The march of time

Seven years ago in Spring, under Efi and Adonis’ walnut tree in their garden next door, my neighbour and friend Lefteris and I celebrated our 70th birthdays – he two months younger than I. It was a party of foreigners – mainly English plus my old American friend Tony, staying with us a week– and Greeks, neighbours in Ano Korakiana.

«Αγαπώ την Ελλάδα…αγαπώ την Άνω Κορακιάνα»

It was a perfect evening to mark our arrival at the biblical age for the proper duration of our lives. My friend Kim reminded me that its unseemly to grumble at the problems of being old when so many don't get to be old. All the same today I asked Lin, rhetorically, what justifies me being grumpy and sometimes sad.

“I’m closer to death. Although I’m healthy, I’m weaker and shall get more so. Lefteris is poorly." 

A few days ago he fell, a second time, off steps he’s been using all his life. His back's purple and black. We heard him crying out one morning and ran to try and help but Vasiliki was well ahead of us.

“People die. I’ve no older relatives to talk to. My mum passed in 2012 at 95, your Dad in 2016 at 98, your mum last year at 94. We’re the elders now ... One of our best friends is suddenly ill - diagnosis maddeningly uncertain - and won’t be back to Corfu this year. But it’s not just the elderly who are dying or sick but people in the prime of life. Y crashed his motorbike this July, widowing his young wife and leaving his young daughters fatherless. K and T suffered the worst catastrophe –  their only daughter, aged 28, about to be married, died without warning this March after drinking a morning coffee. A few weeks later my friend Dave phoned to tell me Trish his wife, hardly 50, had, out of the same blue, a fatal heart attack. 'She was meant to go after me' he said. There are other bad things affecting acquaintances. Martin who tripped over a low wall in Duikades a few months ago and fell three metres onto concrete; flown back to England unable to walk or think straight, stuck in therapy for months perhaps disabled permanently. B's wife in an induced coma in the island hospital, suffering sepsis. What a catalogue and there’s more. P, so full of life and wisdom, undergoing the ordeal of chemo following five hours surgery to remove suddenly discovered tumours. That doesn’t count unheralded separations of people we’ve enjoyed as couples – three, perhaps four, whose happiness together we’ve witnessed, whose exchange of vows – spoken and unspoken - was part of my hope for people living happily ever after, their children as banners heralding the out-dated pledge ‘so long as we both shall live’.  And look what's happened to our fecund orange and lemon trees, infested with scale insects and black mould, becoming barren of the fruit that fell into our hands in such abundance!"

Just before our grandchildren were born Amy and Guy bought a house, with our help, on the edge of the city. It was near the largest sewage works in Europe and under the flight path of Birmingham International Airport, but behind it, until the rising ground arrived at the woodland skyline, were fields; arable farmland laced with footpaths, three hundred yards from a canal that led north west from the heart of the city, along whose towpath I could cycle seven miles from Handsworth, via Spaghetti Junction, to visit them, often with Oscar dog running beside me, or, when he got too old to keep up a reasonable pace, and too blind to stay out of the water, sitting in my front pannier.  It wasn’t what you’d call a posh place. I’d say it was 'Minworth', though the post code implied ‘Sutton Coldfield’.
I thought it a brilliant choice; a walk from Minworth Primary School where Guy became a governor. There were country walks – indeed a gate like a magic door in the hedge at the bottom of their garden led into fields. Shops were close. They lived an easy drive on the Tyburn Road from our home in Handsworth.

 The children and Oscar in the fields behind Summer Lane

Two years ago, with much touting by the city of its contribution to providing 10,000 jobs to enrich the Midlands economy, Birmingham City Council was allowed by HM Government to breach the city’s constitutionally defined ‘Green Belt', permitting the construction of 6000 new homes, and, over the next five years, a factory estate on the fields behind the family home on Summer Lane.

Artist's impression of the new Peddimore industrial estate to be built north of our daughter's home

Footpaths were stopped. Signs showed the farm land awaiting concrete. The football field, on fallow grazing behind their house, was flayed and laid with wormless astroturf. A substantial clubhouse arose.
In his last year - 1993 - my stepfather wrote an ode to his love of the countryside that ended with the lines:

I said I must write a warning.  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.

Amy and Guy, now with our grandchildren, Oliver and Hannah, and with our long term family friend, Liz and her husband Matt and their children, Sophia and Henry, didn’t wait. A year after the blighting of their edge-of-town countryside was announced, Amy and Guy put their house up for sale. Guy gave notice at the place he’s worked over 20 years, and Amy, with help from family, bought a house on the edge of the Forest of Dean at Drybrook in Gloucestershire – a few hours' walk through the woods to our cottage in Lydbrook. The sale of their house in Birmingham awaits survey and searches before exchange of contracts. They started moving into the new home the third week in August. On Monday 2nd September the children, in new green uniforms, started their year at a primary school in Lea, just over the Herfordshire border, 15 minutes drive north from Drybrook.

I’m pleased Amy had the resolution to make this move. We have mixed feelings. For the foreseeable future we shall see far less of our family. Richard’s been working in Istanbul for a year. Now Amy’s moved to an area that has the protection – though naught’s guaranteed – of a National Forest, a  place we’ve known and loved for over 35 years; buying Rock Cottage up a path on Bell Hill, Lydbrook in 1981.

Lin's mum Dot, Amy and Richard on the lawn at Rock Cottage, Lydbrook, about 1990

Above the Wye across from the Forest of Dean - a place we've known and loved over 35 years (photo 1995)

Amy and her family won’t have to wake in the morning to the dismal sight and sound of construction-destruction. It’s almost, but for the wild life, a win-win circumstance, since for many the  ‘exciting development’ on the edge of Birmingham adds to local property values, bringing what government PR calls ‘employment, retail and leisure opportunities’.
On one of the first days, the new house sale near completed, in the middle of August, I took a train to Lydney from Birmingham. Guy collected me from the small station to stay with the family at Rock Cottage. Next day I was driven four miles eastward, via Ruardean, to see their new home in the country. I walked around it inside and out and saw it was good. Amy and Guy went measuring for carpets in Cinderford. With Hannah and Oliver and a map I headed into the forest, few hundred yards from their new home, to walk to Lydbrook. We were without Oscar. Our 17 year companion had died of old age in our garden in Handsworth on the first day of August. I buried him on our allotment by the park – along with an episode of our lives.

Oscar's grave prepared by Winnie and I on Plot 14, Victoria Jubilee Allotments

Mum died at her home in 2012 aged 95 on 1st November. Oscar died in our garden on 1st August 2019 aged 17

It means the end of seeing our family in the city, taking buses, trams ...

 ... in and out town with Oliver and Hannah, cycling in the park and along the Birmingham canals, helping open and close lock-gates...

Helping a narrow boat up Farmer's Bridge Locks in the centre of Birmingham

...working on the allotment, helping split logs...

... working with some of Handsworth Helping Hands activities, dipping biscuits in my tea, visiting Handsworth Park ...

The wedded trees in Handsworth Park

Hannah, grandpa and Ollie litter-pick the pond in Handsworth Park and get a free boat ride

When I taught Oliver to row. Hannah's cracked her collar bone a few day back.

... strolling through the Birmingham markets together looking at wares, chatting to stallholders, having snacks at the baked potato van, watching me eating oysters, learning to spend small pocket monies, visiting St Philips Cathedral and St Martins-in-the-Bullring to light candles "for great Nan, for Jack Hargreaves, for Oscar"

 ... and dip fingers in holy water and listen to my stories about the stained-glass windows, meet people and ask questions of people with placards spreading political and religious messages,  take part in defending allotments...

Balbir, Oliver, Hannah and I in Victoria Square campaigning for the Walsall Road Allotments

...listen to buskers, spot a homeless man sat in the street – perhaps bring him a coffee or a soft drink, visit the big bookshop at the end of New Street and leaf through books in the children’s section and talk to staff, wander down the Great Western Arcade looking through shop windows, buying rich cakes from the Polish bakery at the Colmore Row End,

... sit together in the window of Pret a Manger trying to get smiles from those passing outside by waving and knocking on the plate glass, keeping score, and ever asking and answering questions – watching, observing, having small adventures to mull over at bedtimes. It means and end to the grandchildren staying overnight with us helping and chivvying their homework ...

... as well as studying the dramas of Titanic, Bismark, Graf Spee, Marie Celeste, and Nelson’s Victory, the battle of Waterloo and The Battle of Britain – with the aid of exciting films especially A Night to Remember and the films of Sergei Bondarchuk and Guy Hamilton. For the time being it’s an end to striving to answer Oliver’s questions about the universe, life and death, Aston Villa, and the nature of vampires, and Hannah’s interests in saving the polar bears and the existence of unicorns.

Hannah's 3rd birthday on Plot 14 by Jan Bowman

Lefteris' birthday

A balmy day yesterday. May's issue of The Agiot - a local web based newsheet published monthly by our friends, Paul and Lula, in Agios Ioannis is running my account of the infamous frog farm scandal on page 6.  Lin continues working on the shutters. Mid-morning we hear a strimmer at work and persuade an amenable municipal grass cutter to spare the harebells gathering on the path below our garden. Growth, that would once have been kept gratefully close-cropped by villagers’ goats, sheep and donkeys, has to be cleared by the Demos from miles of paths, verges and commons across the island to lessen fire hazard as it turns to tinder in the heat of summer. 

The pollen released set me sneezing, especially as I’d already climbed through our kitchen window to clear the weeds in the narrow space between our house and our neighbours' garden wall. 

“Watch out for snakes and scorpions when you’re down there” warned Lin. All I saw were lizards and some cracks in the sink waste pipe which I covered with duct tape.

Yesterday was Lefteris’ birthday. He’s the same age as me - younger by fours days over a month. We were invited to lunch from two, bringing presents and sitting down to a table of goodies and conversation that ranged over 'our' village, the Easter holiday, the death of Osama bin Laden and the 'wedding' about which Natasha knew more than we. We thought Kate – now Katherine – looked like a sensible sort who’d be good as future Queen to William. It was impressive to see all the horses and carriages and crowds down Whitehall and the Mall where I enjoy cycling when in London. Seeing it on their screen I felt a frisson for Westminster Abbey, my local church for the six years I was at school next door, where I sang and, when senior, read the Lesson. We laughed at the short clip of a verger doing a cartwheel in the knave. All very English, though isn't he from New Zealand where they're even more English? Lunch continued with sweet sweet things, small light cakes with honey and quince and raisins and sugar to choice. 

Dimitra arrived with greetings for her grandfather and, ensuring our fingers weren’t still sticky, we got to going through one of Lefteris and Vasilikis’ family photo albums, with small nostalgic black and white pictures of when they were married and young - vignettes - seriously handsome and beautiful and, as pictures were thirty years ago, allowing composed faces that endure rather than toothy ads for dentistry. 

We emerged into late afternoon, having using up too much of the day for further work. This is when grown-ups are excused to rest emptying the house of children licenced to play the rest of the day, but all siesta Lin continued painting shutters - the ones we’ve altered by covering the louvers to make them into old Corfu ones. These were fixed with glue and tacks, then undercoated, after the plywood insets had been treated with preservative. 

Then comes the job of filling the small gaps around each cover and the repairing of cracks and filling of the holes made by the tacks. Once this has dried, each shutter gets an undercoat of green with a final finish. The job goes on and on and this is just one set of shutters. 
"We'll leave these on through the summer heat. If the plywood hasn't buckled we can convert the others."
Also painted – primer, undercoat and two coats of green – are the four pieces for the shutter frame. We are fixing this first set of recovered shutters in front of a new metal window frame only in place since 2005. I, having drunk more of Lefteris’ wine was sleepy and indolent, watching Lin but now and then snoozing in the sun thinking of the throaty croaky voice of Papa Lazarue in The League of Gentleman muttering in Gippog “You’re my wife now” or Hannibal Lecter “I'm giving very serious thought...to eating your wife” or Don Corleone mumbling from Marlon Brando’s cotton wool packed jowls "But I didn't know until this day that it was Barzini all along." Later I woke from dreams I’d forgotten.

** ** **

We skyped Amy the other night; found her at home with Guy and Liz and the puppies. Each puppy was held up for us to see as we sat outside Sally’s in Ipsos. 

“They’ve all been sold” said Amy 

“How much?” 

“£150 each and we’ve been careful about checking who they go to.” 

We got onto to talking about how Amy and another WPC had been trying to deal with a gang of youths who were using loud foul language in public. When persuasion failed they’d tried to arrest them. The youths resisted. Amy was pushed over into the road and got an egg-size bruise on the back of her head. 

“So what happened?” asked Lin 

“They got off” 

“How?” 

“The CPS need a 95% success rate for prosecutions. The lawyer who works with us - or should - said my colleague, who was also thrown to the ground, had charged them with ‘breach of the peace’ instead of ‘disorderly conduct’. Pushing me and my fellow officer to the ground, instead of being a compound offence of ‘resisting arrest’, amounted to ‘reasonable force’ in resisting a ‘false arrest’.”  

Such casuistry has long caused whingeing in the canteen, a precision about the interpretation of civil rights balanced by police misdemeanours on that score – one exacerbated by the other - but this being my beloved daughter I found it tricky to stand back. 

“I’m proud of you” I said “for not being angry or bitter. For your grasp of the details. A passing car could have injured you or worse.” 

Cider and wine making

My enjoyable search for a suitable film to be put into a DVD continues. I realise that the greater part of my films of Jack are from Old Country not Out of Town, the preceding series. That already puts a limit on the use of Out of Town films at SWFTA that could be used. Barring finding further copies of OoT that contain shed scenes rather than just OB sequences, that limits us to Old Country. I have never gone through the films I have systematically, preferring to look at them when the mood took me. Many I've never seen before, being out of the country at University in America when this series was running, so I enjoy seeing them even twenty years or more after they were broadcast. I learn as I go along but for now I'm recognising that some films were the first of the standard two film episode around a half-time commercial break. Thus each film either shows the start of the programme, ending with 'Part One', or it starts after the commercials and ends with credits. The person recording these on to VHS off their TV at the time of the broadcast would often turn on the recorder after the titles started, turn it off before they'd quite ended. That needn't be a problem. What we seek is a 'shed' session that can be spliced at start and finish of a suitable 16mm film from SWFTA. Roger Charlesworth at Plymouth now has my copies - on 5 DVDs - of all the episodes and parts of episodes I have.
As I go through the films I have I stream a selection on Vimeo and YouTube. Thus I've just put one of two films about cider making on the internet.
This was a film I liked because in content it so reminded me of the process of making wine in Ano Korakiana. Neighbours share a machine for crushing the grapes. I got a chance to turn this while Leftheris and Fortis were working with a load of grapes they'd bought from trucks parked by the highway brought up from Zakinthos - after local grapes had shrivelled on the vine in the heat of July and August last year. The juice from the crushing is allowed to ferment without further pressing. Relatives came with extra flagons to collect some of Lefteris' wine. Juice from the lower quality grapes and the debris in the drained tank is pressed out with a screw press that also goes around the village. The pomace from the pressings is used by some to make Tsipouro  - Τσίπουρο - a party spoiler that no-one I know likes much. Leftheris, our neighbour, spreads the pomace on his garden. This  is a tiny clip of me being warned, while helping with grape crushing, to keep my hands out of the cogs. Some of this wine should be ready by Easter.

***** *****
I'm learning more about the work of Central Handsworth Practical Care Project. It was largely run by Glynis Foley, its project manager, who lived in St.Peter's Road. She died a few months ago. Disliking the oversight of a committee, for the last ten years at least, she'd held all the reins, keeping the project's minimal paperwork to herself - audited until the Coalition came to power by BVSC - while Edmund Branch who I've known, to greet, for years, does a range of jobs around the neighbourhood - small repairs, garden maintenance, security works, house clearance and furniture recycling for local pensioners. I suggested I might be a candidate for work, for which we'd pay, to get the foundations made up for a shed on our allotment. "Yes we could do that" said Ed. He's worked three years with Chris, a younger man. I sat beside him as Edmund drove us in the project's truck to do various jobs. I said I'd take pictures for a short film about the project; hoping to give it higher profile now that funds are getting so scarce. The first job involved emptying things from a house after a death, taking some to the dump, other to the Red Cross Shop in Newtown and some specific items - an electric kettle, a sewing basket - to other pensioners Edmund knew wanted them.

Clearance

Later they removed a few boxes from the house of a new widow and discussed arrangements for her transport to her husband's funeral in a few days. Then they came to our allotment to prepare an estimate for a few hours' work there. Next came an hour's work with a chainsaw clearing foliage and overhanging baskets from a public footpath near Romilly Avenue. "This is a slow time of year" said Edmund. I didn't like the idea of all those photos just going to the tip, so took the portrait of the young woman with her bouquet in the small avenue to put in my study.
*** *** ***
Thursday evening in the Agricultural Co-operative in Ano Korakiana: The first meeting was held to plan for this year's village Carnival. I assume the event will be on a Sunday in mid-February (13th?). Old and new volunteers turned up on an exceptionally chilly evening - for Greece - to discuss organisation and ways to make the event even more successful than last year's.

Το φωτογραφικό φακό ήταν η Αγγελική Άνθη

...and in Corfu city centre, news via Facebook, of active citizens - Κantounistas - Καντουνίστας - demonstrating in a humorous and light hearted way about people parking their cars on the city's new cycle lanes and joining together to bag and dispose of litter [See Living in lala land]:

Kantonistas

To Maria*:

Dear Maria. What exactly does kantounista mean? X Simon

From Maria:

Kantounia are the many little alleys in the Old Town of Corfu. Kantouni is a Corfiot word not used anywhere else in Greece...there are ATENISTAS (Athens) and many other analagous words in other Greek towns. It is a new idea and term that our young people have invented. Just when I had lost hope I see our young Corfiots are becoming more active. Let's pray that it will last and bring results. Maria

*Maria is a a Corfiot - Maria Strani - a writer married to a writer Jim Potts (see Corfu Blues). A few years ago Maria wrote a passionate cry of anger and grief at what had happened to Corfu in the last two generations through the greed and fecklessness of her fellow citizens - The Pimping of Panorea. I argue with her that this is not just a Corfiot problem. Being a small island amplifies the effects of human habits that are endangering the planet.
** ** **
Peter Papageorgiou wrote me a CV for Kantounistas:

Ο Simon εκτός από ακαδημαικός είναι 2ης γενιάς φιλέλληνας, περνάει αρκετούς μήνες το χρόνο στην Κέρκυρα, (μένει στην Κορακιάνα) και είναι λάτρης του ποδήλατου, περπατήματος, των μέσων μαζιής μεταφοράς, του αρέσει να μαζεύει σκουπίδια και η εθελοντική εργασία γενικότερα. Επίσης έχει αντιτεθεί, με νόμιμα πάντα μέσα, σε ζητήματα "κακής" ανάπτυξης, έχει διαδηλώσει υπέρ της προστασίας του περιβάλλοντος και έχει λάβει μέρος σε critical mass (ένα τέτοιο θέλω να οργανώσουμε κι εμείς μια μέρα...