'Out of Town'

From: Simon Winters

Hi Simon. Don't know if you are in UK and can make it, but there is a Kaleidoscope event on this saturday at Stourbridge. We are filming interviews for a major BFI documentary about missing tv. We will be filming David King about OoT. Can you make it and be interviewed? Cheers Simon

Stourbridge Station

Saturday morning I was on my way to the Talbot Hotel in Stourbridge. The middle aged man sitting opposite wore a floppy sun hat, travelling clothes that seemed to set off his bulk, peered at a satnav in one hand and a note book in the other.
"What kind of train is this" I asked. I had been on the vehicle once - December 2011 - before but spotting a true trainspotter I thought I'd see if I could find out more.
"It's called a Parry People Mover"
"I like it"
"It's the only one in the country"
No more was volunteered; the satnav getting full attention.
We trundled along a mile of bumpy single track surrounded by greenery arriving at the one platform terminus next to Stourbridge Town Bus Station. Via a lift and a tunnel I cycled down the High Street to where Kaleidoscope was holding one of its regular get-togethers, found Simon and after a cup of tea was sat with David King to be interviewed about the way we'd arrived at the 'Lost Episodes" of Out of Town.

Dave King, Out of Town DVDs and reels of archive film from the archive

Chris Perry asked questions. Rory was behind the camera. I extemporised about my stepfather and described Out of Town - not easy, as the tags 'country life' or 'rural pursuits' misses out on what was really a vehicle for my stepfather to enjoy chatting to a few million people about his favourite subjects - for instance rabbiting with nets - with brilliant illustrations from his camera-toting friend, of twenty five years, Stan Bréhaut...

Jack and his cameraman Stan

...and David told how he had discovered and saved the Out of Town episodes that Delta on the initiative of Charles Webster, put together and put on sale last year (Note: In Sept 2015 Delta became insolvent and the following month I terminated their licence on grounds of 'breach of contract', a condition that applies to any sold on copies of Delta's OOT DVDs). I spoke also of the 'unwieldy material' brought in April 2012 to a lock-up in Birmingham from South West Film and Television Archive - Stan Bréhaut's 16mm reverse negative location film with library sound effects...

...and a whole lot of - so far unmatched - ¼inch reel-to-reel tape of Jack speaking to these films and introducing each episode. I spoke briefly about technical challenges that I'd explained in more detail in the account included with the Out of Town 'Lost Episodes':

...I hadn’t only begun to grasp that the background sound on Jack’s programmes was added later – from sound effects in the library at Southern synched with events on Stan’s film. What was I to do with hours of such film? Jennie at SWFTA gave me a clue. She and her husband Roger, also working part-time at the archive, showed me a shelf of ¼” reel-to-reel sound tape in cardboard boxes. These for no obvious reason contained Jack’s voice as he talked in the studio from his set – a shed - and his commentary on Stan’s film for that week’s episode of Out of Town. It had taken hours to find the tape that went with the film. There was no order and no titles that allowed simple one-to-one matching. Roger, using a Steenbeck machine that could play separate film and sound tape simultaneously accurately splicing sound to vision. He then digitised the result and we had a 1975 episode of Out of Town as a gift for Richard Hill and his family. Well nearly. At the start and often at the end of each episode of Out of Town the viewer would see Jack  sat in his studio ‘shed’ from where he’d say “Hullo” before moving seamlessly into talking about Stan’s location film, run on a monitor in front of him in the studio. This all went out live. The location film would end. We’d see Jack again in his shed for a few remarks and a “cheerio” and the gentle signature tune Recuerdos de la Alhambra. So we had Jack’s commentary and location sound effects, but we had no picture of Jack in his shed. Richard’s film with which he was delighted came to him on a DVD courtesy of SWFTA with a stills of Jack inserted over the recording of his studio introduction. But what about the sound effects; of traffic, of cattle lowing, a fish splashing, wind in the trees, a bucket dropped? “People fill in the sound if you give them a clue” was Jack’s reasoning so I was told recently by one of Jack’s old colleagues, David Knowles. He’d certainly fooled me. I learned that my stepfather had made a point of asking expert sound people not to get “too clever”, inserting every possible event that might have had a sound. “Just make it sound like outside and synchronise doors banging and gun shots” I was slowly understanding why it was so tricky to trace whole episodes of Out of Town. “Jack loved to do high quality television on the cheap” added David who’d produced Jack’s successor programme - Old Country - for Channel 4 in the early eighties. My youthful memories of Jack musing about technical challenges were being jogged “I don’t want to go out in the countryside with a TV crew of half a dozen and a pile of kit. They frighten things away.” I learned after a bit that even Jack’s director George Egan stayed away, as Jack with Stan in essential tow went on location. “The finest outdoor cameraman in England” he called him, shooting silent, sound added later, and live continuity by Jack’s when broadcast. Jack knew that what made TV different from cinema and more than just lesser picture quality on a small screen was being live. He was stimulated by the risk of going out live but much more he relished the knowledge of talking there and then to his invisible audience. “We filmed nearly 1:1” explained Jack years later “The normal ratio of used to edited film is 10:I for the sort of thing I do. In commercials it can be 1000:1.” Jack and his team did minimal editing, had a minimal set and a minimal crew and it went out live with Stan’s silent location film plus library sound effects....

Jack Hargreaves tries out Richard Hill's patent 'exploding' bait box from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

...and an episode about rabbiting from Old Country, successor to Out of Town, screened in the early 1980s on Channel 4 with Stan's successor, Steve Wagstaff, behind the camera..

Chris Perry, seeing the OoT film cans and sound tape I'd brought with me to Stourbridge said, to my delight, that he would introduce me to an ex-BBC expert who would know what needed to be done to wed sound and image from the archive. I've been looking for ways to get this done for two years now. I so hope this will lead somewhere.
In the early 1990s, When I was 50, I began searching for my dad, not the parent I'd come to know, but the individual who met and married my mum in 1940, whose DNA is mine...

He died in 1973, In the midst of war my mother and he, having made my sister Bay and I, were divorced. Living with my mother I would only get to know my dad after he'd been married over 10 years to Maria, who he'd met in Athens in 1949. Twenty years later, I'm learning more about Jack, the step-father with whom I enjoyed my childhood and youth from one Christmas in 1948. My dad's life is part impenetrable; hidden by his profession. He served in MI6 (Greece, Brussels, the Far East, London, Washington) until his early death at 52. My stepfather's life, including so much that was very public, is made puzzling by his versatile and invigorating self-invention. The novelist Graham Hurley,  who worked for Jack at Southern TV, wrote....

...It was this wonderful marriage of fact and fiction that made him such a great broadcaster (and inspiring boss). Like so many men from that generation including George Egan (Director of OoT), who flew SOE agents into France aboard tiny Lysanders), Jack had been through something infinitely bigger and more scary than any of us would ever find in television and it gave him a breadth and a perspective and a degree of creative mischief that was utterly beguiling. I put a number of the Out of Town programmes onto tape (Stan shot mute film; Jack's studio musings became the sound-track) and after a while I began to spot where fact strayed into fancy. Viewers, and gobsmacked youths like me, loved him. Like Stan, truly a buccaneer...

*** **** ***
Lin was entertaining Oliver most of the day after Amy.on her way to work, dropped him off. I got to see him later. He's not saying much tho' making lots of interesting sounds. We played on the sunny lawn after I got back from Stourbridge and later, for tea, sat Ollie in the same high chair used by my mum, by me and my sister, by our children Richard and Amy...

...Guy came round after work to collect his son.
I started working on removing woodwork and tiling holding our bath. It's got to come out so we can do something about growing damp in the room below coming, it seems, from under the bath. The bath was put in with great firmness in 1935. Getting underneath it, let alone extracting it,  is going to be a stinker given we want to save the long slate panel that runs beside it and seems immoveable. I removed the locker I built twenty plus years ago so that I could start trying to tease out the panel. Hopeless. I'm so tempted to take a sledge to the slate. But if I do I'll regret it. What a mess.

It's still winter on Democracy Street

Katerina and Lefteris help me get firewood upstairs

Firewood that I cut in October and stored in the apothiki is dry, so, with help, I barrowed enough for two days' heating to below the balcony and hauled them up on a rope and stored them in a box beside the stove, with another load stacked under cover just outside on the balcony.

The water was reluctant to flow from the shower. I recalled the stopcock beneath the utility room sink. It was jammed. WD40 applied. Next morning bent double and reaching through a cupboard I managed the tiny twist needed to get a good hot shower. The small garden is getting attention. Enough plaka’s been recovered from various places for Lin to finish the path out of the garden gate. “My plants are taking good root. Look here and here.” She shows me plants that will flower in a month or so. 

The lemon trees bear hundreds of fruit as does the blood orange tree. I’ve made a jug of juice from the windfalls of two days. Our days so far have been warm enough to dry our washing in the sun, bringing it in at dusk to dry anything that needs it in front of the stove.
** ** **

I’m trying to get my head around the Localism Bill trawling colleagues thoughts in their February Report The World Will Be Your Oyster: Perspectives from the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV). It’s a struggle to find perspective. I’m trawling through others’ chapters annotating parts that catch my attention. 
I’m doing the same via Athens News wondering how things are in Greece. That should be no different simply because we're here, the web having provided a stream of information – text, images, film – about Greece, Corfu and Ano Korakiana. “Reading your blog” smiled Mark the other day, when as usual we were using his and Sally’s WiFi “you seem to know more about what’s going on around here than we do.” Hm. I still haven’t made much progress reading island politics despite a diagram drawn for me by T. last time we were here.

I have this insane idea when I arrive at a cherished place that it will not have changed; that we can continue from where we left the last bookmark. But the consequence of going to and fro is to have missed important episodes of Democracy Street. Sometimes it's buildings – like the new hospital at Kontokali, at last up and running, or the steady progress of work renovating the Music School below Venetia in the village. There may be lost trees; people who are absent who we’d expect to see sitting in the winter sun at noon, and others who are there, where they ought to be, greeting us. We value the gossip, yet are apprehensive. It's a relief to find people we know are well but we also hear of people who’ve died, of people unexpectedly very ill. An email from America, from my old friend not seen for 45 years, who was joining us here for Easter, says he and his wife must cancel their visit to Greece this year. His brother-in-law has pancreatic cancer; only months to live, not wanting to 'waste time' on chemo. We hear from our neighbours of such news closer to home.

My half-brother once muttered to me, as we – young parents with our companion wives and beloved children – trailing in front and behind, walking across the apron in Athens for a flight to England, after a family get-together combined with a holiday in Pylos with travel through the Peloponnese, “One day all this will end.” Yes indeed and thank goodness. How could one savour love, friendship and every ingredient of joy and desire, without the constant awareness of that simple fact? It's why I try to be less free with my camera, lest thinking a moment can be captured in a box I give more attention to preserving it than living it. A wise thing I’ve come across recently in Hurley’s aside on p300 of my p/b copy of his One Under: 

The best writers are ghosts in their own lives. They dwell in the shadows. They watch. They listen. They remember. 

A few lines earlier, back a page, Hurley has the same character’s comment on a would-be writer:

“...he had no sense of completion. The best writers have a sense of wholeness. Their books are no more than metaphors. There’s a circularity, a feeling that events are feeding off themselves, pushing a story forward, yet reinforcing something important that’s happening underneath. It’s a very hard thing to out into words, which I guess is why there are so many crap writers around, but what I think it boils down to is that these people have well and truly got it together. They’ve had a bit of a think about life. They’re sure of their bearings. They’ve got the measure of the raw material that goes into the book…"

My stepfather, writing and live in front of a camera in a studio shed and in his live commentaries over the intervening films shot by Stan Bréhaut and his more temporary successor Steve Wagstaff, achieved this. 

In One Under Hurley’s character doesn’t mention knowing how to write English. Perhaps a grasp of the infrastructure of writing – its grammar – is a taken-for-granted essential, as with musical composition, iron moulding, stone masonry, wood carving, glaze and paint. These are media humans have struggled with for centuries. JH’s talent lay in his grasp, before it became codified, of the grammar* of a new medium – not just text to screen, nor a version of cinema, more like radio for being live – his preferred style of broadcasting on television. Had he not made his name in radio in the 1930s, then, before D-Day on Montgomery's staff, been involved in the ingenious multiplicity of deceptions aimed at confusing German intelligence as to where the allies would land, and as the Allies advanced through France and the Low Countries, discovering and taking over enemy broadcasting stations set up in the lands they’d occupied and broadcasting back - often, so he told me, relying on technology superior to ours, morale depleting duplicity, in word and song, to their retreating soldiery. He was, with his companions, one of those whose entertaining trade, never overtly political, was spiced with the product placement of democracy - deadly serious persiflage. Graham Hurley in an email to me last May, containing more, wrote: 

It was this wonderful marriage of fact and fiction that made him such a great broadcaster (and inspiring boss).  Like so many men from that generation Including George Egan, who flew SOE agents into France aboard tiny Lysanders),  Jack been through something infinitely bigger and more scary than any of us would ever find in television and it gave him a breadth and a perspective and a degree of creative mischief that was utterly beguiling. I put a number of the Out of Town programmes onto tape (Stan shot mute film;  Jack's studio musings became the sound-track) and after a while I began to spot where fact strayed into fancy. Viewers, and gobsmacked youths like me,  loved him. Like Stan, truly a buccaneer.

* Long ago Jack gave me Davis & Wooler's 1960 slim illustrated book The Grammar of Television Production

***** ******
Skyped my mother in the Highlands and had my wrist slapped by my son, up there a week, for my preoccupation with the medium rather than the message, Emma laughing.

******
News of a new DVD about Ano Korakiana's Carnival 2010 with the event's history going back many years, is published on the village website ... Κυκλοφορεί από σήμερα (επιτέλους!) μετά από κυοφορία δύο περίπου μηνών, το νέο DVD της Επιτροπής του Κορακιανίτικου Καρναβαλιού, με τίτλο «Καρναβάλι Κορακιάνας 2010», με πλούσιο φωτογραφικό και ηχητικό υλικό, καθώς και video. This year's Carnival, if we've understood right, occurs in the first week of next month - I presume on Sunday 6 March 2011. (23 Feb '11: Whoops! Just saw a notice in the village - its next Saturday 26 Feb!)
And a nice review in the TLS of Jim Potts' book - out a year now - The Ionian Islands and Epirus. A Cultural History. This now sits in our loo as a book to be revisited - regularly, while Richard Pine's latest op-ed in The Irish Times argues that 'The Greek leader seems to be acquiring the ruthlessness he needs to tackle his opponents.'

...There is widespread, if grudging, recognition of the fact that, with the possibility of stretching the pay-back period of the bailout, Papandreou, and his finance minister George Papaconstantinou, have got the measure of a Europe which otherwise would be shaking the Hellenic hound by the scruff of its neck much more viciously. Papandreou’s ability to come to terms with an otherwise anti-Greek Angela Merkel puts down a marker as to whether or not Greece sees its future in Europe – at least on the terms dictated by the centrist states. But there’s the rub: Papandreou wants to create a modern Greece that will be western-looking and European. The dissidents he would like to be rid of are of the old school which insists there is a Greek, rather than a European, solution to a Greek problem. Papandreou has little choice but to be brutal if his reforms, amounting to a reconfiguration of Greek society, are to be successfully implemented. But election or no election in Greece this spring, eyes will be concentrating on the change of power in Ireland, not least in regard to the issues of transparency and clientelism.

** ** **
Today we have rain which at least will clean the dust away after I've been using the angle grinder to tidy the latest plaka Lin's laid in the garden.

Buttered toast, marmalade and a big mug of tea

A good perch

Someone told me opening Democracy Street made their computer crash. Then someone else told me. With such a percentage of readers inconvenienced, I pondered this. I was displaying ten entries at once, stills and videos, sound tracks, links, and an over-extended index (so Nick Booth, who helped me start Democracy Street, reminded me ages ago) too much information for some to down-load? Other’s seem to do the same without this problem but they know things about the medium. I set about amateur tidying; reduced displays of entries to two at a time (keeping the option to ‘search’), removed links to Facebook and Twitter (why let them harvest?), but kept films and pictures. I asked ‘does my blog still freeze?’ – a phrase that sounds like ‘does my bum look big in this?” Graham replied:

Simon. Thanks for yours.  Been away a bit,  largely with the fairies.  Yes,  your blog works beautifully now.  You've clearly applied your plumbing skills, consulted the wiring diagram,  given it a shake,  and then reassembled all those frozen words in the right order.  Wonderful pix,  especially the sunburst.  Have you ever thought of something similar at book length? Because ‘Democracy Street’ would make the perfect title.  More meditation than ex-pat.  Or maybe a mix of both.  Democracy Street (the place) might offer a very good perch for a book-length contemplation of our fevered times. Entirely agree with your thoughts about airports.  (My) Lin and I have pretty much abandoned them.  We're off shortly on a leisurely train/bus/donkey trip into the Balkans:  London - Trieste - Istria - Dalmatia - Montenegro - Serbia - Munchen - Bechesgarten - Salzburg,  then home again.  A smallish rucksack each,  one full of books.  This time of year, clothing-wise, that becomes a challenge but we managed something very similar to Damascus and Sinai in December a couple of years back and it worked fine.  All you need are two pairs of woolly socks and a sense of humour. Good news on the movie front.  The French are starting shooting 90 minute adaptations of two Faraday books in January.  The new Pompey?  Le Havre... Enjoy the newly warm-water. As ever, Graham.

He flatters me – this potential Leigh-Fermor, Manning, Andrews, who’s been, in other words, around, author of superlative police procedurals that made (my) Lin remark “Is Portsmouth really that bad?” He’s  right. Democracy Street is too good a title to waste. It’s a mental perch that includes another place - our other street called Beaudesert Road.

Here high summer heat brings as many outside, as in Ano Korakiana it drives inside.  Of course, in Ano Korakiana I see the street a little more, walking up and down it and now, looking out from on our new balcony. As Natasha said when we discussed having it rebuilt last year, we’ve now a place from which to say “Good morning”. Yet in Handsworth – as depraved as Pompey - should I, in order to mow the lawn, prune a tree or shrub, or sweep our flaky driveway, spend time in our front garden (one we’ve not fecklessly removed to make more space for cars), I’ll certainly be saying ‘good morning’, harvesting gossip and even putting the world to rights with neighbours and passing strangers, an involvement in public space that took its greatest leap when I took to cycling in the city instead of driving.
And now I’ve another place to chat – Plot 14 – hardly three minutes cycle ride from home.  Our allotment’s next to the main path through Handsworth Park. People strolling there wander up to the fence to gaze through at the new Victoria Jubilee Allotments, forcing me, with secret relief, to cease digging and answer questions about what’s growing, the weather and even the state of the world.
In Ano Korakiana as well as people we’ve discovered eagles, drifting over the crags above the village, mewing to one another, circling in the rising air,  though never in our experience hovering or stooping. On and over the roofs of Beaudesert Road I enjoy my favourite birds – Jackdaws. How they chat. Of the crows these are the ones that most rejoice in aerial cavorting. Though it’s close to the centre of a city as large as Thessalonica, Handsworth where I’ve lived since 1979, is a village – and indeed  when it was, up to the 50s. a smart suburb before becoming ‘inner city’ – our high street, Villa Road, was called ‘the village’.
****

Exploring Corfu history in the National Archives at Kew

LCD screens abhor the sun. Can you read a netbook by the pool or on the beach? It’s a small itch of mine that books will soon go, but for people who collect them for their own sake or their value on the market. Even older library books will have been scanned for researchers to study them on screen – convenient and safer for the original. I’m seeing these devices around – capable of storing a home library in a slice of bread, searching, annotatable, download War and Peace in three languages via WiFi wherever. Someone who is no Luddite and loves reading books wrote a piece in the NYRB on the demise of the book, partly because publishers can’t afford the floorspace to store their current publications, let alone back-lists.  I can see the use of these things - Amazon's Kindle, Sony's ebook. Could I have one and make it look dog eared with attention, risk slitting the spine, keep my place turning down corners, spill things on it, press flowers and notes to discover years later? There’s a £20 note slipped in to my 1911 Britannica at home in case one of our children needed it while we were away. With over a thousand wafer thin pages in each of twenty nine volumes that’d be a devil to find without the name of the entry. I’m not sure I can remember it either.  But how much easier it will be to keep and circulate books in those places where books are burned, their readers arrested, if texts can be kept on a postage stamp, a canon in a flashdrive, a library on an ipod. All the same a paperbook book is a most ergonomically satisfying technology for reading, even as new dexterities help new readers to flick through and make notes and links on web books. No doubt there’ll be specialist second hand bookstores – though at the moment lack of customers and rising rents has them falling like nine pins, Hay-on-Wye notwithstanding. I believe the new way to get a book on paper with a spine and cover will involve pressing a virtual option button for a hard copy – simple or deluxe with choice of bindings - when ordering on the web, or over a counter at a privatized library or coffee shop with books – beside the Gaggia an impressive web linked combine printer binder – short, tall, grande, venti? At present a hard copy is the default purchase and the option a web copy to download to your gadget. This will be reversed. (see Espresso Book Machine)
*  *  *
We’re racing through small jobs. I’ve connected up a light for the new porch, having removed it from where it’s sat unused and disconnected since we bought the house, once above the old French windows now replaced. (I did turn off the mains when removing it). Three wire – positive (brown), negative (blue) and earth (green/yellow) -  to two terminals. It doesn’t matter which is used for positive and negative and the earth is sealed off with insulating tape. I’m that electrically illiterate, I had to check with Leftheri I was doing it right. We need no light over the new french windows as a light sensitive municipal street light hangs above our balcony.
We’ve realigned a down pipe from the rain gutter to go round the end of the balcony – four 90° angles, a widerner joint, three more brackets (Don’t drill during siesta). We’ve smoothed the plaster round the new French windows (why are they called French and why windows when they’re doors. Was there once a door tax in France like our old window tax?) and refixed marble skirtings at the foot of the doors with silicone and a slight gap tp stop cracking if the wooden floor flexes. Only a few years ago I’d never have believed myself using an angle grinder with stone cutting disk to make even simple cuts in marble.
Lin’s made a curtain for the doors, fixing twenty wood rings to the header tape, to hang on a piece of one inch dowling with a spring fixed in a drilled end to hold it in place in the holes I’ve cut in the doors’ side walls.
I tied up a loose hanging wire under the eaves and directed our young vine upwards where it can get more sun. The leaking tap in our veranda is replaced. I was struggling with my wrench when Petros who’s working with Fortis on the house below us came by and asked what I was doing. I showed him adding more in paltry Greek. "Ena lepta" ("Just a minute") and he fetched a much larger wrench and had the old fitting off in seconds, asking first if I’d turned off the water. “For sure” ("vevaios"). I had a replacement tap and after repairing the water heater plumber’s string too. “Thanks so much, Petros” “Efharisto poli, Petro” “Ti pota” ("It’s nothing"). Lin’s put plants on our new stairs and the edge of the porch. I’ve mended with sturdy screws and glue the rickety wooden chair we’d recovered from a flytip last time we were here; good for leaving outside and standing on for cutting the bourgainvillea and wisteria. We’ve cleared weeds from the garden, and put them in the composter, swept and swept and swept and made wasp traps out of two plastic bottles baited with honey and cherry brandy, fed the cats including a lone kitten which seems orphaned but is now living on us and even more generous left-overs from the neighbours (this morning a plate of sardine heads).
Tomorrow afternoon we're expecting to meet John Martin and Annie Guthrie off the Anek Lines ferry from Venice, come to stay for a few days.

Dreich

Bowketts have no need for a website, nor call on the social web or food bloggers to pass the word about their wares. Given a choice between heading out on a rainy grey May afternoon in the Midlands with time on our hands, Richard and I could go to a film - which we did yesterday, watching Four Lions at Five Ways - quite funny, quite brave and clever but not that funny given Chris Morris' previous - have a meal at one of our favourite places in the middle of town - Village Café or Café Soya, or visit the finest butcher in the Midlands to buy their Champion thick pork sausages - weighed on a metric scale translated to avoirdupois for customers - and from the hot food counter, a warm crispy crusted baguette filled with roast beef, horse radish, onions, mushrooms and gravy and an equivalent in roast pork for my son. "I enjoy this weather. It reminds me of Giles' sodden English landscapes". We sat in Richard's grey Mondeo, happily grazing, before driving home through the grisly marches twixt West Brom and Brum.

Sausage counter at Bowketts of Oldbury

The first time I cycled outside summer was with my friend John Richfield in 1993 or 1994. It was either early October or early November - probably the latter. Leaves had fallen. It was a chilly, grey Friday afternoon turning into a dank evening. Somewhat gingerly I got out - unearthed from summer storage - the old Raleigh I'd bought for under £50; pulled on a second jumper and wrapped myself in scarf and beanie.

John'd chivvied me into joining a late afternoon critical mass involving a group of cyclists who wanted to make a point about their right to cycle with the rest of the traffic in Birmingham city centre - England's motor town. John lent me a luminous tabard and we set off from Handsworth, the mile and a bit into St.Philip's Square where there was a gathering of about fifty other people on bicycles. It was exhilarating to ride with the herd, enjoying the strength of the convoy, occupying spaces I'd never have risked using on the inner ring - like the Queensway and the road that runs beneath the city centre library that leads to the top of New Street, then up via Smallbrook Queensway to hideous New Street Station and on to a pub on the canal at the top of Farmers Bridge Locks where someone I knew, vaguely was inviting involvement with protests against the Newbury bypass.

Something clicked. We'd lived in Bagnor - a decade before it went metropolitan - though we'd started that 'rot' - as my stepfather put it pithily when I asked him innocently about a new neighbour 'doing up' his house. I'd grown up in a hamlet, during long holidays from school in London. We'd lived in Bagnor since 1948. Jack had seen the way the wind was blowing long before. Delivering imprecatory asides about the Tragedy of the Commons, with a passion he'd never use on television, he'd had us decamp for deeper countryside in Hampshire in 1960. I'd known in the 80s, from my home in deep Birmingham, that one of our new Bagnor neighbours, Michael Horden, had been campaigning in the conventional way against the new road. I'd written a letter to the local MP and later to the Minister Brian Mawhinney - along with thousands of others. Futile - in a land in love with cars on a roll from predict and provide and Thatcher's 'great car economy'. Apart from present harem, this bypass would drive through a childhood idyll. Jack, by then living in Dorset, wrote me that the project was inevitable. He was disinclined to rage. Privately he'd written '

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.'

I was ripe for engagement - and became with other green Brummies a supporter, a weekend warrior - in the Third Battle of Newbury, a series of marches, confrontatory conversations, direct action including lock-ons, the occupation of trees and many noisy meetings. There would be no victory for those opposing the bypass. Strategy, such as it was, involved the orchestration of a noisy defeat without violence, and so it was - a prolonged symphony of shouting and crying amid the buzz of chain saws, the roar of cherry picking tractors and crashing of high trees and astute public relations that turned a local defeat into a pivotal event that changed road building policy across the UK and made a career for the clownish Jeremy Clarkson and his laddish sidekicks. Lin and I are even casual fans of Top Gear - TV entertainment that, like many life choice programmes, makes drudgery fun.

Within a couple of years Lin and me were no longer delayed at Newbury on our regular drive to catch the ferry from Southampton or Portsmouth to enjoy twenty years of summer holidays in Brittany. I'd become a cyclist with attitude, the man who loved bicycles, interstitial living. Still am - but tempered by cycling's pleasures. Motoring has become a loveless marriage, and cycling so embedded in central and local government policies that now and then I yen to have a car and drive it places - a Morgan? Not really but...The pleasure I get from being in the open air all year round has changed my attitude to weather. I no longer value being insulated from it. It's a return to an infant impermeability when rainy days signalled things to do. A car can even feel claustrophobic. I embrace the Norwegian maxim - or was it Billy Connolly on Scottish weather - "there's no such thing as the wrong weather, only the wrong clothes". All edge has gone from my tediously enjoyed moral superiority, an aura around some cyclists that doesn't only reside in the paranoia of fuming motorists. How could I claim such a thing given the flying I've done? And now my daughter's just married Guy who sells Fords in Sutton Coldfield - very well. I share the road, enjoy the company of others in the city - cars, buses, trucks or motorbikes and people walking - all traffic. I thread the city traffic, especially in London, weaving wet city streets past bright shop fronts, crossing the Thames, commuting between the mainline stations on my way to other places or to work in the capital, navigating canal towpaths, river banks and linear parks snaking alternative ways through the urban landscape. Psychogeography - bring it on! It's been a privilege to be lent or to hire bicycles in great Australian cities and to ride through the back streets of Corfu town. I enjoy most weather, embracing the Gaelic word Dreich - a condition and mood I can name and dress for; certainly part of blessed Corfu's repertoire - as winter mist glides between cypress tops ascending the ravines of Trompetta.

Dreich weather above Ano Korakiana

* * * *

My comment about the celebration of Ionian enosis quoted on page 3 of the June Agiot - newsletter from Agios Ioannis, but on the wider contemporary stage Teacherdude, English citizen journalist in Thessaloniki, captures street reaction by Greek citizens to their government's policies on Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

* * *

The news in the world - narrow'n'broad-cast is full of Israel and Gaza. Sometime in 2007 I wrote that ...

I'd been playing a tennis court witness between John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt's book The Israel Lobby and Alan Dershowitz's rebuttal Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy. All these authors have a case and so I am for the moment intellectually paralysed - my normal condition - except when humour enters, but this matter is remorselessly devoid of humour. [The letter cost but then...]

This morning G emailed me:

Simon...if you owe yourself one big treat it has to be a movie called Lebanon. I saw it last night. It's Israeli-made and (to no one's surprise) won the big prize at the Venice Film fest. It's the first day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in '82. The action takes place entirely inside a Merkava tank. The rookie crew, four guys, are shit-scared. The atmosphere reminded me of the best of Das Boot. It's hugely claustrophobic and the exterior narrative unfolds through the lens of the aiming optics. The tank ends up in the recently flattened ruins of a township in South Lebanon, surrounded by Syrian commandos. The battleplan has gone seriously off-piste and I won't ruin the rest of it for you except to say that I've never seen a better war film: graphic, credible, ghastly, and deeply compassionate. The irony, says me, is that this could have been made by Robert Fisk. Yet it comes from Israel, made and co-funded by Israelis, which I guess says something about the ever-deepening puzzle of the Middle East. A truly astonishing piece of work. Unmissable. G

** ** **

Cavafy's arrived - a newer translation with Greek on one page, English the other

Briefing

The City in May

I've got mail - about the coalition:

Simon...Whatever else might be said about our sainted Coalition, it's certainly transformed the political landscape. Already, a coupla weeks down the line, New Labour are the oldest news. Scarcely a day (or a joint press conference) goes by without the ober-Tories going a deeper shade of scarlet. The Rage on the Right is a joy to behold and the smart money has to settle on the short-odds bet that Dave and Nick probably mean it...never thought I'd wake up to sniff a bonfire of Tory manifesto pledges - Inheritance Tax, Capital Gains Tax, and constitutional reform to name but three. Neither would I ever have associated St Vince with yet another assault on the Post Office* (sugared with a helping of shares for the workforce). These guys are serious and a full five years begins to sound less than fanciful.

Dave is clearly the King of Political Opportunity, out-ballsing even Blair in his C4 moment (parking his tanks on the 1922's turf was a delicious piece of Sudenten-kraft). So where do the ubers go now? And - much more importantly - WTF happens to the metropolitani of New Labour?

In the annals of Blind Robbery, Dave is an extremely gifted operator. In broad daylight, with Lib Dem connivance, he's stealing NuLab's clobber and leaving the poor bunnies to their fate. The only real direction to head is leftwards, towards (brace yourself) some kind of socialism... but a journey like that would tear the party apart. No wonder Cruddas, wise man, said no thank you.

And here's the best quote from this morning's press...an aside from a comparison with the giddy days of '97. These guys, says whomever, are moving at breakneck speed and bolting down promise after promise. Much of this stuff will necessarily have to wait a while, not least because - as smiler Liam confirmed - we're skint. But the sheer velocity of what's happening takes your breath away. And Blair's boys? Back in '97? They hit the ground reviewing.

Nice.G.

** ** **

Took the train to London, cycled through the city to the river, via Holborn and Fleet Street, King William Street; crossed the river on Waterloo Bridge, commuters coming the other way; east on to Tooley Street. When I ride at rush hour in the city I think lines in the heads of thousands since they were composed, since I heard them at school - recorded by Eliot in Mr Lushington's English class at Westminster. He encouraged listening, slipping in analysis when you weren't looking. Redemption and commuting elide unhindered by reasoning:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought ... And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

... Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours...

But London wasn't like this. Nor I. Lushington also explained the objective-correlative in a way I could understand; which still makes sense. Unvoiced words - phrases - assemble in my head - the river glideth...mighty heart...all bright and glittering in the smokeless air...and with the heart of May doth every beast keep holiday - correlating artlessly with my surroundings connecting them timelessly to all I've known and been taught since birth - sublime and banal, agreeably jostling.

The crowd, like me, did feel sprightly, flowing indeed but more like a parade than a procession. Brown fogs gone.

I'm working with a new council executive next week. This morning I met with with a senior officer and the new council leader to talk through my draft:

GOVERNANCE IN XXX: GETTING THE BEST FROM OFFICERS

Seminar for a new Executive

AIMS

• To understand political and managerial roles, responsibilities and structures and how they are changing,

• To demonstrate ways in which member-officer collaboration gives direction and purpose to local government,

• To learn more about working effectively with and through officers.

This event for senior members aims to strengthen the purpose, creativity and direction of the Council in difficult times. It will focus on better understanding of how new policies emerge, about negotiating the respective roles of members and officers, about clarifying the role of cabinet in the decision-making, modernising corporate governance, reviewing individual skills and information needs, and enhancing organisational capacity.

STYLE: Simon Baddeley with xxxx will use short talks, films, and exercises to stimulate analysis, reflection and shared discussion of these issues.

PROGRAMME (As the programme is participative, timing of specific sessions between start at 1000 and finish at 1500 may vary. Short breaks to be agreed)

Welcome. Introductions. Purpose of the day - Leader and CEO

'The Improvement Journey': working with councillors and officers – invited elected Mayor from an exceptional council

BREAK

Briefing on Xxx Council’s organisational structure – xxxx

A performance framework for the new Cabinet? – Simon Baddeley/Cllr xxxx, Leader of the Council

LUNCH

Constructing trust between members and officers – short talk and discussion introduced and illustrated by SB

Summary: What we take from the day; implications for our work as a Cabinet – Leader of the Council

CLOSE

* * * My colleague Philip Whiteman has helpfully extracted local government relevant policies from ‘The Coalition: our programme for Government’ published by the Cabinet Office yesterday, putting in bold what will be of most interest to us at Inlogov: 4. COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT The Government believes that it is time for a fundamental shift of power from Westminster to people. We will promote decentralisation and democratic engagement, and we will end the era of top-down government by giving new powers to local councils, communities, neighbourhoods and individuals.

• We will promote the radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups. This will include a review of local government finance.

• We will rapidly abolish Regional Spatial Strategies and return decision-making powers on housing and planning to local councils, including giving councils new powers to stop ‘garden grabbing’.

• In the longer term, we will radically reform the planning system to give neighbourhoods far more ability to determine the shape of the places in which their inhabitants live, based on the principles set out in the Conservative Party publication Open Source Planning.

• We will abolish the unelected Infrastructure Planning Commission and replace it with an efficient and democratically accountable system that provides a fast-track process for major infrastructure projects.

•We will publish and present to Parliament a simple and consolidated national planning framework covering all forms of development and setting out national economic, environmental and social priorities.

•We will maintain the Green Belt, Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) and other environmental protections, and create a new designation – similar to SSSIs – to protect green areas of particular importance to local communities.

•We will abolish the Government Office for London and consider the case for abolishing the remaining Government Offices.

• We will provide more protection against aggressive bailiffs and unreasonable charging orders, ensure that courts have the power to insist that repossession is always a last resort, and ban orders for sale on unsecured debts of less than £25,000.

•We will explore a range of measures to bring empty homes into use.

• We will promote shared ownership schemes and help social tenants and others to own or part-own their home.

• We will promote ‘Home on the Farm’ schemes that encourage farmers to convert existing buildings into affordable housing.

•We will create new trusts that will make it simpler for communities to provide homes for local people.

• We will phase out the ring-fencing of grants to local government and review the unfair Housing Revenue Account.

•We will freeze Council Tax in England for at least one year, and seek to freeze it for a further year, in partnership with local authorities.

•We will create directly elected mayors in the 12 largest English cities, subject to confirmatory referendums and full scrutiny by elected councillors.

•We will give councils a general power of competence (SB note: what about 'general competence'?)

•We will ban the use of powers in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) by councils, unless they are signed off by a magistrate and required for stopping serious crime.

•We will allow councils to return to the committee system, should they wish to.

•We will abolish the Standards Board regime.

•We will stop the restructuring of councils in Norfolk, Suffolk and Devon, and stop plans to force the regionalisation of the fire service.

•We will impose tougher rules to stop unfair competition by local authority newspapers.

•We will introduce new powers to help communities save local facilities and services threatened with closure, and give communities the right to bid to take over local state-run services.

•We will implement the Sustainable Communities Act, so that citizens know how taxpayers’ money is spent in their area and have a greater say over how it is spent.

•We will cut local government inspection and abolish the Comprehensive Area Assessment.

•We will require continuous improvements to the energy efficiency of new housing.

•We will provide incentives for local authorities to deliver sustainable development, including for new homes and businesses.

•We will review the effectiveness of the raising of the stamp duty threshold for first-time buyers.

•We will give councillors the power to vote on large salary packages for unelected council officials.

Coming home on the London to Birmingham Pendolino

* * * And from the Ano Korakiana website a reminder, dated 19 May, that the current local council - Demos Faiakon (Δήμος Φαιάκων) - will very soon cease to exist under the Hellenic Government's Kallicrates Plan for reforming Greek local government, and hoping that attention will be given to the collapsing edges of the road just below Venetia by the ravine, and just below the bridge on the same ravine where rain is threatening more damage as well as the need to re-tender the work for the long uncompleted football ground below the village which I understand to be the property of the great Thessaloniki football club PAOK:

Όπως είναι γνωστό, σε μερικούς μήνες, Δήμος Φαιάκων και Νομαρχία Κέρκυρας δεν θα υπάρχουν, σύμφωνα με το σχέδιο «Καλλικράτης». Στη θέση τους θα δημιουργηθεί και θα λειτουργεί μάλλον ένας Δήμος…για όλη την Κέρκυρα. Όσο είναι λοιπόν ακόμη καιρός, η Δημοτική μας Αρχή ας φροντίσει να κλείσει κάποιες εκκρεμότητες και να προωθήσει κάποιες άλλες προς τη Νομαρχία. Ενδεικτικά αναφέρουμε: 1.Την αποκατάσταση από το Δήμο του δρόμου, που από την Επαρχιακή οδό οδηγεί στην είσοδο του χωριού στις Μουργάδες, μέσω Λαμπράδων. Κυρίως εξαιτίας του έργου της γεώτρησης, ο δρόμος έχει καταστραφεί από τη διέλευση βαρέων οχημάτων. Εδώ και μήνες έχει αναγγελθεί η αποκατάστασή του, ενώ έχουν γίνει και οι απαραίτητες τοπογραφικές μετρήσεις. Ενώ όμως το έργο ήταν να δημοπρατηθεί το περασμένο Φθινόπωρο, ακόμη δεν έχει γίνει κάτι και ο κόσμος που τον χρησιμοποιεί καθημερινά ανησυχεί… 2. Την ανάγκη αποκατάστασης από τη Νομαρχία δύο σημείων του επαρχιακού δικτύου εντός του οικισμού όπου το πλευρικό τοίχωμα του κεντρικού δρόμου έχει υποχωρήσει, από τις βροχοπτώσεις του Χειμώνα. Το ένα σημείο βρίσκεται στην είσοδο της Βενετιάς, όπου έχει υποχωρήσει το έδαφος στον τράφο μαζί με τα παρακείμενα δένδρα και το άλλο πριν από το γεφύρι στον μεσαίο δρόμο…όπου πέρα από το χωρίς οπλισμό τοιχίο που «έφυγε» με τις βροχές, έχει αρχίσει και ο δρόμος να «γέρνει». 3.Υπάρχει επίσης η σημαντική εκκρεμότητα του γηπέδου του ΠΑΟΚ, για το οποίο έχει δοθεί για άλλη μια φορά υπόσχεση στη Διοίκηση του Συλλόγου, ότι είναι προς υπογραφή νέα δημοπρασία για την ολοκλήρωση του έργου…Για να δούμε !

* * * Today is of course a day of celebration in Corfu and the other Ionian Islands. 21 May 1864 is the date of the formal ending of the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands and their union - enosis - with the Hellenic Kingdom. How could any Ionian, unless they were paid servants of the British profiting from the continuance of our military and administrative presence, oppose the lowering of the British flag and the raising of the Γαλανόλευκη over the Septinsular? There were those whose material interests were linked to the spending of the British. There's a fine house near us in the centre of Ano Korakiana that Kostas Apergis - village historian - told me was built from the profits of providing bread to the Protectorate garrison. But I do not mean these people. I refer to that faction within the rizospastai led by Ilias Zervos of Cephalonia

who bitterly resented the calculative way - as they saw it - the British seemed to have deferred to the populist arguments of Constantinos Lombardos of Zakinthos

for enosis, abandoning their Protectorate to the Greek Kingdom before it had been possible to negotiate Zervos' vision of an autonomous Septinsular Republic.

The remnants of this resentment seem to have faded now that Ano Korakiana's band no longer, as they did for many years, absent themselves from the celebration of the anniversary of union along with the band of Kinopiastes

*** ***

Alan and Honey, as promised yesterday, sent pictures of the double doors at the top of the new stairs and the support column at the end of the balcony.

Today Greece received the first tranche of the EU bail-out loan. My Greek Odyssey posts Elytis' prophecy from Axion Esti - a recording.

***

*It's going to anger many, especially Liberal Democrats, seeing Vince Cable pushing further privatisation of Royal Mail. I fact the LibDems raised this at an annual conference 5 years ago. It's about risk and who'll pay for it, given the demise of paper correspondence, even for legal documents, and growing consumer resistance to junk mail, one of the main items now carried by postal workers. I've scanned the response from businesses that use the post office - the Mail Users Association; also the Postal Services Commission's response to the Independent Review of the UK Postal Services Market. Believing instinctively in the contribution of village and 'corner shop' post offices to social cohesion, this is sad reading. Two years ago I imagined trying to explain to intrigued great grandchildren the process of writing and posting letters. It may be that my sense of place can no longer be confirmed by objects and actions to do with the post as we've known it for two centuries. Perhaps I have to brace myself and unpack, empty and refill a bundle of cherished things I associate with a sense of place and community; fill it with other objects and activities. It's chicken and egg. As conventional paper mail declines so the cost of providing it to those who still use it increases. People, as have we, turn to other ways of doing what was previously done by post. Post boxes are threatened with the same future as phone boxes, even though removing them has taken away traditional place markers - objects older people and their ancestors knew as part of the unnoticed noticed. For the young these things have less resonance. This isn't just a public-private issue, though that debate will dominate the politics of the matter. It's about human invention - socio-technical change. Where do I look for other ways to maintain and recreate what matters? Closer settlement patterns versus sprawl; villages instead of suburbs; access via proximity (walking, cycling, urban transit) replacing access by mobility (motoring, flying); carfree and car-lite rather than autodependent; local rather than global food chains - allotments, city farms and home produce versus big box food retailing. Further invention. Smart growth. Sustainability. In Ano Korakiana we don't have much to do with post, collecting electric and water plus rate bills from the last shop in the village.