On the way to Scotland

Despite a half day strike in Greece delaying our flight three hours, we were home in Birmingham by 9.00pm on Thursday.

I phoned Scotland.
"Mum's asking for you" said Bay
"I'll be in Inverness tomorrow afternoon."
Left the house at 6.15 Friday morning with Oscar for company and caught the 16 bus into town - fare £1.90. It arrived within seconds of our arrival at the Hamstead Road stop. Empty dark streets, wet leaves and a bag bumping over paving stones. I bought my rail tickets on-line a short time after getting home to Handsworth via train and coach from London Gatwick. Punched in my codes at a ticket machine on the New Street Concourse. Birmingham to Inverness via Glasgow booked as separate journeys and with Senior Rail Card brings the cost down to £66. I should be in Inverness just after 3.00pm.

Speeding north

*** *** ***
The evening before - Wednesday evening - Lin and I walked up to the church of the Prophet Elias and watched the dusk settling on the village; the house tidied, all packed and ready to leave for England in the morning

Ano Korakiana from the hill of the Prophet Elias

Ithaca or The City

So we made it back from Corfu to the Highlands for our daughter's wedding. Richard, our son, took the photo of Amy and Guy leaving Alvie Church. Now we're properly back in Birmingham. It's hot for England. Lots to be done in the garden. Trailing Oscar, I visited Handsworth Park

Many were enjoying the hot weather. Chatted with Keith, one of the wardens, about staffing uncertainties, and shared his frustration that yet another motorist had driven into the park wall on Grove Lane, distorting railings; smashing 10 feet of brickwork, just after the repair of similar damage off Hamstead and Holly Roads.

Peered through the railings at the Victoria Jubilee Allotments site. There's still a lot to do if they're to be ready by June 6th. Dropped into Apple in the Bullring to get my keyboard repaired, and raised with Nick M the possibility of tutoring in Greek. Amy and Guy came round - both back at work. I'm touting some new short courses, seeking to arrange another Leader-CEO video, going to a meeting on Tuesday evening about Black Patch Park, going to Warwick tomorrow morning to see Jonathan Davies to put together another bid to the ESRC, skyped Annie G in Bendigo, noticing she was her on line at one in the morning there; heard news of changes at the Durrell School and the success of last week's seminar, wrote a brief slightly garbled email to Thanassis and Katya in Ano Korakiana about building knowledge on what makes a village sustainable...and collected Richard from New Street after his Sunday flight back from the Highlands. He's assembling and editing photos of the wedding.

** ** **

I know very little of Cavafy - an humane and self-deprecating genius - a man who in the 1930s presciently described himself as 'a poet of future generations'. The introduction which guided me is Auden's. [He wrote 'I do not know a word of Modern Greek, so that my only access to Cavafy’s poetry has been through English and French translations.'] When Cavafy says 'you', he means himself. In his latest book about Epirus and the Ionian Islands, Jim Potts quotes lines from Cavafy - à propos Corfu - the last two lines of The City - to which I've added one earlier line:

There is no ship for you. There is no road.
As you have ruined your life here in this little corner,
you have destroyed the whole world.

δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό.

Ετσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ

στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ' όλην την γή την χάλασες.

Unlike Ithaca and Waiting for the Barbarians - often recited, more portentously than I suspect the poet intended - I'd not come across this poem. I looked it up. The City inverts Ithaca. The latter's a benediction. A prayer for a wedding. Your destination is less important than your enjoyment of the journey. Keep advancing the ETA. The City's an execration, a curse. Blight one place, you'll blight the others. Give up trying to find a place where the grass is greener. You carry the waste land with you. Thank you Jim..a new planet...realms of gold...peak in Darien.

I read about one of the moderators of last week's seminar on the History and Culture of the Ionian Islands at the Durrell School website - a man immersed in the poetry of Cavafy

Anthony Hirst, until recently Lecturer in Modern Greek (and now honorary research fellow) in the Institute of Byzantine Studies, Queen's University Belfast, is a member of the Board of the Durrell School. Hirst has written a commentary on the parallel Greek text of a 2003 translation by Evangelos Sachperoglou of Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy; introduction by Peter Mackridge, a fellow moderator at the same seminar. I've just ordered it, second hand, from Amazon. Reading about the challenges of capturing Cavafy in English given his 'braiding of demotic with Katharevousa Greek' I can see the especial value of publishing original Greek and English alongside each other.

She got married

On a Monday in May our daughter Amy married Guy Hollier at Alvie Church in the Highlands, an errant sun, now and then, silvering the loch below the church. My mum Barbara was there, Sharon brown her carer, Linda of course and our friend Liz Delaney was bridesmaid. Guy's parents and just a few more friends. Guy's best man, his brother Russell. Keith, manager at The Station Pub in Sutton where, three years ago, Guy ordered a pint of lager and was served by Amy. Our son Richard was wedding photographer. I walked Amy to where Guy waited before the Minister, I gave her away. In that sweet place I had the sense of something momentous. (see Ano Korakiana website ~ messages from Katya, Kostas and Eva... Εύα και Κώστας)

The ceremony was as simple as the church, the music played on a keyboard set up for the occasion. Amy and me walked in to Canon in D by Pachelbel. We were welcomed by Minister Ron Whyte, who announced a hymn - 'Praise my soul the King of Heaven' which even I can sing, then the marriage - the Minister asked for no photos at this point, which was right -

I, Guy, now take you, Amy, to be my wife. In the presence of God and before these witnesses I promise to be a loving, faithful and loyal husband to you, until God shall separate us by death

I, Amy, now take you, Guy, to be my husband. In the presence of God and before these witnesses I promise to be a loving, faithful and loyal wife to you, until God shall separate us by death

The blessing and a reading from Corinthians 13 - resonant:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

He agape oudepotte piptei, Love never she fails. eite de profeteiai, katargetezontai, be it prophecies, they will cease, eite glosai, pausontai, be it tongues, they will be stilled, eite gnossis katargetesetai be it knowledge it will cease. Nuni de menei, pistis, elpis, agape, ta tria tauta, So remain, faith, hope and love, these three, meidzoon de toutoon, he agape, but the greatest of these is love.

Second hymn - 'I vow to thee my country' - (Thaxted) - tricky phrasing - and the Benediction, the signing of the Registers - Ode to Joy - and, as Guy and Amy left the church, Mendelssohn's Wedding March.

I respect, and delight in, the contrast between the austerity at Alvie and, earlier in the year, the venerable colourfulness of Saint Athanasios at the foot of Ano Korakiana. I've enjoyed every cliché in the ceremony book, including hymns that choke me up; at the same time, embarrassing me*. It was an arranged event, but one in which the old type of arranged marriage - by parents - was turned on its head. Instead of the bride and groom meeting for the first time on the day of their wedding, it was we parents who hardly knew one another until Monday. It was me crying rather than Lin, and it was Amy leading me up to the church rather than the other way round.

At the wedding breakfast in The Rowan Tree hotel where we'd stayed overnight, I made my speech - about strong women - starting with Jane Austen - she whose genius invented the subversive idea that people should get married for love - getting on to my family; my great grandmother Lucy who eloped with George Halkett, a penniless Scottish intellectual; my mother who divorced just after the war because she wasn't going to give up her career as a journalist to 'wear a hat' and be a diplomat's wife; about Linda who ignored caste barriers that would once have separated us (as did Elizabeth Bennett near two centuries earlier, unlike her brilliant inventor) and then about Amy, our daughter, who has a talent for making you not afraid of life, who, as a policewoman, will walk the mean streets - 'not a fragrant world, but...the world you live in.'

Amy's bridesmaid and best friend - Liz Delaney

* * *

Pavla, who wishes Amy and Guy 'na sou zisei!' (may it live!) - has just published her second book on Corfu - [KORFU Pavla Smetanová ISBN 978-80-7422-025-8 160 stran/datum vydání 2010-05-12] - in Czech, so for the time being it's not available to me. She describes Corfu as experienced by a writer who's lived here over twelve years, married to a Corfiot, aiming to familiarise Czech speaking readers with everyday life on the island, its customs and traditions, describing Greek cuisine; where particular dishes can be found; best routes; places to visit; beaches and romantic corners of the island; historical facts and practical information.

Knížka popisuje ostrov tak, jak ho vidí autorka, která zde žije od roku 1998. Seznamuje nás s každodenním životem Korfanů, s jejich zvyky a tradicemi. Přibližuje typickou řeckou kuchyni a zároveň radí, kde ji najít. Popisuje ty nejhezčí trasy a místa, která stojí za návštěvu. Vypráví své osobní zážitky, které za léta života na ostrově nasbírala. Doporučuje krásné pláže a romantická zákoutí ostrova. Zároveň nezapomíná na historická fakta a praktické informace.

** ** ** Amy observes the custom of throwing her bouquet in the air. The catcher is the one, according to tradition, who'll be married next, among Liz, Angharad, another Amy, Phoebe and Haley. * * * The brilliant Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas who I first encountered writing with poison ink of his Greek Australian roots in Loaded was giving a far more generous view of the immigrant experience and attitude in a BBC R4 interview with Mariella Frostrup in connection with his latest book - The Slap. Tom Shone's interview with the author from the Sunday Times 9 May 2010:

His parents, who are both still alive, emigrated to Australia right after the Greek civil war in the 1940s, finding work in factories, his father putting money aside so he could buy his son books for school — Great Expectations, Mills & Boon, whatever he managed to lay his hands on. Tsiolkas would sit in class, scribbling ideas for movie scripts he wanted to write, and determined on the career of writer when a teacher read something of his and pronounced it “filth”. It wasn’t until he went to university, however, where he met and fell in love with his room-mate, that he came out to his parents about his sexuality, moving out of their house shortly thereafter.

“It was really difficult for them, coming from where they did, to understand, first, my sexuality, and, second, what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “But at no point did I ever feel unloved. No matter how difficult it was... I could come on as a working-class hero, but the reality is, yes, my parents were migrant factory workers. That’s where I came from. I’m really proud of what they’ve given me, not just materially, but in terms of their love, their support. I feel confident enough that everyone in my world understands my relationship and how important it is to me.”

*See Governmentality, from my 'conclusion' on the penultimate page; Thomas Mann, in Dr Faustus, on how music can surface the 'folkish layer':

...magical palliation for their fear of complexity...longing for neat wooden villages set in pasture land on the edge of pristine forests, the innocent domestic rituals of pastry-cooking and precise needlework. His novel depicts deep responsiveness to music, innerlichkeit, the Lutheran separation of state and church in an uneasy co-existence with helpless bourgeois humanism, and something else that creeps up on you beneath an artful patina of circumlocutory reticence, suggesting how a particular kind of civility created the space for its opposite - the surfacing of the folkish layer.

Was ich Ihnen in abgerissener Kürze erzählte … ist die Geschichte der deutschen Innerlichkeit. Eines mag diese Geschichte uns zu Gemüte führen: daß es nicht zwei Deutschland gibt, ein böses und ein gutes, sondern nur eines, dem sein Bestes durch Teufelslist zum Bösen ausschlug… Thomas Mann, 1945, Deutschland und die Deutschen (see also and this pp.47-66, quote from p.64) '..there are not two Germany's, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning.'

Reflective analysis of a genius, but - no - not specifically German, not even Nazi, but any of us. Some of the comments under some clips of I vow to thee my country on YouTube tap into the English scoundrels who've no wish to read its second verse; who'd fulfil the expectations of J.B.Priestley about who'd strut if fascism got a grip.

Snowed-in

Hi Simon. Just A quick HAPPY NEW YEAR you all, and to let you know that Ian with Sally's help has seen to the chimney. So you should be OK for when you come out on the 11th. Cheerio Mark.

A welcome message from Mark in Ano Korakiana with news about our problem chimney at 208 Democracy Street. Ian, the builder we found through Nick at Skripero, needed to add another length of stove pipe that reached higher above our roof, support it and top it with a spinner that would ensure it drew. Our chimney is inaccessible; just reachable by extending ladder from Leftheris' garden, and defended by wasps. The job was impossible until winter:

Oscar goes off piste

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....we sit, my mother and I, before a log fire, with plenty of wood brought in from the lean-to. The village is only a few hundred yards away but more snow in the night has blocked the lane to all but tractors and walkers. I'd cleared short pathways so that I and Sharon, my mum's helper, could get into the garden - a particular concern of my mother's, who watches a regular flow of garden birds, through her bedroom window, visiting half a dozen feeders full of seed and nuts hung from shelters on posts - robins, blue tits, chaffinches. There was a power cut for an hour after a snow-burdened tree fell on a power line to the houses at our end of the village.

After lunch, the dogs were demanding a walk. I set out, well clothed, into knee deep snow, through which the terriers bobbed, lunging through drifts that could bury them. I trudged slowly but steadily up the esker east of us, sometimes making a route for the dogs, though most of the time they seemed keen to go their own way, standing now and then to get their bearings. The landscape is pristine; Brin Rock showing over mist further down the Strath.

I don't take this terrain for granted. I know it well enough, but lose the light or get caught in a snow squall and everything changes. Today the quiet is palpable; the land like new, crossed in places by wild animal tracks already fading into the snow, while under the larger trees are shallower places slightly rank where sheep have sheltered, warming each other. I hear my breathing as I work slowly up the esker, feeling for dips with my stick. Nothing else most of the time, especially as on the down slope the esker's bulk lies between me and the road to Whitebridge via Ruthven. It's not silence, just a landscape where smaller sounds are allowed - snow clumping off a tree that swings upright relieved of its weight, a buzzard mewing in the distance, the sounds of the dogs working through drifts over their heads, panting like me who can almost hear - certainly feel - my heart beating both for exertion and for the content of this winter realm, made the nicer by the prospect of a warm hearth, hot tea and a carefully nursed glass of Laphroaig - I still pronounce it something like 'leapfrog' - that's been sitting in a cupboard at Brin Croft.

I follow a forestry track a few hundred yards then turn into the woods already exhausted with wading. Snow's up to my waist at times. The dog's follow, trusting me, passing through the gorges I create. Then, over a fence half hidden, following it through the unkept grounds of the 'ghost house' - the Lodge - where, once, the long absent owner, to discourage vandals, suspended a teaspoon in mid air on black thread, so that if you peered through a window, as I did long ago with my children and, now adult, nephews and nieces, you'd see it floating, and on a wall inside, daubed in dripping paint, the sentence, 'do not disturb us we are sleeping'. I'm told that if you trespassed inside and opened a door, a string attached to it, made another door bang upstairs. I recall a rusty hatchet buried in a lintel. The uncarpeted floor creaked. Add to this a fellow intruder going "wwaaaa waaaa woooooo rrrroooooaaaaarrrrr wooooo!" Nightmares guaranteed.

Whose woods these are

The owner's nailed plywood over every downstairs window after campers - a dozen young people apparently dropped off in the area by their parents a few years ago, smashed glass in the Lodge that had lasted at least as long as I've been roaming Strathnairn, and started a fire in the woods that was put out by locals before it spread.

Meanwhile from far away - a reply on Facebook from John Martin to my birthday greeting:

Thanks Simon, Just got home after Amy's Ride some 60kms around the Bellarine Peninsula from Geelong down to Queenscliff. Had a swim in the solar heated pool (34C!) and am off to the Foundry for a beaut steak and a red for my birthday. I am a lucky boy indeed! Cheers, John

* * *

A ramble on the roots of the current situation in Greece by Avirama Golan at Haraatz.com with interesting insights and quotes, including one from the inventor of Inspector Haritos, Petros Markaris, and in its title 'Beautiful and strange homeland' [Όμορφη και παράξενη πατρίδα] - a poem by Odysseus Elytis, sung by George Dalaras:

Όμορφη και παράξενη πατρίδα

Ωσάν αυτή που μου 'λαχε δεν είδα

Ρίχνει να πιάσει ψάρια πιάνει φτερωτά

Στήνει στη γη καράβι κήπο στα νερά

Κλαίει φιλεί το χώμα ξενιτεύεται

Μένει στους πέντε δρόμους αντρειεύεται

Κάνει να πάρει πέτρα τηνε παρατά

Κάνει να τη σκαλίσει βγάνει θάματα

Μπαίνει σ' ένα βαρκάκι πιάνει ωκεανούς

Ξεσηκωμούς γυρεύει θέλει τύραννους

Πέντε μεγάλους βγάνει πάνω τους βαρεί

Να λείψουν απ' τη μέση τους δοξολογεί.

I’ve never seen a homeland more strange and beautiful

Than this one that fell to my lot

Throws a line to catch fish catches birds instead

Sets up a boat on land garden in the waters

Weeps kisses the ground emigrates

Becomes a pauper gets brave

Tries for a stone gives up

Tries to carve it works miracles

Goes into a boat reaches the ocean

Looks for revolutions wants tyrants

* * *

In the early hours I peer through my bedroom window. The moon is full and high. Alles schläft; einsam wacht. [Flashbacks to around this time a year ago and two years ago and my first entry on Democracy Street on 1 April 2007. I love the quote from J.B.Jackson:

The bicycle had, and still has, a humane, almost classical moderation in the kind of pleasure it offers. It is the kind of machine that a Hellenistic Greek might have invented and ridden. It does no violence to our normal reactions: It does not pretend to free us from our normal environment.]

* * *

Jasper Schuringa was visiting the USA from Holland - the first to leap towards the failed faith-assisted suicidée on a plane coming into to Detroit Metropolitan - a busy airport at any time with, at Christmas, the lights of four descending planes at once visible from the milling concourse. Schuringa burned his hand attempting - it seems successfully - to put out flames meant to detonate the PETN sewn into the other man's crotch "so they would be near his testicles and unlikely to be detected"

(It won't be just "remove your belt, sir" in future, especially if suicidées use IEDs like drug mules - and if as a result we start to use body scanners, there'll be longer Qs - also vulnerable. Ooh ah missus...passeggeri nudi ai check-in... what a dilemma! Toss for virtual strip search or full pat down. See also - who profits and if they really work)

I wonder how I'd behave in Jasper's situation? A study done years later - which I must dig out - of those who'd given sanctuary to Jews during WW2 showed that, unlike those wouldn't get involved, these people had been accustomed to pondering with the encouragement of their parents “What would you/we do if…" We were like that and Lin and I played moral dilemmas - as a game - with Richard and Amy, but I was warned by Jack never to judge anyone by assuming from what you know or think of their present character, what they might actually do in a crisis (why Peter's denial is so cogent and human, because swore he would not do what, in fear, he later did)

My stepfather said that when push comes to shove you never know how you or any one else will act. People who’ve won medals will say they surprised themselves. This was true of the small minority in the Milgram experiments who refused to administer electric shocks (albeit fake ones, as they learned after) to another. Some who resisted the pressure of authority in Milgram's labs were also people who would fail the recruitment interviews of many agencies - being likely to be assessed as troublemakers. Milgram wisely reminded us, while warning of its dangers, that conformity, and therefore an impulse to obey authority, is essential to social cohesion. Hm? So who was the hero on the plane? We know a name and a few other public details, but what of his character? (Meanwhile there must be a training camp where the very faithful are carefully practising setting light to the fuses of IEDs secreted in intimately confined spaces. Oh dear oh dear. The things men do for their gods.)

** ** **

A helpful overview in New Athenian of the year 2009 in Greece

A walk in the snow

I set out down the lane beyond Brin Croft, walking gingerly over the almost invisible cattle grid, striding on through boot deep snow. The terriers romped ahead into the dusk. A near full moon rose over the taller pines above the esker.

Where the sheep huddled, I turned downhill along the fence on a familiar path to the river, now knee-deep, feeling my way with my stick. Stepping into a deeper patch I pitched laughing into a drift. Only the tails of the terrier's showed - wagging periscopes. The river came in sight, black between white islands.

I lurched along the bank; the dogs plunging ahead came to the bridge blocked by a fallen birch and I, covered in snow turning to ice, knelt and crawled under. The path on the west side of the Farnack had been trodden already and was easy to follow. I held the fence on my left; occasional branches on my right. Lulu begged me to throw a stick. "Oh no. You want to play otter but no!" The dogs rushed ahead yapping. Dark figures appeared. "Hi there." A man and a boy pulling a sledge. "So beautiful! He'll remember" I said. The stranger replied "Yes, but unfortunately he is from Switzerland." "Ah. So this is normal?" We smiled and passed. The light lessened in the west, replaced by the moon's through the trees on the opposite bank. I glimpsed the warm yellow square of my mother's bedroom in Brin Croft above the steep slope where the river turns a corner. In minutes we were crossing the meadow, picking my way up the slope on which we'd sledged - Amy, Guy, me and Richard - before Christmas.

I was powdered with ice, small chunks in my boots, feeling warm and happy. In the porch at Brin Croft I towelled the dogs, shoved my iced socks, gloves and jacket in the tumble drier and tied my soaked boots on a radiator. Then tea and buttered toast with candied Scottish honey in front of the wood stove, chatting to my mother, as when back from such a walk as a boy - in those days on the slopes of Glen Affric and along the banks of the Beaulieu river above Cannich at Fasnakyle for Christmas.

* * *

Over 2009 climate change became ineluctably politicised. I'm a foot soldier in at least one of the ignorant armies milling at the gates of a new faculty. Climatology has become an issue for the ballot box, requiring us to tick bits of paper to be dropped through a slot - pro or con, either/or, for/against, "ayes to the left, nays to the right" - diverting us from the fuzzy world of conjecture, hypothesis, method, raw data, doubt and scepticism. I've been interested, for years, in the messy interface at the heart of government, between administration - in this case as a host for science and the getting of empirical evidence - and politics. My inherited political interest in the environment has jumped too far ahead of my knowledge of the science.

In governmental terms, there's a disconnect. As the political profile of climate change becomes more and more prominent (though golfing adultery attracted about as much public interest during COP15), too few politicians are properly briefed on the evidence while being required by the electorate to take stances on climate change that will determine the vote. In the administrative world, including the world of scientific professionals, there is much political naivety about the way evidence informs politics.

I've realised over 2009 how ignorant I am. I realise what an enormous amount I need to learn before I can even qualify as a sceptic, let alone participate in informed discussion about the findings of Climate Science. In this I am like a politician who aspires to govern, who sees the need to bridge the gap between science and politics; who knows that scientists and politicians need to 'inhabit each other's worlds'.

A summary from a free-lance science writer, Kurt Kleiner, in one of the bridging initiatives to which I'm referring, from Nature Reports - the news behind the science, the science behind the news. Someone convinced that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax will likely say my sources are irremediably biased, but I'm less interested in opinions of the 'convinced' - while recognising their political weight. I want to wander the realm of doubt - id est science (see Kurt Kleiner again) - while keeping my faith that we've fallen far short of our duty of stewardship to the Earth. [See back here and here in Democracy Street]

See also the article to which Kurt Kleiner refers by Professor John Ioannidis at the University of Ioannina Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. What a tasty morsel for the convinced.

* * * *

I've just discovered - no 'disambiguated' as Wikipedia describes it - a new term - Millet - via a conference at the University of Athens on 14 January 2010 'From millet communities to minorities: Greek Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire ~ Turkey and Muslims in Greece, 1830s – 1939'. This came via the very useful Hellas/Greece portal, which led me to IOS - virus in Greek - a group of journalists criticising nationalism and other shortcoming of the Hellenic legal apparatus. Through thematic articles published Sundays in Eleutherothypia, this group covers topics such as the Muslim minority, school textbooks, the requirement to declare religion on identity cards...

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHear the silence

Ιθάκη

Just before Christmas, Margarita Pournara, wrote about the life of Giannis Moralis, Maria's first husband, in Kathimerini - 23 December '09:

“I have painted so many angels in my life. Soon, I will be one of them. You will see, this could be my last summer on Aegina...” Yiannis Moralis had a gentle and disarming way of talking about death. He was not actively awaiting it, but was fully aware that, until his departure, he would relish every breath. That was also his final piece of advice: “Life can never be constantly pleasant. You should see to it that you have a journey full of many, small happy moments. Be sure your suitcases are full before your departure.”

I met him just once in Aegina in 1968. A kind genius and mentor.

** ** **

And so to the Highlands again - this time by train with Oscar; first leg on the London-Midland service to Liverpool, changing at Crewe - a station I like more than the town - for a Virgin train to Glasgow Central, then a short walk to Glasgow Queen Street to catch a Scotrail for the last leg to Inverness. At Perth we were delayed an hour, waiting for a delayed down train from Pitlochry to clear the single track. This long journey has run through my life, since a second steam engine was attached at Perth for the climb through Drumochter. In those days I would travel by the sleeper from London and see my dear Scotland in the morning; hearing the seagulls along the Moray shore as we ran into Inverness. The sleeper is dearer than going to Inverness by air - especially with the £40 charge to bring Oscar. I've come to enjoy the nine hour journey - breaking it up with conversations, films on my laptop, hot drinks and a picnic - made up by Lin, left in the fridge for me the night before with a reminder note on the table to set her alarm - and, at the moment, a good police procedural. What better than a Martin Beck, knowing I've got eight more to enjoy in this superb series, predecessor to grumpy Kurt Wallander, another Swedish mean streets man...

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. (Raymond Chandler 1944) (see same in 1950)

,...both professionals. The train from Crewe was quite crowded. I treated myself to First Class and was never asked to pay the supplement. While enjoying its spacious emptiness I got into conversation with Alastair and Tom, on their way to the latter's mother's funeral near Glasgow. Alastair collects first editions. He showed me "a trifle" recently bought - a privately published, beautifully printed, copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover dated 1928 - the year Lawrence's novel came out. I suppose that now it might seem past its prime, but just after the famous 'not guilty' verdict at the Old Bailey in November 1960 I read the book, a Penguin paperback, quite enthralled. It led me - a sexual ingénu for another five years - from snickering embarrassment into guiltless anticipation of joys yet to be. Larkin expressed it, though he, born in 1922, claimed '1963' was '...just too late for me.'

Speeding north through Cumbria

Having left Birmingham just before 10 in the morning I came into Inverness, after an hour's delay while awaiting a downtrain from Pitlochry, just before 7.30pm. My taxi driver took the Culduthel Road, trees and hedges white blanketed, to Inverarnie, from where, with Oscar, we walked the last two hundred yards up the snowed-up lane to Brin Croft.

An earthworm in the snow

As always in Strathnairn, I woke late and lingered in bed; Lin even later. I sat watching over-dramatised news about snowy weather across the UK and a plenary speech by Obama at COP15 "Our ability to to take collective action is in doubt." After lunch at last Richard and I went for a walk along the Farnack. Grey-white with trees in silhouette and the sound of the river loud then quiet as we strolled with the leaping roaming dogs. The Highlands near my mother's home remind me, at this time of year, of Robert Frost's poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. Richard pointed to something at our feet.

I stared at the whitened path, at a straight twig as I thought, then realised he'd spotted an earthworm working its way gradually south across the snow. I lingered watching its progress, amazed that it should be where it was, hoping it would slide itself into the protective cover of the earth, but it continued on its way threading the uneven surface of the melting snow. By the time I looked up my son was a field away.

* * * "All the quality shops are closing in Inverness" said my Mum. She's especially saddened at losing Borders, the bookshop chain that has just gone into receivership. With her disabled parking permit Mum could be parked just outside Borders in the vast and rather unappealing retail park just outside the city - where a few days ago Richard, Amy and Guy went to enjoy watching James Cameron's tour de force 3D creation Avatar (my link is to the inimitable Corfucius who's seen the premier in Corfu) - and, helped into a wheelchair, go browsing among the shelves at Borders, get help finding and ordering books from the staff, and - taking the lift - go up to a mezzanine floor overlooking the book space and enjoy a coffee and cake at an in-store Starbucks, also equipped with WiFi. I, and a million others, have hardly helped with our growing tendency to get books on-line. Mum will miss the opportunity to browse, touch and turn the pages of real books. I can do virtual browsing but as important, I can, on a bicycle, free of the need to park a car, find bookshops that she would find inaccessible - both arriving and getting around, once inside (but see).

Brin Croft

At Brin Croft

I glimpsed powdered hills through cloud as we descended towards Dalcross. Guy and Amy collected Lin and me from Inverness airport after a 1¼ hour flight covering the 450 miles from Birmingham driving us the seven miles, via Croy and Culloden, to Strathnairn, Inverarnie and up the rough track to Brin Croft overlooking the Farnack, a low sun dazzling off a smattering of snow. Bright watery light. The joy of being in the Highlands with my family. Richard's here too. We sat around the table enjoying soup, salad, quiche , pork pie, cheeses and wine.

My mother's house is full with us, her terriers, Bibi and Lulu, Amy and Guy's puppy, Cookie, and their three cats, Pepper, Gizmo and Casper, ensconced in the log cabin. It's Amy's birthday. We'll have supper at Dores on Loch Ness, leaving Sharon and the animals in charge. This afternoon I showed my mother photos from Australia as the others went off to walk the dogs on the Garbole Road.

By the river Farnack

The Farnack runs below my mother's home in Strathnairn, between the leafless elder and birch which hides it from her house in summer. A neighbour's made a path that runs a mile beside the stream with two bridges allowing an hour's circuit that suits me and the dogs who tear happily up and down the banks and over the frosted fields below Meall Beage, strewn with frozen mole hills. The sounds of the river are changed by the cold - vibrant ripples going abruptly silent as the water flows under sheets of ice, small pockets of air expanding and contracting beneath it, reflected in the winter light.

I collected Sharon  - my mother's carer from the station - after lunch. She'd flown from summer in Durban to Paris in winter - "bumpy all the way" - then Paris to Aberdeen, then train to Inverness. After chatting to mum about her holiday she went to bed. Christine and James and their daughter and son-in-law and new son came round with two bottles of champagne. Happiness emanated from them, infectiously. Two hours before our midnight Mark and Sally texted me 'Happy Greek New Year' from Ano Korakiana and I texted back 'Same to you from both of us' tho' I'm hesitant about chasing Lin at Jill's - she being so uninterested in ceremonies. I phoned Richard; heard the sounds of a party - "Happy New Year to you Dad, must go." Amy phones just after midnight from the cottage in Gloucester, sending love and greetings from Guy, Liz and Matt -= and the cats they've taken down with them. "We found a pipistrelle. What should we do with it?" "You must have woken it from hibernation when you warmed the place up. Put it back in the roof and hope for the best. It won't survive outside." "I think it ate the big spider" she says.

Brin Croft

* * * I caught a bus to New Street Station on Monday afternoon and caught the Edinburgh train with minutes to spare. On the long journey north from Birmingham Oscar behaved impeccably - meeting and greeting fellow passengers including dogs on the same route. I read my Obama biography and watched the DVD of Beowulf - quite fun, though, as ever, seeing an image of monsters detracts from rather than adds to the terror evoked by Grendel and his mother when I first read and imagined the epic. Isn't that one of the reasons for art? Trying to get a hold on horror. At Edinburgh, where we had an hour to our connection, the dog and I climbed Waverley Steps to Princes Street, where a torch-lit parade with drums and pipes was passing; then back to our platform to join the 1933 to Inverness, where we'd arrive just after 11pm and I'd be met by Petra, standing in for Sharon as my mother's carer, and driven out to Inverarnie. * * * To JD:

I saw the Schatz piece in the LRB. I think we are all looking for 'the story' - an intuition that this is  something our assumptions about the world might prevent us seeing, or because there is a missing piece in a composite hiding the picture. Iason wants it to be something more than adolescent frustration vented against modernisation and globalisation. I'm not sure what I want but that I want to see a light at the end of the tunnel for a country I love. I want the centre to hold - but I'm not sure what constitutes a centre at the moment. Happy New Year. Simon

From JD:

Well, I'd like to think it is about the fight for an alternative modernity/ modernisation to the dominant one, which is about the commodification of everything and the insistence that people behave 'responsibly' and 'respectfully' in spite of casino capitalism and the havoc it causes. In my view we are still closer to the beginning of the crisis than the end, so there may be a possibility for real alternatives to emerge here, in Greece and elsewhere. My Marxist instincts tell me that new worlds are only ever forged in struggle and can never be delivered on a plate fresh from a philosopher's mind. So, for all the teargas and smoke we should hope that the turmoil in Greece is a nursery for something vibrant and new. Time will tell, but my Greek friends, mainly academics and government advisers, all know that something needs to change there. Best JD

A mug of hot chocolate before I go to bed

Still in Scotland for a few more days. My mother - born 1917 - first made me a hot choc drink before I went to bed when I was about 10 in 1952. Last night's mug means she's been doing this on and off for 56 years. It's 1130 pm and she making me another now, and pressing on me an article I should read ('My god' she mutters) from the FT Weekend (2/3 Aug 08) by Simon Kuper about Seymour Hersch The last great American reporter.

* * *

There's a blogger in Corfu who brightens my days - Corfucius, writer, photographer, musician, linguist and collector of unconsidered trifles about the island and the world, past and present. He doesn't want a link, claims no one reads him. Miss him then, but it's a shame not to catch this well-informed student of Thersites, Voltaire, Falstaff, Dr Johnson and that inventor of flânerie, Baudelaire - before he sails on to Ithaka.

In the Highlands - 'love, let us be true to one another'

In Strath Nairn at Brin Croft above the River Farnack for a week and a bit. The train left Birmingham at 11.00 am and travelled 450 miles north via Glasgow. Oscar came with me and helped quiet a number of crying children on the journey. I had a cigarette while strolling between Glasgow Central and Queens Street Station and was collected from Inverness Station at 7.35 pm by my mother's carer, Sharon, who drove me up to Inverarnie. There's quiet and the pleasant drowsiness that goes with this place. Oscar is delighted to be in the company of other terriers, running through mossy woods, heathered braes and damp grassy meadows, chasing scents. I enjoy rail travel. I'm vexed by our trains. Sealed windows lost us fresh air. Unreliable air conditioning replaces adjusting windows. Gone is the opportunity for farewells; to kiss, touch, and step into the carriage even as it starts to move, waving for as long as you stay in sight of one another - and after. The ends of platforms where once one might have waited, apprehensive and excited, for an arriving glimpse of a familiar face peering then smiling from an open window, are empty. Watching an Edwardian drama on TV, Mum and I were musing over all the people we were not supposed to marry or even befriend once - people who are close family who might have been lost because of class, religion, or ethnicity. How can I moan about trains while free of those idiocies, proud of grandparents and parents who wouldn't stand for them and broke the rules? * * * Plutonium leaks at Austrian plant Gruesome crime shocks Greek isle Grisly murder aboard Greyhound bus in Canada Woman's baby cut from womb Police charge man in brutal deaths of two French students in London EastEnders star Brooke Kinsella's brother stabbed to death 7 dead in stabbing spree in downtown Tokyo after attacker drives into a crowd British government vows tougher knife laws after spate of teen slayings Noel Gallagher says "knive-wielding scum bags" are taking over Britain * * * I doubt dreams are prescient but they do reveal states of mind. I woke this morning from a nightmare in which I was signing a register in a large municipal building to claim a death certificate for my daughter. The clerk had pencilled 'Amy' where I was supposed to write more detail. As I reached over the form with my pen I sensed - as did the clerk on the other side of the desk who began to raise a Samaritan hand - an avalanche of grief gathered like a rogue wave that froze as surely as a computer crash. I was awake. Oscar had jumped on my bed. I showered and dressed and pondered how myriad synapses, picking up activities in my brain, had fed this into my dreaming mind as an event among the two most dreadful I could imagine. I don't find it difficult to conjecture causes. We live with the debris strewn by the kick-ass in the White House. I have my attention drawn to things like the horrors in the news that, because they are remote (though I was enjoying busy Akihabara a few days after and this local blog says much about separation), and Amy encounters their aftermath in her work in Birmingham, but these are not the main movers, not even the many speeded up videos on YouTube of receding ice and the rude and messy squabbling about whether it's us or nature, or a mix of both, that follow. All that flitters easily through my mind. It was the accretion of feelings that gathered with Mark lending me a book when we were in Ano Korakiana the other day - Alan Credland's A Land Beyond Belief. Then, up here, seeing an edition of Charles St.John's Sketches of the Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands - a 7th edition published in 1878.

Jack said the Japanese say 'to be angry is to make yourself ridiculous'. We mock public anger by referring to Grumpy Old Men. Grumbling is wasteful. The Aussies are on to something when they refer to 'whingeing poms'. Charles St.John's book is a pleasure to read because he has no idea of what' s going to happen to his world, or rather he writes as if that were the case:

"I am one of the unproductive class of the genus homo, who, having passed a few years amidst the active turmoil of cities, and in places where people do most delight to congregate, have at last settled down to live a busy kind of idle life...Though by habit and repute a being strongly endowed with the organ of destructiveness, I take equal delight in collecting around me all living animals, and watching their habits and instincts; my abode is, in short, a miniature menagerie."

Alan Credland wrote - just a few years ago - a book of melancholy for the loss of winter stubble, salt marshes, winding tide creeks, field ponds, unploughed pastures and small fields - often replaced by rape - hectares of dazzling yellow, towering pylons, lost place, loomed skies obscuring the celestial night - all made trickier to deal with because city visitors, following the heritage signs of a commodified 'countryside', are mostly blind or indifferent to the devilish details of such seismic change. Some of the many who've bought into a constructed rural idyll now complain about mud on country roads, noisy stock - especially cocks crowing - and church bells. Credland isn't angry. What I think is important is not to hold on too hard to the externals. Age makes change more apparent.

Mum and I went to the Highland Field Sports Fair at Moy on Friday and Saturday. We greeted friends in the committee tent - hugs and kisses, tea, cake and sandwiches, in the background the cracking echo of shotguns. Shopmobility provided an electric scooter that carried mum around the many stands. Long ago her husband, Angus, was an originator of this annual event. I bought a couple of cured rabbit skins for Teal's dummy. Never was there more equipment nor more information available for enjoying the worlds described by Credland and St.John, and yet here those worlds have gone, in all but facsimile - with game reared and shot for employment in the leisure economy, deer culled for their own protection, most fishing the result of stocking. There are niches - few and secret. 'Field Sports' are set up against 'Blood Sports' - one group of city folk making a symbolic stand against another group of city folk, with those who work the land picking up what they can while hiring, from the further reaches of Europe, men and women willing to work for wages on a land designed, until very recently, for concentrated food production. (I've been reading Rose Tremain's latest - The Road Home) Even so a streak of violet pink, from a field of rose bay willow, seen from the car as we drove to Alturlie Point yesterday, to walk with the romping dogs beside the tranquil Moray Firth, reminded me of the proliferating growth of set-aside. Change is puzzling. What I feel is separation from the ground - through my own ill-education about it; because I don't work on it, and hardly ever did. This is why there were tears of happiness in our urban eyes as we gazed on Emily Kngwarreye's work at the Tokyo Art Centre a few weeks ago. This blighted creation is what Chatwin traces with such witty curiosity in The Songlines. This is what Paul speaks of in his biography of Jack - the rift between us and the land and its denizens. I struggled to write of this over ten years ago in Internal Polity. It's a recurrent recognition of lost place, unarticulated, outside popular sympathy, a quiet unexpressed, and so repressed, bereavement - hence this morning's waking nightmare.

At least four of my relatives are heading for Beijing; two via the Trans-Siberian railway - bound to witness great events, great spectacles, China rising and the smog around the magnificent 'bird's nest' stadium is a potent symbol of the way we are fouling our own nest far beyond China (I've collected 1788 images for the Flickr group International flytipping). I embrace the rift of modernism. Existential angst is the self-chosen price for devotion to the daemonic mysteries of science, committment to evidence based policy, faith in scepticism and enduring doubt. No other route is really on though, a bit weary at times and, prompted by dreams, I like to dip my toes gingerly in the sea of faith - wrap myself in the folds of its 'bright girdle', and of course, there are visitations.

...on Poros, the villa Galini, where, distracted and overcome by the beauty of the landscape from his windows, Seferis had difficulty writing. About this he wrote 'Life is so beautiful that if Homer had not been blind he would have written nothing.'

If with the tongues of men I speak, and of angels, Love I do not have, I have become a gong resounding or cymbal clanging. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know mysteries all, faith mountains move, Love I do not have, nothing I am. Love is generous, virtuous, Love does not envy, boast, not proud is. All she protects, all she trusts, all she hopes, all she perseveres. Love never she fails. Be it prophecies, they will cease, Be it tongues, they will be stilled, be it knowledge it will cease. So remain, Faith, Hope and Love, these three. But the greatest of these is love

The musician is Zbigniew Antoni Kowalski (also called Preisner). The soprano is Elżbieta Towarnicka, singing in Greek. The song is for the 'Unification of Europe', based on the Greek text of 1 Corinthians 13, from a film by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski's - Three Colors: Blue

Ean tais glosais toon antropoon lalokai toon angeloon, agapen de me echo, gegona chalcos echoon e kumbalon alaladzon. Kai ean echo profeteian, kai eido ta mysteria panta, pistin ore metistanai, agapen de me echo, outen eimi he agape makrotumai, chresteuetaihe agape ou dzelloi, erpereuetai, ou fysioutai. Panta stegei, panta pisteuei, panta elpizei, panta upomenei (pasted gratefully from a YouTube comment, but I'm hoping someone will write it out for me in Greek letters)

Received via YouTube from kotera18 on Sunday 10 Aug (I've thought about this before):

εαν ταις γλωσσαις των ανθρωπων λαλω και των αγγελωναγαπη δε μη εχω, γεγονα χαλκος ηχων κυμβαλον αλαλαζον.και εαν εχω προφητειαν και ιδω τα μυστηρια πανταωστε ορει μεθυστανην.

αγαπην δε μη εχωουδε ημη.

η αγαπη μακροθυμηη αγαπη ου ζηλει, η αγαπη ου περπερευεται, ου φυση ουτε.

η αγαπη παντα στεγει,παντα πιστευει, παντα ελπιζει, παντα υπομενειη αγαπη ουδεποτε εκπιπτει ειτε δε προφητειαι καταργηθησονταιειτε γλωσσαι παυσονταιειτε γνωσεις καταργηθησετε Νυνη δε μενει, πιστις, ελπις, αγαπη, τα τρια ταυτα, μειζον δε τουτων η αγαπη.