Days

Leftheri’s grapes shrivelled on the vine this August. We’d seen them there parched, too dried for sultanas. He picked a couple of dessicated clusters as we chatted – me on the balcony, he in the shade of his garden. “No good” he said. They clicked on the ground. In a few weeks he’ll get grapes from Zante when they bring them north to sell from trucks by the mainroads.

Zante-Zakinthos, below Cephalonia, the southernmost - but for tiny  Strofades (Stamphani and Arpia)  - of the Ionian islands, now that distant Kithera, beyond the Peloponnesian capes (Morea on the old map), is in a different region of Greece. “One third red, two thirds white.” First Fortis, his son-in-law, will use the press, then bring it up here, for him and Vasiliki to make their wine. “No problem.”

How could Kithera, over 300 miles from Corfu, nearly 200 south east of Zakinthos, ever have been part of an Ionian cluster? Kithera once called Cerigo, was at southern end of a Venetian archipelago, which with Parga and Vonitsa on the mainland, formed a strategic line, as irrelevant today as a pocket batteleship, along the crumbling Ottoman border, controlling the movement of ships between the Adriatic and the Aegean.
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Nancy was with us at supper last night, returning to Nick with Estelle in England today. She told me that all those diacritics that characterise Greek polytonic were actually quite useful.

“We have all these ‘e’s in Greek - η, ε, ει, αι, οι – often pronounced in different ways. The signs helped. With demotic you have to just remember them.” I said I was almost enjoying reading Cavafy in Greek because of all the untranslateable double and triple meanings that emerged when checking them in the lexicon. “I don’t like him” she confided “At school we were always being told about double meanings in Cavafy” “Ah another child turned off poetry by school?” “Perhaps” she agreed. But then Cavafy's been called ‘a poet of old age’ – not so much because he wrote so much work in the latter part of his life, but that his poetry has greater effect when one has had time to apply layers of varnish on memories of the past, and can look back on a long irretrievable wake. Nancy's too young to accumulate my cargo of nostalgia. Perhaps she should have another look at the poet around 2045.
School's started and we hear the encouraging chiding chat of parents getting children ready for classes as we lie in bed. Then quiet. Since Adonis and Ethy have done up their apothiki and laid out the garden next door, and our porch, steps and balcony have been completed, children, who used to kick a ball up, down and around the alley that runs from Democracy Street down to the lower road, have limited their play to chatting and playing quieter games as they sit together on the steps next to the street. The voluntary repairs to the playground further down the street, close to Mark and Sally’s, has taken the louder play down there among swings, slide, seesaw and turntable. It’s good to hear children playing in the village, receiving the passing ‘hullo’ and polite nod.
Just below us Fortis and two others are renovating the house at the turn of the path below us for a family in Corfu from the village - relatives we think - who also own the slightly derelict plot of green below us which they’ll use as a  garden.
Today we’re at loose ends, having been used to being tourists while Val was staying, we're back to being more in the village, thinking of work on the house, making lists and giving up at their imagined length. “There’s too much to do” sighs Lin. “Let’s just lie around” I say. Music plays on my computer – some especially resonant with our passivity, heard faintly as we sit below in siesta heat pondering “what we shall we do or go fishing?” Almost grateful Lin sets the spinner, recovers our washing, and after a while we hang it up in the garden.

Lin does some filling below the windows over the balcony which though only completed a month ago feels as if it’s been there always, so naturally does it fit the side of the house. Lin remarks “It’s so easy to get to this wall now.” Painting it, as we should, doesn’t feel like anything we want to do. Not yet. We can’t decide or agree on colour. On the steps to Democracy Street young Katerina and  Lefteris hang about – literally.

I take a photo of the contrasting light and shade on the new porch – a project on which Alan spent longer than he did on the steps and the balcony. Part of us shares his liking for leaving things incomplete, not messy but always unfinished, ready for more. No bad description of this village, or Greece. I wonder what we’ll do and what awaits us…περιμἐνοντας τοὺς βαρβάρους.
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We watched The Book of Eli two nights ago – a new-style Western in which the evil survivors of a man made eco-catastrophe are routed - most of the time - by a good survivor walking west with a book which he defends with lethal force - martial art with gun, long knife and karate chop having long replaced the Winchester, the Colt and the fist. Old Testament in morality, the script hints now and then at the lost beauty of mercy and love and yearning to eschew force against depravity. Our hero, mortally wounded, makes it to the West Coast where he rows out into the Bay with a loyal and pretty companion. The highpoint is Denzel Washington’s reading from memory, his book having been taken from him in his last fight, of the story of Genesis, dictating the book recalled in whole from heart to a scribe on Alcatraz - an armed monastery with printing press whose members are republishing the Torah, The Koran and, at last, The Bible – New King James Version, Alacatraz Press, and literature of all languages and art in the new dark age. Meantime the baddie – Gary Oldman, superb as ever, is left with the actual book of Eli for which he’s done so much killing, maiming and torturing, and it’s in Braille, and his woman, blind from birth, isn’t going to play. Amen.

Marble

“You know” remarked Nancy, in one of the tiny gaps in our conversation the other evening, "that this country is not ‘Greece’, we call it ‘Hellas’.” Who’d have thought it? Least of all cack-handed me that I’d been applying a 1.2mm stone cutter on an angle grinder to shape a skirting of marble from Evvoia for the upstairs room. It’s not sculpture (several reincarnations away if I’m very good) but the joins, as we work round the room, look sound and neat. Other countries have crude oil so that people will come from across the world to drill wells in their lands but for their gifts in building and making images of men ‘Hellas’ – a name made of old words for ‘bright’ and ‘stone’ – got marble. * * * How does a child learn to understand and think for itself? Some never do, living always within hearing of the chimes of certainty; some from conception use every sense to parse the world. Is one luckier? From early on I wondered at those sweet and sour fantasies offered children – not quite aware I was a child, full of enquiry but with limited intelligence. My first magic was stars, gazing up at them from a veranda in a village in Hampshire with my great grandmother, before peacetime light pollution. She and I shared her house almost on our own, my parents working on the war. She named the Milky Way and the Plough and said no one knew what was beyond them but that "it went on". I lay in bed – I recall this – wondering at my first mystery – that we were surrounded by a space that went on. I shifted – logically – to the puzzle of time. “So when did it begin?” “No-one really knows,” she said. Wonder filled me at the idea of something that could not begin because even if you defined a beginning you could not truthfully answer the question “but what came before the beginning?” and more than imagining some end to the universe you could answer the question “but what’s beyond that edge?” By saying “I don’t know” to a small child my dear great grandparent from Oldham had shown me a mystery, at a time of joyful childhood innocence – so puzzlement and wonder and excitement at the unknowable became intertwined. It made it easier to share in the fantasies while knowing they were there for those who shared them. I believed and knew at the same time - ‘Father Christmas might be’ - the magic old man in deepest red and green velvet bringing grown-up’s presents in bright crackling silvery paper. I happily wondered at the magic of conjurors at London Theatres who could cut ordinary people, from the audience, painlessly in pieces and make birds appear from their pockets. I saw a colour picture in a book of a man bleeding with nails through his hands and feet and felt nauseated, horrified. This man had been deliberately hurt by some people. I didn't understand but it looked unspeakable. There was no magic, nor wonder in the matter, just nails through flesh in wood (no picture of this atrocity needed). I was too ashamed to ask about what I'd seen. I was told at school, much later, stories about heaven and resurrection - magic not as mysterious as the infinity I’d been helped to see by my great grandmother. Growing up I struggled dully with methods of enquiry, which, to someone cleverer, would have led me to the discipline of science. I was actually more attracted to the methods – though I didn’t think of them as that – for approaching mystery, getting closer to my first experience of infinity, the devotions that gave insight into ‘the eternal’ - in school English, Divinity, History and Art - subjects in which I was quite good, because I enjoyed them, unlike my dismal performance in maths and latin (requiring logic). I learned beautiful sounds, language and music; secular and religious merged; rituals and example kept me striving to be good, instilled conscience, explained frightful things, defined compassion and love and instilled doubt as a proper way to approach faith while teaching that despair was a kind of sin. Thus my religion has never clashed with wonder at the infinite and the stories of Adam and Eve, of beginnings – of which my favourite is St John’s in which the beginning is a word and the word was light; mystery contained in shifts of tense. I'm moved by words that doubt and wonder have inspired – the face of the deep, the wings of the morning, nunc dimittis, we shall be changed, in sure and certain hope, , behold I show you a mystery, he shall stand at the latter day. Long ago my stepfather told me that although he didn’t believe in hell, his actions were influenced by the fear of it instilled in him as a child of Methodists in Huddersfield. I don’t think he regretted this. It is good that although I’m faithless on the subject of incarnation, miracles and resurrection, I wonder at their magic. I gladly share in devotions that bring me closer to such mysteries, yet long ago my step-father, pondering the church as an institution, asked me if I knew that the Queen Elizabeth – that behemoth of a ship whose exploded image I’d once assembled in a wooden jigsaw – that that ship, so he’d been told by an engineer, “if you stopped stoking her boilers or fuelling her turbines, would continue through the ocean, like a city freighted with her thousands of passengers enjoying her shops, dining rooms, lounges, swimming pool, promenade decks, cinema, and her many state cabins with private baths through to crowded steerage, for another ninety miles before she finally stopped.” [Back to the future 24 March 2009 - piece by Tom Sutcliffe in The Independent 'Why we are all haunted by religion', that it monopolised an appetite - or Larkin quote 'a hunger in himself to be more serious']