First lines

They seemed at first like floaters inside my eye, or the blemishes on a digital image which can be brushed gently off a laptop screen, but their musical mewing showed four short-toed eagles soaring over the crags above the village. A group around the shop gazed up at them as I paused with another barrow of firewood from Steve's house to ours. Overnight Tuesday's weather changed back to wet and windy.

The sun has hung his hat up
Drip drip drip all day
The sun has hung his hat up
‘Cos he doesn’t want to play

Now we’re all unhappy
Drip drip drip all day
The sun has hung his hat up
‘Cos he doesn’t want to play

He ‘s not up this morning
‘Cos he’s blamed for global warming
Now he’s staying in all day
To give us all a warning.

I’m glad I sawed and stored most of the latest firewood yesterday. What’s left is sheltered under Alan’s new balcony. So...‘what to do on a rainy day’. Read, feed cats, make the bed, keep the stove working up a cosy space all day, ponder the news - I understand enough Greek to follow Katerina when she told us that she’ll be moving to a new school between Ipsos and Ag. Markos now that the village school is being ‘amalgamated’ along with many schools across Greece. I’d seen this on the village website, mentioning there are now only 12 children at the school in Ano Korakiana.

Το 2ο Δημοτικό Σχολείο Κορακιάνας σήμερα έχει 12 μαθητές. Προτείνεται η κατάργησή του και η συγχώνευση με το 6θέσιο Δημοτικό Σχολείο Αγίου Μάρκου, σε απόσταση 3,5 χιλιομέτρων. Δημιουργείται σχολείο με 103 μαθητές

Such eventualities have been occurring in villages across the modernising world, though not where rural populations are still large, as in Tikli in Rajasthan, where Martin and Annie Howard, who we know, have started a local private school in the country 15 miles south of the outskirts of Delhi. That would be so unlikely in Europe where young parents feel they can only make a living for themselves and a future for their children by moving to larger settlements. At least there’s a viable 103 pupils in the combined school three and a half kilometres away on the lower ground between Pyrgi and Ag.Markos.
*** ***
What to read?:

When the same nightmare awakens her, she sits bolt upright in the middle of the bed.  McBain Alice in Jeopardy 2005

Towards the middle of July, in the year 1838, one of those vehicles called milords, then appearing in the Paris Squares for the first time, was driving along the rue de l’Université, bearing a stout man of medium height in the uniform of a captain in the National Guard.  Balzac Cousin Bette 1847

First lines. Like the tips of icebergs, skirted by the less attentive, an indicator as to what may lie beneath. I’m equally attracted to both beginnings, written a century and a half apart. Go on to the whole first page and I may be reading what the author wrote last - distilling the essence of their story in those first 30 or so lines, after the rest was completed, or I may be reading the page the author needed to get right before they could progress. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.’ I remember Olivier speaking these lines in the film of Richard III, still better than the versions I’ve seen on stage. Good first lines are like poems, or clever advertising copy – containing a weight and depth beyond the number of words in them, the meaning and intention of the writer. I love ‘once upon a time…’ because I remember having enchanting stories read to me. This will be timeless magic. ‘In the beginning darkness was upon the face of the waters’ or is it ‘the deep?** I can’t recall exactly, but nearly as good as 'The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of...' and so on, for a good paragraph, introducing the universe of Pickwick. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged...'  starts Jane Austen’s great novel Pride and Prejudice  - her first wasn’t it? ‘It was the best of the times. It was the worst of times.’ A Tale of Two Cities. ‘It was a crisp April morning and the clocks were striking thirteen’ I don’t know if it was crisp or April, but the 13 chimes I do recall. Knowing what was to come in Orwell’s 1984, imagining how I could be persuaded to embrace a lie even though reality is presented to my eye and ear. ‘I first met him in Piraeus.’ People who’ve only seen the film of Zorba the Greek will guess it. They seem so simple, yet these first words are steeped in the genius of their inventors. Kadare’s Three Elegies for Kosovo 1998 ‘Never before had rumours of impending war been followed by a confirmation of peace.” I looked that up to see how Kadare started that little book, but what about the ones I can nearly remember? For some reason I’m always thinking Dostoevsky and not Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina which starts 'All happy marriages are the same; all unhappy marriages are different.'* Is that correct? It was far better than that but until I check it on the memory-stealing internet that's what I recall. How about the first great historian Herodotus’ History of the Greek and Persian War 430BC ‘According to the Persians, best informed in history, the Phœnicians began the quarrel.’ “I like that” said Lin. “It’s as good as the Ed McBain.”

*Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way -  Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
**And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
*** ***
We had our first class in Greek here. Superb. Our tutor Aleko Damaskinos, teacher of mathematics at Edinburgh University and Queen Mary, University of London, used the blackboard around the dartboard at Sally’s on the Ipsos esplanade to take us through a number of nouns and verbs that we’d been using to make some simple sentences, taking some of the hard work out of learning the frustrating inflexions of Greek (inflect = to change the form of a word, for example, to show a change in tense, mood, gender, or number). Eight of us – two Dutch - Anneka and Laura, - an American – Mickey – and the English - Roman, Jane, Carol, me and Lin, paying a small sum each for an hour’s very good tuition.

Words we will require for this lesson Aleko told us:
Η θέση (thesi) = place, έχω δίκιο (thikio) = I am right,
Δεν έχο δίκιο = I am wrong,
Δικός μου  (thikos mou) = mine/my (m)
Δική μου = mine/my (f), Δικό μου = mine/my (n),

Δεν πειράζει (pirazi) = it doesn’t matter.
Ίδιοσ-α-ο (ithios-a-o) = the same,
Γυρίζω (girizo) = I return/I turn,
Γύρισα (girisa) = I returned/I turned,
Γύρισε = return! (command),
Η δουλειά (thoolia) = work/job,
Ευχαριστημένος-η-ο (efharitstimenos) = happy.

We started sentences: I returned home = Γυρίζω στο σπίτι
He went back to his place = γύρισε στη θέση του,
What did he/she do? = τι έκανε;
What did you do, Andrea? = τι έκανες, Αντρέα;
What did you see? = τι είδες;

"'See' is very irregular. A bit of a stinker" said Aleko.

βλέπω-εις-ει = Ι see (you see, he/she/it sees)
είδα-ες-ε = I saw (you, he/she/it saw),
δεν είθα τίποτα = I saw nothing

On to some imperatives: βάζω (vazo) = I put, βάλε = put!
δίνω (thino) = I give, δώσε = give!
παίρνω (perno) = I take, πάρε = take!

And some prepositions, μέσα = inside, επάνω = on top

Then a little test: Take the book and give it to Dimitri = πάρε το βιβλίο και δώσε το Κύριο Δημήτρη.
Take the bag from the chair and put it on the table = πάρε τη τσάντα απο τη καρέκλα και βάλε την επάνω στο τραπέζι.
What are you doing, Andrea? = τι έκανες, Αντρέα;
I took the bag  from the chair and I put it on the table = πήρα τη τσάντα απο τη καρέκλα και την έβαλα έπανω στο τραπέζι.

Τhus we continued for a rewarding hour, practising our pronunciation, carefully assembling usable sentences, transposing them to other settings with slightly different nouns. Meanwhile I'm smarting because I seem to have told someone who asked, not, as I intended, "I am taking firewood (zeela = ξύλα) to my house", but "I am taking a bitch' (skeela = σκύλα) to my house." I wondered why the person to whom I mentioned this, slightly proud of my diction, looked puzzled, even a little alarmed.
*** ***
Ian Wegg who's been helping me research broadcasts involving my stepfather, Jack Hargreaves, has found me this 1949 news item from the British Pathé website:
Howard Marshall does commentary for the BBC, from Peckham swimming baths (long demolished), as Jack tries to reel in strong local swimmer called Harold Elven. I recall JH telling me he'd set this up hoping he could 'catch' Harold, but the rod broke. Even now I can remember being vexed for my stepfather. In my seven-year-old mind he never failed at anything. Ian writes: '... possibly the oldest existing film of JH? It shows he was recognised as an angler even then, 10 years before his first Southern broadcast."

On the beach at Ipsos

Bombardier Spike Milligan in Where have all the Bullets Gone? recalls a wartime outing by military launch across the Bay of Naples to a private villa on Ischia where he and Len Prosser were directed down ‘a few rocky steps’ to a private beach below mount Epomeo.

The day is sunny, the sea is like champagne. We plunge into crystal clear waters that in forty years time will be floating with tourist crap and overpopulation…..even as I type this, I can see that splendid sunlight on that warm azure sea in a time capsule that will never come again.

My stepfather wrote ‘So we will live out our days in the cracks between the concrete. And then they will pour cement on top of us.’ Rather as I can enjoy cycling through the intersection of stream, canal, railway, and footpath below the sturdy concrete columns supporting the congested roads of Spaghetti Junction, so, in 21st century Corfu, we get pleasure from bathing off a small pebble beach squeezed between a slipway at Ipsos and a rubble tip, sitting and lying on a discarded chair and lounger amid polystyrene remnants and electrical sheathing in front of a handsome but ruined caique, ravaged by teredo, unlikely to float without a new keel and bilge planks.

We cool ourselves in the sea, dry and read and swim again. A bear family with a chubby cub and an Alsatian drive up in a van advertising plumbing and tiling in outer London. They launch the jet skier they’ve towed to the shore and take turns whizzing back and forth in the beach’s radius, the father making the aquatic equivalent of handbrake turns to slash wash over his delighted daughter diving in the shallows. The dog paddles neck deep in the sea. Further out a motor boat alternates between towing a brightly coloured paraglider carrying someone in harness high over Ipsos Bay, an inflated sausage floating its riders, and a flotilla of dinghies from which we can hear happy squeals. Around five the caique Madalena goes by freighted with passengers returning to Gouvia from a BBQ day-trip up to San Stephano. Much further out a sail moves, slower than a minute hand, across the horizon below the mainland lost in haze. I’m torpid, drifting with languid strokes in the waveless water, reading Anne Zouroudi, a writer with an experienced feel for Milligan’s future imperfect.

We dined at a fish restaurant at Kommeno with Mark and Sally, who’d watched the three DVDs ‘An Exile in Paradise’. “We’ve been watching your videos” said Mark “Didn’t really like them.” “Oh” (dismay) “What didn’t you like?” “Joking. They were really great”. Sally said “I wonder how Edward Lear managed that journey.” We’d learned from Robert Horne’s retracing of Lear’s travels 160 years ago in Corfu and northern Greece - much still under Ottoman rule - and Albania, that there was another dimension to the life of the limerick and nonsence rhymer I’d known, with a billion others, since childhood. Epileptic, myopic, asthmatic and prone to fevers Lear sketched and painted a brilliant collection of mid-19th century landscapes in an area unvisited by artists and writers – much of his work bought for almost nothing by a Greek philanthropist who left them to the Benaki in Athens. I’d bought the DVDs in the UK and before passing them to our friends, had watched them with Lin, entranced as Robert Horne and his camera crew encountered people near places where Lear had sketched held up copies and asked people just where the artist had sat so we could look at the present day site – some changed immeasurably and some not. ‘An Exile in Paradise’ has echoes of Edmund Keeley’s book ‘Inventing Paradise’ except that where Keeley’s heroes invented the tourists’ dream of modern Greece – Athens, the Aegean and the Ionian seas – Lear’s focus is seldom seashore and places famous (or infamous) for tourism, but rather places still not well known and in some cases still viewed as hazardous for visitors. Jack in that same ode wrote of people who claim a right to walk where they please ‘…but we look where they trod before and shudder for what follows in their footsteps.’ Perhaps there has been learning. Things that remain beautiful are sometimes so because protected by a history of blood and poverty muted by selective memory – another way of describing the lazy sentiment of nostalgia.

Ipsos in 1950 by Maria Chroussachi

The wood stove is working!

Just before sunrise on Monday morning I checked and found the fire had stayed in overnight. The logs are seasoned, from a truckload I’d bought and carted down our steps and stacked in February last year. G and M had carried them from beside the house where they’d have got soaked and stacked them in the apothike from where I carted six logs upstairs last night. I placed an olive log on glowing embers but saw I needed smaller logs. I made a cup of tea, fetched a dustpan and brush, and a handsaw and put on socks and pants and brought the laptop upstairs. The embers needed coaxing but until fire flamed, smoke came from the door and lid when opened. I didn’t want to spoil a growing ash bed with the riddle and was wandering whether to open a window to increase the draw when I spied a flame. I opened the front. The fire spread, muttering and clicking. I drank my tea, basking in the enveloping warmth. The bedroom door was open to spread the warm for when Lin dressed. Bright sunlight leaks through all the eastward windows. Shadows of invisible smoke rise twirling beside the shadow of the stove on the white wall. I assume it’s very thin smoke off the paint of the stove that will stop in time, or does a sun so bright make shadows of the heated air? More vexing right now is a foot long crack in the marble slab behind the stove. Was this made by too much heat behind the stove; by a flaw in the kavalla? Will it extend across the rest of the slab? We need to get to know the stove; the effect of its placing in the room, how its heat spreads, our choice of fuel, the weather, the design of the flue – inside and out. In the room is a thirteen foot stainless steel tubular radiator too hot to touch and already turning iridescent, adding to our warming. Yesterday morning condensation in the flue dripped brownily on the floor from the horizontal joint closest to the wall. Heat from embers prevented that this morning. Olive creates a lot of tar and we help create a market for olive wood – the tree whose abundance is part of the island’s character. I was assured this load came from the trimming of local trees every two years, but we’d prefer to collect the generous amounts of discarded wood we see by the road and along the shore. One day, not so far in the future, people will mock us for not knowing how to use the sun that shining so dazzling on us in the depth of winter to warm our homes. The kafenion here has two solar heating panels facing south west beside its terrace – as an example to all who pass.
* * *
There are so many small birds frolicking around the gardens and the robins are numerous and allow you to get within a few feet. We wondered if the shooting sends them into the gardens and empty buildings of the village like some modern agriculture in England drives country creatures into the city using the canals as routes and parks, allotments and untended gardens as habitats. D told us the other day of a worried man who’d wandered up to the place they’re making a house below Ano Korakiana and asked, in English, if they’d seen an animal he was seeking. “It has a dark voice and…” – making a swift gesture as though combing back a quiff and “a chi!” – pronounced hard. Could this have been a badger, or the particular character of a missing dog?

* * *
Sunday morning, reckoning the mortar dry round the flue hole in the wall, I light our stove. It warms the main upstairs room. We drop in on a table top sail at Drifter’s Bar in Dassia and buy cutlery, china, pictures, a mirror and a four foot long hand-made hand-painted papier maché parrot on a stand. The breeze from the north chilled us even in direct sun creating the clearest of views across the channel as we passed through Ipsos. Once home we finished work on the guest bedroom door and hung it with glass replaced, between the kitchen and the downstairs bedroom. In the evening with the temperature falling below freezing the stove warmed the whole house. We sat and gaze at the flames listening to the logs, which I’d brought up from the apothiki, crackling, inhaling the slight waft of wood smoke. It’s only a week now before we return to England for five weeks.

* * *
Sunday morning: The sun rose into a watery sky. There was a shower in the early morning. Lambros and one mate arrived at 9.00am. This confirmed my learning that you need to be on the spot with any building. Not because of dishonesty or incompetence but because work on houses, like surgery, requires regular revision of original plans because of the inconstancy of materials and settings. A flue tube as just too large to fit the second bend poking out of the wall. Our spare tube is needed and another cut with the grinder. Another fitting is too loose.
How to make it stable? Our longest ladder is almost impossible to position safely in Leftheris’ garden. One more rung of extension might have made it possible but there’s a safety fitting that makes extension that far impossible. Rightly so. We find one acceptable position, which is OK to insert the pipe and chimney top and mortar the outside part of the hole made for it, but not to drill for a bracket to hold it. Lambros asks for wire. He finds the right stuff off the neighbouring waste ground and fixes the flue to the same bracket as the gutter’s. I hold the foot of the ladder like a limpet while Adoni hands Lambros mortar through an upstairs window. Meanwhile Lin’s putting a coat of varnish on the conscientiously stripped and sanded and filled door for the guest bedroom which now has a worn surface of ancient eau de nil lacquer with wood showing through that interior decorators enjoy crafting and lovers of the new regard as scruffy. Then upstairs Lambros and Adoni are straightening out our drunken archway – with render. I’m on the phone to Paul. “Is there a difference here between mortar and plaster?” “Not really. It all depends. We tend to go for a slightly knobbly finish.” “OK. Thanks.” Later when Aln trying to restore the upstairs downstairs two-way switch he finds a two-way switch but no wiring leading upstairs. “Where did it go?”

"My fourth cat"

Mrs Kolcak, our neighbour, came to the door to say their big old cat had been scared up a tree after being set upon by the next neighbour's dogs. Specks of blood were on the rockery. Within minutes the West Midlands Fire Brigade arrived - five men in a big red fire engine. An extending ladder was raised. A young firefighter got the miaouing cat under one arm and carried him down through the awkward foliage. We clapped. "My fourth cat" he said. Cat, shivery but unhurt, went indoors to be fussed over.

* * *
This is from the 'north central' section of Stephan Jaskulowski's map of Corfu. It shows Ipsos Harbour to the east. Ano Korakiana to the west. The the winding roads to Sokraki and Spartillas to the north. It's 10 years old but still works for getting round by car, bicycle and foot - philhellenism at work! As good a map of the island and the city as any I've seen. Of course there's the detailed sections of the Corfu Trail and, no doubt, military maps* we can't see.

Stephan went all over Corfu with a GPS on this amazing project. How well he must know the ground. The section of his map I've posted is unpublished. Stephan, in Nottingham, sent it to me and it's helpful for guiding visitors over the five kilometres between Ipsos and Ano Korakiana. I've put a white cross on the map to show the whereabouts of 208 Democracy Street.

To obtain Stephan's published map of the whole island while supporting Agni Animal Welfare Fund visit www.agni-animal-welfare-fund.com/Maps.asp or e-mail Stephan at thecorfumap@ntlworld.com

*In the sixth chapter of Prospero's Cell Durrell mentions in his diary - 8/8/38 - that 'Bocklin has walked over the hills from Metsovo and arrived in the island' ... 'a tough looking specimen of the new Germany'. Bocklin, who Durrell knew in Paris as a 'seedy blond youth', unknowingly allows Durrell to discover, in a guest room at the White House, 'a bundle of accurate architectural drawings of the main harbour and fortress.'

२०८

Friday, April 13, 2007 How satisfying to insert a new chip in my phone, enter a Personal Identification Number and find that it will work in Greece. For some this would be too easy to mention. Not for me. Whenever I’ve travelled my phone has been on ‘roaming’ for calling and being called anywhere. Yet call a number in Corfu, be it a few kilometres away, the person called pays for my call at international rates. Not a good way to treat friends in Corfu. Lin’s painting upstairs. I’ve gone on clearing the garden. We’ve asked another roofer to give us an estimate to compare with the one we expect on Monday from G. We’ve made up the bed that was left here, had a late light lunch and caught glimpses of neighbours and heard their children playing and seen distant ferries moving to and fro in the channel. Thursday, April 12, 2007 A calm fresh cloudless dawn. We are living on 'Summer Song'. Had breakfast on board and later in the morning drove up Ano Korakiana getting more used now to the road and its pinch points at Ayios Markos and the various potentially tricky passing points on the road up to the house. At the 208 Democracy Street Lin gardened, tidied and cleaned most of the day. I went to Corfu to work on the internet responding to enquiries from various councils. Back at the house late afternoon we checked the whereabouts of our cesspool and the best place in the small garden to transfer rubble from building work. Someone played a recorder next door. After dusk at CJs I chatted to an engineer about how Corfu’s water system struggled to cope with summer visitors. Not that well from what I’ve read and heard from Greeks and foreigners. There are problems with traffic, with waste, with land use, and - more subtly – with social fabric as tradition becomes commodity and harvesting begins with the start of the holiday season.

An old postcard of Ipsos

Enthusiastic from experience in Australia about what could be done here, Harry Tsoukalas in the April ‘Corfiot’ announces the first (Location: Kontokali – inland inner road close to Danilia junction info@petracon.biz 6947 269112 or Garnet at 6932 606332) of 3 recycling yards charging €50 to receive rubble, which at 20 cubic metres per truckload, would cost €500 to dump at Temploni.

The realm of wonder

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Yesterday we started clearing the small garden, to see what lay beneath. I opened the gate onto the path to the lower road. Neighbours brought a house gift. Our builders arrived to measure up the roof for an estimate of complete repairs as well as removing the concrete rubble blocks that the previous owners had set up beside the house to stack rubble and which have brought damp into the lower rooms. A young woman from the house behind when asked said “It was very nice” leaving unfinished her view that improvements had been unsuccessful. We agreed. An outside staircase to a balcony had been removed. I cycled back to Ipsos and Lin came down in the car. Shared a lager and an altercation with itinerant topers whose game is to ask questions, top the answer until someone remonstrates and then say ‘sorry’. We were part rescued by a friend who’d winked across the space at the bar into which this couple had barged.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Summer Song lies near the end of the seaward arm. of Ipsos Harbour. The owner of the little yacht moored next to ‘Summer Song’ until February, sailed for Italy while we were away, but Magnus, her skipper, is now in hospital there after he became ill while crossing the Straits of Otranto. The Italian Coastguard came alongside his drifting boat but in trying to lift him from his boat he dropped into the sea from which they only finely rescued him after two hours in the water.

We went into town and drew money from our bank behind the Liston, bought bedding, shower curtain and paint in the Evraiki [Back to the future reference: Look out for a forthcoming book by Marcia Haddad to which I was referred on 27/7/07 by Stan Boardman-Jacobs' 'The Day My Heart Broke']
We drove to Democracy Street - the back way, turning off the Sidari Road along roads lined by the pink blossoms of Judas trees, to gaze from our balcony at the sea and the woods and the village above and below and discuss plans for the house. I checked the shop nearby could receive our mail. “Yes, two or three times a week it comes.” I said the bread was good there. The owner said he used to have a bakery there. The wood meant the bread lasted 5-6 days, “but I don’t want to talk about that.”

Monday, 9 April 2007 Ano Korakiana, Easter Monday
We visited 208 Democracy Street and met the builders. It may be necessary to redo the whole roof rather than just repair parts of it. Ano Korakiana’s Easter Monday procession gathered round the bend by Little Venice. We had a coffee – skirto and nescafe – at the kafenion and gingerly wandered up Democracy Street to the ravine bridge where we waited. The drums started. The procession moved off. A troop of cub scouts, cross bearers and then the Ano Korakiana band. Woodwind – clarinets and flutes – to spice the grander sound of the swaying trombones, trumpets and the drums. They were playing San Tomasso. Solemn but not sad. Then three ranks of dignified women in suits with purple ties – part of the choir. Then passed – St.Peter and St.Spiridon and St Michael on banners, then priests. One saw us and nodded and said “Christos Anesti, Where from?” “From England.” I should have replied "Anethos Anesti".



We waited a little and than strolled on, wary to follow, but not join the procession as it played down Democracy Street. We visited some friends at the bottom of the village. Later on the low road past olive trees, Lin stopped the car and we could hear bees not yet recruited to the killing labour of monocultivation, doing voluntary work among the wildflowers.

Edward Lear, Corfu, 1871, w/c & gouache. Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA

Saturday, April 7, 2007


The big ferry from Bari sailed hardly a 100 metres by the corner of north east Corfu in the dark and on to Igoumenitsa where we landed and trollied our luggage a kilometre along the seafront to the Pantokrator. We remembered how when we'd come this way the previous November a south wind had blown with such strength off the shore our ship had been unable to dock for two hours - a wait that had given us a new friend in Hy from Ayios Markos who'd ridden home with us once we'd made it to Corfu.



She was very full, convivial chat drowning the noise of unwatched TVs in the familiar saloon. One family, at least, had brought a whole lamb for Easter. It lay wrapped beside them but as the crowd increased was stowed below their seat. 'One vast realm of wonder' (Canto 88 Byron's 'Travels of Childe Harold') - words of a lover, blind to flytipped refuse, strip mall development, bleached menus selling 'pise and ships', UK redtops and eurotrash porn, dumb t-shirts, fuming traffic, wall-to-wall football on TV and shaven lads with rosy bellies. But Greece makes me blind. I get a lump in my throat as I see it twinklng below from a late night plane or rising from the sea from the deck of a ferry.

The air was crisp as the ship headed north west over a flat sea. At the Port of Corfu by mid-morning Kostas' boy met us with a car. We left it outside his office with our luggage and strolled towards the Liston until we were standing tightly surrounded by people of all ages below fine balconies packed with onlookers, some preparing to drop terracotta pots on the marble streets below. As even larger pots appeared in the windows above we "ooh'd" and "aah'd" in anticipation. At noon the cascade began. 'Crash" "huraaaaaa" "crash" "huraaaaa". The water in the pots, as well as holding the sins of the preceding year, ensures shards don't explode among the onlookers. The sun shone bright. the crowd was civil and happy. A few minutes later with bands playing we strolled through pottery strewn streets, eating roast lamb, onion and tomato on pita bread.

Friday, April 6, 2007
All seats to Bari from Rome were reserved. At Termini by 8.30am we walked through the bustle and boarded a Eurostar for Bari hoping for the best. Another passenger, a young teacher, Valerian, helped translate, asking the guard if sitting on our luggage would be OK. He nodded. A young woman ran to catch the train as it started and the guard opened the door so she could hop aboard with a broad and slightly out-of-breath smile of gratitude. In a spacious lobby at the end of the last carriage we could gaze through glass at the receding lines as our train sped south.



The snack trolly was a door away. We enjoyed hot chocolate and espresso. Later Lin made a picnic – bread and wine. Cassino, Caserta, Foggia and then some seats came free. We ate, chatted and read. The train was clean and roomy; the passengers civil without needing words. No-one sought our tickets or made announcements.
At Bari we left our luggage at the station and soon found ourselves in a Good Friday procession through the high sided streets following or being followed by a brass band in grieving sonour swaying amid a procession of saints carried on biers behind Jesus - ecce homo - bearing a cross to Golgotha by crowded pavements, shops (few shuttered) bars (none closed) a nunnery and commuters in their cars queueing to get out of town.