From America

A letter from Connecticut

Dear Simon. Hard to believe that it has since before the election that I sent you any word of happenings here.  Such a sea change; it seems like one should almost demarcate it as the change of an era  "b.e." and "a.e." on the calendar!
 Helen and I learned the results over the internet at our hotel in Argentina.  We were overjoyed and relieved as I think much of the world was. It would have been truly awful had the Repubs prevailed.  The victory was much more widespread than we could have dared hope. Here in CT the democrat Chris Murphy roundly trounced an almost perverted TEA Party type- a woman who owns a wrestling TV network and who spent over $100 million of her own money in her two attempts to become a US Senator.
Now we just have to get Obama to really stand up to the Repubs and we have to reform the filibuster rules of the Senate.  Obama seems to have much more spine these days although one can never be certain and there is a strong movement to reform the Senate that includes even the Democrat leadership.  So there is real hope.
H and I had a fascinating 2 wk trip to Argentina where we had never been before.  A vast beautiful and sharply contrasting country in the foothills of the Andes where we spent much of the time. Amazing highly colored rock formations where one can see plate tectonics played out in Technicolor.  Food and wine excellent and not just the superbly flavored beef one hears so much of.  Lots of excellent Italian food brought over by the Italian immigrants in the late 19th/early 20th century.
Since returning I have started a monthly philosophy dinner/discussion group with four friends.  Lots of fun and ANY topic up for argumentation.  Had a similar group in Washington before moving here.
We a getting ready for the crazy American Christmas season. It is a bit exhausting but it will be fun to gather with our children and splash down oysters with Loire wine.
So what is up with you and Lin?  I see Greece is into its usual troubles and the Economist says that GB may leave the EU.  Our best wishes to you for rambunctious holidays.
Much love to you both, Tony & Helen
PS we are planning a trip to Sicily in late spring.  I want to see the temple at Segesta most of all.  Have never been to Sicily so will be an adventure.  Probably won't make Greece this time but any chance we can lure you to this side of the "pond" in 2013?

Segesta

*** ***
Tuesday morning Lin drove us into Inverness across Daviot Muir to Inverness - beside frosted verges and sparkling trees, ice melting from the wiondscreen.

Ben Wyvis lay spotless white on the lip of our horizon as we descended the steep wind past Newton of Leys leading to the Culduthel Road to call on William T Fraser to collect the undertakers' bill before visiting Bank of Scotland with Mum's death certificate and Will to allow them to release cash from her account to pay. Probate rules allow this. Other equity is locked until the estate is cleared. We've been working to reduce outgoings on Brin Croft, while protecting the house from the elements and enjoying warmth in the sitting room. It's a small version of larger austerity policies.
On Sunday Richard went home. I returned him to the airport for the Sunday evening flight to Birmingham.
"Drive back via Mains" he asked. So I drove past the shop. over the Nairn, to turn north at Balnafoich down the long straight narrow road that runs parallel with the river towards Daviot - a road we've known for thirty years, driven, walked and cycled along it. A blunt ache - not left when her husband died in 2005, now untended even scruffy, but so recognisable for that sound of crunching gravel beneath our arriving tyres; there the blue painted door that was always open, and the dogs that scurried out barking.

Mum and Angus at Mains of Faillie

"I may not pass this way again" said Richard, the dusk descending.
"Do you remember' I said "walking up this road beyond the drive to meet mum and me arriving once? We must have rung from a phone box near Perth and you children surmised our time of arriving and came out with the dogs to greet us. You'd gone up a week earlier on the sleeper."
I'm ill acquainted with grief. The main way I've thought to assuage my sadness, is not as one might try - impossibly - to quench the agonising grief of untimely death, like this I glimpsed on a note stuck to a motorway service station window...

...keening, crying out in anger and pain, on the edge of cursing God, but by being stalwart.

Let’s say goodbye to her now; and be as brave as her; as brave as you know she'd insist we be. It’s not her death that matters in the end.It’s her life that we’ll take away from here.

On Monday evening I braved the woods above the house; the paths where I try and fail to get lost, even in the gloom of sunset. Sheep were strewn over the frosty fields below the dark edged horizon of the Strath

Brin Rock at dusk

I walked between close birch and pine along a familiar leafy path as the dogs almost invisible dashed effortlessly back and forth through the winter undergrowth appearing and disappearing in the gloom, never roaming too far, my companions rustling in the woods.

These woods at dusk

*** *** ***
Tomorrow is Saint Spyridon's day on Corfu; the Bishop always recognisable by his shepherd's hat, who was at the first council of Nicea in the third century of the Christian era, debating the nature of the Son of God' was He as suggested by Bishop Arius - standing opposite Spyridon at the great assembly in Nicea - finite, part mortal or was he, as the majority eventually agreed, consubstantial and eternal, rather than, as Arius in a growing minority argued, a subordinate entity to God the Father.

Bishops Spyridon and Arius - without halo -  debate the Trinity at Nicea

Getting ready to leave the Highlands

Farewells said. The younger ones ready to leave

The other morning Amy and Guy left early to get south before there was more snow on Slocht summit or Drumochter Pass. Margie F, my mother's carer, drove in convoy with them for a while. heading on to London then a flight home to South Africa, having transferred her role to Fiona W. Abruptly we were two dogs less; my daughter and her husband gone back to work and Margie no longer here. The house seemed to empty. After I'd gone to bed, halfway through Kadare's The Three Arched Bridge, just after the builders had immured a man in their stonework:

The bridge ... demanded a sacrifice. Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bards sang. The monk, sure that no one would volunteer, was aghast to learn that Murrash Zenebisha, an average local worker had been immured into the bridge's first arch in the night, his face still visible, staring out from the bridge, where his corpse could be made out beneath a veneer of plaster. It was something that violated everything we knew about the borders of life and death. The man remained poised between the two like a bridge, without moving in one direction or the other. The man had sunk into non-existence, leaving his shape behind him, like a forgotten garment.

I'd left the laptop up-loading a film I'd made with mum. I woke to the ring of a Skype call.
Lin "What are you doing in bed so early with your computer on? Watching porn?"
"Why should I when I'll be home soon?"
"Ha ha" We chatted about things, she smoking at the kitchen table in Handsworth, me in my nightie looking tired.
"My leg's swollen" I said "I bruised it tripping over a big flowerpot and the swelling's still there after a week."
"Yuk" she said when I showed it to her "Ibuprofin? It's anti-inflammatory." We can both play Carrie and Charles Pooter. "I've got us a flight for Easter to Corfu. When can you get away?"
"April onward. Do you ever think of saving the environment?"
"OK. I'm going now."
Boo-peep goes the Skype hang-up. A frog jumping into a pond. Awake again I read some more Kadare. I so like him but I don't think this tale of a bridge being built - an idea I like - can compete with Ivo Andrić's Bridge over the Drina. K's Broken April still has the strongest hold on my imagination and my thinking about Albania.
On Monday morning Oscar and I will take the train from Inverness to Edinburgh Waverley, and change there for Birmingham New Street, arriving at 1900 - eight hours. I've made myself a picnic - grainy brown bread sandwiches, one with hand carved ham and mustard, the other with cheddar and pickle sauce, plus some buttery shortbread and toffees. Fiona's prepared one for Oscar. I've the book to finish and then perhaps some DVDs - John Ford's cavalry series, extinguished myths of the west.
I managed to have mum make one more video, in which she speaks of how she and Angus came to live at Mains of Faillie forty years ago, creating such a special place for so many of us.

Mum's memories: coming to live in the Highlands from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
****
As well as pointing me towards the nicest news from Corfu about the long long awaited new hospital at Kontokali, and a web diary by the Prime Minister's brother, Nick Papandreou - from which I jumped to Dreams in time of Greek Austerity - Jim Potts has left me two poems - one 'more like a haiku' - he wrote about Sotiria Bellou in the comments at the bottom of my previous entry - 'The greatest voice in Greece, for me' he writes...

      Greek Music

      The salty tang of sea-ports;
      The belle-laide voice of Bellou:
      Rebetic.

** ** **
John Martin in Bendigo, who when I first visited Brisbane with him in 2009 about the catastrophic floods that struck the city in 1974, mails:

Morning Simon, more rain overnight, all along the east coast of Australia to add to the floods in Qld. Brisbane will have flooding the next few days. Your time in Scotland with your mum and Amy and Guy sounds delightful. Good on you for asking about your mother's history. I am sure your attention is much appreciated. Delighted to have your video greetings on your blog. It was a nice short summary, very appropriate, and generous. Thank you. Not long before you are back in Corfu. I imagine February would be an interesting time being colder than when we have been there. Lots of time to explore the island, read some good books and just take it easy. We are off to Adelaide later this week. When is a good time for a chat via Skype the next few days? Cheers, John

Source: BOM December's rainfall deciles for Australia 2010

Hi John. Have a good visit to Adelaide. I missed it this time and recall how much I liked the place – especially the hills and the pier at the end of the tram line. I do like a return trip to a destination on an edge. Climate dislocation, sovereign risk...I’ve been seeing it. Bizarre to think that last year this time you were concerned about fires – and may yet be. By and large the UK is without weather extremes or earthquakes, which is why even small variations from the average cause us such problems stirred by superlatives frenzy in the media. “Terror of vicar’s wife after Oldham earthquake worries her carp” “I was woken by it” says Wolverhampton plumber “I had to call in sick.” “After the loose tile dropped off my neighbour's roof I became agoraphobic claims another quake victim” “Quake failures. Coalition government must go” etc. I’m back in Handsworth tomorrow night and could call you around 0930 your time or the next day. In Corfu January is famously the wettest month, but February can be too. I got lots of firewood ready last October. As I scan the internet – not just mainstream media – it seems there are an enormous number of unique separate initiatives to enhance sustainability. Something emerging not easily recognised amid the confusing landscape of the immediate.

...and via Global Voices,  (and here up to 12 January '11) came to Christopher Joye's Aussie Macro Moments, oh, I commented on the removal from the mouth of a white southerner of over 200 n-words in a small school's edition of Huckleberry Finn in Alabama brought to my attention by Corfucius - my favourite blogger ever.

That there's an argument to be made for Alan Gribben's action speaks to our times. Looking back in another generation or two, if we really have come to live in a world where color of skin means less than the content of character, we will be as puzzled by this censorship as we are now by those Victorians who draped the legs of their pianos with frilly lace.

...and as brilliant Chris Rock famously asks and answers "can a white man use the word...not really"
*** ***

Me and my Amy in the Highlands

I took a final walk with Oscar, before leaving in the morning, in the woods near, and figured the way the path though mildly sinuous had seemed straight yet led me the way I'd come; an undetectabed curve in what seemed direct. I walked slowly to spare my ankle, stopping to  hear the soundlessness of the woods, though my tread was muffled by snow. Two people, one a child, had walked ahead of me in the day, also with a dog. Their prints guided me where the path was unclear.

Whose woods these are

With my students in the Winterbourne

Friday morning was so crisp and sunny that it seemed a good idea to visit the gardens on campus. One of the most significant differences between the Winterbourne Gardens and Handsworth or Black Patch Park is that the former is quite private and the others very public.
We'd visited Handsworth Park on Thursday, met people and took Oscar with us. [The photo is of the celebratory opening of the restored bandstand in Handsworth Park in May 2005]

At the gate of Handsworth Park a man introduced himself as 'Doctor Street' and raised the issue of how far the park had been funded by the wealth of empire, in particular from the profits of slavery. We debated this in the gateway of the park as the students watched and concluded a discussion that had begun quite aggressively with a warm embrace. 'Parks are for conversations. That includes courting, companionship, general conviviality and of course policital debate'. Strolling on, we encountered a couple with their child sitting on a park bench overlooking the pond. I asked if they were local especially as the wife was part veiled. The man said he was visiting from Hong Kong, but felt really safe in the park.

Oscar wouldn't be allowed in the Winterbourne Gardens which are part of Birmingham University. We were there with two of my Japanese students and Alex my friend and colleague, asking them to consider what they had learned during their stay, how they'd make sense of that when they plunged back into the stream of Japanese life on returning home, and how they'd maintain their learning. We felt the gardens posed a classic contrast between public and private and, because it was such a lovely dewy October morning, that the beauty of the gardens would fix things in some special way for them.
* * *
Today to celebrate the arrival of a letter inviting my daughter to be ready to start her new job in mid-November. She drove off to work and 'to watch the rugby'. I took the 16 bus home, where comes the news by phone that six new children are moving into Mains of Faillie. 'I hope they enjoy it as much as we all did' said Amy.
This was a picnic by the little loch above Faillie in 1987. L to R - Lin, Amy, me, Richard, Susie, Angus, mum, Anthony and my eldest sister Bay. Now in late 2007 my mother has at last sold her old home and so can repay the swingeing bridging loan that's been taking interest off her for the last six months, and enjoy her new home further down the strath without encumbrance.

An e-mail from the Middle East says my friend from Irak will be here before the end of the month.

A phone call to Corfu, a little muffled, and Dave assured me the lower roof on 208 Democracy Street has been secured. 'It'll all be done when you arrive in January.'

* * *

I'm aching and feeling less than chirpy with the two jabs I had this morning at our GP - one for flu (left arm), one for influenza (right).

Constructing trust

I've written workshop outlines - for the police, for Scotland, created a poster for my option on this year's Public Policy MBA - a collation of pairs I've filmed, some famous caricatures, sketches of the tango.
I tried starting my chapter on leadership - but I must transcribe some conversations and get into shape to resist displacement. I had an e-mail acknowledged via a Blackberry at 2100. More and more people are on line 24/7.
Mum says she's sold Mains subject to survey to the people she wants to live there. She solved some other dilemmas too. Not bad at 90. The water butt has refilled. Amy's been phoning to get insurance for a car she likes.

Family

The photo is of Maria with some of her grandchildren. She died in November 2005. In a few hours perhaps we may have the start of the next but one generation. All of us have children - 15 in all - 6 of them girls. One son is married. They expect a boy today making one of my half-sisters a grandmother for the first time.
* * *
I've a list of things I didn't do yesterday to avoid doing the thing that has priority, which is to start writing a chapter I've agreed to write for a friend's book. As soon as I'm poised to start, displacement activities present themselves. Yesterday it was our garden - which Lin and I set to weeding removing and bagging that hairy plant which looks like Borage but isn't as well as lots of Sticky Bobby, dandelion, nettles and wayward couch grass. Lin tended the fish. Amy, back from work, helped. Other errands presented themselves. I phoned Mum. She's optimistic about the sale of the home we've visited since 1966. "If they go ahead and buy it the place will be as it should be - full of children". In 1973, returned from America and looking for work I took refuge in the Highlands and made a swing for the local children that hangs on a tree by the house with a view over Strath Nairn. It was used a lot but I've only needed to repair it twice in 30 years. Now it may be used again. These are hopes.
Lin and I chatted last night about whether life was better here or in Corfu. It's not a choice that interests me, wanting to be part of both - but I started the conversation because here we allow ourselves to be enveloped in news as we don't in Greece. What's the difference between being conscientiously in-touch with the human condition and overloaded with evidence of trouble? "Should we take a fortnight in Corfu before September?" we wondered.

The climbing rose - Jour de Gloire - from the garden in Handsworth has a delicate scent better than anything from a bottle.