"Have you visited other places in Greece?"

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

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

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

My response today at 12:59

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

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

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

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

Amy and her cousins Anna and Natasha ~ August 1996

Wherever I travel Greece wounds me,

Opou kai na pao i Ellada me pligoni

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

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

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

Summer Song off Corfu ~ Sept 2008

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

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

An amicable divorce

I have just seen my car driven away by a friend who's got it for free. I've been 'deciding' for 5 years - maybe longer. But the final decision to be rid of it came a week ago, since when it's sat in our drive, insurance cancelled. It helped that the cost of repairing its transmission was assessed as more than its worth. I have not been without a car since the 1960s. This evening is a moment long anticipated, regularly postponed. My family seem to have had cars since they were toys. I recovered an old photo of Barbara Maine, my maternal grandmother Bar, in her Peugeot smoking a cheroot. I recall having some of my happiest childhood times in cars, with my family. What I best remember (something written about and filmed at the time) is the accessibility to places all over Britain we got from having a car in the 1950s. I realise we drove - 50 years ago - on roads that most people now see in absurd advertisements - filmed on locations in Croatia or Albania. My mother and step-father were writers and journalists through the late 1940s and '50s. Cars were part of their salaries. We had the means to drive. We would arrive at places where there would be no cars for miles - or very few. We could park next to beaches, cliff tops, and high ridges with mighty views (see what I mean about advertising?). We reconnoitred long, lightly-paved rural lanes ending in cul-de-sacs where, after a word with a the farmer, we set up tent and fished in clear trout streams. We ate our catch fried in butter. I was often very happy - innocent of being in a vanguard of social change. My step-father remarked once, when I was going on once about the 'beauties of the countryside' (I was a literary youth) that this sort of thing wouldn't last. 'We're doing things the very rich could do. Now we are doing it. Soon everyone will be doing it! We're part of the rot.' In later years he observed that the central dilemma of socialism (quoting Bertrand Russell) was that 'you can ruin anything by making it available to everybody.' From the mid '60s, life on the open road, new motorways notwithstanding, became increasingly closed. The freeway became unfree as more and more people, understandably, sought access to a possession we'd enjoyed more exclusively. The freedoms promised by the advertisers of cars became more and more conditional. Friends of friends were killed in them and by them. I started travelling abroad to get away from the crowds in my own country - often walking and relying on trains and buses when going to lonelier places that were still places. Travelling with my wife, we seldom returned more than twice because we could always see material prosperity spreading - as it rightly should - but in the process blighting the quietness and slowness of more self-sufficient economies we'd visited as guests rather than an important part of the new local economy. We saw fishing boats laid up and replaced by marinas and yachts. We saw heritage signage spreading, as places became consumer items and we became harvest. We too had been consuming but we'd usually enjoyed the only table in the house.
In old age, my father said

'The only places left to live will be the cracks between the concrete. I advise you to to live in places already ruined. Maybe you will find the wisdom to make them better in some new way none of us understand."

Photo from Richard Risemberg's 'Bicycle Fixation'

I did not revisit my childhood experiences of motor touring until 1995, when with my young children we toured the Peloponnese in a hired car. We had had help from the Greek half of my family identifying still isolated areas of the peninsula. The motorway southwest from Athens was under construction. We drove en famille from Athens via Corinth and Leonidi, Sparta, Kalamata and Messini to Pylos on almost empty roads, stopping when we wanted and having picnics, strolling together through ancient ruins. Stopping high in the Taygetos mountains in Lakonia (the point from where this summer's conflagration spread) one Sunday evening and hearing silence under a black sky pierced by a million stars (normally hidden above the yellowing pall of light polluted England), with no sound except the cooling cracking of the car, hot from ascending a narrow zigzag road where we encountered no other vehicle for half-hours at a time. I took joy seeing my little daughter and wife who, unlike me, had never been to Greece, walking among the remains of a civilisation I associate with my roots as well as my present family. The car took us to the edge of beaches and right up to tavernas where we could park and walk to a table. Only once an ill-judged detour 'to see the sea' at Koroni jammed us into the narrow walking streets of an ex-fishing village grid-locked by visiting motorists - foreign, and the new expanding Greek middle classes, and us. Back in England I saw this holiday as an anachronistic replay of my motoring childhood and realised I could not keep trying to stay ahead of people with the same aspirations as myself but slightly further back in the rat race. I had to start thinking about my step-father's old age advice. I kept my car but reduced my annual mileage below 3000. My favoured way of getting about became my feet, my bicycle, train or bus, while car ownership just went on increasing. I have indeed found contentment and interest in the cracks in the concrete. I have watched wild fowl, inland seagulls, herons, urban rats, and foxes along canal towpaths, passing beneath the pillars of raised motorway junctions as I've cycled and walked the city, threading its congested roads and alleys free of worries about gridlock and parking. I have enjoyed picnics in the shadow of dilapidated industrial ruins. I've campaigned for more urban green space, for education for sustainable living. I've chatted across the rich world in cyberspace to like-minded people about ways to solve that central dilemma of making the riches of the world available to everyone without destroying it.
I've tried to imagine cities where more people will want to stay and make them into real places again instead of dismal, narrow economies where they can earn enough 'to get away.' I have found the roots of such cities in my own home town, as I walk and cycle about. Anyone hearing moralising in these reflections, should know that we fly to places still, that there's still a car in the drive (my wife's). My daughter has just bought her own. We are profligate with energy. This is more about about ending my long taken-for-granted relationship with the car - my auto-dependency. It's been a gentle separation, then an amicable divorce from a long and increasingly jaded marriage of convenience.
[A piece I wrote 7 years ago about 'cutting my car use']

[Back to the future 14/01/08 Alex Taylor, Fortune senior editor: DETROIT (2008 Detroit Motor Show number) -- If you are looking for some insight into what the automobile of the future will look like you could do worse than talk with Tom Lane. An American, he runs all of Nissan's Product Strategy and Product Planning from his office in Tokyo. Unlike most executives, he welcomes the imposition of new U.S. fuel regulations that mandate 35 miles per gallon by 2020. "It is not an issue" for Nissan (NSANY) he says. He expects the new regs to drive more small cars, improved technology, and a broader variety of shapes and sizes, as designers try to get more variety out of similarly-sized vehicles. But he points to some discouraging global trends that don't bode well for the industry. He notes that consumers in Japan are losing their mojo when it comes to cars. The population is aging, and younger drivers would rather spend their money on new cellphones and Internet access." Japan is increasingly not interested in new cars," he says. The population in Europe is aging too, and Lane sees similar ennui spreading there. As car ownership becomes more expensive and cities increasingly impose congestion pricing on car usage in center cities, he sees car owners switching to mass transit for their daily commute, and then renting cars for longer trips. "The U.S. is headed that way," he says. "The challenge for us, going forward, is a more interesting offer. Doing a better Sentra or an Altima isn't going to do it." [Review article 'Reducing our dependence on the car', Local Government Studies (2000) 20:1, pp.101-110]

['Cutting car use' Bicycle Fixation 2000]

[Back to the future. AlterNet piece on driving cars in July 2008]

[Back to the future 11 Oct 2009: The auto industry frets over young people's lack of interest in driving]

[Back to the future 14 Oct 2009: Oil ~ From extraction to consumption: an exhibition by Edward Burtynsky]

[Back to the future: 14/06/10 Lament for today's cars]

[Back to the future: 28/03/12: Edward Burtynsky ~ Automotive detritus, Oil ]