"Have you visited other places in Greece?"

Danica becalmed near Antikithera on her voyage back to England in 1962

From a fleeting acquaintance on Facebook - an e-mail:

Kerkyra is like London (!) rain all the time (August- June) never snow. But is sooo beautiful, reminds me of Venice. Have you visited any other places in Greece?

My response today at 12:59

I first saw Greece as I crossed the border near Thessaloniki on a train from Venice in 1957. A noisy wedding party woke me at Larissa, around one in the morning. Grumpy, I asked them to let me sleep and they asked me to cheer up. That's the English-Greek thing! At my Greek yiayia's flat in Koloniki I went to the loo and glimpsed the Parthenon for the first time through its small window. I walked with the crowds with my candle at Easter and marked a cross on the lintle of the door of my step-aunt's flat with its flame. I sailed from England to Greece in 1962, passing between Zakinthos and Kefalonia, through the Gulf of Patras to the Aegean via the Corinth Canal. I've rounded the three southern capes Maleas, Matapan and Akritas, gazed south from Cape Sounion, driven over the Taigetus and the other great ranges of the Peloponnese from Athens to Methoni with my family and been alone at Delphi (centre of the world) - such silence I could hear the blood running in my ears. My ancestor, Henry Maine, wrote long ago in an essay on Popular Government (1885) 'Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.' This is your burden in modern Greece - to be the source of Western civilisation. Such expectations! The irony, as reading Thucydides shows, is that Greece's perfections and flaws are in the Western grain. Do you understand this possessive love of Greece in foreigners - especially the English - far deeper than sunny beaches and giros, rooted in the blind attachments of educated passion?

Elizabeth Jameson, me and her brother Chris (skipper) at Lymington after Danica's voyage from Athens ~ Oct 1962

George Seferis who said of the blighting of democracy on 28 March 1969 "This anomaly must end. Now I return to my silence and I hope there will be no need to speak again" wrote far far more than I ever could. From the ship Aulis in 1936:

On Pelion among the chestnut trees the Centaur's shirt slipped through the leaves to fold around my body as I climbed the slope and the sea came after me climbing too like mercury in a thermometer till we found the mountain waters. On Santorini touching islands that were sinking hearing a pipe play somewhere on the pumice-stone my hand was nailed to the gunwale by an arrow shot suddenly from the confines of a vanished youth. At Mycenae I raised the great stones and the treasures of the house of Atreus and slept with them at the hotel `Belle Helene de Menelas'; they disappeared only at dawn when Cassandra crowed, a cock hanging from her black throat. On Spetses, Poros and Mykonos the barcaroles sickened me. What do they want, all those who believe they're in Athens or Piraeus? Someone comes from Salamis and asks someone else whether he `issues forth from Omonia Square'. `No I issue forth from Syntagma,' replies the other, pleased; `I met Yianni and he treated me to an ice cream.' In the meantime Greece is travelling and we don't know anything, we don't know we're all sailors out of work, we don't know how bitter the port becomes when all the ships have gone; we mock those who do know. Strange people! They say they're in Attica but they're really nowhere; they buy sugared almonds to get married they carry hair tonic, have their photographs taken the man I saw today sitting against a background of pigeons and flowers let the hands of the old photographer smooth away the wrinkles left on his face by all the birds in the sky. Meanwhile Greece goes on travelling, always travelling and if we see `the Aegean flower with corpses' it will be with those who tried to catch the big ship by swimming after it those who got tired of waiting for the ships that cannot move the ELSI, the SAMOTHRAKI, the AMVRAKIKOS. The ships hoot now that dusk falls on Piraeus, hoot and hoot, but no capstan moves, no chain gleams wet in the vanishing light, the captain stands like a stone in white and gold.

Amy and her cousins Anna and Natasha ~ August 1996

Wherever I travel Greece wounds me,

Opou kai na pao i Ellada me pligoni

curtains of mountains, archipelagos, naked granite. They call the one ship that sails AG ONIA 937.

I envy you that you can read this in Greek. I have the sea.

Young Tiger makes landfall at Barbados on Wednesday 6 January 1966 after crossing the Atlantic from Las Palmas in the Canaries

Summer Song off Corfu ~ Sept 2008

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It's chilly on the road but not icy and I can get in and out of town faster by bicycle than bus. I do love cycling and it does - now and then - give me little bursts of energising optimism amid the doleful smell of burning fuel. At my really useful one-to-one at Apple today, with Karl helped by Ash, I was shown how to solve a problem of down-loading a mélange of film files in my archive of political-management conversations. "Convert them with Streamclip into DV. It's the best for editing." We tried it with a fractious file which, even if it would download, had been losing its soundtrack on being converted from MPG into AVI or MOV. As a DV file it loaded with sound into iMovie for editing. "Hurray! Now how do I download stuff from my VHS tapes?". "Try a DVC? We've got it in stock" This was a digital video converter. I bought one to mine the hours of film I made in VHS.
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I got an e-mail from Kim saying that showing these videos on 'Democracy Street' needs more interpretation. 'Information is not knowledge':

Dear K. I really need your thinking on this. I've ploughed an isolated furrow with the films I make with the help of many practitioners for which I'm immeasurably grateful. I've been trying to make it easier for those interested (and some who start off uninterested in what they expect will be a dry subject) to learn from the films - hence the extracts plus limited interpretation and transcripts on my blog and thence to the web - a pilot in making the material more accessible. You suggest the clips need more interpretation. 'Information is not knowledge'. I have a dilemma. I prefer to avoid interpreting. I know for some this may be frustrating, but the idea is to encourage observation by showing people things they might not otherwise have a chance to see. I provide the means of watching practitioners at work and learning from that, with others. I do explain the difference between political and managerial processes; about the resultant role tensions between politicians and administrators; and the idea of overlapping zones - political, managerial and professional; about the way individuals through their integrity - their personality - can resist the centrifugal forces that can result from tensions between different ways of understanding direction and purpose in government. It's as thought I might describe the nature of sibling rivalry, or the tension between mothers and daughters-in-law where social convention in a patriarchy means they live under the same roof after a man (son and spouse) has married. I point the camera and replay the films, encouraging people to think, and share their thinking, about what they're seeing and hearing - helped by comparison, playback, stop frame and selection, with and without sound - among clips of successive conversations. The explanatory notes are here (pause the film to read the longer slides). Do you think I should put five or six lines of extra explanation beside each clip? I feel a bit like the curator at an exhibition of abstract art. I want people to look at the paintings, but I know from my own experience that a label - even if it doesn't explain - can be somehow reassuring - a way of having one's thoughts guided from words and explanation to images and the possibility of understanding. Best, Simon

Bad building on Corfu

Sunday 23 Sept. This morning while Lin, who doesn’t do morning food, slept I made myself toast and very lightly scrambled fresh eggs, a mug of tea and orange juice and enjoyed breakfast under the veranda, having placed a pot of basil beside me to keep flies away. Later we went into town to bargain for flowers to put beside Kiria Leftheris’ who’s promised to water them with hers, thus hiding the stump of the external steps amputated by the previous builder. Bad things are being done to houses here – bad rebuild, bad new build. Roof joists of grossly impractical form with unnecessarily heavy purloins and ill judged joints; hollow higgledy-piggledy brick work; walls without insulation likely to leak in winter; incompetent work hidden by render, plaster, filler and paint; ungraceful imitations of Venetian arches – things that would never pass building regulations or planning rules in UK, blighting the island’s architectural traditions – most of it driven by the migratory fantasies of plump northern geese. Long ago Jack* said to me ‘if you move, go somewhere already ruined’. This advice has suited us fine in past years. This house, as we knew when we bought it, comprised two properties joined together with surpassing incompetence by a local British builder who took its vendors for what they had, which is probably why we were able to buy it. We are removing the shoddy and enabling what remains of the good to emerge. As we do this it grows on us that incompetence can, unintentionally, reveal ingenuity. There is a wood stove in what was once a single storey house. The builder ran a flue through the wooden beams of his upper floor which almost broke through his new roof tiles. He thus created, simultaneously, a fire hazard and a leak. He nailed sub-standard floor boards without tongue and groove to the new floors. They lean and creak under foot. None of his doors close. His unfixed skirting board bowed from the scuffed walls and will be good for kindling. His roofs had no insulation nor waterproof membrane. His breeze block bunkers encroaching on the side lane were his inept means of disposing of rubble from an unnecessarily demolished external staircase and balcony. These filled with rain from his ill fixed gutters forcing damp into the walls, while the removal of side stairs left the side door unsheltered. Rain drove under and round it. In the upper floor of the older two storey house he cemented up a window that looks towards the sunrise. Sometimes we imagine the misery of the previous owners as these faults came to light during the Corfu winter. It was perhaps for warmth they put lino on the fine tile floors, but why did they cut down the vine and the lemon and orange trees to put up a dish aerial? Possibly seeing England via BBC and ITV helped keep their minds off the disappointing mismatch between their hopes for Greece and the cold, wet winter, the dark strange foreign village, the wasps and flies of summer, but I don’t really know and I’m not sure they did either. If Greece wounded George Seferis, how must it have hurt our predecessors.

In the Manner of G.S. (1936) No matter where I travel, Greece wounds me still. On Mt. Pelion amid the chestnut trees the shirt of the Centaur slid among leaves to wind about my body as I mounted the slope and the sea followed me mounting also like mercury in a thermometer until we came on mountain waters. In Santorini as I touched the sinking islands and heard a flute play somewhere on the pumice stone an arrow suddenly flung from the confines of a vanished youth nailed my hand to the gunwale. At Mycenae I lifted the huge stones and the treasures of the Atridae and slept beside them at the inn of The Beautiful Helen of Menelaus they vanished only at dawn when Cassandra crowed with a-cock hanging down her black throat.

[Back to the future: June Samaras of Kalamos Books circulated a story in the Miami Herald, 24/12/07 with the comment 'Use the URL to see the awful photograph (12/07/08 this image has now been removed) this guy is using to state his case ... If he thinks THAT is a true scale model of the Parthenon, it is no wonder the British Museum does not choose to take things seriously... A plea for 'Marbles' in Parthenon (see 'missing commentary' above in this blog]

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We are beginning to grow accustomed to the sounds and smells and shapes of this home – the warmth stored in its walls in the evening and its cool in the day, the bougainvillea, the green rushes and the lemon and orange trees and the immense panorama of Albania and Greece at sunrise and the violet evenings and the wind ruffled sea in the afternoon, Vido island and the olive covered mountains as far as the eye can see and the crags behind us. I could move around it with eyes closed. It is so quiet in the mornings even with cocks crowing, charter flights rumbling, dogs barking, scooters buzzing along the side roads, the conversational chorus between our neighbours at the start of school, the chat outside in the evening and occasional yells of fury at children and the miaoing of Bubble hoping for affection and milk.
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 Saturday 22 September. Most flies and wasps that get in the house want to get out and their freedom can be arranged. But certain small flies sunbathe on my keyboard, hover over my tea and do not accept the offer of an opened window or door, so must be stalked and swatted. My impulse is to protect insects, especially the innocuous spiders that commute discretely along ledges and other interior surfaces. Lin found several 12cm centipedes upstairs and drowned them claiming ‘they bite and were really nasty’. Is this so? We argued. ‘I don’t want them breeding in my house’. She wouldn’t mind them outside. I think there’s a treatise to be written on what living things are accepted by different peoples in their homes, in their gardens and in the world and how acceptance and even welcome varies between people, between individuals, between Lin and me. The cat Bubble has rediscovered us. She’s in a poor state with a cough and will not now cross our threshold. Since we left in April she’s learned – no doubt at the end of several brooms – that she’s a village cat not a household one. * * * I doubt we’ll get that cruise this stay. There’s too much unfinished here that’s not been done since we arrived. ‘Welcome to Corfu’ said V at CJs with sympathetic resignation. L and I have done much and the house is liveable and we eat and sleep here happily enough and receive guests, but winter will come and other jobs we need to do that we can’t, until the electrics are fixed and after which there’s plastering to do and joinery. Last night over several chilled lagers D said ‘don’t worry. I’m a stickler for things. You relax. While you are away me, and B and Mgl will see the whole lot done. You won’t be disappointed.’ D has looked after Summer Song and been something of a guardian to us over the year from the moment he raised our spirits from the depression we were in on first arriving in Ipsos and seeing the musty condition of the boat we’d bought. ‘There’s a list we’ll make and get her up to scratch.’ This happened then and could now.
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The half moon last night shone among strange cloud formations like the striations of agate – not visibly moving. Through the night at this time of year comes the regular drone of the northern geese arriving and departing.
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Last night I lost my SIM card for phoning home. What sense would that have made ten years ago. Why are we searching the house for a 25mm x15mm plastic strip on which has a 12mm x13mm golden chip next to a 19 digit numbers on one side and a corporate logo on the other next to the words ‘if found call 0800317720’. It could be smaller but for the need for human fingers to pick it up and insert it inside their phone. It has this vital function. It ties me to the company who provide the service that enables me, for a payment made automatically by my bank, to phone England. We also have a similar card from a different company that we can use in Greece but which is made useable, after it has been inserted in the same phone, by being ‘topped up’. This done by buying a card locally which if scratched reveals a unique number which when keyed into my phone tops up its credit by about €20. If I used this to make international calls it would swiftly run out of credit, but it is useful for receiving such calls. Were I to use the other card for receiving such calls they would be ‘roaming’ calls for which I, and not the caller, must pay. Furthermore if I call locally using this card the person I call also ends up paying for my call as though it were from abroad – even though the person I call is a kilometre away. These circumstances mean we are frequently shifting chips in the phone. Wiser people might keep two phones for local and long distance, setting up a bar on roaming calls to the international chip. It must have been during one of these substitutions that I mislaid a chip. This morning I came downstairs and found that before she’d come to bed, after I’d fallen asleep, Lin had found it – in a corner of the kitchen floor. I describe this because accounts of daily events leave out matters so mundane, yet I find a detail of how you might reserve a seat on a stage coach and how pay for a ticket on one intriguing. No Victorian fiction I’ve read mentions how such a transaction occurred. We are simply told ‘they took a coach to Dover’. Yet the matter of currency, credit and the flow of information on paper or electronically and its loss and recovery are vital to us. Without credit one becomes a stranger – hence the term ‘credit’ from the latin term ‘credo’ - a statement of principles or beliefs, especially one that is professed formally, faith, dogma, doctrine. We are even when dreaming of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence, only made rendered free by secure location in a matrix of trust validated by international credit-reference agencies and state bureaucracies. A lost digit on a short circuited computer can see freedom evaporate - we become unbelievable. Another human can see us with their eyes, but the classification system that guarantees what that other human being must know to allow us freedom to pass or purchase cannot. We have disappeared. Our connection with Corfu is a matter of the heart, but it is also about our tax number, and the electricity and water accounts on 208 Democracy Street - meters on the wall and at the bottom of our property. We learned, last night, that my Mum, bound for a long anticipated holiday in France, has to return from her point of international departure, Birmingham, to Inverness, because somewhere between those two airports she mislaid her passport – a thin burgundy docket 125mm x 88mm constituting her permission to travel outside the UK – her ID, her permit, her authorization - her credit. Until I lost the chip yesterday, I was reproaching her for her absent mindedness. Thank goodness Amy and Richard were able to drive over to the airport hotel where she was ensconced in limbo to succour her as loving grandchildren. *Jack Hargreaves who brought me up - my stepfather