Mum's memories

Started taking down some notes on film as mum trawled her memory of seventy years ago; she in her state bed at Brin Croft speaking about life at 5 Bina Gardens in 1939 and 1940 - of bombing. "We heard the bombers going over, and they went on and on it seemed and the more they went on the more scared I got...

Mum's memory of the Blitz

Still falls the rain...Edith Sitwell's poem 'The Raids 1940'

I'm used, when in SW5, to cycling by the old home at Bina Gardens. In 67-68, when I had my first job at the Tavistock Institute, I lived on the ground floor - the house turned into three flats by my grandmother. I nearly burned it down, throwing what I thought was a dead match into a waste basket, going out for a pint of milk; coming back to find a fire engine outside. Smoke was smelled early by my grandmother's resident landlady, so I'd only singed my little kitchen leaving a messy stink I could clear up myself after a telling off for culpable stupidity.
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It was John Martin's birthday yesterday. Annie sent out a circular to friends asking for a message she could put on a DVD for the celebration.

Happy Birthday John! from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

"Bit long winded" said Lin, but I sent it anyway with soundtracks from films John and Annie have made in Australia of Mayor's and Chief Executives in conversation.
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Elections in Greece, local or national, happen on Sundays. On 2 January, Spyros Thymis was elected President of Ano Korakiana's Local Council, and of the two nominees for Vice-President - Spyros Tsirigotis and Phokion Mandylas - the latter was elected by 3 votes against 2.

Αρχαιρεσίες χθες, δεύτερη μέρα του νέου χρόνου, για το Τοπικό μας Συμβούλιο. Πρόεδρος εξελέγη ομόφωνα ο Σπύρος Θύμης. Για την θέση του Αντιπροέδρου έθεσαν υποψηφιότητα οι δύο εκπρόσωποι των συνδυασμών της δημοτικής μειοψηφίας, δηλαδή ο  Σπύρος Τσιριγώτης και ο Φωκίων Μάνδυλας. Αντιπρόεδρος εξελέγη τελικά ο Φωκίων Μάνδυλας με ψήφους 3 έναντι 2.

What I find inordinately pleasing is that I am starting to be able to get most of the meaning from postings Thanassis and Katya put on Ano Korakiana's superlative website
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After his return from a grim 18 days in an Iranian jail the talented Iason Athanasiadis had gone off my radar.  Checks on his website showed nothing new there for quite a while. But now there's an exhibition of photographs by him from Iran on the LA Times website. This is an individual who loves Iran, who had special access there through his language skills and Greekness, but who's now been banned from going there. let down no doubt in the eyes of the local police by his English parentage.
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Again despite my irritating limp I trudged with the two terriers from Brin Croft towards and over the esker across the flattened meadow to the forestry track that runs east-west above Inverarnie, a chill wind stirring the trees into the sound of surf until I could cut south into the shelter of the woods above the village, joining that mysterious path again, from which where it divided I took a slightly different direction, carrying on instead of turning left towards the lane that leads back to my mother's house. After a while the path became rough, seemed to trail off altogether into rutted planting ditches, but I soon picked it up again heading straight and direct through tight ranks of blue branched larch, until to my astonishment, I came to the small stream I'd crossed when I joined it. All unaware and thinking I was strolling east I'd entirely doubled back on myself.
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Also silent for rather too long were Aris and Katie Roussinos, working on a project to harvest premium olive oil from ancestral land in north west Corfu. Then Aris who writes - more than well - replied to a Christmas greeting just before new year:

Dear Simon. Merry Christmas to you too, and a happy 2011. Apologies for our long silence: our laptop gave up the ghost in Corfu, and by the time we came home we'd forgotten our Blogger password. We've tried every possible permutation of likely-sounding passwords, but no joy. Annoyingly, we lost almost all of our photos too. Anyway, we're back in the UK, working again and dreaming of going back. It seems the bar to entry into the olive oil market is the lack of bottling plants in Corfu - in fact a more sensible, if less romantic, idea would be opening up a bottling plant-for-hire... I hope all's well with you. With very best wishes, Aris and Katie

Dear Aris. I doubt there’s a successful enterprise in the world that hasn’t suffered a few false starts. I suspect you have learned a thing or two. I take your point about the dearth of bottling plants. There’s a busy olive oil processing factory just below Ano Korakiana – a hundred metres off the Kato Korakiana road out of the village. The owner also runs a metal working business. I understand that families and individuals take their olives down there – to extract, tin and bottle olive oil - mainly in the new Year ... the place is lit up working 24/7 for a couple of months. Have you thought of visiting? It seems that it must provide a service for a limited area, and certainly not your part of the island. Thanks for writing. Please stay in touch. Our very best wishes to you both for 2011.

Hi Simon. Thanks for this; I'll certainly have a look next time I'm over. The issue is, there's bottling and there's bottling: EU H&S regulations (compliance with which is mandatory for sale to Northern European supermarkets) are immensely strict, and expensive to adhere to, and Corfu doesn't have much of an infrastructure to support this. I've noticed a mini-boom in Corfiot local produce recently, so things are changing; I think part of the problem is the lack of co-operatives in Corfu compared to olive-growing regions on the mainland- there, farmers club together for machinery and marketing costs, whereas in Corfu... At the risk of sounding German, Corfiots have good and bad points, and they're largely the same. As (I've realised) I simply don't have enough trees to make oil production a sole income, I'd be reliant on working with local producers to buy their surplus oil and market it abroad. As for the last 300 years or so Corfiot olive oil was sold primarily for industrial purposes, there's been a degree of laziness in the local sector: olives are allowed to ripen, fall naturally and over-ripen/spoil on the ground for ease of picking, rather than being beaten from the tree at their purpling best. On the credit side, this gives Corfu its unique landscape of towering olive trees. On the debit side, it leads to often indifferent oil. So, to make the oil viable as a high-end product, I'd have to persuade dozens of local small producers to severely prune their trees (for ease of picking), pick the olives in the most labour-intensive way possible, then process them somewhere I could oversee the process on dates close to each other ready for bottling and shipping to points north and west. Corfiots being Corfiots, there are a number of different routes to financial disaster here. Ultimately, this would be a more viable project for an enlightened feudal landlord than one idealistic peasant amongst many. The one local competitor I've found (Martinego from Avliotes) produces bog-standard oil, and bottles it themselves. So for now, I'm treading water working in TV in London again (SB note: Aris in a podcast on The Word in May 2009 joins in a  discussion on the state of TV), hoping that the imminent phasing out of olive subsidies will enable me to buy up decent-sized plots over the next ten years or so and start in earnest (or buy barren land ... and plant new trees: the yield and quality of which would be far higher than in our damp, foggy Northwestern valleys). Anyway, we'd very much like to stay in touch. 

Dear Aris. Fascinating to read your analysis. It makes such sense.  My thought. He’s young. Bright. Knows the globalisation riff and can make a living playing it yet still thinks small is beautiful. He’s not going to let this go. These might be the first paragraphs of the memoirs he’ll write thirty years from now. Further thoughts. Anyone who isn’t pondering these (almost) insurmountable challenges isn’t really alive. Failure is not a shame in these circumstances. Giving up might be.  Long live Sisyphus (Camu’s version) who must surely have trodden water a while before starting up that hill again with his boulder. Can I put your analysis in my blog? “there’s bottling and there’s bottling”, “beaten from the tree at their purpling best”. As Michael Caine would say “not a lot of people know that." Your endeavours fit with ideas I’ve been following and even pursuing around localism, sustainable regional communities (my friend John Martin at LaTrobe), the governance of common pool resources (Elinor Ostrom at Indiana), the recovery of the commons, and urban food growing (my friend Richard Wiltshire my theorist-practitioner) – all interconnected. Power to your elbows and best wishes to Katie. Simon (in Scotland, then England than Corfu)

Hi Simon. Just to add, in case you didn't see this on the Guardian website, this is how olives should be harvested (film from Valentina) ...notes:  1) of course the oil will taste good straight from the mill, any oil will; that's no indication of its taste after a few months in a bottle. 2) Contrary to assumptions in Northern Europe, Italian oil (where it isn't imported in bulk from Greece and Tunisia) is generally a product of huge aristocratic latifundia* rather than happy small producers. Corfu was the same until land redistribution in the 1920s, which was undeniably good for the peasants but possibly less so in terms of access to international markets (My dad's still quite bitter about this...). Best, Aris     *Where the southern latifundia were broken up after the war, the landowners generally bought the land straight back from the suddenly cash-dazzled peasants.

I entered the home of a woman...

From: Iason Athanasiadis Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:58:27 +0330 To: Simon Baddeley Subject: The tragedy of Greek apathy Dear Simon. In the end, I gave the piece to Guardian Comment and, as you can see, it's attracting a fairly lively debate! Thanks so much for the fascinating insight and historical background I couldn't hope to be able to provide on my own. Looking forward to hearing your comments. Warmly, Iason Guardian.co.uk 18/12/08: Moving back to Athens in 2003, I found a society living in denial. Greeks were skimming the cream off the last rounds of EU subsidies oblivious to the tidal wave of globalisation looming over them. I had been living in Qatar, the very definition of a globalised city-state. The return home was a welcome respite from the Arab peninsula's identikit steel-and-glass cities, where city centres had been abolished in favour of income-appropriate super-malls and the pursuit of business was supreme. On my first night in Athens, I sat in a leafy square and watched young couples enjoy ouzo and mezze as children played under the lemon trees. Some of those same children may have been torching the municipality's Christmas tree last week or chucking petrol bombs at its parliament. Greece's student intifada erupted over the shooting by a policeman of a 15-year-old student, but the anger and lasting power of the riots imply a deeper malaise. The violence and nihilism with which banks, government buildings and private cars were burned down wrong-footed the older generation. But after the smoke cleared, there was a self-conscious pause as both sides waited for lucid demands to be made. "Who if anyone is emerging?" asked Simon Baddeley, an honorary lecturer at Birmingham University's School of Government and Society in the UK, who offers coverage of the crisis through his Democracy Street blog. "The ideological stuff I've heard so far seems juvenile. Any new ideas would have surely to come linked to a set of workable economic and social ideas that don't look like the ones I'm hearing,"....

Dear Iason. You quote me correctly. My thoughts were shared with a Greek citizen I admire, about a land that has furnished my life. Omit that and my interrogatives make me sound like yet another keyboard colonel aching for tanks on the streets - something that anyone but a dunce can see is not going to happen. Indeed your piece in the Toronto Star, on 16 December, quotes columnist Alexandros Papahellas writing that 'Our problem today is not whether tanks might roll in the streets, but that even if they did they would likely collide into each other.' I'm very grateful for your thoughts, for the comments it's encouraged, and especially for MilesSmiles' reflections on a 'Western condition' - reminding me that this crisis in Greece is only momentarily Greek:

We now have pretty good reason to think that neoliberal capitalist democracy is a failed ideology, incapable of dealing with the real problems societies face. Part of the problem is that neoliberalism is a bit like Ingsoc – an ideology that is paradoxically set up to destroy the possibility of ideology. Neoliberalism atomizes social discourse so that talk of a common good becomes almost incomprehensible, since nobody is supposed to criticize anyone else's values and all that rubbish.

I hope to be saying I was wrong to comment on lack of leadership in Greece, because I was unable to recognise original thought - because I'm locked, with the rest of us (including most of the rioters, with their multilingual posters), into looking at the present in the mirror of history. It's an old forgivable error. The future may be being worked on in a beer cellar; inhabiting some 'rough beast'; a sapling indistinguishable from surrounding annuals. What may be unfold may be good and bad and will have been developing in ways that are initially parasitic, sucking meaning and agency from familiar events and institutions. I'm more puzzled about what is happening than I ought to be. I am also rather excited and optimistic. I do not feel apathetic - a Greek invention describing stoic withdrawal from the affairs of the world - and I do not think what is happening will lead to the inevitable disaster that is the essence of that misused term tragedy. I wait on the moment, embracing conversation.

* * * * This situation posted to YouTube on 16 December has had nearly 57000 hits - the banner held up so awkwardly - well, a bit 'shuffly' after a while - invites viewers to stop watching television and go on the streets. The rather longer statement by the manager of the TV station deploring the invasion - not, he insists, a 'take-over' - has had less than a 1000 hits so far - not least I suspect because he's less aware that for those for and against a cause, situationism is, outside the psychotic obscenities of Mumbai, the only game in town. Even Dubya had the wit to make a point about the size of the shoe thrown at him by a Iraqi TV journalist last Sunday. I'm reading of Robert Shoemaker on The London Mob and George Rudé on The Crowd in History.[Ref: Adam Shatz in London Review] And this piece posted 17 December by Andrew Lamm plus the conversation/comments that follow illuminates changing perspectives in the hall of mirrors within which news is created

Editor’s Note: While nearly 500 journalists and media developers met in a five-star hotel in Athens to discuss the state of the media, the city smoldered from riots organized by young people using new forms of communication. [Reminder:"Karamanlis or tanks" - the choice that Konstantinos Karamanlis, uncle of the present PM, posed to Greeks in 1974]

* * * On Thursday I took the ferry from Portsmouth Harbour Station across the estuary to Gosport - about 8 minutes - to run a workshop on Questioning, passing through London via Waterloo Bridge, dropping off for an hour with Richard Wiltshire, co-author with Deborah Burn, of Growing in the Community, published by the Local Government Association with a foreward by Baroness Andrews - "Everyone benefits from allotments and we are conscious that there is rising demand..." This is the first time government has gone beyond saying allotments are good and acknowledged that more people want them. Richard gave me an overview of his current reading of the prospects for allotments and food growing in cities which I'll summarise shortly. I wasn't home until just after one on Friday morning but was immersed in reading Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father. I watch this man with such hope and interest as he assembles his cabinet. It was fascinating to follow his mind at work, parsing his growing up and emerging identity, as the offspring of black and white - the relief of encountering a mind that can struggle with and navigate dilemmas and contradictions is almost palpable. I see my face in the window of the train, hurrying through the dark, smiling at his prose. * * * *

A political-management disconnect

Councillor Margaret Eaton (video ~ October 2008), Chair of the Local Government Association and Paul Coen, its Chief Executive who, on 12 December, via the LGA website, wrote:

Since September it has become increasingly difficult to have confidence that the political leadership and the managerial leadership of the LGA are at one on both the direction of travel and the day-to-day leadership of the Association. On Wednesday I was asked to take leave, which I have done. The LGA and I will now seek to agree a way forward. We do not believe that this will be aided by further publicity and speculation. Therefore we shall be making no further comment or answering questions until it becomes necessary.

A wet day in the Midlands

Cycling to Dudley the other day to run a workshop for the council, I folded my bike and caught a 74 bus which stopped for a moment over the motorway, and I thought how the cartoonist Carl Giles had this gift for evoking a wet day in an English town. I like this chilly grey damp; the bright shop fronts above reflective streets, the tear of motorway traffic pushing up spray, the damp dog smell of Harris Tweed inside the bus and the memory of dank railway station platforms. * * * Patras 12 December 08: A video of the broadcast from the occupied station SuperB Patra, a major TV station of Western Greece. The station was occupied by demonstrators and students. After the broadcast the station was left to continue normally. * * * * Email from Iason Athanasiadis:

Dear Simon. It's been some time we hadn't been in touch and I wanted to write and see how you are. Needless to say, I've continued reading your writings, even as my year at Harvard finished and I moved to Istanbul (which felt like the best thing to do). Now I'm working on a project for the Pulitzer Center on contemporary Turkish society and preparing a show of my work in LA about Iran . Also writing about the recent riots. One of the most interesting aspects of this whole business - aside from the youth Intifadah side of it - is how Greeks are calling it an imposed Velvet Revolution from the side of the West. Have you heard anything about this? How are you and how is the teaching going? Warm regards from Istanbul. Iason

Dear Iason. What a pleasure to hear from you – as good as a landmail message from a friend hitting our doormat on this rainy day in Birmingham. I’ve not “heard anything about this” but my deep curiosity is redirected. Listening to Malcolm Brabant from Athens on BBC R4’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ second story – 7 minutes into the programme) talking about Karamanlis and whether the international press are over or underplaying the crisis, shortly after your mail arrived – the ‘velvet riots’ phrase was used, but without reference to ‘imposition’. (conspiracy theories are proliferating tho’) Brabant argues for the significance of the unrest – “a cluster bomb of grievances against deep flaws in the Greek state”...”a highly educated generation living in an economy that is practically feudal.” He also mentions Karamanlis’ reference to the ‘pimps’ - the toxic hidden influence of the quiet powerful – he’s failed to counteract. “Statesmanship is not an abundant quality among Greece’s political establishment.... The stone throwers are just discovering their own strength – who knows what they might achieve...” I am also interested in the views and facts of Nikos Raptis (e.g. his thoughts on parecon) on Friday...I’m an engaged spectator hungry for understanding about what is unfolding in Greece. Thank you for your story in the Washington Times. We wait on the moment So far as teaching and research are concerned – you may notice, on my blog, attempts to embed videos of political-management conversations I’ve been collecting over 30 years, with explanatory texts. This is a specialised endeavour for the benefit of people who'll be working in UK local government – but I’ve always had difficulty making this material accessible outside the lecture room. This is a shame because I am intrigued by the minutiae of conversations that make government. The issue is less technical (though I’d like to improve the quality) than legal. University lawyers get worried about having research material on YouTube – even though the most august figures are now using it as simply an extended part of the public domain. Now I must mend a puncture in my bicycle and venture into the festive streets of my own city. How many of students in Athens will be going home for Christmas?. Kindest regards. Simon

* * * An e-note at the Foreign Policy Research Institute website article by Cornelia Tsakiridou, a philosopher at La Salle University in Philadelphia about current Greek myths...

'that those in positions of authority cannot be trusted; that the rebellious and poor have a monopoly on justice; and that problems facing the nation are caused by obscure international enemies and their domestic operatives... Despite attempts in the national and international press (among them Le Monde and The Guardian) to give a deeper dimension to the Greek riots and to offer a mix of elaborate psychological and sociological explanations, the truth may actually be rather plain. The riots happened because the legal mechanisms designed to protect the public interest remained idle. The reasons are not difficult to surmise. First, in Greece the public domain is the designated arena of political and personal advancement. Thus, except in rhetoric, there is effectively no concept of public interest to uphold and defend. There have been no counter-demonstrations demanding that the violence, looting, and destruction stop because they are against the public good. Second, many in the public apparently sympathize with the rioters’ stance that state corruption justifies state disruption. Third, an increasing number of Greeks across the political spectrum believe that the riots are the result of sinister foreign designs too powerful for any Greek government to deter... As the majority of New Democracy supporters have conceded in recent polls, blame falls squarely on the Karamanlis government for failure to restore law and order and maneuver conniving opposition parties, PASOK and especially the radical left SYRIZA (whose hand in the riots is all but certain) into a show of unity. But even if against all odds Karamanlis proves resilient and survives this crisis, the mindset that made it possible and the dangers it poses for the country’s internal security and stability will persist.