth a read. Best Y

X to Y:

It's not about Greece though, is it? The average Greek worker has it a hell of a lot better than the average Chinese or Indonesian one. That is the tableau we're now playing on. As for the second juncture of your thinking which I interpret as self-regulation, it is to be hoped that the EU will be better at regulating Greek elite excess (I chortle as I write this, knowing how deeply we're scraping the barrel at this point) than the unions can be. The trade unions have never regulated the Greek elites. They have just sought to get a better deal for their workers. In so doing, they have only constrained the Greek elites minimally. The root of the problem is far far deeper. X

Y to X:

Well, that is true - and the average British worker has a far better wage than the average Greek. No doubt Gordon Brown will remind us of our privileges in that regard when people complain about falling working class living standards. At the same time, he will continue to indulge parasitic bankers and ignore rising relative inequality, which is the real source of misery and alienation in so-called developed economies. So, are we arguing for a race to the bottom, which is what the globalizers have wanted all along? In my view, the answer is for Chinese, African and Indonesian wages to rise and militant trade unionism will have an important role to play there. Contrary to what one might think, Chinese workers are becoming quite belligerent in that regard (see Bill Dunn's work), as are South Africans as ANC hegemony slowly starts to weaken. Re: the piece you sent I cannot honestly claim to be an expert in trade union matters - there's an industrial relations group in WBS who are - but I'll take the compliment and hope they don't see it! Best Y

Me to X: So now Y has said you can't have Mrs T who's it going to be? X: Dora... ;)

Me: Well now. That's interesting. She made a good job of being Mayor of Athens and she's got a feel for international politics. The camera likes her. Do you know something I don't – as to why that might be impossible or possible? Best S

X:...and she's as tough as thatcher. it's no secret that she's been groomed to be PM since she could walk. She's now waiting out Karamanlis to become so unpopular that she can step in and save ND from disaster... or so goes the scenario...X:

Me: I was looking back through my blog. DB came on my radar in November 2007 and she’s neither klepht nor diaspora. Simon

(Her speech at Oxford in November 2007 - about strengthening the capacity of the European Union to govern, rather than rule; a shrewd distinction) * * * European government's are faltering in exercising authority reminding me - painfully - of my flailing inadequacy as a father of teenagers in the 1990s. When our children rebelled I had nothing robust nor central to offer but love and frustration. We struggled to set boundaries, arguing furiously, apportioning blame. Our fragile centre just about held despite our inconsistencies. We'd take it in turn to drive around town waiting outside, even wandering into city nightclubs when they’d gone there under age. I’d threaten, uselessly, to sue managers for allowing under-age entry. Drugs were rife. We got the police out once when one child refused to come home. Then they turned 16 and we lost even more control clinging to the tattered moral authority given at the cost of constant endeavour - supported by regular conversations with equally frustrated teachers (who, oddly, liked them both a lot). From age 16 the banks took them with pressing offers of free loans, plastic cards and gifts for starting an account. To our complaints at this soliciting, bank employees, when you could reach them, would repeat “they’re adults now.” In law they were... Cut to 2009; one’s in the police – and good at it; the other designs websites - well. But talk about a rollercoaster ride – for them and us – and we’re a fairly boring respectable family of means. An unlikely authority on these shenanigans - a gay French intellectual of global fame - Michel Foucault - explored the links between government of self, household and state. He referred to governmentality. I've written about this. Thought about it. But writing and doing can be so separate - and certainly are for me. Foucault's thinking is often used as a way of analysing ingenious mechanisms of state control, but I would have loved to have sought that man's advice on parenting. "Cher Michel. Pouvez-vous m'aider avec un problème..." I like the subversion of seeking guidance from Foucault on family rule. It's too late now. We lost him in 1984. Now I hear my adult children playing piano when they drop round and my heart turns over (treat these revelations with discretion says the bourgeois in me – for their sakes. They never read my blog which is fine). So I suppose this was what I'm on about when I wrote ‘parents of Greece could stop this’. I suspect the Greek education system lacks the openness needed to even begin to deal with the ugly rebellious transition to modernity that is now the ordeal of growing up. For every enfuriatingly childish action by immature adolescents there's a counter reaction in the soulless world of turbo-capitalism (see Luttwak). How do you arm a young person with the personal and authoritative capacity for judgement that will enable them to navigate the moral wasteland that surrounds them, undermining them, undermining parents, schools and all those delicate linkages that make up Foucault's ideal of a robust connection between self, household and state? I'm not seeking scapegoats - they're everywhere. I'm searching for ways to hold the centre. Self-improvement is not of itself enough. There needs to be a domus - a household. And that household needs a firm link to the idea of a state. Each levers the other. Each can weaken the other. But what is the state today? From whence comes it's legitimacy and its contract with its citizens, and what do citizens do to confer that legitimacy when they struggle to exercise authority over their children? For me, for us, this is a storm part weathered - but at no small cost in wear and tear, and the horizon's got a cold sharp edge to it.

'I would now like to start looking at that dimension which I have called by that rather nasty word "governmentality". Let us suppose that "governing" is not the same thing as "reigning", that it is not the same thing as "commanding" or "making the law", let us suppose that governing is not the same thing as being a sovereign, a suzerain, being lord, being judge, being a general, owner, master, professor. Let us suppose that there is a specificity to what it is to govern and we must now find out a little what type of power is covered by this notion.' Michel Foucault. (2004). Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collège de France. 1977-1978. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. p. 119

Multiplicity not Ship of Fools

The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, creation, in 1986, of Bill Reid, comes as near as any piece of art to describing my world. I like the idea of a boat, but the much used image of the 'Ship of Fools' projects our private ugliness - looks and behaviour - as images of shared foolishness, but in the process enjoins mockery of the ugly, the poor, the maimed, the underclasses [Bosch's is the example I know from Foucault's 'Madness and Civilization' used on Psych 171 courses I taught long ago at Michigan]. It's too easy to see a ship crewed by others. Reid's figures, though mainly animals, are us - our polity. I crew this boat; may even aspire to advise its skipper. The image consoles when I'm despondent about democracy - the worst form of government except for the others. 'There is certainly no lack of activity in our little boat,' said Reid, 'but is there any purpose? Is the tall figure who may or may not be the Spirit of Haida Gwaii leading us, for we are all in the same boat, to a sheltered beach beyond the rim of the world ... or is he lost in a dream? The boat moves on anchored in the same place' freighted with creatures who bite and claw as they row. Not a grounded apolitical ship of fools, rather the discordant family of all living things striving to up-anchor and gain steerage amid the dangers of the sea, about which my mentor, Denys Rayner, wrote 'neither cruel nor kind ... Any apparent virtues it may have, and all its vices, are seen only in relation to the spirit of man who pits himself, in ships of his own building, against its insensate power.' (Preface to 'Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic' London:Kimber 1955)

In the bow Grizzly Bear faces Bear Mother, their cubs between them. Next is Beaver at home on the ocean floor hoarding the water and fish of the world; then Dogfish Woman with a hooked beak, gills on her cheeks and a pointed head; then Mouse Woman, guide to those passing from the human to the non-human domain. Raven steers. Beneath his wing is a grudging oarsman representing humans who labour to build and rebuild. Athwartships is Wolf with claws in Beaver’s back, his teeth in Eagle’s wing. Beneath Eagle is Frog. The hatted figure is the shaman Kilstlaai, holding a speaker’s staff topped by an Orca.

Unlike the Ship of Fools this boat is a descendant of Jason's Argo and the crews who shared in Ulysses' odyssey, comforting me with my ancestor's maxim 'Except the blind forces of Nature, there is nothing that moves in the world today that is not Greek in origin'. Reid's vessel, introduced to me by the political philosopher Jim Tully ('Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity' Cambridge, 1995), who places it on the cover of his book, inspired my favourite paper: Baddeley, S. (1995) 'Internal Polity' Human Relations, Vol. 48, No. 9, 1073-1103 (1995) hum.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/48/9/1073
Abstract: Repression has been a conditional means of civilizing the psyche, but in pluralistic democracies where diversity is valued, where assimilation is not a condition of citizenship and where aspirations are formed within consumerism, this road to self-understanding is unreliable. At a time when neither individualism nor collectivism encourage individuality, the idea of an internal polity enriches self-awareness, strengthening agency in the world. Perhaps.

* * *

While on mythic boats what of Argo? Here's the artist Engonopoulos' impression of her celebrity crew of argonauts - all progeny of Gods. Someone's sitting on the gunnels gazing at the sea smoking a cigarette (not in an enclosed space). Jason's staring ahead in shades, not exactly leading, but holding a fine steering oar. There's Heracles with a studded club; Orpheus with lyre, and some of the crew in the water, relaxing. Lovely blue. Lots of light. How is this relaxed company going to get all the way from Volos to Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea to steal the Golden Fleece? Perhaps they'll just chill out on the shores of the northern Aegean and make up a brilliant story about their adventures when they get home.

* * *
The ship and crew I really want to know more about is the Hercules - a two masted square rigged brig of 120 tons chartered in Genoa by Lord Noel Byron - a collier, therefore tubby, skippered by a Captain Scott - from whose decks the great poet sighted Zante and Cephalonia on 2 August 1823. Hercules carried Byron in company with Edward Trelawny, James Hamilton Browne, (author of an account of their voyage from Italy to Greece), Vitali, Count Pietro Gamba, Dr. Francesco Bruno, Constantine Skilitzy, the gondolier Tita Falcieri, the valet Fletcher and steward Lega Zambelli, several other servants, five horses, Byron's bulldog Moretto, and the Newfoundland dog Lyon. After several months wait at Cephalonia, Byron received a summons from Prince Alexander Mavrocordato to come at once to Missolonghi, with a request 'to co-operate...in the organization of western Greece.' The machinations that followed, made more confusing by separate accounts of the events up to Byron's death on the 19 April 1824, have not sullied the historical conclusion that the poet, though he did not die in battle, died for the freedom of Greece.

I would like also to know about the ships of Admiral Lascarina Bubulina of Spetses who fought in the Greek War of Independence, having been born in a Constantinople prison. In 1811, twice widowed, the mother of seven children, rich by inheritance from her husbands, Bouboulina managed to increase her fortune by astute trading, becoming partner in several Spetsiot vessels, building three of her own, including the Agamemnon - the first and largest Greek fighting ship of the 1821 War of Independence. I only learned this because she was mentioned in a commentary by Michael Cacoyannis explaining why Zorba called Madame Hortense 'Bouboulina'.