"Back to reality"

Dassia beach ~ "Oliver! To make castles you must add water to your sand"

I mistook the old bloke with a flat cap, a fag in his mouth, shuffling by my borrowed chair in the airport car park, for a local.
"Kalimira"
"Are you waiting for a car?" he said
"Ah yes. Yianni told me he's just coming"
I glimpsed the wife with luggage ready. Yianni drove up, shook the old man's hand, patted his back, kissed his wife.
"Back to reality" I heard the man say.
Yianni saw them off; strolled over to deal with my paperwork; licence details.
"Hullo, Simon. How are you?"
"Not so good"
"Why?"
"Seeing off my family"
"Ah you will see them soon"

All that's true, so why do I feel the old sadness of separation in my stomach? It's unavoidable. Cole Porter ...'how strange the change from major to minor, every time we say goodbye?'
It matches the joy of arrival, smiles and laughs.

In one way I'll be glad to get back to just-us-two routines with time to make toast with butter and anchovy paste in the morning while Lin sleeps. Good too to take down that inconvenient safety gate at the top of the stairs, disposing of nappies and food strewn in bits on the floor - and cigarette butts; quiet in the house instead of ....

Bed invasion

....yelling, weeping, whinging, pattering feet and bumps on the ceiling and shrieks at Oliver's new invention - 'spiderdirt!'..which of course is everywhere, imagined and for real.

Hannah and Oliver with Amy

We've been together to Sidari, Kouloura, Kalami...

Kouloura

Palia Perithia, Ermones, Kanoni, Vlacherna, Sokraki...

Sokraki

...Dassia, the pool at Dominoes - still chilly - near Ipsos...

Kanoni where we watch the planes taking off and landing

...Gouvia, Faliraki, places in the delightful city, and at Piatsa in the village where the children are made much of and we watch people and cars and bikes go by. Oliver's been to the shop with me to buy bread. He can say "psomi", ''efxharisto"and "yasoo" and cope with being hugged by - to him - strangers. Oliver and Guy came with me to Pirate Island in the boat.
Last night - their last night - we had Mark and his parents for supper. Lin made two kinds of meat loaf with tasty tomato sauce, baked potatoes with butter, runner beans and carrots, and lots of bread before that to mop the mix of balsamic vinegar and olive oil that came with wide plates of tomatoes and mozzarella, like abstract patterns.
I imagine Oliver, especially, as a camera  '..with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking' starting an album that will last his life.

Faliraki below the city

*** ***
The day before they left my ache began, adding to the joyful taste of every moment. The still summer air within the shade of the cottage hallway was suffused with the unmistakable smell of a live brown trout just caught, held, to keep it pristine, in a small sheaf of fresh grass laid in Bignall's kreel. On such days as this when departures approaches the little dying comes in small sensations that touch every sense and cue timeless associations. What is beautiful in the day becomes even more beautiful.
This is when memories are made that last until old age, until death I suspect, hung in the memory gallery; sometimes still pictures, to be evoked by a smell, or hung in the hall of continuity open all day and night for life - awake and asleep - the palette of every sense, separate and together - the latter the mysterious ingredients of déjà vu.

At Emeral after taking the family to the airport

'The sea is calm tonight'

Innocent as artists but without the craft. Nothing is significant – expect food and love and attention – nothing is insignificant. Nought selected, everything relevant, all is fecund with intimations. Later the children will select, learning the necessary understanding of common sight, which so few slough, to recover glimpses of celestial light, dreams that recur, gloriously fresh.

The bridge over the brook at Ermones

*** *** ***
I had a frantic text from Winnie...

...the bees had caused her problems. She and Dennis had been stung; she twice. I phoned and emailed Gill, my neighbour apiarist. She said the bees population was expanding beyond the hive on Plot 14. She halved the colony. That vexed the remaining bees, hence the text from Winnie. More phone calls. I told Winnie she must stay away from the allotment but she went back and called me again and sent me a clip from her phone...

"Winnie! They're swarming"
"They're dangerous"
"No not while they're swarming. It's OK but phone Gill now"
Later Gill told me that thanks to Winnie she'd caught the swarm and temporarily moved the colony.
"There should be an almost entirely new lot and I'll bring them back"
"I so hope so. I do not want to lose our bees"

Bees

I arrived - Sunday afternoon - to find the bees on Plot 14 seeming to be swarming - buzzing loudly in a cloud above my enclosure, clustered on hive and netting, settling in small groups on surrounding leaves. I watched fascinated, knowing this is not a time when bees are especially likely to to be concerned with defending themselves or their space. I phoned Gill, the hives carer and apiarist. I left her a message about what was going on. She phoned back.
"I'll come and have a look"
I gave her the new combination lock number; our site having again been visited by a thief in the night, as Danny told me, chatting to plot holders about what she thought had happened sometime between midnight and 6.00 on Sunday morning.

Gill comes to inspect the hive

It turns out, the bees on my plot aren't swarming as I feared; rather a new colony is taking over the old. The whirling swirling cloud of bees I'd taken for swarming is an invasion.

Scouts from another colony have found the hive. They led their bees to it. The are taking over a new home. The intensity of the buzzing marked the outskirts of a battle in and around the hive.

Skirmishes on the Balm Scented Poplar

"The existing queen has probably been killed" said Gill "or she may have just died"
So a new queen is being enthroned.
"The new bees aren't sure of their whereabouts. Not sure how to get in and out of the hive"
We watch them wandering as they learn the local topography.
"The new bees have been eating the old colony's honey" said Gill
So no honey for us for the moment.
Gill added some sugar to the hive to help sustain the new colony - one she thinks more vigorous than the one it's replaced.

Gill checks what's going on in the hive as people beyond enjoy a day in Handsworth Park

*** *** ***
Yesterday morning we attended to a long standing responsibility.  Lin drove us down the wet M5, packed with end of term traffic, onto the Ross Spur...

South on the M5

.... then 20 miles south west past Ross-on-Wye, to the Kerne Bridge turn, and so on the road beside the river to Lydbrook - a journey that ran through twenty three years, ever since we bought Rock Cottage as our dacha in the Forest of Dean the year our son was born.

Oscar walks up Bell Hill to the cottage he knows

There came a time when the children grew up, the hill up to the cottage was harder for Lin's parents; we came in 2006, to live for months of the year in Ano Korakiana in beloved Greece. Rock Cottage was left to its own devices. The forest has a way of encroaching on any of its border habitations with its trees, shrubs, brambles, nettles, moss and damp. Some of this penetrates the lime mortared walls. Our cottage that was easy to make warm in winter, always pleasant any time of the year, its lawn a sun trap hidden from view of the houses across the narrow steep sides of the Lydbrook Valley, through which runs the Lyd, a scruffy stream much culverted that runs down to the Wye at the food of the village...

The Loud Brook this Saturday afternoon

A summer morning ~ down Lydbrook valley to Courtfield from Rock Cottage

Lin and Richard at Rock Cottage 1983

Our sitting room there

Rock Cottage, Lydbrook, in 1995

At the start of the year Dave Kenworthy of Evolution Trees made a clean sweep of the trees that had started to surround and enclose the cottage and its small lawn, clearing especially a line of ash growing into the power line serving the house, undermining the bank of the footpath up Bell Hill. We'd asked our friend Martin to take a look at the place; make an assessment; suggest some plan for recovering from the mess the cottage has been left as a result of botched repairs by a builder who's let us down, promising work that hasn't been done; wasting our money - mores fools we - and finally disconnecting all the plumbing with a view to 'improvements' having already installed a set of new windows at complete variance to Lin's thrice repeated email and face-to-face specification.
We met Martin and Sandra, and their son Adam, in the car park by Lydbrook Social Club, drove to the Courtfield Arms just above the river Wye where Sandra, before I could stop her, bought our pub lunch, and Martin our drinks - for me a pint of good bitter, just the right temperature.

Dear Martin and Sandra and Adam. It was lovely seeing you all in Lydbrook. Thanks so much, Sandra, for the lunch. Thanks Adam, for your offer of help clearing inside and outside Rock Cottage. I have your mobile. Send me your email? I guess we’re looking to the weekend 2-3 August for this, but let’s make the arrangements after your concert.  We’ve been getting pessimistic about Rock Cottage after being let down by our last builder.   Following our get-together in Lydbrook some of the weight of the project ahead is lifted off our minds. Love, Simon and Linda 

Hi both. Glad to hear you're feeling a little better about the task ahead...I must confess I was shocked to see the condition of the Cottage. I always visualise it as it was in May '92 when I did that veranda roof - and I used my motorbike, we lived in Gloucester. It was a glorious summer that year, Sandra would come over in the afternoons (after work) and sunbathe in the back garden. The ride there in the cool mornings, and the ride back with my jacket tied around my waist because it was so hot - ahhh!, happy days indeed. We'll have to see if we can recapture some of that. Martin X 

Dear Martin...I could see the weight lifted off my mind by just putting the place in a skip and auctioning it (:)), and then I thought about things like ‘not giving up’ and my family’s love for the place and - as you observe - all the pleasure we’ve got from it. It’s a different time and I’m not looking to recover what’s past, but I’d like to hope there’s life in the old property yet.  We had the misfortune to have a run-in with a builder who we trusted and who let us down in mid-work. Let’s make his mess good and see where we go from there. Let’s see what can be made good for the next generation and our older selves. Love to you all.  Simon 

June 2014

**** ****
Yalova in Messinia, Tsampika and Agia Agathi in Rhodes, the most beautiful beaches in Halkidiki, Agios Prokopios in Naxos, Galissas in Syros and the beach in Irakleia in the Cyclades. The Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF) is inspecting popular Greek beaches in order to sell them as private property. Two coastal areas have already been sold. More such sales are being completed. The Greek Finance Ministry's Coastal Development bill submitted to parliament last year - frozen this May for 'more consultation - turns my stomach. The proposed law lifts all restrictions on the maximum area designated for constructions on beaches for business purposes; of bars, erection of umbrellas and sun beds, you name it, and abolishes free access to Greek beaches by the public.

I know it's 'signature' politics; "too easy", but opposing the measure to sell of Greek beaches via comment and signatures on an Avaaz petition is better than just wringing our hands...

Under her signature, Lin commented: As a Greek property owner who spends about 5 months a year on the beautiful island of Corfu, I am horrified at the proposed sell-off of Greece's beaches to private companies.
Do the Greek government not realise that the public beaches are the main wealth of the country? Leave them alone and they will continue to bring money into the Greek economy every year, attracting the tourist trade that is Greece's main source of foreign income.
Sell off the beaches and that's that. End of. If tourists cannot visit the beaches they wish to go to, Greece will lose a large proportion of her tourist trade. If this bill is passed, the income from the beaches will be one-off payments from the private companies. One payment and no more in future years.
Why do you, the Greek government, want to shoot yourselves in the foot with this misguided idea? Do you want to destroy the tourist industry? Do you want to reduce Greek citizens to pre-tourism poverty? Are you really short-sighted enough to go ahead with this preposterous idea?
The beaches do not belong to the Greek Government. They are not yours to sell. They belong to the Greek people!!!
I can only think that corruption continues to be rife in Greek government. Someone must have been offered a very big incentive to propose this disgraceful bill!

Kimolos

Under my signature: Παραλίες για την πώληση!! Πωλείται! Η πορνεία από τις παραλίες. Το πούλημα της πανωραίας. If you can push drugs and traffic children, prostituing beaches is easy! The promoters of this bill are pimping - beloved Greece - "Ελλάς! So alluring she can make us a lot of money if we put her up for sale" - they whore their own beautiful daughters, sisters and mothers. Shame on this proposal.

Stop the sell-out of Greek    beaches to private companies

Plot 14 in June

Gill keeps a progress report on the VJA bees

Standing close to their hive, seeing bees coming and going, I catch the enticing whiff of honey. Gill finally brought over new bees from the city teaching apiary at Highbury Park and placed them in the hive next to the shed on Plot 14.
These new bees have been on the allotment about a fortnight. Yesterday, as I was earthing up potatoes, she arrived, donned her beekeeper's clothes, and made an inspection. Avoiding fast movements, she lit a bee-smoker, removed the lid of the hive and and drew out frames as I watched from the other side of the net enclosure I'd built in March.
"Wow!"
She held a factory floor held vertical, teeming with bees.
"They are making a Queen, which is what I was hoping"
She pointed to a larger beeswax sealed cell in the centre of one of the frames
"In fact they are growing two. So I shall have to remove one"
"They don't seem concerned about you lifting them up en mass and turning them over on the frame, Gill"
"They are a very mild breed of bee"
Yes, Apis Mellifera

Bees on a frame from the hive on Plot 14

"I'll check again in a week, but so far so good"
We are especially solicitous as the first hive Gill put on the VJA, back in 2010, had to be removed after complaints from a plot holder's wife who feared he risked anaphylaxis if stung. I pressed for their return and, after assurances about insurance liability and attention to health and safety, a hive was allowed back on my plot on condition I constructed six foot high netting around the hive to protect the public. Gill delivered bees in July 2012. They didn't survive the winter. More were brought in 2013. These were still fine in early February 2014 but then too many of the them went foraging during an interval of sunny weather. When wet weather returned, returning workers brought fatal damp into the hive with them.
"Wet weather is bad for bees" Gill told me as, in March, she inspected the empty hive containing a few small corpses and a damp patch, like a tumour on an X-ray slide, on one of the frames.

Growing a queen - her cell

So now we watch and hope. I'm delighted the bees are back and that Gill has persisted. "If they continue as they are the hive could hold 60,000 bees"
A plotholder wandered over as Gill was packing up to go
"Your bees have been all over my hot-lips"
****** ******
An odd and depressing run-in with someone on the Villa Road. I'd just posted something for Lin, and was coming out of a hardware shop, having bought a new bolt for the gate into the beehive enclosure. I passed, in the shop entrance, the man I recognised as having taken a plot next to mine a year ago, and then swiftly abandoned it. We'd had an amiable chat at the time he arrived, seemingly keen to grow things. But as is too typical of allotments, he soon abandoned the plot, leaving a pile of recovered building rubbish intended for a 'summer house' he'd spoken of building. He left under a cloud, annoyed with the VJA committee who, he claimed, had let him down when he'd tried to chop down the hedge and tree overlooking his plot. They said he should not have done it.
"Hullo" I said
"You can fuck off"
"I don't understand"
"I want nothing to do with you lot. Leave me alone. I'm with my boy"
"My lot? What is the problem?" I said and waited. The boy stood silently beside his father.
"I'm saying nothing to you. Piss off"
I remained standing on the pavement; then followed him back into the hardware shop.
"Right" said the rude man "I'm calling the police"
He dialled 999 on his smartphone.
"Police please... ... ...This man won't leave me alone. He's following me. Yes. I'm on the Villa Road - with my boy"
I cycled off to continue shopping. On my way home I cycled past him and his son walking in the same direction, still talking on his phone. Seeing me he turned and headed back the way he'd come. The boy followed.

Villa Road

A Police Neighbourhood Team transit van drew up. I wheeled my bicycle up to it; Oscar in the basket.
"You can stay away. I'm talking to them, thank you." said the man
An officer descended and took me aside, keeping an ear open to his colleague's exchanges, as he took down my contact details and asked what had happened. I did my best to explain the last few minutes'  bizarre experience.
"You seem a lot more compos mentis than the other gentlemen" he muttered and tucked his notebook away "I've got all I need, thank you"
*** *** ***
I'm not unhappy about progress on cultivating my allotment - slow though it is. We all now know that the soil is testing - stony, uneven and full of detritus. Experienced gardeners are doing well, but many others have given up. The plots on both sides of mine are typical. The committee have given me permission to scythe the one on the west side of Plot 14, but a new tenant on the other side must be allowed his own time. I am aware that where I and Taj have dug in manure the ground works kinder. It weeds easier. it grows better. I will persist with this work on the soil - despite the cost of manure.

Our fourth year on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments - Plot 14

Vanley dropped over to my plot at my request.
"You can take up all your garlic" He set to pulling it all up
"Get me a bucket of water"

He sloshed all my pulled garlic clean and hung them in the trellis of the shed...

"They look good like that. You feel like a hunter-gatherer?"
"You teasing me, Vanley?"
"They'll last a year. Plant the next lot in winter"
I peeled a small garlic bulb and ate it, enjoying the hot pepper crunch of it.
Your cabbage has all run away. Just pull it all up. If you have a rabbit they'll like the leaves. You should harvest your broccoli now, before it seeds."
I cut a dozen florets, and dug up a small crop of new potatoes, while earthing the rest.

The Vitis Boskoop Glory, planted August 2011, bears grapes this year. Taj has kept an eye on the plot.

Vanley walked up and down the plot.
"Get some more plants in. What about tomatoes?"
"Yes. Runner beans. Peppers. Marrow. Brussel sprouts"
My cabbages are a 'runaway' failure. A dozen cauliflowers don't look healthy, but the Jerusalem Artichokes are looking fine, as are my broad beans. The onions I planted in March are looking unhappy. Vanley shows me the yellow tinge on the flesh of a couple of sample onions. "Onion fly"  - a pest plaguing the VJA these last two years. There;s fruit on both apple trees. The other three fruit trees - pear, plum and cherry - didn't blossom. Too young?

Earthing up my potatoes

Like

*** *** ***
 The 'traditional' borders - actually boundaries of nations called Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq set up in 1916 under the Sykes-Picot Agreement - are more fragile and permeable than the one between Russia and Ukraine.

The secret arrangement: the Sykes-Picot Agreement made between France and England in May 1916

While the UK glues to Brazil. ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and its supporters are speaking triumphantly of ignoring post-Ottoman colonial borders (those distinctive locality severing lines drawn over the Middle East a century ago by the English and the French). ISIS are 'nation-building', determined to restore a fundamentalist dominion across the Middle East. How may this Levantine struggle play out within the urban populations of Northern Europe? The silence from our government is palpable. One may imagine the wringing of hands in those corridors. I watch and learn and feel safe in green England. My very dear friend in Baghdad, writes:

Dear Simon...it seems there is a wide scale attack on the country by terrorist groups, rebels and foreign fighters. The wrong policies of the PM Nouri Al-Maliki have aggravated the situation. The whole political process is at stake and the coming days are very decisive in keeping the unity, integrity and safety of Iraq. I hope this will finds you well, I miss you my friend. Best regards, D.

*** *** ***
Richard Pine's Letter from Greece in The Irish Times

As Greece questions its identity ‘the only thing uniting us is conflict’

Greek people are inured to uncertainty. The Greek word abebaios - αβέβαιος - means “without a foundation, unsafe”. It suggests that uncertainty emanates from a lack of structure in the Greek world. Question marks settle themselves on almost all social issues.
Perhaps only those who have emigrated and – with spectacular success in some cases – made new lives elsewhere, found something more certain.
All this is by way of a preamble to the fact that Greece hasn’t known this degree of uncertainty for many years.
Of course, some things are certain: the economic situation and all the hardship it has entailed. But no one seems to know what to do about it. The entire issue of a “Greek identity” is up for debate. What does it mean to be Greek? To come from a quiet, rural, inward-looking state into the current chaos of the EU in which it is expected to be European and yet at the same time retain its Greekness?
Was Greece ever ready to join the EU? Was it necessary to adopt the euro? Did it deal appropriately with the eurocrats when the bailout crisis loomed? These may be political and, above all, economic issues. But at heart Greeks are wondering – and have been wondering for at least the past century – what westernisation and modernisation would really mean. And no one has come up with an answer....(17 June - continued)

Making tea on the allotment

I begin to get a sense the soil on Plot 14 is improving. Before Christmas I invested in manure and topsoil. Since then Taj has been helping dig and weed out...

...the white rhizomes of couch grass that spread just below the surface of the soil, extracting nourishment, we remove by spade and hand; pile at the back of the plot. I'd not pride myself on tilth of the kind you'd find on Vanley's plot, but that's my goal. It's an endless process, made more arduous by the now well known proliferation of stones ...

...on all VJA plots where once a mighty prehistoric river ran under tropical sun. These primordial water-smoothed stones are being extracted and piled up, in some cases used to edge paths. I feel nearly as optimistic with experience as, when, in ignorance, I took on the plot four years ago.

Four years ago

In between, there have been times when I've procrastinated about even going out to the site, though it's hardly five minutes on my bicycle. The other day I brought out a kettle and camping gas stove - the means of making tea on site.

My new kettle

Taj met me. He usually comes on foot, often jogging, but occasionally on his new small bicycle. We continued working. I'd used the Handsworth Helping Hands van to deliver a water butt someone had thrown in one of our street clearance skips. It needed was a tap which I bought on eBay. Hoses are forbidden for watering plots but you're allowed to use them to fill a water butt. Almost surprising  to be thinking about water, given previous weeks of rain, but of a sudden it had become warm and sunny. With the van on the plot we set about clearing and loading up rubbish left by another departing plot holder whose dreams of building a summer house out of old timber had foundered along with the rest of his plans to grow vegetables. With the semi-rotting wood, went sacks of plastic detritus, a rusting water filled tool box, a grimy dented electric kettle (did he think there was power on site?), bottles and cans.
"A cup of tea, Taj?"
"No. I have orange"
The kettle whistled. I applied myself to mug, tea-bag, milk -  in a wine bottle - and sat back in the sun, a bowl of water for Oscar.

We gazed on the ground in front of us. Taj had been digging at the top of the plot and I at the bottom. More rows of potatoes were in, each nested in a handful of topsoil, beside two rows of onions.
"It's looking good, Taj"

"Now for cabbage, sprouts, cauliflower. But I must find a way to protect the young plants from the pigeons. Bastards!"
We worked until 2.00. I peeled off layers of clothes under the warmth of the sun; had two more breaks for tea and some chocolate fingers, melty. A rhythm of sorts. Taj tidied the paths adding edging bricks and lazying slabs I'd recovered from a skip last year. My broad beans are showing. I'm not sure about the state of the onions that have sprouted. They look the same as they did three months ago. I dug up the last of the Jerusalem artichokes, taking some home for eating, replanting the rest in two rows.
Gill came out to check the beehive she's kept on the plot the last two years.

The bees which had lost their queen and died off last winter had made it through this winter, but after Gill had done her inspection she said "They're all dead. I think it's because the weather got better a month or so ago. They started going out. Then we had this rain. Bees hate wet'"
She held up a comb she's taking for analysis. It showed a grey patch like a tumour on an X-ray. "That's the damp patch. They brought in the rain when they returned to the hive"
She'll seek another swarm for April. I said I was going to rebuild the hive's surround; make it less vulnerable to wind.
"It's nothing you're doing wrong, Simon."
*** *** ***
I took Oliver to see the allotment. He wanted to hold Oscar's lead. We processed down our road; I holding Oliver's reins, he led by Oscar, until we got to the VJA site when I let Oliver take over...

...watching he didn't snatch at Oscar's lead and that Oscar wasn't going to pull him over, They seemed to have a working relationship.
The departing plot holder next to me, during his 6 month occupation, cropped the hedge that bisects the site - a useful wind break running most of the length of the site. He left the cuttings uncollected.
Allotments demonstrate gaps between between intention and action. Other plots near ours reveal similar chasms. Being more familiar than I was three years ago with the difference between an idea and an action I can sympathise. It would be good to have a successful gardener next to me instead of two more or less fallow plots on either side. Oliver was as intrigued by the shed as I, wanting to shut himself inside, burrowing under the wheel barrow.

My grandson in the shed

I imagine living long enough to ask him if he recalls being in that shed or will he construct his early memories out of grown-ups' anecdotes and images? How much have I've made up the story of my childhood  - 'a sleep and a forgetting'.

Sat on Gypsy at Mill End  - the story of my childhood

Then we walked on to Handsworth Park, having this favourite place almost to ourselves. A sturdy west wind blew down the pond, a calling wind streaming the spring bud willows. Now and then a cloud gap allowed dazzling light onto the ruffled water.

Even I was tired when we finally got home. Oliver sat at our kitchen table, gradually nodding into sleep, a rusk in one hand.
"You and Oscar have worn him out" said Lin

*** *** ***
From New York where they've been in a museum my half-sister Oriana sends me an anticipatory e-card, a wedge of Oldenberg Cake

*** *** ***
On Thursday evening I'm taking the minutes for a committee meeting of Handsworth Helping Hands. We're hassled by errands and news of difficulties in other people's lives; a distant friend made blind by a series of strokes; another diagnosed with only months to live; another braving the ordeal of chemo, and a sudden wave of sadness for the absence of my mum. What I meant by a 'calling wind', the way the rushing sound, like a big waterfall, like distant surf, reminds me of other occasions with the same note, seeming to stimulate memory as varnish brings out an oil painting, a fragment of infant sensation when I was preoccupied with the green of the grass around me, happily alone insulated, left to myself, and somewhere a small aeroplane wandering in the sky, a sound undulating with the gusting of wind in the trees, independent of place and time, abrupt, a sound from heaven.

The earth turns towards the sun

When we in our species' infancy supposed a personal agent, as I'm inclined to even now until thought overrides instinct, so this gusting wind in the trees ...

Our washing line in Ano Korakiana

...that blows the washing dry, that I feel calling was - is - a being, as is the sun rising and setting, and the earth, giving increase.

Jimoa, John, Linda, Mike and Charles - Handsworth Helping Hands

*** *** ***
My university is kindly and gently saying goodbye:

Dear Simon. As you may be aware, it is INLOGOV’s 50th Anniversary soon and as part of this celebration we are seeking to put together a ’50 Faces of INLOGOV’. This will feature 50 people who have been involved in the life and work  of INLOGOV (both in the past and present) over the last 50 years.  We would very much like to have you as one of our 50 Faces and I am writing to enquire whether you would be willing to be featured?
We are aiming to put together some information together about each person and I if you would like to be featured, please could provide me with the following information to use in this context:-
1)      Two/three sentences to describe your current role/career
2)      Two/three sentences on how being involved in INLOGOV as a student, staff member, client etc has helped you
If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me in the first instance.
Kind regards, Rachael

Rachael Pearson, PA to Catherine Staite, Director, INLOGOV
Institute of Local Government Studies

Dear Rachael, I hope this will do. Let me know this has arrived and if Catherine would like it modified - with subtractions or additions.

1. Two/three sentences to describe your current role/career

Inlogov is a gateway to a world that’s engaged me for forty years. Despite intense pressures – political and financial – I’ve been allowed to remain an ‘amateur’, encouraged, by successive directors and invaluable colleagues, to balance writing, research and face-to-face training and development with practitioners, never having to put an academic career ahead of a shared fascination with studying, supporting and working with local government practitioners. In retreat from campus I remain a community activist with enough experience of government to make trouble in sensible ways.

2) Two/three sentences on how being involved in INLOGOV as a student, staff member, client etc has helped you

I’ve been a tourist in my own land; finding routes by train, ferry and bicycle to seminars and consultancies between Kirkwall and Newquay, Barnsley and Greenwich, roaming deep countryside and mean city streets, working with all flavours of councillors and the diverse professions that strive to serve them. My research focus - a thirty year preoccupation - has involved capturing on video, with their permission, the conversations of members and managers at the source of tension between politics and administration where government is made. The institute's international reach has brought invitations to assist in the same exploration in Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia.

I attach a pictures that is reasonably flattering:

Best wishes

Simon

Simon Baddeley, Visiting Lecturer, INLOGOV, University of Birmingham 

Leaving Darlington "The seminar on scrutiny skills for councillors went well, I think"